The End
"Happy Absolutions"
Author: Starla
Email: Starla@Buffymail.com
Notes: Who is jelly?
Additional Notes: This fic had to be reworked entirely, as the first version
was so abstract that not even I had a clear idea of the plotline. Hope this
version makes more sense.
They come across each other in an alley, years after the end, and it's gnash of teeth and sharp of word and blood of days gone by.
She moves like silver, now, like liquid quick and burning rage, and dimly, he must register that she's as beautiful now as she has ever been.
If he was in his right mind, he'd know more than her scent and her skin, but his mind is madness. He does not remember her, her laughing, gentle words, her soft sweet love. He does not remember her coffin, going down, down, down, where he could no longer follow.
He just knows that she was gone, but does not remember why.
'I know you,' they think. 'I knew you.'
Lips curve back over glinting, glutton fang, and he hisses, because it's all he knows, now, is anger. He tries to speak, to form the words that will shield him from her, but he cannot. He will not.
In his mind, he hears a preacher's solemn song ((Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today)) but cannot connect it with the woman before him. Part of his soul screams at him that it's not right, that she's not here, that it's all lies, as it has always been. His mind, the bits of it that are left, pleads for him to run.
Instead, he stays rooted to the spot.
She stares, and feels the stab of blood in vein. Muscles stretch and shake against flesh, and she wishes, wishes like anything, that it could all just go away.
Unlike him, she remembers; she remembers good, and bad, and all that love and lust and like. She remembers breathing for him, and burning for him, and fighting with every single wish in her bones for him.
She remembers being his heart; she recalls living inside his soul.
She knows he left her, left her cold and alone and ((fire bad)) hurting for him, wanting nothing but peace until she was flying -- flying --
And falling, and dead.
All he remembers is the ice-cold aftermath, the empty-ache cry of his soul in her absence. He knows not that he is longing for her; just that he is longing for something, and that he holds her at fault.
This was the First's doing, though he isn't aware of it. Evil, hate, came to infect his soul and leave it cold. His lover's ((don't say it, don't say it, don't say it)) death left him open and bleeding and raw, and all it took was a whisper-whisper to drive him mad. He held on til the last moment of the End of Days, til the last demon fell and the sky was blue again, but then he let go, fallen to the First's malevolent clutches.
((She didn't have to jump, you know. She jumped because she wanted to, because she couldn't stand living another minute loving vermin like you. If she hadn't jumped, you'd be happy. You're nothing to her now.))
His growl slips through his lips like narrative, and she tenses in anticipation.
They fly at each other, though neither knows why. They tug, and they bleed, and they smash-smash-smash at each other, but nothing gets the job done.
((She wanted to fuck that whelp of yours, you know. Can't you just *hear* her, screaming his name, drawing his blood? She'd have ridden him like a pony, without a second thought to her poor old tortured mate. And she'd have *loved* it. Like she never loved you. If she loved you, she wouldn't have gone.))
At the first taste of her blood, he howls, because isn't that what he's missed all these years? He tastes her and he is her and he knows her every tear.
((Drink. Drink from me.))
At the feel of fangs in her neck, she screams, and it's terror-terror-lust, shot of star and beat of heart, and everything she's ever known slid into his mouth like butter.
She gasps, and fights back, and fist-fist-fang, until she has him down, and she bleeds from the neck, and the arm, and the soul, as she gazes at him.
"I didn't want this," she said. "I promised myself-"
"You promised a lot of things," he hisses, finally finding words, though not their meaning. He pushes up against her, needing something from her - some absolution. He knows that there is an end to be had here. It's the end he has longed for since the moment he felt her dead skin, saw her funeral dress vivid brown against the pale silk of her coffin.
"Slayer," he whines, "we always knew it would come to this."
They had known, even back then, even kissing and cuddling and loving their way through that innocent youth. They had known, as the last demon fell, that it would come to them.
And he remembers, with her blood on his lips, the love, and the lust, and the cuddles. He remembers Mr. Gordo, and ice-skating, and loving her so much he felt there was nothing else. He remembers loving her, and his anger at her death screams in its ferocity, even as his heart throbs for her.
He remembers *her*.
He remembers, and there's nothing left to do but give in.
He knows he cannot go back to that existence, knows that now that she has broken through those defences, he cannot be fixed. What good is his life, his death, if he spends it lusting and longing for her?
He still believes she is not real. He thinks this woman before him is a ghost, and his Buffy - his real Buffy, huntress and lover and friend - is still six feet under the ground, buried in deep decay.
If only they'd told him, almost a decade ago, what they were doing, the dark magicks that Willow was weaving, the plan they had to make her real, once more. They did not, though, for he was already buried so deep in his own grief that he left his friends, his country, and practically the whole planet. He had left himself.
Since then, it had been demon down, demon down, killing and protecting and not letting another soul such as hers perish needlessly. In the End of Days, he stood against the darkness, and it was the last time he roared her name.
He knows, acutely, the absence of her, has felt it in a mysterious way in all the years gone by. "It's Buffy," they had said, and that's the last thing that ever made sense to him, because since then, it's been nothing but gone, gone, gone, gone.
As for her; she knows only that she returned home, and he was no longer there.
"I looked for you," she says, "I looked for you because I needed you, and you weren't there."
She had hunted for him through years and months and hours, had searched every scrap of this godforsaken world, growing ever more bitter, hating him a little more with each day.
"I needed you," she repeats, and it's the tears of the dead, and the living, and everything in between. Everything that she has become.
She collapses against him, and he longs for this to be real. He'd give anything to erase the memory of her death and the long years that followed from his mind, but he cannot.
"Buffy," he moans, "Buffy, Buffy, Buffy."
Her answer is a howl, a sob into his skin. "Angel," she whimpers.
"You're not real," he insists, "Why are you doing this to me?"
"I am real," she promises. "For a while I didn't think I was, but I am, I am, I am."
She kisses him, presses sobbing, stricken lips against his skin, and swears over and over that she exists. She tells him of heaven, and hellish earth, and the hate she felt for the life she was returned to. She tells him of her coffin, and her bloodied hands, and crawling into his hotel only to find him gone.
She tells him of her search, and how she had her own part in the End of Days. She promises him, *promises* him, that she's there.
And at the final touch of her lips on his, he believes her. He rolls them together like clay, and they form something new, something infinitely more tender. He takes her into himself, and *feels* her, in his soul, and he believes.
They came across each other in an alley, years after the end, and it's slipping of lips, and murmur of skin, and love, love, love, and everything he forgot he was missing.
As the sun comes up, and she pulls him away, into the safety of her hotel room, he thinks maybe he's found his own absolution, stretched in the arms of a dream come real.
The part of him that still bleeds for her death remains dormant, and for the first time in months, he knows some peace. Fragile, frightened, he allows her to hold him in her arms, listens to her promises of love and life, and sighs.
He's just glad to hold her close.
Part of him considers the hatred he felt for her, weighs it up rationally in a brain exhausted by new knowledge. He remembers the whispers in his ear, the schizophrenic panic from which his resentment grew, and he knows - it was lies, all lies, grinding him and grilling him to dust.
She gave him life again - real life, not signified by beating heart or breath of lung, but by simple, joyful, love.
He doesn't need a shanshu, he only needs her.
And now, he's got her, anger, and death, and the First evil be damned.
He's got her, and he's been saved.