PART SEVEN

"Where are we going?" Angel asked, walking as fast as he could without running, but still a good few metres behind Buffy.

"To the forest."

"What happened in the forest?"

Buffy slowed down her pace and waited for him to catch up.

"Be patient, and I'll tell you when we get there."

They'd left the party as soon as sun had set, both eager to get his memory back as soon as they could. All the way down the road however, he was asking various questions about what had happened when he was in hell, stuff she'd rather not answer, like 'So what happened to you?' and 'Did you bring me back?'. Angel had been broken the night before, but now he was acting like being sent to hell and turning evil was no big deal, which was a bit flippant in her opinion. But maybe he was repressing. He'd had a lot to take on in 24 hours, whereas she had had three years. And it wasn't like she didn't know about repressing- trying to get Angel out of her mind when she was going out with Riley. Also, when Angel did remember his past, she knew he'd be back to punishing himself with guilt anyway, so maybe he was thinking of the big picture and giving himself a few saving graces.

She couldn't blame him, she would have done that too if she was him.

"How are you coping with all this?" she asked, meaning to be a rhetorical thought but somehow becoming a verbal question.

Angel immediately sagged. Buffy realised that the way he'd been that day, it was hard to remember he was ill.

"I'm not, just trying to make it easier on you, being less emotional, sticking to the facts. That way, you don't get added pain at seeing me in pain."

Buffy was surprised that was his reason, but she didn't feel happy about it.

"Do what feels right to you" she told him seriously.

"I'll do my grieving in private" he replied

They walked through the playground.

"I needed that today" Angel said, changing the subject "The party, it helped. You know?"

"Yeah. Everyone was pretty drunk though"

"It was nice to feel accepted. I haven't felt that accepted for a…" he broke off and sat down on one of the swings, head in his hands. "I'm a killer, I shouldn't be feeling happy."

"You're making amends, that means you're a good guy. That takes you out of the killer category." Buffy walked to his side.

"Sorry about earlier, I shouldn't have kissed you like that. I was wrong to."

"It was a two way street, I'm sorry- I took advantage of you."

"But I'm the one with the curse, I shouldn't have risked it." Angel shot back, determined to be the one to blame.

"We've kissed plenty of times and it's made no difference to your sanity. There's a difference between being happy and being entirely happy."

"But I don't know that"

"Well you're going to have to trust me" Buffy said angrily. Like she'd lie and put the entire city, or the world, in peril?

But Angel thought that trusting her went without saying. Obviously not by the way she had stood back like she'd been bitten.

"Of course I do. I don't trust anyone else… not even myself anymore"

"You will when you remember"

"But what if I don't? It's possible you know, I could just stay like this. Trapped in a cage…"

"At least you won't remember hell" she offered, trying to find an upside. "I wish I could forget it, not a nice place to wind up."

That confused him further. He looked up at her.

"You went to hell too?"

He'd assumed that when he was sent to hell, that was the end of their relationship and adventures together. Suddenly, he created images of how his memory might turn out- Buffy ending up sucked in hell behind him through Acathla and them both helping everyone escape it, rambo style. It made for a pretty cool slide show.

"Kind of, it wasn't 'hell' hell, but more of its waiting room. Another dimension"

Angel's 'lovers-fighting-side-by-side' image shattered into fragments.

"When was that?"

"A few months after I… killed you."

If she hadn't accessed hell to save him, Angel opted to hear how Buffys life really developed when he was out of the picture.

"Tell me about it. I want to know what happened in Sunnydale when I was gone."

But honestly, what he wanted to really know was whether Buffy mourned him or not.

Buffy blushed. "I wouldn't know, I didn't stay"

"You left?" Angel said incredulously.

"Uh-huh. That was a pretty bad night for me, everything kind of got screwed up. Kendra died, my friends ended up at hospital while Giles was tortured,-"

'By you', Buffy silently added sadly

"-Snyder expelled me, my mom found out I was a slayer and kicked me out, oh yeah," Buffy said dryly "and I killed the man I loved, just as he turned back to normal. I took off alright"

And to be truthful, same events, she'd probably do it again.

