SERIES: Only When I Sleep interlude
DISCLAIMER: All belong to Joss, but he's currently being nasty to Angel/making Buffy nasty, so I'm borrowing them.
TIMELINE: After 'First Impressions' but also after 'We Walk In A Dream'.
SPOILERS: 'First Impressions', the other installments of the series. Also 'Lover's Walk', 'Angel', 'The Prodigal' (I think), 'I Will Remember You'.
SYNOPSIS: Angel thinks of Buffy. Ah! Surprised you!
DISTRIBUTION: Just ask!
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This follows Only When I Sleep 3, 'We Walk In A Dream', but it also stands alone; you don't really need the series to read it, and you don't need to read it for the series (but you know you want to anyway). I was considering writing it and then a couple of people wrote after 'We Walk In A Dream' and said "so the end ... what was that about?" or similar, so I figured maybe I needed it :).
FEEDBACK: Yes, please! Tell me if I'm completely misreading the whole Darla-dreams thing and Angel's feelings about it.
RATING: PG, maybe a little higher.

'I can't get you out of my thoughts
Or out of my heart and I know I'm in love with you baby
Everything I do leads me back to you
You got to know that you're driving me crazy'
Can't Get You Out Of My Thoughts, DumDums

I haven't had a really great sleep for two hundred and forty-odd years. A good hunter never really opens themselves up like that; leaves themself vulnerable to any idiot with a stake. And I was the best. Sleep is still that weakness for me, but it's easier to indulge in it when I know there's people around me who can keep me safe while I let myself go.

I just don't like to. For a hundred years I was tortured by a thousand terrified faces whenever I closed my eyes, and the dreams were worse. It pretty much put me off. The dreams after I returned from hell my waking mind protectively stopped me from remembering; still does, when I have them, but I always have the shadow, the twisted sheets, the knowledge that that's what I was dreaming of, but never anything of what I actually dreamt. I sometimes wonder if it would be better to know - whether it would help me feel a little more like I've paid my dues if I knew exactly what I experienced there.

Then the other dreams came, less than a month ago; the dreams where I saw Buffy, and felt Buffy, and upon waking instinctively knew had been Buffy, though I don't know how or why it happened. I have a fair idea; sometimes Buffy seems less completely herself than a mix of her and the now-dead female Oracle who sympathised with our sad story.

Whoever it is, it became easier to go to sleep, because there was a chance I'd get the fix I am denied in the real world. I hide it better now, and sometimes even forget for a little while, but ultimately Spike was right to call her my addiction; and righter still in his assertion that we wouldn't, couldn't stop loving each other. The dreams with her have taught me that.

The new dreams, the ones where Darla appear, teach me again what I'd forgotten; that a sire's addiction can be stronger still.

I have dreamt of Darla before; nightmares of us playing together before I regained my soul, of her rejection just after, of my final rejection as I staked her in the back. But these dreams, these images of homeliness and contentment and even passion ... these are new.

Well, not entirely new. The dreams of someone looking after me when I come in exhausted from the hunt, of a caring embrace meant to soothe and reassure, of a hot meeting of smooth flesh; that's been a common theme since I left Buffy in Sunnydale and picked up my mission in LA. But Buffy. Always Buffy. Especially after our lost day, when my unconscious tortured me with images of how our life together could have been.

Though never as much as my conscious assailed me with images of Buffy lying bleeding and broken, her life draining away in my arms as her instinct to protect me, her human lover, killed her. I still believe I did the right thing that morning; I just wish I'd had one more day, one more minute.

The demon rejoices to have Darla placed in the position Buffy usually occupies in my dreams; he abhors my love for her, and loathes my desire, though that he at least understands. To have Darla, his mate, in the role of my lover, is in a way his revenge; he taunts me with the stark images, vividly recollected from the day or night's dream. He taunts me further, with a glee I used to reserve for the kill, with the memory of my reponse to those images.

And that is what baffles and reviles me the most. How I can wake with a happy smile on my face; how I nearly strangled Wesley for making her leave. I try to tell myself it's a physical response after a hundred years of almost unbroken celibacy, a simple reaction to the proximity of a female my body knows intimately.

That's Buffy too.

But it is more than that; I respond to Darla, to what Darla does, emotionally. When I wake up I wonder where she is for a split- second, why she's not lying next to me. Then I hate myself for it.

For all of it; for betraying Buffy, for wanting a woman, a demon, I know to be dangerous, for enjoying her. Especially for enjoying her; for enjoying her to the point that I spend more time in slumber than in reality. I know that my game is off; I'm distracted, I fight with one eye on the demon and the other on the clock, wondering when I can get back to bed. I disgust myself, but I can't stop myself either.

And this is my redemption? I'm behaving how I did when I ran with Darla, and later Spike and Dru, revelling in the blood and destruction we brought so easily. As if I'd never killed her, as if I still knew what it is she wants. With one difference; I know different.

I am different. I don't want Darla in the unthinking, animalistic way I did for so long, and I don't want these dreams, this twisting of memories. I want what she offers in the dreams. I want the loving presence, the comfortable relationship, the slow worshipful lovemaking that only happens when you know your partner's body better than your own, the little things that have no importance until you have them with someone you love beside you. Or until you don't have them at all.

If I can't have those things really, I'll settle for them in my dreams. But not with Darla.

I thought I was safe last night; I sat in my old apartment and assumed she was coming. But it was Buffy who welcomed me into her calm arms, gave me a chance to hold her. I felt better just from her presence; she filled the room. She always does - it's thrilling, as a vampire, to be in the presence of a Slayer but know her not to be a threat, feel her strength without risk. I felt her essence surround me, and I thought that maybe I would be okay, maybe I could get through this, throw Darla's chains off.

Until she revealed herself with an inadvertent reference to her other visits. My blonde lover. But not the right one.

I didn't think she would attack using Buffy's form; like the truly addicted, I thought that was sacred. Darla is using any way she can to get to me.

And I don't know how to fight her.

NOTE: Considerable D/A undertones in this one; I apologize to rabid haters of them together, but considering that this series is primarily dreamfic and the contents of Angel's dreams in the ep, I couldn't *not* explore it. I'm actually ambivalent about the pairing (which I'm more than happy to discuss if anyone wants to); being the spoiler slut that I am, I don't see it having too many repercussions on what's currently passing for B/A. However, it will have big repercussions on this series; sorry, I have to work with what Joss gives me and I think it'll be getting worse before it gets better. But I promise that then I'll go back to the fluff.

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