DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything.
DISTRIBUTION: Yes, take it -- please! Although I’d appreciate the URL!
RATING: R for a sexual situation of the C/A variety.
THEME: Angst/Drama.
SPOILERS: Awakening. General Season 4 stuff (and general Season 6 stuff for BTVS)
COUPLINGS: Angel/Cordelia, Buffy/Angel. It's a B/A fic.
DEDICATION: To Jill, for being such an all-round fantastic person! The help you’ve given when I was planning the story was an absolute life-saver, thank you! Also, cheers for beta'ing!
I'm also going to dedicate this to the guys at the Babble Board (if they'll have it *g*). I've been lurking at the BB quite a lot over recent months. It's a wonderful atmosphere and it's a relief to have a refuge from all the less B/A open-minded BTVS boards on the 'net!
SUMMARY: A moment of synthesised happiness, followed by the real thing.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I really want to emphasise how indebted I am to Jill. I've incorporated into the fic some of the dialogue she’d suggested, which I feel just terrible about, but it seemed silly not to utilise it when the alternatives I came up with were much inferior!
I make a few references to Buffy and Angel's meeting from Season 6/3. None of it is canon. It's just my own interpretation.
I was tinkering with this right up until posting, so if you see any typo's, I'd really appreciate it if you let me know :) Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story. Cheers!
*** WARNING: There's a big C/A sex scene coming up! ***

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
From The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

His mouth sucked upon her without piercing the skin. The flushed indentations snaked across her body like rubies. Were they animal? The way he ravaged her ...

With a head full of gratification he never stopped to consider further than, was she being satisfied? Was he? What else mattered whilst they were together? She dug tarnished nails into his shoulders and positioned him correctly on the bed. The sticky stench of intimacy clogged his nostrils and the windowsill.

Repression had removed his sensitivities. It was fortunate his hands never lingered anywhere for too long or he would have bruised her. His limbs tangled awkwardly around her like an overgrown virgin -- the short, shorn thrusts of the pelvis burying hungrily within to the rhythmic moans of her satisfaction.

He rutted his mind into cruise control to overcome the unfamiliar form beneath him so that she would become his again. The scent of her long, golden hair reminded him of their walks along the promenade, when his scalp had tinged with sunlight and her fingers entwined with his. But Cordelia had short hair . . . Angel folded the thought away.

This was sheer abandonment, an absolute surrender of self to sensation and lust. The weight of his suffering seemed to lessen as though a hand had buried itself within his centre and torn his heart away. Was he made from air? He was soaring -- across the sky! Everything that had bound him to the earth was gone. He was numb, unblemished. *Purified* by her act of love.

Cordelia, Cordelia, Cordelia. He would have to tell her how she completed him in ways he’d never known before –- and he’d been so very lonely recently that to encounter this kind of recklessness allowed him a relief he’d long searched for. Were they soul mates? Possibly. She’d fallen in love with him quite accidentally and he . . . well, what was it he felt, if not love? He should trust his heart in this matter.

*You’ve got a heart? It’s not even beating!* Yes, those words still stung but she was talking out of grief -- or so he consoled himself during those first few nights alone, before Cordelia. He had a heart, he knew that well enough, but the Powers -- or the Gypsies -- saw to it that it should remain empty, carved from stone. A curse. Cordelia, he moaned again. Cordelia. Oh, he loved to say her name!

Angel led a life of self-inflicted control that she had taken away with a kiss. Even now, as he was in the act, did he wonder why he would risk his soul in such a fashion, when she would be the first in danger. Did he love her that much? That little? Had she forgotten then, what he was capable of doing to her? For she was a smart girl and she *had* kissed him first.

Justification fell flat upon his shoulders. He knew what he was, how foolish to play this game. With his slab of flesh and careless embrace, who was he to talk of love? Here he was, soiling himself into the void. Angel pushed himself further into Cordelia in taint disgust. Why couldn’t he free himself from his monster? Why was it that only his monster could free itself of him?

