A STITCH IN TIME

Book 2: The Eleventh Hour

by Yahtzee and Rheanna

~Part: 5~    

Darla lifted the skirts of her gown higher in a futile attempt to keep the mud off them. But the path they were following through the forest was barely a track, and her ballgown was ruined. Everything, she thought bitterly, was ruined.

"If you're not going to tell us what's going on, at least say where we're going," Spike said, holding his chest and grimacing a little as he tried to keep up with her.

Darla didn't answer Spike because, for once, she didn't have the answers. Confused and disconcerted, she was acting on little more than instinct, and her instincts told her that in desperate situations, the best response was to buy time to think, to hole up somewhere safe and dark. "We need a place to gather our strength," she said, explaining what Spike should have known long ago. "A place far away from the others."

"A cave!" Drusilla squealed joyfully. "A lovely cave, damp and cold, with spiders and little crawly things. I know a lovely cave for us to play in. So close, so close."

"The closest one will do," Darla said. Sure enough, they came upon one very soon, and despite Drusilla's protests, she was able to herd her unruly charges inside.

"I liked it better when we were planning on holing up in a luxury hotel suite," Spike said.

The cave's interior was indeed damp and cold. Darla sat down on a low outcrop of rock and rubbed the sides of her head with her fingertips, willing the last few hours to make some kind of sense. But it was impossible to concentrate, because Drusilla had started to spin around and around in the middle of the cave, her arms outstretched, tunelessly singing one of her made-up songs. "Blood on the dance floor, blood on the knife, Drusilla's got your number, Drusilla says it's right..."

Spike folded his arms resolutely across his chest. "I'm not moving until I get some ANSWERS."

Darla raised her head and looked at them, loathing for both Spike's tantrums and Drusilla's ravings welling up within her. They were like children, she thought with disgust. No, they were worse than children, because at least children eventually grew up. Spike and Drusilla were eternal infants, artlessly and clumsily savage, more often hindrances than helpmeets. Right now, Darla could imagine no greater pleasure than to rid herself of both of them, permanently. She imagined the grit of their dust beneath her fingernails with a kind of grim delight.

But she clenched her teeth and then balled her one uninjured hand into a fist. It was hard to admit, even to herself, but Darla needed them. Without Spike, she couldn't keep Drusilla. Without Drusilla, she couldn't get Angelus back again. And that was not a possibility Darla was prepared to consider. Just a few days more, and she could wash her hands of them. Just as soon as she had her darling boy back once more.

Maintaining a civil tone with difficulty, she said, "What answers do you require, Spike?"

For a second, Spike looked a little shocked that his outburst had produced a response -- usually, Darla simply ignored him. Then, recovering himself, he raised a hand and started to list points on his fingers. "Well, let's see. I want to know where those two stake-wielding harpies back there came from, for a start. I want to know why Angelus was siding with THEM against US. Above all, I want to know -- what the HELL is nail polish?"

Drusilla broke off singing and took Spike by the hands. "Pixies' paint pots, tiny little brushes for fingertips. I'll paint mine red like blood and you'll paint yours black like your black, black heart."

Spike laughed. "Damn. I was hoping it had something to do with nails of the metal variety. Preferably being hammered into people."

Drusilla shook her head at Spike, chastising him with a teasing grin and a waggling finger. Darla narrowed her eyes. There it was again -- that same strange lucidity Dru had been displaying lately. Darla had noticed it when Dru had called her bracelet 'hollow' back at the villa, and again when she saw Angelus at the ball. In fact, Darla thought suddenly, almost all Drusilla's instances of near-sanity seemed to relate to Angelus.

Spike stopped laughing and draped one arm casually over Drusilla's shoulder. "Pixie paint -- that's one question answered. How about the rest?"

"The women at the ball are of no consequence," Darla said, although as she said it she could not help but recall the girl in the orange gown and the way Angelus had looked at her. "They'll die soon enough. Angelus is -- not himself at the moment."

"Not himself," Drusilla repeated, and giggled. "Not himself, he's someone else. He's Angel."

In a second, Darla had covered the ground between them. She struck Drusilla so hard she flew backward, colliding with the cave wall with an audible crack then sliding down it until she was sitting on the cave floor. Darla leaned down so that she was nose to nose with Drusilla. "You will never, ever call him that. He is Angelus. He is Angelus, my Angelus. His name is feared on three continents, and it always will be, or I --" Darla broke off with a choke, abruptly aware that Drusilla's face was wavering before her through a haze of tears. She blinked them back before they could well over.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and Spike's strong grip spun her around so she was facing him. His face shifted, showing his demon's aspect, and he snarled, "Lay a finger on Drusilla like that again and I will rip out your throat -- and somehow I don't think Angelus or Angel or whatever he wants to call himself will show up to stop me."

"Spike..." Drusilla's voice was soft. "Don't be angry with Grandmummy. She's sad because he's gone away."

"My heart bleeds," Spike muttered, but he changed back to his human face and relaxed his grip on Darla's arm.

Darla cared nothing for Spike's bluster; typical, she thought, that he'd threaten her with something messy and showy that would actually harm her not at all. She was still looking at Drusilla. In a quiet voice, she said, "You know, don't you? These things you've been prattling about -- pixie paint and hollow bracelets -- they're not things you've seen in fugues and dreams, are they? You're describing things that are real. Everything you've said about Angelus, about those accursed gypsies --" Darla broke off, aware that Spike was listening intently. "Tell me, Drusilla, how do you know?"

"I came back," Drusilla said simply.

Darla felt anger mount into rage within her. The truth, she was certain, was locked up inside Drusilla's head, as jumbled and unintelligible as the rest of her thoughts. "You never went away, you stupid, demented idiot --"

"The future," Drusilla whispered. "It's all metal, you know. It was in the book, it was all in the book!"

"What book?"

"The book I found. The book I will find." Drusilla held her hands up as if in a shrug. "I was digging in the loveliest tomb. Faded flowers and dried skin like little sheets of paper. Gray as doves, and when I breathed on them, they rustled like silk." This was just the sort of thing that made Darla long to slap Drusilla's face, but she forced herself to listen in silence. "The hands held a book. I peeled back the fingers. Snap, snap. Then I had the book. That man who died had wanted to take the book with him. He didn't want anybody else to read it. Naughty man. He didn't want to share his time machine."

Spike groaned. "Oh, not THAT cheap penny dreadful."

Darla's head snapped up. "You know what she's talking about?"

Spike shrugged and looked just a little embarrassed. "I wouldn't even have started reading the bloody book except that the bloke I got it from was so engrossed by it he never even twitched until I had his throat out. I figured anything that absorbing had to be worth a couple of hours. Turned out to be rubbish, though."

Darla felt the faint, flickering hope she had been nurturing start to die. She had almost been prepared to give credence to Drusilla's stories -- but that was all they were: stories. And not even Drusilla's.

"What was this book?" she asked tiredly. "Who wrote it?"

"Some talentless penny-a-liner called Wells. It's called The Time Machine." Spike scowled. "If I had a time machine, I'd go back and stop him ever putting pen to paper."

"Is it true?" Darla asked Drusilla. "Is this all just a story?"

"A story," Drusilla said happily. "Not THAT story. A different one. But the same. The same and different too. Spike's story isn't supposed to be true, but it is. My story's supposed to be true, but it's not." Her face clouded a little. "Not yet. The pages are changing."

Darla turned around and started to walk away.

Behind her, Drusilla's voice softly added, "It's Angelus' story. I came back to change it, Grandmummy. We have to make my story true."

Darla stopped. She looked around.

A time machine, she thought. Then: Drusilla came back. She knows because she came back.

A time machine. It wasn't possible -- but it would explain so much. It would explain the Angelus with whom she'd danced at the ball, who had grown so used to the soul the gypsies had given him that he scorned Darla and lavished his affections on a human woman. Was that how Angelus' story ended?

But it could still be changed. Angelus could be restored. And once he was, with command over time itself -- what power they would wield together!

Trembling with excitement, Darla looked at Spike. "You know where the gypsy camp is, don't you?"

He brightened immediately. "Yeah, I found them. Are we going to do some real killing tonight?"

"Soon," Darla said. "Very soon. But there's one more element to put into place first. Go and find Angelus, Spike. Bring him here."

"Bloody hell!" Spike exploded. "Make up your mind! We just LEFT Angelus, or have you forgotten?"

How to explain it without giving too much away? For a second, Darla was at a loss, until Drusilla helpfully said, "That wasn't Angelus, silly."

"It bloody felt like Angelus' fist in my face," Spike said sourly.

"It wasn't," Darla said. "I spoke to that creature. It wasn't Angelus. It was some -- some wraith or phantom that merely looked like him."

"Well, if that wasn't Angelus, where is he? And how do you expect ME to find him?"

Losing her patience, Darla snapped, "With a divining rod, if you have to! You're of his line, Spike, you can find him. And when you do -- no matter how he behaves, what he says -- BRING HIM TO ME."

Darla shouted the last words with such vehemence that Spike actually took a step back. She smiled to herself, satisfied that she had reasserted her dominance. For now, at least.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, I'm going." Spike leaned down and kissed Drusilla lightly on the crown of her head. "See you later, love."

"Bye-bye," Drusilla said. As Spike left, she lifted her hand and waggled her fingers, waving after him like a small child. She looked up at Darla and smiled. "The boys aren't here, and it's just us girls."

"That's right," Darla said. "And you can tell me stories to your heart's content."

"I have a ring," Drusilla said, holding up her hand. A golden band glinted on one finger. "Aren't I a pretty bride? We can go to my cave and see the fire on the ceiling. The fire's a door. Ding-dong! Avon calling. Doorbells ring. My ring."

Darla wanted to snatch the ring from Drusilla to make her concentrate -- but then she thought, could the ring play a part in this too? What did she mean by a ceiling of fire? Nothing Drusilla said, however bizarre, could be ruled out.