Although Angel couldn't breath, he almost drew breath in surprise.

"I went to Los Angeles for a few months. That's where I got sucked into the demon dimension. After that horrifying experience, I came back home, it kind of woke me up."

"I'm sorry, I am- I should have just gotten out of your life when I had the chance" Angel seethed, standing up "Then I'd never had woken Acathla, and you would have been happy. If I wasn't so selfish, you would have been spared all this…"

"If you left me, then I would have come with you." Buffy replied, rubbing her head. She sometimes wished she'd done that when he went to LA. "Besides, if I didn't have you, I'd have been with some Riley-ite for the rest of my life, or dead."

"Lets get going" Angel said briskly, hurting that she'd been through so much because of him.

They silently continued walking.

*

The trees were green, the ground was brown. An eerie quietness was echoing around the forest, that not even an owl would interrupt.

"This is where I next saw you." Buffy said, showing him the area that they'd fought when Angel returned from hell. "You were an animal, wild, ferocious, I didn't recognise you at first, then you turned around and looked at me, nothing – nothing – scared me more than seeing you that day. Like a ghost. You were dead, gone, I'd killed you- but then suddenly you weren't, you were alive again, and savage. I'd finally accepted you'd gone, but then you came back into my life. I could have died with fright that night. But hell, it'd affected you. Years of torture, you were different, like I said- an animal."

Angel walked over to the muddy spot she'd pointed to, and dipped his shoe in slightly, trying to imagine running around and snarling. Not an image he could picture himself doing.

"I just appeared?" he asked. The concept was just too weird "One day gone, the next I was back?"

"Pretty much. I'd been having these dreams about you since I killed you. Every day, night, during work, you kept re-appearing to me, I was torturing myself because of what I did. I thought it was another dream, but this time, it was real."

"It wasn't your fault, you didn't have the choice."

He offered his hand to her, and she walked over to hold it.

"I wish I could have had that day again. If I'd stayed with Kendra then you'd never gotten Giles, and maybe that would have changed things somehow. Or if I knew that day you'd turn back to normal…"

"There's no point dwelling, I came back"

"Yeah, after centuries of suffering, I'm sure you forgave me for that one"

Angel didn't reply. Seeing as he couldn't remember, he didn't know if he had forgiven her or not.

Buffy continued her story. "So I caught you after a bit of badly choreographed dirty dancing and chained you up at the mansion until I worked out what to do. I mean, it was possible that you'd stay like an animal forever, but thank god you gradually regained your personality and turned back to normal. I didn't tell Giles, I didn't know what was happening until you'd lost your animal persona, and by then I decided I wasn't ready to share the fact that you were back with everyone else. Also, a new slayer was in town, I couldn't risk you getting dead again, and after last time…I was so scared they'd take you away from me, and I needed you so much. And you needed me to get better, like now, I suppose."

Her speech finished, Buffy felt her headache worsen. No more tears, she'd decided. Problem was, without being released, all that grief was storing itself in her head, and it hurt a lot.

A lot.

"That sounds quick" Angel mused. One day in hell, the next on earth. One day a savage wild thing, the next a refined gentleman again. But from what he knew about hell, he figured it wasn't a quick transformation after all. Maybe Buffy made it sound short to spare his feelings.

"It wasn't, trust me. I mean, you were still weak, and it took a long time to get better."

"But you helped me." Angel traced one of his fingers slowly across her hand in varying directions, making her tingle all over her body. She loved that feeling, it made her feel alive.

"Not like you seem to be indicating" Buffy laughed from the tickling. She hoped that her darned headache would go, it was making it hard to concentrate. "I couldn't risk being with you again, so we were strictly non-relationship people"

They glanced at their hands entwined together, and automatically dropped them, without really knowing why. Circumstances had changed so much since then.