Cordelia tasted of dewberry on the tongue. Bitter -- but laced with a kind of comfort that Angel knew, fallen deity as she was, would be the nearest he’d get to paradise. It shuddered through him like a cascading waterfall, brought him back to his youth in an alternate reality, returned his virginity (or innocence). *This is what it’s like to be free* Angel drank in deep gulps. *This is what it is to be free*

Or not. For this was what he wanted, his perfect day, and yet . . . it rang hollow, somehow, like surface material. He didn’t understand, want to consider why he could feel so good and bad in one single moment, as though everything he touched was tainted: Connor, Cordelia . . . it seemed impossible that he could resolve things so quickly between them when yesterday they were close to falling apart.

Angel shook his head. How he could think such things whilst Cordelia was there beneath him, *giving herself to him* in the ultimate expression of love? It was his mind rebelling against her – against them – for taking Cordelia as a mate when he had no right to.

Even his most solid self-delusion could not fool him otherwise. She awakened such vivid sensations in his body but they never extended to his mind – or his soul.

He didn’t care. He would embrace this physical pleasure of being, if nothing more could be achieved. She was his, his Cordelia, his happiness. Perhaps perfect, perhaps not. But he couldn’t deny that Cordelia aroused him to the point of euphoria, made his head spin in the way that only love in all its magnificent glory could. She made him feel good about himself; she was human, caring, warm. And although their relationship wasn’t built on fire or intensity or any kind of depth other than friendship she *did* make him happy.

With a final jolt Angel climaxed and revelled in his moment of blissful happiness before –

*Buffy*

This one stray thought tagged a corner of his mind, ruptured him with such clarity and horror and terrible loneliness that he physically repelled himself from Cordelia and fell back on the bed.

*My love, what have I done?*

A pain – something beyond oblivion or mortal comprehension suddenly plunged itself down his spine, splicing him like a tiger.

*My love, forgive me. I’ve made a dreadful mistake*

Was this perfect happiness? And to achieve it, without her? In Darla he’d found pure sorrow and Cordelia, mock ascension. He desperately wanted to burrow his head into her shoulder and find that precious deliverance she had offered him but where he sought comfort he now found dirt and death. Cordelia was never his saviour. She was his damnation.

“Buffy . . .”

Wretched, wretched man! How could he do it to her – for this, a drunken fumble! His face felt wet, had he been crying? What kind of man wept for his soul! Time was never meant to part them but her death had changed everything and he had grieved – god, how he had grieved for his lost mate! She was different when she returned. Distant, even when they’d kissed, as if he no longer mattered to her. She no longer loved him. His heart ached for her but he’d returned home, alone, craving ice cream and affection and anything that would soothe his wounds. He had wanted Buffy. She was his True ... but she would never know.

“Of course I do,” a familiar voice whispered from across the room.

“From the first time we kissed, I knew it would always be you.”

Like automation Angel lurched from the bed, taking one of the sheets with him. Cordelia said something he didn’t pay attention to. She’d paled into insignificance, into the wallpaper the very moment he found himself staring into the hazel eyes of Buffy Summers – or the *form* of Buffy Summers, for it couldn’t be her standing there looking so beautiful and tragic and free...

“How did you --" Angel trailed off uncertainly. He ached to touch her, to know that she was real, but he didn’t trust his fingers to stop there.

Buffy had left him a broken man back in that motel room and hadn’t contacted him since. It was insane to believe that this was some heavenly intervention, a last act of kindness from the Power That Be, to reunite two lost souls for one final embrace when this was nothing more – could be nothing more than the sickly delusion of a dying man.

“Hello, Angel. How have you been?” Her trademark smile.

“How have I – how can you ask me that?” The woman’s presence seemed to penetrate through him and attack his inner core. “I’ve betrayed you! Angelus will return – everything’s ruined! Buffy . . . I’m sorry, I’m so sorry – ” He barely cared that it couldn't be her, so desperate was his pain, his desire to be forgiven.

The woman who looked so much like Buffy shrugged. “There’s nothing to apologise for. I understand why it happened – what you were searching for."

He knew now, too. It was never about love -- not love in its purest form like he had had with Buffy. The sheet fell limply through his fingers and curled around his feet.

Buffy continued; "We all want comfort, Angel. To feel loved, complete. There are times that we are so alone that we can’t stand it anymore and we latch onto something ... anything ... just to feel.”

“Something ... is better than the void I’ve carried since leaving you," Angel said in a low voice. "At least, that was what I kept telling myself until today. It’s always there inside me, Buffy. This leaden, empty feeling. I thought Cordelia would ... make me feel part of something. Less alone.”