Hunkering down next to Drusilla, Darla repeated, "It's just us, and you're going to tell me everything you know about books and time machines and the future. And, believe me, this time I am listening to every word."

***  

The night was cold, and Fred shivered as she crouched behind a fallen tree trunk, watching the entrance of the cave where they had seen the three vampires go in.

Charles looked at her in concern. "You cold? You want to borrow my turban?" He meant it sincerely, but there was something so funny about the idea of Charles Gunn offering to lend her a bright red turban made from strips of curtain to keep her head warm that Fred couldn't help but giggle. He smiled back at her. "Seriously. This thing's toasty. Add some earflaps, and you're talking about quality protection from the elements."

"It's okay. But thanks anyway." She looked at the cave entrance and became serious again. "I don't understand this. Why would they come all the way out into the forest to hide out in a cave?"

"It doesn't make sense," Charles agreed. "But as long as Darla and the rest of Angel's vampire relations are hiding in a cave and not doing any history-changing gypsy killing, I ain't gonna complain."

Fred looked at their surroundings, suddenly realizing the clearing where the cave entrance was located wasn't completely unfamiliar. "Yes, except that the portal that the time machine made -- the one that links 1898 to the future -- isn't far from here."

"No way," Charles said. "That was, like, miles away. Ten miles or something."

"I keep telling you, it wasn't nearly that far. I can't tell exactly in the dark, but we're pretty close." An unpleasant thought struck her. "Charles, do you think that's why they came here? Maybe Drusilla told Darla about the time machine."

Charles' face was grim as he said, "I really hope not. The twenty-first century only just got rid of Darla; it doesn't need her back again. Besides, Darla knew there was a time machine around here, she wouldn't be near it -- she'd be in it." He put his hand on Fred's arm. "Someone's coming out."

They tensed, and watched as a shadowy figure emerged from the cave entrance. Even in the darkness, it was possible to tell that the silhouette was distinctly male. "That's Spike," Fred whispered. "Should we follow him?"

Charles nodded. "Darla might be sending him to find the gypsies."

They crept forward, treading as lightly as possible on the soft earth. Following a person unseen was hard, Fred thought, but following a vampire with heightened senses of hearing and smell and perfect night vision was a different magnitude of difficulty again. To be certain of remaining undetected, they'd have to stay so far behind Spike they'd probably lose him before they knew where he was going --

"Bloody hell," Spike said and turned around.

Fred and Charles ducked behind a dense bush. Fred held her breath and put her hand over her chest, as if she could muffle the sound of her heart beating. Spike must have heard them, or somehow sensed them --

But Spike was looking back at the cave entrance, not Fred and Charles' hiding place.

"Should just go right back in there," he said in a low voice. "Tell the stupid bint she can't order me around." Raising his voice to a simpering falsetto, he said, "'You're of his line, Spike, you can find him.'" Then, in a more normal tone: "Even when he's gone it's Angelus this, Angelus that. You'd think the whole bloody world revolved around him. Well, fine. If she wants him, she can damn well have him. They can be happy making each other miserable, and Dru and I can have some fun."

Abruptly, Spike turned and set off back along the forest track at a brisk pace.

"She's sent him after Angel," Charles said.

"No..." Fred said slowly. "I think -- I think Darla's sent Spike after the other Angel, the one who's just been cursed. And there's only one reason she'd want him."

Charles looked at her. "She's gonna do it -- she's gonna make the gypsies lift the curse. Come on." He started to run -- but in the opposite direction to the one Spike had taken.

Fred hesitated, confused. "Aren't we going to follow Spike?"

Charles shook his head. "If we're going to stop this, we're gonna need supernatural help -- injured or not."

***

Too bad, Cordelia thought tiredly. I kinda liked that wig.

The image that faced her in the mirror now was a far cry from the glamour of a few hours ago. Instead of a crown of long, dark hair, she had her old Golden Shimmer crop, somewhat flattened by a night of wearing the wig. Instead of the correct, regal posture she'd had earlier, she was slumped over as far as the corset would allow. Her puffed sleeves had been mashed down in the melee and now reminded her vaguely of a collapsed soufflé she'd seen once at a dinner party. Her gloves were bloodstained and crumpled on the floor. Only her earrings, still dazzling and bright, had the same glitter.

"You're sure nothing's broken?" Cordelia could hear the concern in Angel's voice, was aware of his physical presence next to her, but the mirror only showed one weary, slightly bruised face, and that was hers. For once, she envied Angel's lack of a reflection.

But when she turned to look at him, she saw his condition had already visibly improved in the hour since they'd stumbled up the hotel stairs to their suite. At first they'd been able to do no more than collapse (Angel on the floor, Cordelia in a nearby chair) and try to recover. But Angel's vampiric regeneration kicked in quickly. He was already moving more comfortably; the blood that soaked his tuxedo shirt might as well have been shed by someone else.

"All I need is some sleep," she said tiredly. "I need to get undressed, Angel. And I can't really do it myself." She half-lifted her injured arm -- wincing as she did so -- by way of demonstration.

Angel looked completely flustered for a moment. Before Cordelia could even wonder why -- it wasn't like he hadn't seen her in her underwear before, for Pete's sake -- he had collected himself. "I'm sorry," he said. "I should have thought."

She turned away to give him better access to the back of her dress. She felt Angel begin unfastening the buttons that ran along her spine, surprisingly deftly for a man with such big hands, she thought. Then she half-smiled, realizing Angel had probably done this many, many times before.

His hands worked their way down to her painfully constricted waist. "You probably want to get rid of this corset, too," Angel said. She felt his fingertip catch in the ribbons that bound it so tightly closed.

"The word 'duh' is so appropriate, and yet it just doesn't say enough," Cordelia said. When Angel hesitated, she laughed a little. "That means yes. Take this evil, evil contraption from hell off my body."

Angel pulled her sleeves down her arms, going slowly, careful of her injured shoulder. Cordelia winced, and he hesitated. "I'm not hurting you?"

"A little," she admitted. "But not as badly as this corset. Keep going."

Angel slipped the dress down over her hips, and it billowed to the floor, a flash of color at her feet. Then he began unfastening the corset, loop by loop, and Cordelia felt her grateful ribs expand outward. She took in a deep breath that filled her lungs for the first time all night. The rush of oxygen hit her bloodstream, and the room wavered around her for a moment.

"Cordy?" Cordelia realized that she'd swayed on her feet; Angel had caught her around the waist, bracing her against him. She leaned against his chest gratefully; he seemed like the only still, solid thing in the room. "You're hurt worse than I thought --"

"No, really, I'm all right," Cordelia protested. She covered his arm with her own; the motion sent jabs of pain through her arm, but she forced herself not to groan. "It was just a whole lotta air all of a sudden. Felt nice. Hey, I guess I'm one of the natives now -- I swooned."

"I should have thought to lay in a supply of smelling salts." She could tell Angel was smiling as he said it. As she'd hoped, he stepped back a little, reassured, and finished loosening her corset. She thought he would remove it immediately, but instead he gently took off her earrings and dropped them on the bedside table, where they glinted in the faint light from the oil lamp. Then he ran both of his hands through her matted-down hair; it was surprising how refreshing that felt, to have her hair fluffed back up again. Finally, he pulled the corset away from her and tossed it aside. Cordelia would have thrown it very, very hard, but he had the basic idea. She took a few more deep breaths, relishing her body's relative freedom. But she could still feel bands of pain where the corset's boning had been.

She looked down in dismay to see that her camisole was stuck to her skin from sweat and pressure; the lines of the corset had dug into her flesh the way the seams did on too-tight jeans, only far more brutally. Carefully, she took the fabric in her uninjured hand and peeled it away from her sore skin. "Owww. And ow. Every crappy thing I ever said about feminism? I take it back. Any movement that got rid of these things is A-OK by me."

"You'll have marks for a while," Angel said. He paused for a moment, then said, "I can help a little. Lie down."

Cordelia sat gratefully on the bed and carefully worked her way into a reclining position. As Angel moved toward her, she grimaced. "Angel, you have got to take that off." She gestured at his shirt. "I think we have freaked out the hotel management enough without getting blood all over the bedspread."

"Oh. Right." He quickly stripped off the shirt; though she'd seen him without it countless times, Cordelia realized it had been a while since she'd been called on to bandage up his wounds, or chatted with him after he got out of the shower. She smiled a little as he half-turned to toss the ruined shirt on the floor and let her glimpse the gryphon tattoo for the first time in months. Angel moved as though he was going to sit beside her, saw her smile, then paused. "Cordy?"

Feather mattresses were beautiful things, Cordelia thought. Down pillows. The bed was so soft, so welcoming. "Yeah, Angel?"

"I've been thinking -- I mean, I was wondering --" He gave her a look that was far harder and more searching than she'd expected. "You haven't mentioned Groo at all. This whole time. I was just --  aren't you worried about him?"

Groo. Cordelia remembered his sweet grin in a flash of memory that was gone as soon as it came. Angel was right: Not only had she not mentioned Groo, he hadn't even entered her thoughts. Guilt stabbed at her briefly, but it faded in an instant. "If you were evil, I never ended up working with you in L.A.," she reasoned. "That means I didn't get sucked through to Pylea, so Grooie and I never even met. In the altered reality, he's in Pylea, being a champion and loving life. In other words, Groo's the lucky one."

"Yeah," Angel said, looking down at her. "I guess he is."

Something about the look on Angel's face made her feel suddenly embarrassed. What would Groo think if he could see her like this -- undressed on the bed, waiting for Angel --

Well, Groo couldn't see her. But Cordelia rolled over on her stomach, all the same.

She felt the mattress sink slightly as Angel sat next to her. He began rubbing her back, his fingertips massaging the angry lines where the corset had been. It hurt -- but in a good way. Cordelia could feel the indentations along her back begin to soften as he went. "How's that?" he said.

