Rating: PG-13
Couple: Buffy/Angel
Improv #27: Balm/bomb
Rapt/rapped
Scent/sent/cent
Vain/vane/vein
Disclaimer: None of this is mine.
Author's Notes: I got back from a nine day college visiting spree, watched "Flooded" and "Carpe Noctem," got the new improv words and decided to write this . . . haven't gotten much sleep (what's new?) so be nice.
Feedback: Pretty, pretty please?

He said, "Come to me," and I felt the words in my bones, slipping like liquid through my veins.

"I'm coming," I said, because there was no power in me to resist the pull in him. Because some part of me thought he could make it all hurt less. Because even though I didn't know how to want - except to go back, always, to go back, to find peace, to have it be over - I wanted to see him again.

Back when Angel still lived in Sunnydale, when we were still . . . we, there was this little cabin up in the mountains. We went there once to stop some kind of witchly gathering (the bad kind) and stayed overnight. I don't know how Angel found it, or who owned it, but it had a fireplace and a tiny kitchen and a bed with lots of comforters. We dragged them off the night we were there and sat on the floor by the fire, wrapped up in blankets and talking about everything and anything. We fell asleep on the floor, and when we woke up we decided that anytime we needed to meet outside of Sunnydale, anytime there was a problem or the need for privacy, we would meet there. I remember liking it there. I used to think I couldn't imagine a place more . . . safe, warm, where I felt wholly loved.

It was not, I knew, going to be the same. Driving up there, finding him, sitting by that fire wrapped in a blanket, in his arms, was not going to make me . . . whole, or happy. The place I'd left was gone forever, and nothing on Earth, nothing in the real world, could equal it. I knew that. But I had to go anyway - and I had to go immediately.

I think I may have scared Dawn and Giles a little, but I was past the point of caring. Everything had been building up, for days, like the water in the pipes, only they were too old, too tired to handle it all and suddenly so was I. Maybe not too old - maybe too young. I heard Angel's voice and I cracked, all at once, releasing problems into my consciousness like a river of blood, life and death. I thought Angel because it was the one solid thing I could hold on to in the flood. I have to go see Angel. He needs to see me. I need to see him. I wanted to give them more of an explanation, but I thought if I stopped, even for a moment, I would collapse in earnest and wouldn't make it to the cabin, to my one hope for . . . salvation? No, I'd had that and lost it. My one hope for life to be warm again.

You'd think it would be dangerous for me to drive, but if anything I think I did better than usual. My mind was so wholly overwhelmed that it seemed to separate from my body, my reflexes. I made all the right turns, I stopped at traffic lights and looked both ways before entering intersections. I obeyed the speed limit. I got there. I'm amazed I even remembered where it was. Somehow, I got there.

Come to me, he said, and I went. Because he needed to see me, or because I needed to see him?

I was shivering on the way to the door, though it wasn't cold. No, that's a lie. It was cold. The whole world was cold, and lonely, and real, far too real.

The cabin was just as I remembered it, remote, quiet, the door unlocked. I opened the door, careful not to let the sunlight too far in. I didn't know where Angel would be just that he was . . . there.

And he was. Standing against the opposite wall, his arms crossed as if to protect himself, he watched me walk in. Watched me close the door behind me. Could he see how I was shaking? Did he notice that I was paler than before, thinner, colder? Not the last certainly; Angel had always been cold.

When he died, before he woke up as a vampire, was he there, in that place?

There was a particular scent to the cabin, of wood smoke, pine needles, old books and Angel. It was warm, of course, too hot for my jacket, but I didn't feel like taking it off. All the thousand terrible things inside my head had narrowed down, quieted, fell away, leaving me with just this one: Angel.

"I'm so sorry," he murmured, and I suppose he could have meant about going to hell, or because he hadn't been there to save me, or any of a thousand other things, but standing there with his eyes on me, my throat closed on the knowledge that he knew. He understood. He saw me, while everyone else was still seeing the person they wanted me to be. The person I used to be.

"It's so cold here," I whispered, the words scraping out from a harsh, hurt place. From my entire body maybe; I was wrapped in sensation, and almost all of it was pain.

"I know," he told me, and crossed the room in two long strides to enfold me in his arms, as if it could help - and maybe it could, a little. I closed my eyes and let it all slide away, pretending that I was there again, that the warmth of the room was the warmth of . . . wherever, and that Angel's love, surrounding me, was enough, could possibly be enough of a balm for my wearied soul.

For a minute, I think it was. For a moment, I was loved, totally, completely, and there was nowhere I needed to go, nothing I needed to do, except be there and let him hold me and let him love me.

There were still bills to be paid, and demons to fight and friends to . . . reassure. And they came back, they did come back, but there was a moment. Just a moment, of peace.

I say a moment, but it could have been an hour or thirty seconds for all I really know. Existing there was merely existence, love, contentment, without limits of time. Eventually I pulled away, though I didn't let go of him, or he of me. His eyes searched my face, dark, probing, seeing past the barricades I'd put up. He searched, in vain perhaps, but without pause, for an answer. Where had I been? How did I feel about not being there anymore? How was I coping? Would I make it? Was I still me?

"She shouldn't have done it," Angel said, his hands tight on my arms.

"But she did. Here I am."

"Buffy . . ."

I couldn't handle it. My lips began to tremble, and I knew in a moment I would melt, "It hurts Angel. Everything is real and hard and it hurts. Why does it have to hurt so much?"

He didn't answer me, which is probably best. I don't think I would have believed or accepted anything he could have said; there was no answer for a question like that except this is life, it's supposed to hurt and that wasn't the answer I wanted. I'd lived before, it hadn't been so bad then. Just . . . less. I suppose to recognize pure horror you have to have had pure joy. Without the latter, I never knew the former, even when it was all around me.