"Things kind of blew up in our face though, as Xander caught us kissing"

Angel groaned. Xander had always been jealous of him.

They turned away from the dirt track, and Buffy indicated for him to follow her out of the forest. She had somewhere else to take him.

"Next thing I knew, I was the Scooby outside. They hated me for not telling them about you. It didn't help that Faith had appeared either, doing the Vampire Zero Tolerance thing and attacking you first chance she got"

"Faith? You mentioned her yesterday, something about me defending her?"

"She's Kendra's replacement slayer. Doing time right now, I think, unless she's escaped from prison, which I expect she has."

"Excuse me?!"

"She turned evil too" Buffy summed up

"Guess we've kind of left you with trust issues" Angel couldn't help but say.

"She wasn't like you. You didn't have a choice about becoming a vampire, but she was seduced into evil. Took the side of the latest brewing bad guy and swapped camp for the fun of it. It spiralled out of her control, she was gone."

"How about us, where were we in all this? I'm assuming Willow and the others learned to…uh, stay in the same room as me over time"

"Well…" Buffy took a deep breath. "Gradually, everyone began accepting you again and we were getting closer. But, Spike turned up and made me realise-"

"-That you were in love with him?" Angel asked incredulously

Buffy attempted a patient smile. "No, that came later when we got engaged"

She savoured his surprised look.

"As I was saying before you interrupted, he came here and said some stuff which hit a nerve and made me realise that we really couldn't be anywhere near each other anymore, so we agreed on no contact, although it was more like me forcing you. I wanted you, but it didn't matter. Things had changed since we last were together properly, and it was too late to turn back time and live in happier days."

Buffy caught Angel's look before she processed how ironic her statement was. She groaned, rubbed her tense head and tried to apologise, but Angel wasn't interested, seeming deep in thought. She wondered if he was even listening to her speech, but continued anyway.

"It was kind of difficult seeing as we both lived in Sunnydale. We bumped into each other at Christmas.."

Angel stirred from his thinking.

"Hey wait. Let me get this clear, I was sent to hell and then sent back?"

"I thought we established this" Buffy sighed, an ache pounding in her skull.

"I kind of find it hard to believe I'd accept it and not find out why, that's all"

"You did, I was coming to that, at Christmas. You were having nightmares, in fact I kind of got sucked into them."

"Huh?" Angel asked

"You were having nightmares, and I kind of…got sucked into them?" Buffy tried again.

Angel shook his head, not understanding.

"Put it this way Angel, it turns out that the First Evil summoned you out of hell to try and make you work for them, giving you freaky dreams, working on your emotions to try and turn you into Angelus once more."

"Did it work?" he asked, fearing an affirmative answer.

"No, it didn't as you decided to commit suicide."

Good cue. She indicated to the hill they were standing on, the place she'd taken him to. He glanced around, unaware.

"Here."

"What?"

"This is where you tried to commit suicide! You couldn't cope. Maybe it was you being fresh out of hell, maybe it was the fact you couldn't deal with your new knowledge of your curse. Maybe… maybe it was because I had left you alone. Or maybe it was the power of the First. But you became even more guilt-ridden than usual, and decided that rather than give in to evil, you'd commit suicide and, in your opinion, do the world a favour. You stood here and waited for dawn to come. The sun. I managed to find you and pleaded with you to stop."

Buffy walked on the grass and hugged herself coldly. She couldn't look at Angel now, as her tears were once again free-flowing and tears made her feel vulnerable.

Angel quietly walked around the hill in a circle, assessing it.

"Buffy, how many times have you cried because of me?" he asked timidly, breaking the walk to stand beside her. Her hair covered her face and he wasn't looking directly at her, staring at the view, but he knew she was crying. He could hear it in his heart. .

"Too many. In my dreams, at the mansion, in my room, patrolling, on this hill…"

"So why did you stay with me for two years?"