"Good. Better than good. Keep going." He did. The muscles of her back, strained from her injury and the fight, began to relax beneath his touch. "God, that's terrific. Where did you learn to give such a great massage?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Cordelia smiled into the pillow. She'd have to beg or bribe that story from him sometime -- sometime when she didn't need him to keep going as much as she did right now. Then she reconsidered their situation, and the smile faded from her face. "I guess we kinda blew it tonight."

"It's not over yet," Angel said quickly. "They got away from us, yeah. That doesn't mean we're not going to catch up with them in time."

"But that was our best shot," Cordelia said slowly. "You said so yourself." Angel's hands were still for a moment, and she knew he was struggling to find a way to console her. When he said nothing, she felt fear settle over her, more overwhelmingly than at any other moment in their journey into the past -- because this was the moment when she finally had to face that they could be trapped forever. She'd avoided thinking about the worst-case scenario all this time, but she could avoid it no longer.

Quietly, she whispered, "You can't stake the past you, Angel. Even if they uncurse him. You can't."

"I'll have to."

"If you vanish -- Angel, if you die, if you're not in the world for the next 100 years, that could be as bad as Angelus being around. Maybe worse." It felt worse. Panic was flooding Cordelia's heart.

Angel, perhaps sensing her fear, began stroking her back again. "Shh. Cordelia, that won't happen. If I have to stake Angelus -- well, we know from Drusilla's example that I won't just vanish --"

"Unless you try to come back with us," Cordelia said. Then she glanced over her shoulder. "You mean -- you wouldn't come back with us?"

Angel shook his head, some of his old tiredness back in his face again. "I know what I did the past 104 years. What I didn't do. If the only way for me to protect the world is to do it all over again, then -- I guess I'll have to do it."

"All of it? Just repeat the last century?" Cordelia's mind was whirling at the very thought.

"It might not be that bad," Angel said, entirely unconvincingly. "Lots of great things in the 20th century. Jazz, and V-E Day, and, uh -- Jack Nicklaus' last Masters."

Cordelia sighed out heavily. "I can see right through you. Angel, you do NOT want to go through all that again. The Dust Bowl and Vietnam and, and -- " She half-turned onto her side, ignoring the cramp in her shoulder. "Angel, would you go find Buffy like you did the first time?"

"Of course," Angel said. "That would be part of making everything come out right again. A pretty big part." He gently guided her to where she was lying flat on her stomach again, then went back to work on her aching muscles. His strokes were strong, almost painful as they bore down upon her back, and yet her body went warm and liquid as he touched her.

She whispered, "Would you fall in love with Buffy again?"

Angel was quiet for a moment. He finally said only, "I don't know. I couldn't know. A hundred years from now -- it's a long time." Then he patted her back, almost playfully, and with forced cheer said, "Do you think you're going to avoid working for me in L.A.? You're not getting out of it that easily. I won't let you."

Cordelia smiled, snuggling down into the soft pillows and mattress. She could see Angel's silhouette on the far wall; the warm, golden light of the oil lamp traced around the shadow of his body, as well as hers, stretched on the bed beneath him. His chin was low, his eyes perhaps focusing on the small of her back. For some reason it was interesting, watching him watch her.

"Of course," she murmured, "we might have completely botched things up, and then we'd have to stay here with you." The prospect should have terrified her; it did quicken her heartbeat, make her fingers curl along the edge of the coverlet. But what she felt wasn't really terror at all. "Maybe we'll all be together."

"I want you guys to be able to go back," Angel said. "But -- Cordy -- I'd miss you. A lot."

"Of course you'd miss us," Cordelia said. "I'm just saying, you might not have to. We might be stuck here together." It was too much to be scary. She couldn't do anything but smile. "What kind of a suffragette do you think I'd make?"

Angel paused, but then she heard him laugh a little. "I think women might get the vote a lot sooner."

Cordelia made up her mind, with the firm resolution best brought about by fear, that being stuck in the past with Angel wouldn't be like being stuck at all. These corsets wouldn't be in style too much longer, and at least she'd have her friends with her. The mission -- well, there'd still be plenty of vampires and demons around to be stopped, right?

She relaxed further, letting go of the last vestiges of worry. The massage was definitely helping with that. God, Angel had great hands.

Then she remembered those same hands clasping Darla's as they'd circled one another on the dance floor.

"Angel?" she said. "Seeing Darla -- that must have been freaksome."

"In some ways," he answered. He continued working on her back, smoothing away the pain. "She's changed for me, because of Connor."

"She hasn't really changed," Cordelia warned. "You can't think of her as Lady Madonna. I did, and remember where it got me?"

"I understand that very well," Angel said, in a tone of voice that suggested he understood it a lot better than Cordelia did herself.

"It's not that I don't trust you to do what you have to do," Cordelia said. "I trust you more than anybody, Angel. But I don't want to see you get hurt any more. You've been hurt enough."

Angel was silent for a moment, and his hands stilled on her back. Cordelia wished she weren't on her stomach, so she could see his face; was he upset? Was he angry? Was he doing his stoic non-emotional thing?

Then he started laughing -- very softly, but laughing all the same. "Cordelia, you have to stop."

"Stop?" She turned her head so that she could see him; he was still sitting beside her, his hands on her back, a half-smile on his face. "Stop what?"

"Stop trying to take care of me all the time," Angel said. "You were just attacked by Spike and Darla, you hurt your arm badly, and the corset alone almost finished you off. And you're still worrying about me." He brought one hand up to her injured shoulder. "Speaking of which, let me look at this." He brushed the strap of her camisole down from her shoulder, baring some of her back to his cool fingertips.

Stop trying to take care of Angel? Cordelia wasn't sure how to take that at all, so she just lay there in silence, obeying Angel's requests for her to wiggle her fingers, make a fist, shrug, and so on. Finally, he said, "You were right earlier -- nothing's broken. You've probably got a sprain, but no worse."

"Okay," Cordelia said, still unable to think of what to say. Angel resumed his ministrations to her back, his touch cool through the thin cotton of her camisole, and they were quiet together until she blurted out, "Why don't you want me to take care of you?"

"Cordy -- no. It's not that. Roll over."

"Huh?"

"Your stomach's got to be hurting too, right?" Angel helped her roll over onto her back. As his hands began massaging her belly, he said, "I'm glad I have you to take care of me. I need you."

"So true," Cordelia said. "Glad we're clear on that. But then why do you want me to stop?"

"I don't want you to stop. Not ever," Angel said. He was watching her in the faint light, his look softer, more open than she was used to seeing from him. She'd seen it before, but so rarely. Too rarely. She liked it. "But you don't have to do it all the time. I can take care of myself occasionally. And sometimes you need me to take care of you."

"Not hardly," Cordelia protested, then realized that she was splayed out in bed, letting Angel massage her skin back into inhabitability. "Well, okay, when I'm being attacked by vampires, you do kinda come in handy."

"Thanks," Angel said dryly. His palm brushed along the side of her waist. "But -- I don't just want to take turns between being your bodyguard and your therapy case. You're there for me a lot, Cordelia. I just want you to know I'm here for you too. You can let me take care of you, sometimes."

"Like now," Cordelia said. His hands felt so good, and she felt herself relaxing still more. She smiled. "I think I like you taking care of me. You know what? Being stuck in the past might not be so bad. I bet you know all the places to be and not to be. All the best stuff to do. We'll travel all over the place, and you can show me the sights. We'll have adventures. Have some fun for a change. You'll have to act like my husband, okay? I'm not having anybody write me off as a 21-year-old spinster."

Angel's voice was slightly uneven as he replied, "Your husband. Okay. I -- okay."

"What?" she said, trying to make light of the sudden dismay on his face. "Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?"

"Never." His hands stilled on her belly, and she thought he would pull away. Instead, he slowly took one of her hands in his own. "I like taking care of you," he said quietly.

The intimacy of the moment struck her in a flash, and Cordelia awkwardly felt as though she ought to pull her hand away, or make a joke, or something. Something that would make it clear that this was just their same old thing, hugging and joking and talking and thinking nothing of it, Angel and Cordy, best friends 'til the end. Not make it clear to Angel, because he knew that, and not clear to her, because she knew that, but it seemed like it ought to be clear all the same.

Instead, she felt her fingers closing around his, as if of their own volition. Angel glanced down at their clasped hands for a moment, then looked down into her eyes. "Cordy?" he whispered.

"CORDY!" Gunn's voice rang out from the corridor. Cordelia and Angel both jumped, startled. "ANGEL!" Gunn was definitely running toward their door. Angel squeezed her hand quickly, then got up from the bed just as the door was flung open.

Gunn's turban was slightly askew. "We got serious trouble going down. Can you guys move?"

"I'm fine," Angel said. "Cordy?"

Cordelia sat up. Somehow, she felt a lot more undressed in front of Gunn than she had in front of Angel; she pulled one of the coverlets over her. "I can if I have to," she said. "Don't ask me to turn any cartwheels. What's going on? Where's Fred?"

"Fred is downstairs stealing us a horse and carriage," Gunn said, shaking his head in something that was both dismay and admiration. "That girl woulda done okay in my old gang. We gotta hope she gets away with it, because we have to get back out into the woods, and fast. Darla's sent Spike out to look for you, Angel -- not YOU you, but the old you. We figure she's going after the gypsies tonight."

Cordelia's heartbeat quickened, and the pain in her shoulder seemed to dim.

Angel began to go toward the next room where his clothes were, but stopped on the way to search through the trunk where they'd hidden their small cache of weapons. He pulled out a couple of hurriedly made stakes and a dagger Cordelia had lifted in the museum in Rome and somehow not lost in the race to get back to the time machine when that future self-destructed. Handing her the knife, Angel asked, "Cordy, can you get dressed?"