"Solace," Buffy said knowingly. "I know what that’s like. I've done it often enough, myself.”

Angel's eyes flickered upward, surprised. “When? Who --” He had no right to be jealous but for that first fraction of a second he could not help but to reveal his feelings through his voice.

Buffy didn't immediately answer him. He waited impatiently but never in his wildest dreams did he expect her to say-- “Spike. ”

“Spike?” Angel moved towards her, purging the name from his lips like bile. "He touched you? Why would you let --"

"Just listen," she interrupted. “I've never told you before that my friends tore me out of Heaven. I didn’t want to upset you, I guess, or didn’t want to hear myself say it,” She shrugged as though she couldn’t remember.

“But I *was* in paradise. Nothing on this planet can ever touch upon how complete I felt up there -- present company excluded, naturally -- and then I lost it all. I pretty much dissociated myself from life, after that. Couldn’t feel anything but numb for a long time."

Buffy walked across the room, to the bed, and laced her hands over a pillow. Angel watched her in quiet contemplation. That Buffy, his mate, could be in so much pain and he'd never known ...

"Spike made me feel things," Buffy mused. "Lust ... disgust ... everything with him was violent and passionate but on some basic level it helped me to survive. Even when I was lying with my back against a wall in a back alley, or -- whatever." She finished lamely. "I hated myself for what I was doing with him, most of the time, but at least I was feeling something. So you see, you and I aren't so different. We've both wanted someone to take away the pain."

“I’m sorry,” Angel told her, although he recognised how feeble the words sounded. He dearly wanted to take her in his arms and heal her with his embrace, but the Buffy standing before him seemed a far cry from the girl she referring to and he doubted that she needed that kind of comfort anymore.

"Don't be. I didn't come all this way to guilt you out."

"I wish you’d told me this back at the motel," he said quietly. "I could have helped, somehow -- or at least tried. It would have been better than --" Angel sighed. He couldn't pass judgement on what Buffy had done with Spike because he understood it, only too well. "The sensation of a body beneath you, someone who loves you ... it helps – however fleetingly – to stop the pain."

Buffy nodded. "Although it can never replace what it feels like ... when you love them back." Her eyes lingered on his for a moment, pressing the meaning home.

Angel smiled wanly. "Do you think, in some alternate reality, we would ever have had a chance?”

Buffy stopped to consider. “As lovers, you mean?”

No. That wasn't deep enough for how he felt about her.

“As *mates*. Buffy ... it was only ever about you. The whole reason I’m here in L.A., doing my bit for the good fight … it was because *you* gave me a destiny. Up on that hill that morning. Do you remember?"

"I didn't give you a destiny, Angel," Buffy said softly. "You always had it, you just didn't know. Whistler told me ... what happened between us -- when we made love -- it set you off on a different path, one you never should have gone down. Everything with Acathla -- Angel, you were never supposed to revert to Angelus, did you know that? Not then, not ever. All I ever did that day was set you back on the right path. To remind you that you are still a champion."

*A champion* The title seemed odd, coming from Buffy. He suddenly found himself undeserving of the term. Ever since Darla had returned to his life he'd drifted so far from his original path that he barely recognised it, anymore. Was he more of a champion back then than he was, now? Brain teasers. "You didn't answer my question."

"Yeah, well you were the one who left me, remember?" Buffy said with a bite of impatience, uncharacteristic of her generally mellow mood. "But if you wanna know what I think ... we were never supposed to be together, Whistler told me as much. But our love … it transcended everything, even the expectations of the ever-knowing Powers That Be. Why else would they let you sacrifice your humanity for me, when by rights we should be living in some small detached house by now, trying to pay off our mortgage and bring up three kids?"

*She knows*

"You ... remember that?" Angel asked quietly, suddenly very aware of the stillness of the room. This was perhaps his deepest secret. Only Cordelia was privy to it -- and even then, he wasn't the one who told her.

"Now I do. Heaven gives your mind a good old wipe when you enter, you know?"

"No. I don't." He'd been in limbo and suffered Hell, but he had never experienced the nurturing comfort that was Heaven.

"Do you remember what they told us on that wonderful, beautiful day?" Buffy asked lightly. "That together we're strong, and alone we are *so* weak. And you know what? They were right. As warriors and as mates, we have to put up a united front against the evil in this world or we *will* die. Together is the only way we can hope to survive." Her voice became intimate. "Together is the only thing that *gives* survival meaning."

