“Okay,” Cordelia said as she, Angel and Wesley drove back to LA “That was stupid, but I’m your friend Angel not theirs. So I didn’t say in front of them. Now, however, I’m saying it: Why, exactly did we go storming out on there in such a god-awful hurry? Cause if it were Xander, well maybe you couldn’t tell, but I dated him and I can tell you that that was a sincere apology.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Angel said shortly. He didn’t want to think about it either, but he had less choice in that matter.
He’d lied when he told Cordelia and Wesley he’d forgotten Xander before he even came to Sunnydale. True he hadn’t thought of his time lost friend in years but when Buffy had asked him if he knew what it was like to have a friend before descending into the tunnels beneath Sunnydale he had remembered.
The months that had followed had confirmed his initial realization that now was the time. Xander hadn’t told Angel his name when they had met in Chicago and Angel had been too embarrassed to admit that he didn’t know the name of the best friend he’d ever had so he hadn’t asked. Xander had told him that they would both be in love with the same girl though and that confirmed the time. Angel had known within a month of meeting Buffy in Sunnydale that she was the girl Xander had mentioned. She had to be because Angel knew that he would never want anyone but her until he was reduced to dust.
Despite that he’d only come to her when he needed to warn her of a new danger. Angel was certain that given the choice between himself and a human Buffy would choose the human. So he stayed away and waited for her to fall in love with the friend he would eventually make. After that happened Angel had figured it would be okay to become friends with her as well and that way he could avoid the initial problems that had occurred between himself and his friend.
It made sense to Angel, from his point of view there was no way Buffy could possibly love him so why should he create additional heartache for himself by trying to win her especially when he would be sewing the seeds of future awkwardness at the same time. He would love Buffy forever, but there was reason she had to know that.
And then in just a matter of minutes he would learn that Buffy loved him and she would learn that he was a vampire. When the dust settled they had agreed that there could be nothing between them, he was a vampire, she was the Slayer. Angel had had to content himself with the knowledge that Buffy wanted thing to have been different, it was more than he had expected.
After that he’d avoided Buffy more rigorously than ever, even going as far as to deliver his warning to Giles rather than Buffy. Seeing her, knowing that even though she loved him it wasn’t enough was simply too painful to be endured.
Then came the Cordex and the prophecy of Buffy’s death. Angel had been sure that Buffy wouldn’t die, she couldn’t. The future he’d been told of hadn’t happened yet; there had been no one else who’d been in love with Buffy. Then Xander came to his apartment that night.
Angel had known Xander loved her the instant he’d seen him at the door. For the first time it had occurred to him that it was possible that the rivalry he had been told of hadn’t ended when Buffy had inevitably chosen Xander over him, but when she had died. In that second of realization he’d been angrier with Xander than he’d ever been before in his life. All he could think of was that Xander could have given him eighty years to prepare for this day and had the nerve to storm into his home now and demand his help.
Angel had been too angry to even consider that the boy who stood before him had no way of knowing what he could have done to stop this day.
Then Xander had pulled out a cross and waved it in Angel’s face. “I don’t like you,” Xander had said. “At the end of the day I pretty much think you’re a vampire. But Buffy’s got this big ole yen for you. She thinks you’re a real person, and right now I need you to prove her right.”
Angel had had two earth shattering revelations during Xander’s little tirade. The first was that his friend, the one he had been waiting for, had never existed. Just like he’d feared Donnely would, Xander looked at him and saw only a vampire. They had never been and never would be friends. The second was that it didn’t matter. Buffy more than fulfilled every hope Xander had held out to him in Chicago. And he could still save her, or if not he could die with her.
Xander had accused Angel of looking at his neck on their trek to the Master’s lair. Xander had been right. Fresh human blood was strengthening to a vampire. Angel had actually considered whether the boy would be more useful in a confrontation with the Master as an ally or as a meal. Fortunately he’d chosen ally, for when they got to the lair Buffy had been dead, drowned and in urgent need of CPR. Angel had said he couldn’t do it because he lacked breath. If Xander had thought about that statement for five seconds he would have seen it for the lie that it was, or at least Willow would have. It was possible that Xander didn’t know that if Angel had truly been incapable of moving air in and out of his lungs, past his vocal cords, he wouldn’t have been able to make that statement or any other. Still it had been faster to say that then to explain the real reason.
The real reason being that Angel had been in a panic since he’d seen Buffy lying face down in that pool. Hard experience had taught Angel that at times like this he would almost inevitably do more harm than good to any human he touched. He wanted her to be better too much to trust himself, if he didn’t pop the delicate tissues in her lungs by trying to force too much air into them then he would shatter her ribs and drive the bone fragments into the organs beneath doing chest compressions. When he was frightened it was impossible for Angel to accurately judge the amount of force he was applying and even though Buffy was the Slayer, she was still breakable. It was safer to have Xander be the one to offer first aid to her.
When Buffy opened her eyes again Angel was ready to forgive Xander anything. But the following fall when Buffy told him she’d “moved on to the living” and done that… dance with Xander, Angel had found that he was insanely jealous. He had always accepted that Buffy would choose his unnamed friend and had never resented that. Angel had been content with knowing that she cared for him, despite his nature. But giving her up to Xander was something he wasn’t capable of doing with anything approaching good graces.
Angel buried every memory of Xander before Sunnydale; the person he’d met so long ago was as fictitious as his own pretense of humanity. Angel had never wanted to think of that person again, he certainly didn’t intend to concede Buffy’s affection to Xander for the illusion of friendship that had been presented in Chicago.
And with loosing his soul and going to Hell it hadn’t been difficult to forget that there had ever been a time when it was Xander’s friendship rather than Buffy’s love that had offered him hope for the future.
Now Xander was back, just back, from Chicago, looking like the ghost of someone who had never actually existed, even down to the coat Angel had given him back then, it was just too much to deal with. Especially when Xander offered his all too sincere apologies along with a reminder of all that Angel had trusted him with.
That Xander from Chicago and Xander from Sunnydale were both real and the same person was more than Angel wanted to deal with. Sure people could change, even without curses, all he had to do to see that was look at Cordelia or Wesley. But he had watched them change from a shallow self-centered girl and an incompetent intruder to the people they were now. With Xander he’d missed the intermediaries. Angel’s last strong impressions of Xander were of the hate filled teen who had accused him of willfully endangering Buffy at the hospital before the Ascension. Angel wasn’t ready to come face to face with the Xander that had walked into Giles’ apartment a few hours ago. He didn’t know what to expect from him or how to deal with him, with having trusted him. So Angel had handled the situation the only way he could, he left.
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