"I can put on my jeans and sweater," she replied. "It doesn't matter what I look like now. Either we're about to get back to the future or blow the past to smithereens."

Gunn growled, "Just HURRY."

***

"The future is made of boxes," Drusilla said. "So many boxes! They live in boxes stacked on top of one another, and sit in boxes that float on roads like rivers. And there are boxes for pictures and boxes that make music, and little boxes that hold a thousand voices and make a sound like --" She closed her eyes in concentration and made a noise that sounded, to Darla, very much like a frog being tortured: "Brrrp! Brrrp!"  

"Very nice, Drusilla," Darla said impatiently. "Now tell me more about this time machine. What exactly does the ring do? Can you show me if we go there?"

"I'll take you to it, if you're a good Grandmummy and wait," Drusilla said, sternly wagging her finger. Was it her imagination, Darla wondered, or was Drusilla enjoying this sudden shift in the balance of power between them? "You're going to love it in the future. So many wonderful things! Arbeit macht frei, Agent Orange, final solution, ethnic cleansing, and best of all, they say the world will get hotter and hotter until we all melt," she finished with an air of authority.

"The end of the world," Darla said. How lovely, to boil away the mortal flesh of this world and leave only the blanched bones. She felt herself beginning to believe in Drusilla's dream-visions -- more than believe. She already knew they were true, but she was beginning to long to see them for herself. To take Angelus to them.

"And oh! Another secret, one that sparkles and bubbles and shines on every street." Drusilla leaned forward very close, so that their noses were almost touching, and whispered, "Coke is it."

"Hey! Anyone want to give me some help, here?"

Darla and Drusilla both looked around; Spike was standing at the cave entrance, supporting with difficulty some filthy, half-dead wretch. Darla felt a flash of anger: How dare he disobey her when she had told him to find Angelus and not to return without him --

The figure Spike was supporting raised its head, and looked at Darla through rat-tails of unkempt hair. It was Angelus. Spike had brought him, just as she had asked.

The night she had driven him from the villa, Darla had thought it wasn't possible for him to look more pathetic, more repulsive than he had as he had wept before her. Now she knew she'd been wrong -- he still looked just as pathetic, but now his clothes were filthy and torn, his face muddied, his hair matted. He must have been sleeping in ditches, she thought with disgust. And he was weak, leaning on Spike for support; he clearly hadn't fed since she'd thrown him out. He couldn't bring himself to kill, Darla realized, and felt renewed revulsion.

"Darla," Angelus said. His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper, but the note of entreaty in it was unmistakable. "Darla."

Darla said nothing. She didn't move.

"Found him cowering under a hedgerow. The devil only knows what's wrong with him," Spike said. His face twisted into something that was half-grin, half sneer of contempt. "He certainly smells like hell. You wanted him, so here he is." And with that, he roughly shoved Angelus toward her.

Darla stood, rooted to the spot, as Angelus stumbled toward her. His arms were held out to her, his gaze fixed on her. He didn't seem to be aware of Spike and Drusilla at all.

In a voice so low only Darla could hear her, Drusilla said, "Here he is, neither fish nor fowl. But foul! He could be one or both or something else again. Choose a door, Grandmummy, and take him through it."

Exhausted, Angelus sank to his knees in front of Darla, his arms still outstretched. "Darla. Darla, please. Please..."

He was begging her to help him, she thought with distaste.

And then: He was begging her. He needed her.

Darla remembered the Angelus she'd danced with earlier that night, the one whose attention had wandered from her and to the human woman in the orange dress. The one who'd walked away from Darla without looking back. Suddenly, in spite of his filth and degradation, there was something desirable about the man on his knees in front of her.

Darla sank slowly to the ground and, controlling her distaste, opened her arms. Angelus all but fell into her embrace, clinging to her like a frightened child seeking its mother. Which in a way, Darla thought, he was.

"Forgive me," he mumbled. "Forgive me, help me, please, I'm sorry, help me --"

Spike was right: Angelus did smell. Darla wrinkled her nose, but otherwise concealed her repugnance. After all, what must the Master have made of her when he found her? She'd been only a frail, enfeebled mortal, rotting from within. Sometimes greatness began with humble materials. And Angelus already had greatness within him; it was just shackled by his curse in chains she had the power to cast aside. She lifted one hand and gently caressed his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. "There, my sweet boy. Everything will be well again, soon. Soon you'll be restored to us."

Angelus looked up at her, his face feverish with gratitude. "You'll make this --stop? Make it go away?"

"I will, my love."

"Thank you," Angelus whispered. "Thank you, thank you, thank you..." He continued to mumble barely-coherent words of thanks as Darla rocked him, childlike, against her breast.

In the century and a half Darla had known Angelus, she had been in turns his teacher, his lover and -- as reluctant as she was to admit it -- sometimes his slave. Now, for the first time, she was his savior, and Darla found she was enjoying the role not simply because it was novel.

Drusilla clapped her hands together joyously. "See, we're a family again, all hugs and smiles!"

"Pardon me while I retch," Spike said.

***  

The vampires were near, and the force of their proximity was almost overwhelming.

Angel closed his eyes, attempting to concentrate. Four vampires, so close, so familiar. Spike's energy was sharp and swift, a red-hot dart whirring through his consciousness. Drusilla's was diaphanous and unformed, a veil that clouded his thoughts. Most familiar of all was Darla's -- cold and hard and beautiful, cast-iron scrollwork that formed a cage.

And then the fourth -- alien and familiar at once, himself and yet not himself. Angel felt as though he ought to be able to read his former self better than any of the others, but the reverse was true; all he could sense was distant pain.

"Angel, this would be a bad time for a fugue state," Cordelia said.

"When would a good time be?" Fred said reasonably. She was unharnessing the horse from its carriage, so that it could run back to its stable and master. One way or another, they wouldn't need it again.

"I'm fine," Angel said. He peered through the night, hoping his other self would mask his proximity from the other vampires. "They're headed deeper into the forest. Come on."

"Not trying to be negative here," Gunn said as they began making their way through the forest, "but what exactly are we supposed to do when we catch up with them? We weren't doing so hot against just the first three back at the ballroom, and with one more -- that one being you -- it's gonna be tough."

They were so loud. So loud. Fred's footstep shattered a twig. Gunn's sleeve caught against the branches of a bush, sending rustling echoes throughout the woods. Cordelia stumbled on a tree foot, and it seemed as though the sound of it thundered. Angel knew his senses were at their most acute, ready for battle, but there was every chance the other vampires' were as well.

"Be quiet," he murmured. "We stop them however we can. But --" This was too important not to say out loud. "Nobody kills Darla. No matter what."

"Angel," Cordelia said. Her face was pale in the night, her voice low enough that even he wouldn't object. "If it comes down to it --"

"It won't," he whispered back. "I won't let it."

"I recognize this tree," Fred said. She stopped in her tracks. "Angel -- this is near the cave with the portal back to the time machine. Really near."

Cordelia's eyes went wide. "Please, for the love of God, tell me that the vampires aren't headed toward the time machine."

"I love God just fine," Fred said. "But that's where they're headed. Do you think Drusilla might have -- could have --"

"She's told them," Angel said. He had thought it impossible to be more desperate, but he had been wrong. He began running after the vampires, not caring about the noise. The others were right behind him, their weapons at the ready. As they made their way up a slight hill -- not far from the cave at all, Angel realized -- he was convinced that they'd finally reached the most desperate moment of this entire journey.

Then they got to the top of the hill, and he saw the torches.

"What the hell?" Gunn said. They were all frozen in place, staring at the lights coming toward them in the distant forest. Perhaps eight or nine torches -- the sound of footsteps so much louder now --  more than a dozen people -- Angel squinted, using his night vision to see just who was approaching.

"It's the gypsies," he said.

"I thought Darla was going after them!" Cordelia protested. "Since when do they come after Darla?"

"Since now," Fred said. "When we changed the time stream, let them know what happened -- they could have figured out more than they knew the first time around. So maybe they're attacking Darla before she can get to them."

The truth settled around him, heavy and dark. "That's one possibility," Angel said, though he couldn't bring himself to believe it was true. "But that's not necessarily what they're doing."

"What, you think they're out for a midnight stroll?" Gunn said.

"They might not be after Darla," Angel repeated. "They might be after us."

~Part: 6~

"I thought you said -- this plan made -- sense," Charles gasped.

"It does," Fred panted, hazarding a glance over her shoulder. What she saw wasn't reassuring -- the mob of angry gypsies was barely twenty yards behind them, their torches bobbing up and down as they chased Fred and Charles through the dark forest.

"Oh yeah?" Charles wheezed. He was using one hand to try to keep his turban on, with only limited success. It was beginning to unwind at the top. "Leaping out -- in front of the gypsies -- who want to kill us -- makes sense?"

"Sure," Fred said. Her chest was tight with the effort of taking in enough air to run and speak at the same time. "We make them chase us -- lead them right to Darla -- then the gypsies and vampires -- will fight each other."

"And this helps -- how?"

"Darla won't kill the gypsies -- 'cause Drusilla will have told her -- that's why Angel's curse wasn't lifted -- the first time."

Something which might have been an arrow whizzed so close to the side of Fred's head that she felt a cold breeze in her ear. She grabbed Charles' hand, and they started to weave and zig-zag between the trees, heading all the time back in the direction of the caves.

"So," Charles gasped, "Darla's tryin' not to kill the gypsies -- we're tryin' not to kill Darla -- so tell me -- who are the gypsies tryin' not to kill?"

Fred didn't answer, just kept running.

"I think I just found the flaw in your thinking," Charles said. "Go faster. Next time -- I come up -- with the plans."  

***

Noises in the forest. Voices, feet pounding -- a mob, not even trying to conceal their approach.