"Because I love you" she replied. What other reason could there be? She turned around and faced him. He pulled her hair out of her eyes. She shook her head and snapped out of her cry-fest abruptly.

"Stand there" she said, pointing to the space he was when they fought. "I ran over to you and you had this peaceful look on your face, and it scared me, I pleaded with you to come with me away from the impending sunlight, but you just talked about how…how the kids were waking up. And the sun was nearly rising, and I tried to reason with you, explain how much you could do for the world…." Buffy stifled her tears easier this time, but her voice still came out in broken croaks. She couldn't stop that.

Angel stepped away slightly, and looked out across the city. He started whispering something to himself.

"A...Angel?" Buffy followed his gaze, but didn't see what he was concentrating on.

His voice became louder.

"Because I want you so badly. I want to take comfort in you, and I know it'll cost me my soul, and a part of me doesn't care."

Buffy almost collapsed with a mixture of exhaustion and surprise. Was she going crazy?

"What did you say?"

He turned back to her.

"I'm weak, I've never been anything else. It's not the demon that needs killing, it's the man"

His body, his face, his tone, they were all the same. Like some sort of flashback. Riley's shirt reminded her that it wasn't one, although she pinched herself to be sure, she had re-lived this moment plenty of times in her dreams.

Buffy could see tears in his eyes, fresh ones to add to the others she had made him cry over the past 48 hours. She ran over and held his gaze.

"You remember?"

"And you said that you wished you hated me, but you didn't." Angel paused for a second to roll the next words out in his mind. "You couldn't"

"Angel…" Buffy almost dying with happiness

"And then it began to snow…"

"Oh god, you remember" Buffy grabbed him and hugged hard. "You do, you remember, oh god, Angel…Angel…"

She whispered his name over and over, pushing her face into his shirt with relief, headache gone like it was never there.

"I don't."

"What?" she asked from her position, ceasing in her sexual moaning.

"I remember that night, but the rest of it's just a blur."

This time she understood what he meant.

"You mean you don't have your memory after all?" she choked on the words.

No… but that meant… she'd have to carry on doing this, being the only one to know what happened between them, all alone. And that meant more time to wait until she could ask him out again. The nightmare of being with him but not knowing if he was going to reject her was becoming worse. And Cordy and Wesley still without their boss… He had to remember… He had to…

"I don't, no... I can remember my childhood, my early days as a vampire, meeting you, climbing up that damn ladder and what happened on this hill, but nothing else. I don't remember the other things you've told me yet"

He was angry, this meant he was no better than a few minutes ago. Angel was fed up with being so helpless, fed up enough to strike out at the air furiously. And the memory, it confirmed everything, not that he doubted what Buffy had said, but now he could remember how he felt on the hill- about Buffy, the curse and his tainted life. It made him feel sick.

"Stupid… useless…" Angel whispered to himself.

It pained Buffy to see him like this. She had to finish it, once and for all.

"That's it." she said to him forcefully. "We're going to cure you tonight. I have two more places I want to take you before Cordy gets a go, and if you don't remember after that, I'm gonna scream so loud that you will explode before my eyes from the sonic sound"

Angel, despite his pain, smiled and stopped attacking the imaginary enemy he was pummelling. He wanted some more memories to assault his mind, he quickly accessed all he could remember, but nothing new was coming. The ladder, then now the hill, then LA. He did feel like the fog was lifting though, even if it was being replaced by mist.

"It'll take a while to get Vampire ash out of the carpet" he joked, wondering where he heard that familiar phrase.

Obviously not from Buffy, whose smirk showed she hadn't heard it before.

She grabbed his hand and started pulling him down the hill at top speed.

"Come on" she said, feeling his resistance

"I want to know what's next on the check list first" Angel asked

"The school" The blond slayer replied. "You'll have to run faster than that."

Angel picked up his speed, all the while pleading to himself to remember.

One memory wasn't enough.

Go to Part 8