She shouldn't have done it. No one should ever do this, this pulling of souls here or there - it is too much, too wrong, too hard.

He didn't answer, just gathered my in his arms again as I shook (I hadn't cried since I came back, I seemed to have lost the capacity for that emotion along with the others). I could feel the cotton of his shirt against my cheek, the muscles of his arms around my back, the dense floor beneath my feet, a thousand little things that made this the world, a world I had to live in again.

I used to love those things; I used to love ice cream and sunlight and the feel of water over my bare skin. Now they were all reminders of what I had lost, no comfort, no justification for a fist in the stomach, the crash of a breaking lamp, the icy cold of my bedsheets, all the terrible, hurtful realities. Just more things to endure.

"You weren't in hell," Angel confirmed as I pulled away again, eventually. He led me to a chair by the fire and sat down, cradling me across his lap. I always forget how big Angel is. Maybe it's not size, really, just that when I fit perfectly against his chest, he seems to envelop me, as if he were protecting me from all the things out to get me. From all the world, now.

"No. Not until I came here." I leaned sideways against his chest, not looking up at him, just staring into the already built fire. Flames. Life. Heat. Pain.

"You don't have to make it, you know." Part of my mind registered what it must have cost him to say that, far more than it cost to hear it. Whatever his words, I could hear the exaltation beneath them. Tempered of course, subdued, guilty. But there. Every word he said to me was a gift of love, and these last most of all; I did not have to stay for him. The greatest gift I could imagine at the moment: freedom. Of all the lives I was responsible for, all the hearts I could crush, all the people I needed to take care of . . . Angel was not one of them. Anyway, he said he wasn't. Not quite true, but as much as he could make it so.

"I do," I replied quietly, paused, and then, "Thank you."

"They will live without you," Angel promised.

"Maybe," I pointed out, "they won't. Besides, they can't . . . they can't know. What they did."

"Buffy," he said gently, "maybe they have to."

No. I shook my head, unmovable on this point. I didn't care how stupid Willow was to have done this, how reckless, how much pain she had caused . . . she had done it for me, because she loved me. I would not betray that. It was done, and only one thing could take it back, and perhaps not that, maybe not even that. None of them could know.

"Tell me what's happened," he said, changing the subject, and I did. I told him about the coffin, about the bot - her ending, not her beginning - about Dawn and Spike, the gang and Giles. I told him about the bills, and how food makes me nauseous, and how I hate the dark but the light isn't much better because it's always too bright, or not bright enough. I told him about the dreams - how I'm back, I'm safe, and warm and not a person, not a human with a body and responsibilities, just happy and then I'm not anymore, it's dark and it's cold and I'm trapped, alone and I can't breath, only now I need to and I didn't before, and when I move it hurts and when I don't move it hurts and it takes me a few minutes to realize I'm only in my room, and even then it's not better, because it's still dark and my bed is always so, so cold.

When I was done Angel put more wood on the fire and brought all the blankets from the bed over to warm up. He made me soup - not soup really, just broth, thin, almost tasteless - and made me eat it by the fire, bite by bite, until it was all gone. It was lighter than most foods, didn't sit as heavy in my stomach, one more reminder that I had a body again. Swallowing was still hard, and strange, but it wasn't as bad as usual, so I ate it all. Never taking his eyes off me, Angel took the bowl from my hand, set it to the side and spread out the now-toasty blankets. He sat me in the middle of them, silent, wondering, and reached for my hair, carefully unclipping it, letting it spill across my shoulders, brush my cheeks, my neck. Every hair made me shiver, every tiny scratch was too much, but I didn't protest and he didn't stop. Instead, he sat opposite me and ran his hands through my hair, over my scalp, down, brushing my skin lightly, the faintest touch, but real, there.

Once, I loved the way his fingers felt in my hair. Now, it was but one more facet of a life I had not asked for. Not as bad as some, but not . . . not what it had been.

He touched my shoulders then, and slid my jacket off - it was too hot for it anyway - throwing it aside, touching my bare skin gently, as if it was sacred, fragile. He handled me in fact, like a very expensive, very precious object, unused to human hands, extremely breakable.

My shirt came off next, his hands moving like a breeze, here and then there, faint, fleeting, cool. Not cold though. I'd long ago learned he was like a cold-blooded animal, warm or cool based on his surroundings, which was I he always used to keep a fire lit in the mansion, even in the summer. Made him feel alive. He hated the thought that when he touched me, he felt cold. Dead.

One by one he divested me of my clothing, my protection against the ice of the world, and made me warm again. An affirmation, I guess, of life and love and the possibilities for joy. A reminder that whatever I felt about it, my body was the vessel of my soul, capable of giving and receiving love, capable of feeling and rejoicing and being. That it was not, perhaps - or only - a burden, a thing to be despised and dealt with when forced to. That it was in its own way, at least in Angel's eyes, something like holy.

It was not like the first moment, when Angel's arms had provided me with a safe haven, a moment of release from the world where I could pretend I was unreal again. This was wholly real, earthly, completely wrapped up in life. It didn't make the bad things go away, the hurtful things, the brightness, the dark, the loud noises, the destruction and pain. It wasn't denial but . . . overcoming, a little, of all the hurt.

I felt beautiful; not as a face, or even a body, but as a person. A live person.

Afterwards I slept, and I didn't dream at all. Hard to admit that that is probably the best thing that happened the whole night; hard to admit that I want to cling to those dreams rather than reject them, sink back into them and never wake up. But I didn't dream, and when I woke it wasn't cold, and it wasn't dark, and I wasn't alone.

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