The vampires all lifted their heads, turning as one toward the as-yet-unseen danger. Spike rubbed his hands together, his eyes glittering yellow and predatory in the darkness. "Looks like we're going to see some action after all."

"No, no," Drusilla moaned. She had raised her hands to her head and was dragging her fingers through her hair, ruining the carefully pinned and curled style. "This is wrong, all wrong. They're not supposed to be here!"

Next to her, Angelus shuddered. He could barely stand up, never mind fight.

"Get in the cave," Darla ordered. She pushed Angelus toward Spike. "Take him."

"I'm not missing out on a perfectly good riot to nurse Angelus' hangover," Spike said.

"Angel," Drusilla whispered. "Angel..."

"I TOLD you not to call him that!" Darla exploded.

"Actually," Angelus' voice said calmly, "I prefer it."

But Angelus had not spoken.

Darla spun around. Angelus -- the other Angelus, the one Drusilla insisted on calling Angel -- was standing behind her. Darla masked her fury with a smile. "I'm so pleased you could join us," she said. There was a woman with him, and it took Darla a second to place her; she looked very different without the wig and orange gown she'd been wearing at the ball. She, like Angel, wore strange clothing -- the woman looked brazen, even to Darla's jaded eyes, in trousers. "And you've brought your little whore, too. How nice."

"I'd think someone with your personal history would be a little less free with words like that," the girl said coolly. "My name is Cordelia, by the way. My friends call me Cordy but, hey, how about you don't."

Spike's mouth was hanging open. He looked at the Angelus who had slumped against a tree, blank-faced and trembling, and then at the Angelus standing in front of Darla. "That's no phantom. He's real. Damnation, would someone PLEASE just EXPLAIN to me what in HELL is going on here? Because NONE of this makes any SENSE to me!"

Drusilla patted him on the arm comfortingly. "Don't be vexed. You'll get used to it, just like me."

"Cordelia. Now I know what to tell them to put on your gravestone." Ignoring the girl, Darla directed her full attention to Angelus. He was standing only a few paces away from his other self, yet in every other sense they were worlds apart. "You had to follow me, didn't you? See, the flame still burns in you."

"Don't flatter yourself," Cordelia scoffed, but when Darla looked into the eyes of the other Angelus she saw a flicker of something that told her she wasn't so far from the truth.

"They're coming closer," Drusilla said. Her eyes were going golden now too, with the nearness of human rage and blood. "Very close now, Grandmummy. The gypsies didn't wait for us to find them. Everyone is spoiling the story now, and someone must pay. I want MY story, and I will write it in blood. The blood's beating closer now. Thump thump."

"We might want to concentrate on the rapidly approaching angry mob," Spike said. "Could be trouble. More trouble than these two, anyway -- the astonishingly unwanted extra Angelus and the girl with the bad dye job."

Cordelia scowled at him. "Irony is so gonna bite you in the ass on that one." But Darla noted that she, too, was glancing over her shoulder at the gypsies.

"Spike, Dru." She flicked her fingers toward the sound of the din. "See to the gypsies. Under no circumstances are you to kill them. Maim all you like."

"I haven't maimed in an age," Spike said, grinning in anticipation. He and Drusilla ran off into the night.

"Cordelia," Angel said. "Get him away from the gypsies. Keep him out of this if you can."

It took Darla a moment to realize what he meant. When she saw Cordelia moving toward Angelus -- wasn't one enough for this scavenging little wench? -- she wanted to scream. But the gypsies were coming ever closer, and all her hot words about preferring to see Angelus as dust had gone cold for her now.

"Angelus?" she said quietly. "Go with her into the cave. I'll come for you later."

"I don't want to leave you," Angelus said. He would not look away from Darla's face, and she had never found his gaze so welcome.

"You are some pathetic," Cordelia said. "But you're gonna be some pathetic for the next hundred years or so. I'm going to see to it." She grabbed Angelus' arm and began pulling him toward the cave, away from Darla. For one beautiful instant, Darla saw a flicker of her darling boy's old fury in his eyes -- but then it was gone, lost in the sickening mire of guilt and horror. He stumbled into the cave with Cordelia. At least he would still obey.

A few feet away, a crash in the underbrush was swiftly followed by screams and yells. The gypsies -- and, from the sound of it, some of Angel's human pets, too -- had found Spike and Drusilla. Darla and Angel looked toward the clamor; she could glimpse torchlight wavering through the branches, the too-quick silhouette of an upraised hand slashing downward. By the time she turned away, Angel was staring at her once more. They regarded each other for another moment of silence.

Finally he said, "It's my turn to ask you to dance."

Darla curtseyed. "Very well," she said. "Let's dance."

***  

Branches swished as Drusilla ran through them, little lashes in the night. A forest of whips, how lovely. If only she could enjoy them.

The horrid gypsies were running at them, shouting, and it would be so sweet to snuff them out, wet fingertips to the flame. But that was not the end of the story.

"Look out!" shouted a voice in English. It was the man with no hair, ducking to one side, dragging the girl with long hair with him. The two of them liked Angel as he was. As they saw Drusilla and Spike, their eyes went even wider.

"Bloody hell, not this one again," Spike groaned as he saw the girl. "And who's the freak in the turban?"

"Oh, they're not gypsies," Drusilla said happily. "You can kill THEM."

Spike grinned. "About time something went my way tonight."

The man with no hair got between the girl and Spike. "See, this is another flaw in the plan," he muttered. "Two flaws and counting."

Then the gypsies burst through the undergrowth. Everyone stared at everyone else for a long moment. Too much thinking, Drusilla decided. Not enough bleeding.

Drusilla shrieked -- one long, high, wavering note, as much singing as screaming. All their minds went silver-white. She sought one fear that would hold them all, held it in her mind's eye, put it in their minds as well.

Through their eyes she saw the forest burst into flame.

The gypsies started to scream as they ducked and cowered. Unearthly orange light appeared to flicker through the trees, to drop like tears onto leaves that sent up sparks. The girl with long hair beat at her trousers; the man with no hair tried to help her. The gypsies were running in all directions, confused and unnerved. Spike shrank back too, but she took his hand in hers and quickly squeezed it twice -- their old signal for her best tricks and games.

"It's not real?" he whispered. When she shook her head and smiled, Spike began to laugh and laugh. "Oh, brilliant. Bloody brilliant. My perfect, vicious dove."

Her Spike, with her again. Her Spike, as romantic and deadly as ever.

"I shall see to the gypsies," she said primly. It was just like playing Wendy Houses. "You can kill the others."

***  

"You think I don't know what you're up to?" Cordelia said.

Angelus looked up at her, bewildered, from the cave floor where he'd slumped in apparent exhaustion. She sighed. "Not YOU you. The other you. Angel. I know what you're -- what he's up to. 'Get him away from the gypsies.' He just wants me out of the battle. He's trained with me, like, ninety zillion times, and he still doesn't trust me in a fight. So, tell me, have you always been this absurdly overprotective?"

She shrugged as she said it, and the lancing pain in her shoulder reminded her that Angel might have had other, slightly-less-annoying reasons for getting her out of the fray. Angelus didn't answer; instead, he just lapsed back into his mute staring at the ground.

Cordelia was disappointed to feel her annoyance at Angel fading; it had been, by far, the easiest thing to think about. It was a lot less frightening than the prospect of Angel getting all sentimental about the ex-lover who was probably happy to kill him, now that she had a spare. It was a lot less uncertain than wondering what was happening to Fred and Gunn, caught between murderous gypsies and semi-murderous vampires. And it was far, far less painful than really looking at Angelus -- the Angel who had been.

This is Angel, she told herself. My Angel. It's easier to call him Angelus, but even if he hasn't changed the name yet, the rest is the same. He has his soul. He can love.

"Do you really want to be with Darla?" she asked him quietly.

Angelus didn't look at her, but after a few moments, he said, "She's my only hope."

"Hope? Hope of what? Being what you were before?"

He grimaced in such wrenching pain that Cordelia's first thought was that he was injured somehow, bleeding from a wound she hadn't seen. But he only said, "I don't want -- I can't -- but --" Angelus gripped his hair, pulling so hard Cordelia thought he might actually rip out hunks of it by the roots. "I want the pain to stop. I want it all to end. Darla can end it."

"By yanking out your soul like a bad tooth." Cordelia wanted to smack him. "News flash, buddy. If you do that, the pain doesn't stop. It just stops for you, and you throw it off on other people. The people who survive the ones you'll go on to kill." She suddenly remembered Giles' face as Jenny Calendar's casket was lowered into its grave. Cordelia hadn't allowed herself to remember that in years.

"Oh, God," Angelus said. He let himself fall back onto the stone wall of the cave. "You're right. You're right. It never ends. No matter what." Tears were in his eyes. Seeing him cry wasn't easier the second time.

Cordelia was startled at first -- she'd jibed at Angel a thousand times, in jest and in earnest, gently and brutally and every way in between. She knew his reactions in every shade and shape, could envision the looks that accompanied them all. Then she realized those reactions belonged to a century in the future; the man who wept before her now was still too raw, too anguished, for any blow to be less than devastating.  

Stung by an entirely unfamiliar feeling of contrition, Cordelia knelt by his side. "I'm sorry. Okay? I didn't mean -- no, I meant it. But you should know it's not always going to be like this."

"No," Angelus said. "It's going to end."

His hand closed over hers, and she thought for one strange, confusing moment that he was making a pass at her. Then she realized that his fingers were wrapped around her stake.

"I won't be what I was before, and I can't be what I am now," Angelus said. "Soon I won't be at all."

***  

"So this is your end," Darla said. "My majestic creature, reduced to this. Reduced to you."