"As mates?" Angel dared to hope. "You think we can still--"

"You came into my life so suddenly that you shook everything up from its roots and now nothing can be put back in its place again," Buffy said with a small, discreet smile. "And I like the mess. I don't care what the bad guys -- or the good guys -- say about our fate. I think we belong together. In this reality, and every other. In every possible meaning of the word."

His heart lifted with her declaration and he slid his arms around her waist, finally feeling at peace with the world -- as though he’d just come home.

"I do love you, Angel. As a human or vampire it makes no difference to me. We may never get more than a few years together -- I don't know what the future holds -- but being together *right now* makes so much more sense than being apart. If I can't make you see that, then you're blind."

Angel pressed his forehead against hers. "If nothing we do matters … " he said softly. "Then all that matters is what we do."

"That's sage," Buffy commented brightly. "Did you read that in a fortune cookie?"

"No. But a very evil man made me realise that, once." Angel grinned, pulling away from her. "And you -- you would have me back. After everything ... even death ...?" He knew the answer. He was amazed it was still yes.

"I want to tell you everything," Buffy said, placing a hand on his chest. "How lost I felt after they resurrected me ... the yearning to become whole again. Even now I can still feel the loss." "My beloved," Angel whispered gently. He cast his mind back barely a year to the hollowed out feeling she'd left him with when she'd walked out that room. Now he could wash those memories away with new ones -- carve a new life together. "I wish we'd talked like this at the motel."

"Yes," Buffy agreed, tracing patterns across his breastbone. "Things might have gone a lot differently if I hadn't behaved the way I did."

"It wasn't your fault. It makes sense now -- now that I know what you've been through. You weren't just rejecting me. You were rejecting *everything*."

"It hurts, though," Buffy realised. "To know that not even you could reach me, when I'd sunk so low."

"It's that I never tried that upsets me the most. And I hate that things had to come to this --" Angel indicated to their surroundings. "Before we could find a way back to each other."

Buffy looked at him carefully. "But you know this isn't real, right? This world, I mean? That you're dreaming?"

"I was beginning to get an idea," Angel remarked.

The room began to fade into an inky black void. The change occurred so slowly that Angel barely noticed the difference, at first. But with every passing beat of Buffy's heart -- which he could feel, so strongly, reverberate through him as though it were his own -- the blackness spread further until everything ... Cordelia's bed, the picture frame on the table ... crumbled into nothing.

"I have no idea what any of this means," Angel admitted looking around. They stood there, in the centre of the darkness, clasping each other's hands. "But there isn't much time left, is there?"

Buffy shook her head. "A few minutes, at best."

A calmness descended over him. "Then I'm glad I'm here with you.

Buffy, I ... after you left me alone in that motel room I thought -- I finally realised that I couldn’t go on clinging to a hope between us that would never come true. That's why I tried to move on with Cordelia.”

Buffy grinned. "You've got to stop looking for that picture-book romance. What we have may not be fairytale perfect, but it *is* real."

“My love for Cordelia," Angel continued. "Or at least what I thought was love until we slept together ... I think it was less painful than what we had because it was ... less to begin with. It could never touch upon what I felt for you.”

“But it was enough for the Shaman to convince you otherwise," Buffy noted.

Angel looked at her, finally piecing it together. “My soul," he said. "All of this ... for my soul! Did they get it?" He almost sounded wistful.

Buffy nodded gravely. “I think so."

"So having sex with Cordelia --"

She stopped him with a finger on the lips. "It wasn't perfect happiness. You just wanted it to be.”

"This is it, then," Angel murmured. "The end of the road." His destiny was now in the hands of his family. If they were to fail, then he’d remain in this limbo -- possibly forever.

He desperately hoped that it would not come to that. He had a lot to put right, when he finally returned to their world. Angel drew his soul mate to him, hoping to draw strength from her body for the long cold void ahead. "Stay with me?" His voice seemed so small.

Buffy’s eyes became pained. "I wish I could!" But even she was beginning to fade, now. She cupped her hands around his face and ignored the tears that ran freely down her own. “*I’ll* show you perfect happiness...” she whispered gently, pressing her lips against his.

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