SERIES: Only When I Sleep 18
DISCLAIMER: They're not mine... almost thankfully, at the moment. Tell you what, I'll have season 2 Buffy and end-season-1 Ats Angel, and they can have them how they are.
TIMELINE: Directly following 'Intervention' and 'Dead End'.
SPOILERS: Yeah, lots.
SYNOPSIS: Buffy. Angel. Dream.
FEEDBACK: Would be treasured.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: It's not the Hokey-Pokey, it's the Hokey-Cokey. But in the interests of accuracy and seeing as Buffy is American, I have grudgingly ceded it in the fic.
RATING: PG

When I fell in love with Angel and made the decision to actually pursue it, I think I realised - with some instinctive knowledge of how vampire relationships work and of how I work and how this was somehow different from the affectionate pangs I'd felt and witnessed before - I half knew I was tying myself to him, so tightly I might never get away. It didn't bother me then. It usually doesn't bother me now.

It *does* bother me that I seem to have somehow tied myself to his whole damn bloodline.

Spike and Angel share a lot of things. Darkness. A demon. Concentration on the hair and the leather. A deep, abiding hatred for one another. A deep, obsessive love for me.

Obviously Angel isn't aware of that last or Spike would be dust flung to the corners of the Earth by now. I'm not sure why I haven't let that happen. I don't particularly mind if Spike gets dusted, but I don't really want to do it myself, not while he's... well, not impotent, from Xander's description of him and the Bot, which I am trying oh so desperately to repress, but... I guess not helpless either because he manages to do enough destruction without resorting to violence...

Okay, I don't know why I haven't staked him.

* * * * *

I grew up in LA and I really have no problems with the desert. However, I wasn't jumping to return right now, even subconsciously - or especially subconsciously. I don't want that to be the First Slayer's domain. *I* don't want to be the First Slayer's domain.

A nice safe bedroom, that was the place to go. Literally. Relatively safe, for Angel and I.

I was aiming for my bedroom, but then you can't have everything. Angel's room is nice. A little dark, but then I don't really expect anything else. And he has an actual balcony, which beats a roof.

"Hi," I said to announce my presence and then sat on his bed and curled myself into his arms without delay. He stroked my hair.

"How are you?" he said.

"Getting along," I said, then swallowed through a sudden lump in my throat. "I..."

"Yeah?" he said when I didn't go on.

"I can't... I can't remember her face," I said in an agonised rush. "I can see her features perfectly, and then when I try and put them together it just..."

"Shh," he said, his voice soothing, reacting automatically to my distress. I felt the familiar weight of his head come to rest on mine and snuggled closer into the crook of his neck.

"It's only been a couple of weeks," I said, sniffling a little. "I was away for longer during school last year."

"But you knew she was there so you didn't think about it," he said reasonably. "This is... different."

"I had the photos out and it's helped," I said.

"Good," he said.

"You don't have photos," I said. "Do you remember...?"

"Yes," he said, his tone unemotional. "But only at the end."

I knew immediately what he meant, and I was speechless for a second. That a bunch of people who take family so seriously can work a curse that makes a man remember *his* family only at the moment when he killed them... Angel himself defends the Romany's actions, but all they do for me is make me remember about human monsters.

"You still remember your mom," he carried on, his voice warm again, through his pain and back to concerning himself with mine. He's often disregarded his own feelings in the face of... well, practically anyone else's, but especially mine. It annoys me sometimes, but right then I was just glad for it.

"How she loved you, stuff you did together... you won't forget her, Buffy. I promise."

"Oh, I know," I said. "It just - hurt. Not to be able to see her."

He kissed the top of my head. "Death's like that."

"Yeah," I said bitterly. "You want to know what else I was told death is a couple of days ago? My gift."

"Told by whom?" he said, sounding surprised and a little dangerous. His arms tightened unconsciously about me.

"A guide. In the form of the First Slayer."

"The First Slayer?" he said.

"Yeah," I said, "there was a whole thing with her haunting our dreams a while ago. She was more lucid this time."

"The First Slayer wasn't lucid," he said, definitively enough to cause me to tilt back my head at a painful angle to catch his chocolate eyes with mine.

"And you know this how?"

"Well, you know," he said, avoiding my gaze. "There are stories."

"Vampire stories?" I said in bafflement. Vampires haven't ever struck me as the types to have a grand oral tradition.

Apart from the biting people.

"In the larger orders, yeah," he said.

Ah. And of course Angelus would have been a social animal of the time.

"Stories like..."

"She was wild," he said. "She was rumoured to have a bloodlust stronger than most vampires."

"A... literal bloodlust?" I asked uncertainly.

"Mmm. Not to drink. Like - warpaint."

"Eew," I said, this time with certainty. "You should tell Giles about that stuff."

"This guide must have been something powerful," he said, segueing abruptly. I didn't feel like calling him on it - these are probably details I neither need nor want.

I've *felt* that bloodlust. I know it, sometimes late at night when I'm tired... I've felt not only the urge to patrol, to hunt, but to *destroy*, put my ancient enemy to death and exult in the light smatter of dust. Is that what Faith felt? What drove her? I don't want to be a hunter like that, living only for the kill. I won't be like that.

"I guess," I said. "Giles and I went to the desert. He did the Hokey-Pokey. I followed a lion. I got talked at."

"He did the Hokey-Pokey?" Angel said, and I could hear the grin.

"That was my reaction," I said.

"Why did you go to it?" he said.