Angel had considerable practice in ignoring Darla's taunts. He circled her silently in the night, focusing only on the nearby cries of the gypsies. And -- that sounded like Fred, in trouble --

Darla saw his hesitation, misinterpreted it and smiled. "You hate it, don't you?" she crooned. "Being so much less than you can be. What's become of you now? A quiet, mild-mannered sort of fellow, I'd expect. The sort of man humans might easily make a pet of, who tells himself he's happy with his obedient human lover."

Cordelia, obedient. Angel couldn't help it: He laughed.

"And you're so secure in your snug little existence that you can mock me," Darla said. Her dark lips twisted in a scowl that he knew was a poor mask for pain. He had hurt Darla thousands of times -- deliberately and accidentally, at her request and against her will and without even thinking about it. She'd done the same to him. It had never mattered much, one way or the other. Their spirits remained as unnaturally unscarred as their bodies.

But this was different. It hurt him now, to see that he had hurt her. Darla's pain had become real to him. Connor had made her real in a way he'd never known -- in a way she'd never known, until the very end.

"I'm not mocking you," he said quietly. "But you don't understand the future I know, Darla. You don't understand the man I've become."

"I will understand it," Darla said. She held up her hand. Cordy's hologram bracelet was still looped around her wrist, but his eyes were drawn away from it. To Angel's horror, the gold ring from the time machine glittered on one finger. "The one piece of jewelry you never gave me, my dearest -- a wedding ring. I had to find my own. Do you like it?"

"Darla," Angel said, not expecting her to listen, "If you understand what that does --"

"I do." He didn't doubt her.

"-- then you have to understand that you're not going to get to the future Drusilla knows. By leaving this time and taking me with you, you'll destroy that, forever."

"What do I care for your future?" Darla said. "I might not even go forward. I might go back -- teach you La Volta for real this time. Or farther, perhaps. You could learn about art from the Borgias, dip your fingers into those paints you're always trying to get me to admire. I can study the craft of poisons from the Claudians. Perhaps you and I will sail down the Nile on a barge, listening to Cleopatra tell us tales of the City of the Dead. We'll drink from the alabaster jars that they think hold immortality, and we'll tell them if it's true." Her voice changed from a dreamy softness to something far harder. "Or perhaps I'll drag you farther ahead. Centuries. Millennia. Who knows what we'll find then? It doesn't much matter. Wherever we go, we'll find blood, and you'll drink it with me, at my side."

"It's never going to happen," he said. Angel had no intention of staking Darla, but she didn't know that, and he didn't mean to let her guess. "I'm going to stop you."

Darla laughed. "As though you could." She slashed toward him, so fast he barely dodged it in time.

Two of the gypsies stumbled out of the forest, and both Angel and Darla tensed, preparing to defend themselves, and each other, from the intruders. But the gypsies were screaming, yelling, swatting at their clothes as though -- as though they were on fire. One of Drusilla's group hallucinations, then. Angel hoped the cry he'd heard from Fred was based on no more than fear of a vision.

But Spike and Dru were in those woods too --

Darla's fist slammed into his jaw, sending him spiraling off-balance. Even as she lunged toward him, he righted himself, blocked her blow and shoved her back into the dust. She scrambled to her feet, laughing bitterly as she pushed her blonde curls from her eyes.

Behind them, the gypsies, still in the grips of their delusion, began to stumble into the cave. Cordelia would have to handle them, injured arm or not.

"So this is all you want for me now," Darla said. "To end like this. Dust to dust."

"Your end is a finer thing than you know," Angel said.

***  

"Hang on!" Charles shouted through the din. "I'm getting you out of here!"

Fred knew very well that Charles could no more see a way out of this conflagration than she could. He was only trying to comfort her in what were undoubtedly going to be their last moments of life.

Every tree was on fire, every branch, almost every leaf on the ground. The flames were orange and red, white and yellow, even blue. In a daze, Fred thought: so many different temperatures. She'd spent too much of her life with Bunsen burners not to know the various meanings of a flame's color. And it had caught fire so fast -- could Drusilla have used an accelerant? But what? And why lay a trap with something that could kill vampires too?

Before her stunned confusion could shift into anything that approximated thought, a figure appeared through the smoke and fire, apparently untroubled by the inferno.

"Well, well," Spike said. "What have we here? Not gypsies. Guess that means I can kill you." He smiled nastily. "Who wants to go first?"

***  

Cordelia's first instinct, when Angelus grabbed the stake from her, was to grab it right back before he could do something stupid like plunge it into his heart. But his fist was closed, vise-tight, and Cordelia remembered a second too late that a even a weak, disoriented vampire was still far stronger than a human. Especially an injured human, she thought ruefully, as a bolt of pain shot down the length of her arm. For a second, she panicked -- then she had an idea.

He'd taken the stake, but she still had her knife.

Using her uninjured arm, Cordelia reached to her belt. The dagger's hilt slipped easily into her hand, and she quickly looped her arm through Angelus'. Now they were crouching face to face on the cave floor, Angelus holding the stake to his chest, Cordelia holding the knife's point against hers.

"If you're gonna kill yourself," Cordelia said, "then I might as well die too."

Angelus stared at her in sheer incomprehension, probably trying to decide if her threat was serious. "Why?" he asked finally. "You don't -- you can't know how it feels. What it means."

There were dark circles under his eyes, cuts on his face where horror had made him use his own nails to tear and scratch at himself. "No," she said. "I don't guess I can."

"You would let me do it, if you knew," Angelus said. "You would not sentence me to this despair."

"But that's just what you'd sentence me to. Don't you see? If you die here, in this cave, then you take the future -- MY future, the one that has you in it -- away forever. Everything I care about won't just be destroyed, it'll never even happen. You're not the only one losing your whole world." Cordelia looked him in the eye, and tightened her grip on the handle of her dagger. "I've got plenty reason to despair. So, whaddya say? C'mon. I'm ready when you are."

Angelus' hand tightened around the stake, and for one sickening, gut-wrenching moment, Cordelia thought he was going to do it anyway. Then his grip slackened fractionally and he lowered his head. "Let go. Let go and let me end this."

"No."

"Please," Angelus said. It sounded more like a moan of pain than a word. "I can't do it if --"

Cordelia waited for him to finish the sentence, then realized he probably didn't have words for what he was feeling, so she said it for him. "You can't do it because you know it'll hurt someone else."

"I can't," Angelus whispered. She couldn't tell if he was agreeing with her or just repeating himself.

"Listen to me," Cordelia said. "You've already had lesson number one of soul-having: It makes you hurt for every bad thing you ever did. This is lesson number two: Having a soul means caring about other people. And that's not a curse." Softening her voice, she went on, "I know you don't get this now. You're not gonna get it for a long time. But one day you're going to be with people you care about. People who care about you. And then you'll understand."

Slowly, he raised his head again and met her gaze. "You don't know what I am."

"No," Cordelia said steadily, "but I know what you're going to be."

Angelus looked at her for a long time. Then he slowly relaxed his grip on the stake, and Cordelia let out a long, shaky breath. She took the stake from him and put it out of his reach. "Okay. That's good. Now we're gonna stay right here in this nice, safe cave, out of the way of the fight until --"

There was a crashing noise behind her, and Cordelia jerked her head around just as two gypsies stumbled into the cave.

"-- Until the fight comes to us," she finished, leaping to her feet and placing herself between the gypsies and Angelus.

The gypsies didn't see Cordelia and Angelus immediately -- they were occupied with beating their clothes as if trying to smother a fire, which was weird because Cordelia couldn't see any flames. No time to wonder about that now. The gypsies were incapacitated, and there were only two of them. With those factors in her favor, she was sure she could hold them off.

Then one of the gypsies stopped beating his clothes and shook his head as if to clear it. He looked at Cordelia and nudged his companion. Then he shouted something in Romanii to the mob outside the cave. Within seconds more gypsies were running through the cave entrance. Four -- seven -- when the odds got too desperate, Cordelia stopped counting.

Through the entrance of the cave, she could see movement outside. All over the forest clearing, people were jostling about, but in the darkness and confusion it was impossible to tell if Angel was one of them. If she could get a better vantage point, maybe she'd be able to see him, attract his attention --

She shouted his name, but the din of the battle outside almost drowned out her voice completely. "Angel!" she yelled again.

The gypsies were advancing on her and Angelus now. Cordelia briefly considered grabbing Angelus and making a break for the cave entrance, then rejected that idea as foolhardy. They'd never make it out.

If only she could see Angel -- get somewhere he could see her --

She looked down at the gypsies, and suddenly realized they were no longer closing in. In fact, they seemed to be frozen in place, staring at her in a mixture of awe and fear.

Wait a second. She was looking DOWN at the gypsies?

And why was it suddenly so much easier to see out the cave entrance?

Cordelia turned her head and bumped it against the cave's rocky ceiling. It hadn't suddenly gotten lower; she'd gotten higher. When she looked down, her legs and feet were simply dangling beneath her. She was floating several feet above the ground.

"Oh, no," she said. "Not AGAIN."

***

Fred and Charles stumbled backward as Spike advanced on them. It seemed to Fred that everything was burning now -- every leaf and twig and branch around them and above them and under their feet exploding with bright, ugly flames. A tiny voice in her mind tried to insist it wasn't possible for the conflagration to spread so quickly, but the crackling, roaring noise of the fire in her ears smothered rational thought.

"There's a way through," Charles said. The smoke was making him cough. "Behind you --"

Fred turned around and saw a passage out of the blaze, between two widely spaced trees which formed a gate of fire.

But before they could run to it, a figure appeared in front of them, blocking the way. It was Drusilla, her dress whiter than the hottest flames of all.

"Dru, pet," Spike said. "Come and join in the fun."

Reflections of the fire shone in Drusilla's golden eyes. "Thieves of books," she said to Fred and Charles. "Scarpers of stories. You'll see how the story should end. Its last line will be death. Yours."

Hemmed in by fire and the advancing vampires, Fred realized with horror there was nowhere left to go. And she didn't even have a weapon -- somehow, in the confusion, she'd lost her stake.

She looked around frantically for something else she could use to defend herself, and saw one of the torches the gypsies had been carrying, still smoldering where someone had dropped it. It was better than nothing, Fred decided, and reached out to pick it up.

The torch crackled as she lifted it, sending a shower of hot embers over her hands. Where they touched her, they burnt her skin, and Fred cried out in pain. For an instant, panic and terror emptied from her mind, driven out by the reality of physical pain.

And the forest changed.

Where there had been one forest, Fred now saw two, layered over each other like paintings on glass. In one, the fire raged out of control. The other forest was cool and dark and the only thing burning anywhere near them was the torch she was holding. All at once Fred knew which was real.

"Fragile mortal minds," Drusilla said as she drew nearer. "Like spun glass, so delicate. See them shatter!"

"Charles," Fred whispered urgently. "Charles, this is going to hurt. Just trust me."

She touched his arm with the torch.

Charles yelled and snatched his arm back. He blinked rapidly, and Fred saw his eyes clear, as if something blocking his sight had suddenly been lifted away.

"Give me that," he said in a low voice. Fred surrendered the torch to him.

"Because I'm feeling generous," Spike said, sauntering toward them, "I'll let you choose how you die. On tonight's menu we have broken necks, choking and blood loss. What's it going to be?"

"How about the special?" Charles said. He threw the torch. It sailed through the air, straight toward Spike, who made no attempt to dodge it. He thinks it's part of Drusilla's illusion, Fred realized. He can't tell the difference either.

Spike laughed. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but Drusilla's fire will never --" He caught the torch: " -- hurt me --"

As Spike's hand closed around the torch's glowing end, his face registered shock, then almost immediately contorted in agonizing pain. Flames shot up his arm, and it seemed to Fred it wasn't his clothes catching fire preternaturally fast, but his body itself. Of course, that was why fire was such an effective weapon against vampires -- why they feared it so much --

Spike was desperately trying to put out the fire before it spread further up his arm. "Dru!" he yelled. "Drusilla! Having a problem here!"  

"Spike!" Drusilla's voice was high-pitched and wavering, like a child confronted with its worst nightmare.

Spike threw himself on to the ground in an effort to smother the flames. Drusilla screeched and ran past Fred and Charles, ignoring them in her desperation to get to Spike. But when she got to him, she didn't seem to know what to do, and could only stand over him, wailing and rocking wildly, as he flailed about.

"Make it stop!" she howled. "Not my story, not my story, not my story!"

The torch was lying on the ground where Spike had dropped it; it had landed on damp earth and gone out. Fred picked it up and, with all her strength, hit Drusilla squarely on the back of the head.

For another second, perhaps longer, Dru continued to wail. Then, very slowly, she toppled forward, landing on top of Spike.

All around Fred, the imaginary inferno Drusilla had created disappeared, as suddenly as if a switch had been flipped. The forest was simply the forest again.

Spike writhed about, either trying to extinguish the flames or simply in pain. Fred watched him for a moment, then began beating out the flames as best she could. Charles sighed heavily before joining in. In a few moments, the blaze was out, and Spike and Drusilla lay singed and unconscious on the forest floor. Charles looked down at the two vampires. They lay in an untidy heap on the forest floor, still smoldering a little. "That'll teach you to play with fire," he said.

***  

Angel lunged at Darla, his stake missing her shoulder. She whirled about, laughing. Her boy had gotten careless in his later life. He couldn't even seem to aim directly for her heart.

"Very sloppy. Perhaps you're out of practice. Or perhaps you can't bear to kill me," she purred. His eyes flickered to look into hers, then away. Aha, she thought, it's true. He doesn't want me dead. He still wants me, down deep. He still wants to be what he once was.

Darla knew she could win this battle now; anyone who was willing to destroy his enemy would ultimately triumph over anyone who wasn't. But she didn't just want to stake this pathetic duplicate anymore. She wanted to hear him admit what he still really was inside, how wrong he'd been to ever think of leaving her side.

Angel swung toward her, feinting left at the last moment; his stake grazed her arm, slicing through the skin, and Darla winced as she stumbled back. She couldn't afford to get sloppy herself; Angel might not be the magnificent creature Angelus had been, but it would be easy to underestimate him.

She kicked out at him, expecting him to dodge the blow, just buying herself time to think. What if she could win him back, soul and all? Could she convince the gypsies to remove the curse on both Angeluses? Could that possibly work?

A brief vision of a night in bed swam up in her mind, and she smiled. Having two versions of Angelus might yet prove impossible, but it was well worth finding out. Nothing could ever stop them then.

"You've missed me," she said as they circled one another. "You've missed what we once were."

"At times I missed you," Angel said simply. "I even went back to you, twice. But I never wanted you badly enough to pay the price of staying."  

The thought of that -- an Angel who could come back and simply choose to leave again, who could put a limit on how badly he wanted her -- outraged Darla. She cried, "And that's all you have for me? I created you! You don't think I'm worth the price?" Darla readied her own stake. Two Angeluses was a nice dream, but so was watching this one turn to dust. "You told me we would be together forever, Angelus. You made me a promise. A promise you couldn't keep."

He froze. Angel stood shock-still, staring at her, anguish written on his face. When he spoke, his voice was low and uncertain. "I made you a promise," he said. "I promised you I'd take care of him. And I didn't. I couldn't. I tried -- I tried so hard, Darla, and I failed. I failed him and I failed you."

Him? Take care of who? None of this made any sense. But Darla could tell that what Angel was saying now was vitally important, at least to him. She felt her curiosity begin to get the better of her anger. "What do you mean?"

"It's the only promise I ever made that really mattered," Angel said. He was shaking his head from side to side, the pain in his eyes and his voice deeper than she had ever seen in him. "I won't ever get another chance to tell you, Darla, so I'm telling you now. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Sorry for leaving her? Sorry for what had become of him? Hopeful despite herself, Darla stepped just a bit closer. "Angelus?"

She felt the blow before she even saw it -- his fist slamming into the side of her head, then her jaw, then again. The world went gray, then black, and she felt the ground swimming up to meet her.

"I'm sorry," she heard once more, and then she heard nothing else.

***  

Darla lay crumpled upon the ground, the skirts of her ball gown collapsed around her. Angel stood still and kept watching her for a minute or more, in case she was faking unconsciousness. She wasn't.

Looking around, he saw a patch of shadow between two trees which was semi-concealed and out of the way of the fighting. Grasping Darla unceremoniously by the ankles, he dragged her limp body toward it.

When he got there, he found he wasn't the only one to have had that idea. Fred and Gunn were standing guard over the unconscious bodies of Drusilla and Spike.

"All RIGHT," Gunn said when he saw Angel. His ballroom finery was ripped and torn, the blue-velvet drapery long gone, and his turban had almost completely unraveled. "That's three for three."

Fred looked equally battered, the torn gold lace at her throat feebly reflecting the moonlight. "All those hard decisions we kept saying we'd think about when we got there? Well, we're there." She gestured tiredly at Spike and Drusilla. "Darla's got to keep existing, for Connor to be born," she said, in the voice of someone who would like to argue but wasn't going to. "But does the future get more warped with a Spike and Dru that know the future, or with no Spike and Dru at all?"

Angel looked down at the three insensible vampires lying on the forest floor. "Drusilla has to be around to sire Darla again. Spike has to be around to bring Drusilla to Sunnydale to get strong again. And there's a lot of things they did, or didn't do, that we can't even guess at. For better or worse -- well, mostly worse -- they're part of the world we're trying to get back."

Fred was evidently thinking much the same thing. "We have to keep everything as close as we can to how we know it should be. That's our best shot at fixing the future."

"If we can't stake them, what are we gonna do with them when they wake up?" Gunn asked. His turban slipped down over one eye, and he quickly finished the job of unwinding it that the chase through the forest and the battle had started.

"I don't know," Fred said. She looked at the long strip of cloth Gunn was preparing to throw away. "Don't get rid of that."

Gunn looked at her. "I'm not putting that thing back on. No more Caliphing for me. As far as I'm concerned, Madagascar can be a democracy from now on."

Fred pointed at Spike and Drusilla. "I meant, we can use it to tie them up while we figure out what to do."

"Oh. Right." Gunn handed Fred a wad of the bandage-like cloth which had formerly been his turban, and together they started to secure the vampires.

Angel looked around the clearing, saw the mouth of the cave and felt his stomach drop. "Oh, God," he said. "Cordelia."

The forest clearing was almost empty now, and with a rising sense of fear Angel realized why -- nearly all the gypsies had gone into the caves, driven there by Drusilla's fire hallucination. He had thought he was making sure Cordelia was safe; in fact, he had sent her into a trap.  

He charged into the cave, knocking people roughly out of the way as he struggled to break through the mob. He was so intent on getting to Cordelia that it was several seconds before he realized none of the gypsies were attacking him.

Angel crashed out of the crowd, almost stumbling as the resistance of bodies suddenly ceased. He was standing alone in an empty space near the back of the cave. Directly in front of him he saw Angelus, crouching against the cave's back wall, his hands over his face. The gypsies seemed to be afraid to go any closer to him, although Angel couldn't understand why; his former self was clearly incapable of defending himself.

Then he heard Cordelia's voice. "That's right, you'd better do some serious cowering. Because, as you can see, this is scary, high-level magic mojo I'm doing right now."

Angel turned around, expecting to see Cordy. Instead, he saw her feet, dangling in front of him at eye level. He craned his neck to look up at her: She was scowling, but Angel knew her well enough to recognize that what seemed to be irritation was more likely a mask for fear. She pointed down at the gypsies and said, "There's more where this came from, you guys. This completely intentional levitation is just the beginning. You'd better hope I don't REALLY get mad." Then she glanced down and saw Angel, and she gave him a nervous smile. "Hey there!"