I shifted uncomfortably, slipping an arm over his chest, absently enjoying feeling hard muscle under the thin black shirt. It's been a while since I've been lying around a bed with one of the male of the species, and I've kind of missed it. Snuggling is good.

"I told you Dawn felt like I was blocking her out, right?"

"Yeah."

I shrugged against him. "So she's not the first."

He knew who I was talking about, bless him. "That wasn't your fault."

"Wasn't it? I never opened up to him."

"Doesn't mean you're shut down, Buffy," he argued.

"You have to say that," I said, fiddling idly with his top button. "You don't like him and love me."

"Do you love me?"

"You know I do," feeling a sudden panic grip me. If Angel... someone I opened up to, laid myself bare to... didn't know how I felt about him, I was *definitely* lacking.

"Say it," he demanded.

I leaned my head up to him, not painful this time, and our gazes locked.

"I love you," I said clearly.

He smiled and caressed my cheek with gentle fingers. "You don't sound emotionally numb to me."

"Well, she said I was full of love," I admitted. "But then she said it would lead me to my gift."

"Which is..."

"Death," I finished glumly.

He sat up against the headboard, pulling me with him so I was sprawled across his lap. I tangled the fingers of one hand in his shirt to anchor myself and wrapped my other arm around his neck.

"That's not true," he said firmly.

I looked at him gravely. "Isn't it?" My love was his death, once.

He stared at me steadily, and I knew he was thinking of the same thing. I could see it in his eyes; the hint of anguish, the shadow of pain he thankfully never fully remembered, the regret, the crippling guilt - and deep, though he tried to hide it from me, the recently-fading certainty that it would have been better for him to stay there.

But also: pride for me, for doing the necessary thing. A forgiveness that was hardly even forgiveness because he didn't think there was anything to forgive me for. Overpowering love undimmed from the time it had happened.

Love, give, forgive. Risk the pain. It's my nature.

Huh. Risk. So if I kiss Angel like *that* and he kisses back like *this* and pulls me even closer like *mmm* and I clutch at him like *ahhh*... that's risk of pain. My pain, his pain, the world's pain.

But it's love. And it's Angel, so it's my nature. I can't stay away from him any more than... well, I want to avoid cheesy romance novel territory here, but any more than something does that really, really likes being near something else can.

And Angel is an *excellent* kisser.

When I eventually pulled back from him, we touched our foreheads together and he dropped lazy butterfly kisses over my cheeks, supporting me as I leant against his chest in that sort of pleasurably boneless way. It's not a new feeling, but Angel's the only guy who's ever made me feel it just from kissing.

(Oh, and he has iron self-control. More than me, anyway.)

"And how was your week at the office, honey?" I said, giggling in a way that was intended to be self-deprecating and ironic, but I think came across as more 'you want fries with that?'

I caught his grin just before he tucked my head back under his chin.

"I despatched one of the problem lawyers," he said.

Ah. Well, that could mean a lot of things...

"In a way that was non-gory, yes?" I said cautiously.

He paused. "Yeah. I mean, he kind of despatched himself. He's gone, anyway."

Despatched like 'out of the city' rather than 'out of this mortal coil'. That's reassuring, anyway. Means Angel's probably still bonding with the coffee maker for his demanding colleague/unfairly boss people.

"How did that happen?"

"He got a new hand, realised it was off someone he knew and walked out of the firm," he said, succinctly and pretty confusingly.

"Right," I said. "The firm as in let's-drive-Angel-crazy firm?"

"Yes," he confirmed.

"So one less of them is good," I said, pleased. "Why did he need a new hand?"

I think he thinks I don't notice when he's being evasive. Honestly, men. Like our relationship didn't get off on the entirely cryptic foot.

"He... lost his," he said.

"People," I said, enunciating carefully, "do not *lose* hands, Angel. They're attached. It's hard."

"His wasn't attached."

"And why wasn't it attached?"

"I cut it off." His hands, resting naturally somewhere at the curve of my hips, tightened, imperceptibly to anyone without Slayer senses and nerves.

"Why?" I said, careful to keep an unjudgemental tone.

He sighed, his chest rising with the unnecessary action. He placed a tentative kiss on my forehead and I pressed closer in tacit encouragement.

"Cordy was sick... he was burning a scroll which held the cure," he said simply.

I can think of better reasons.

Okay, that wasn't nice to Cordelia. But I can!

"That's it?" I said.

"It was kind of the bad end to a bad couple of days," he said, "and I don't like to think about it so..."

"Okay," I said. Despite my curiosity, it was. I trust his judgement. But it made me think... when was this? There's a whole bunch of stuff from last year I don't know about. Of course, there's a good two centuries I know little about, but that I don't think of as my Angel and this... was just more I didn't know about him.

I miss him more when I realise how much I've missed.

"But he's got away from the firm and he can play the guitar again and hopefully he'll never, ever come back," Angel said with mostly-false cheer.

"Guitar?" I said idly. "He any good?"

Angel hesitated. "No."

Yes.

"Nothing special."

Better than me.

"Good," I said, playing my fingers idly over his stomach. "Good."

Without saying a word, we slid back down the bed in synchrony, lying flat and comfortable on Angel's bed (and for a sackcloth and ashes type, his bedclothes are great. Really soft). I drifted off with his arms around me... and when I woke, I felt okay for a whole ten seconds before it hit me... and even then, it wasn't as bad as it's been.

*Love* is my gift.

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