"Are you okay?" he asked.

She was hanging in mid-air, drifting a little from side to side in the draft from the cave entrance. "Yes, except --"

"Except what?"

Cordelia lowered her voice. "I think I might be glowing. Maybe. Am I glowing?"

There WAS more light at the back of the cave than there should have been. Although it wasn't possible to tell exactly where it was coming from, Angel thought he detected a faint lambency in the air around Cordy. "Uh, maybe just a little."

One of the gypsies took a step forward. Angel turned, but for once Cordelia was faster. Her foot shot out, and she kicked the man on the shoulder, making him stagger back.

"Back off, buddy! I'm from the future, and I can float and -- and -- you don't know what else I can do. Like -- I can leap tall buildings at a single bound -- except you people probably think three stories is tall for a building, and jumping three stories is impressive but maybe not terrifying --" She cast a look of desperation down at Angel and whispered, "Help me out here."

"She can shoot laser beams out of her eyes!" Gunn yelled. Angel half-turned to see that he and Fred were pushing their way through the crowd to join Angel at Cordelia's feet.

Fred said, "I don't think they know what laser beams are, Charles." The gypsies were starting to murmur among themselves, and some of them were edging closer.

They were in a standoff, Angel realized. The gypsies had the advantage of numbers, but they didn't know how to respond to Cordelia's supernatural power. Now neither side could risk attacking the other.

"Who's your leader?" he asked loudly.

"I am," said one of the gypsies, stepping forward. He was a tall man with a gray beard; Angel remembered him from the brief period they'd spent in the gypsy camp. This was Gia's father -- Mother Yanna had called him Gregor, Angel recalled. Gregor was holding his arm awkwardly and smelled strongly of fresh blood. "You said you would leave us, and you are still here. Your deceit breaks our truce, vampire. All your lives are forfeit."

"We never lied to you," Angel told him. "We promised we'd help you get your vengeance, and we have."

Gregor's mouth twisted in scorn. "Our vengeance demands suffering."

"Look at him!" Cordelia exclaimed, pointing to where Angelus was crouching behind her. "Isn't that enough suffering for you?"

Gregor glanced at Angelus, then shifted his gaze to Angel. "He may suffer now, but it will not always be so. This one is the proof of that."

"I have the soul you cursed me with," Angel said. "That's what you've wanted all along."

"No. We want you to know pain. Your soul is only the means to that end. If you have come to treasure your soul, it can only be because it has brought you comfort. We could have killed you the night we cursed you. We let you live only so you could suffer while generations of our clan rise from the earth and fall back into it. If there is a time when your soul no longer causes you to suffer, whether that is a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years from now, then our vengeance is ended and you must die."

"Man," Gunn said in a low voice. "These folks really know how to hold a grudge, don't they?"

"Look at you," Gregor said. "Look at these others who surround you. Foolish people to be your friends, a foolish woman who loved you. You do not stand before us in shame. You act as though you have a right to make demands of us, a right to be whatever you wish. That is the right of anyone else with a soul, but not you, Angelus. Never you."

"I understand that," Angel said, feeling his hands clench into fists. "I understand that better than you could ever possibly imagine."

The gypsy laughed at him. "You stand here with your friends, and you want me to believe that you suffer? You want us to believe that you feel pain? You know nothing of it anymore."

The others in the attack party all shifted on their feet, began gripping their weapons more tightly. They were losing their awe of Cordelia and their terror of the fire, and their rage was beginning to well up within them again. In a few moments, Angel realized, the situation would escalate into battle. Could all four of them get out of this?

No, he thought. All five of us.

Angel looked back to where Angelus huddled at the back of the cave and suddenly experienced a stab of sympathy for him -- the first time he'd felt anything beyond contempt for his former self. In 1898 he'd already been older than the oldest human, had traveled continents and considered himself a man of wide experience. And yet he'd known nothing of what made human lives real -- not love or friendship or sorrow or grief. For the Angelus of 1898, all that still lay ahead; right now, his 150-year-old past self was like an infant whose life had only just begun. The future was before him, an unexplored country wide open with possibility.

At this moment, his past self had everything that Angel had wanted for Connor. Everything Connor would now never have.

Angel said, "I had a son, and he died."

The cave was quiet. Gregor stared at him -- no, Angel thought, Gia's father stared at him. He tried to imagine Gia as a little girl, swaddled up in this man's arms, then remembered her as the broken corpse that he had created and Darla had casually discarded. He wondered if Gregor was trying to imagine Connor, knew the man could never grasp the uniqueness and joy of his son -- just as Angel would never truly know the woman he had destroyed.

Their eyes met. Gregor took a deep breath, and Angel realized -- one father knew another.

At last, Gregor said, "Then you will know enough suffering for our vengeance. And more even than that, vampire. You understand this?"

Angel nodded. Gregor lifted his hand, and the massed ranks behind him began to file out of the cave. Angel watched them go without really seeing them, knew Cordelia had placed her hand comfortingly on his shoulder without his really feeling it.

"I had a son," he said again. "I understand now."

~Part: 7~

"Vampires are barren," Mother Yanna insisted. "Everyone knows this."

>From her elevated position, floating at the rear of the cave, Cordelia could easily look down on the old woman and the group of gypsies -- and one vampire -- standing around her. Mother Yanna had followed the attack party; now  she was angrily demanding to know why neither version of Angel was dust yet. The other gypsies were explaining, with occasional comments from Angel. Mother Yanna might be old and frail, but it seemed like she could cause them serious trouble if she chose, and Cordelia was still a little concerned. But she was more concerned about how she was going to get down from the ceiling.

"I'm sure you stayed down longer last time," Fred said to Cordelia's knees. "Come on, let's give it one more shot."

"Okay. But this time, if I start to bob back up, just put rocks on my feet or something. It's boring up here." Fred tugged Cordelia's feet back down to the floor again, and for a few moments she felt as though she could go either way -- up or down. But then gravity settled in once more, and she breathed out heavily as she felt her feet firmly plant on the ground. "Sometime, I want these demon powers to actually be convenient," Cordelia said as she brushed herself off. "And understandable. And to come with an instruction manual."

Demon powers, Cordelia thought to herself for the thousandth time. What does that mean? Where is it going to lead me? Hovering wasn't so bad so far, but she still had no idea how to control it. The glowing thing -- if she really had been glowing, and it hadn't just been some weird light from the time-machine portal -- was new, and even if it was harmless, it was frightening.

Why didn't I ask Skip more questions? Why didn't I make him explain what he was doing before he did it? She knew the answer, of course; the sight of an anguished, insane and possibly dying Angel had frightened her past the point of rationality -- and the only other option had been her own death. She'd thought she'd get less freaked about becoming part demon as time went on, but the feeling of uncertainty was only becoming more acute with each change she saw in herself. If a new power had really appeared tonight, others would probably follow.

Cordelia sighed. She'd think about it some other time. Not now.

>From the floor, Spike let out a low groan as he struggled toward consciousness. Gunn, who was standing guard, simply took up a rock and whacked him in the temple, hard. Spike slumped back on to the ground. Gunn shook his head. "We can't just keep knocking them out over and over again forever," he said. "I mean, sure, it'd be fun, but eventually, we gotta return to the future and leave them here knowing way the hell too much. What are we going to do?"

Cordelia stared down at the unconscious vampires, then glanced over at Angelus. He'd regained some measure of calm in the last several minutes, but he was still a hollow wreck of a man -- and still listening to every word. "It doesn't matter if they know about the time machine," she reasoned. "We take the ring with us and close the door --"

"-- And then they go find the time machine wherever it is in 1898," Fred pointed out. "Even if they couldn't find it, just this knowledge about the future is probably too much to preserve our timeline. That doesn't even start to touch on Drusilla; even if she is mentally unstable, she remembers a lot about the next 104 years. Who knows what she might decide to do, and when, and what effect it might have?"

Cordelia groaned. "This is just not good."

The gypsies fell silent as Mother Yanna raised her hand and stared coldly at Angel. She held up a small stick of something and snapped it, releasing a blue, fragrant cloud. Slate-colored trails snaked all around Angel, then turned white. Mother Yanna scowled, but she folded her arms in front of her and said, "He speaks truth. He may leave our time and take his human companions with them. But if you ever again return, vampire --"

"This is the end," Angel said. "It has to be."

"How can it be?" Cordelia said, gesturing at the vampires. "These guys know way too much about the time machine and the future. You, version 1.0, is probably too shell-shocked to do anything about it, but that doesn't apply to those three."

"We do not care for your troubles," Mother Yanna spat. "We care only that you leave and cease to remind us of our own."

Angel looked down at Darla's still face, and Cordelia couldn't help feeling a strange twinge of uncertainty as he knelt by Darla's side. His fingers brushed a lock of hair from Darla's cheek, so tenderly that he might have been lying beside her in bed, then took one of her hands in his. Oh, please, Cordelia thought, he's been doing great, don't let him go all soft now.

Then Angel stood up and came to Cordelia's side. She was confused when he took her hand, but only until she saw that he was slipping her hologram bracelet back on her wrist. Cordelia looked into his face and saw he was smiling a little. "Now you won't have to tell Groo you lost it."

"Thanks," she said, smiling back. "What's that?"

Angel held up something else he'd taken from Darla, a gold ring. Cordelia realized this second ring must be the one Drusilla had used to time-travel. "Here, Fred," Angel said, tossing it to her. "You're the one holding the keys."

"Well, that's one loose end taken care of," Fred said with a sigh as she pocketed the ring. "Now, if we can just think of a way to tie up the other hundred billion loose ends, we might just get to go home."

Gunn gestured at the unconscious vampires. "Think we could just politely ask 'em to forget about all this?"

Angel stared at Gunn for a moment, then said, "That's exactly what we're going to do." Cordelia frowned, but before she could ask Angel what he meant, he had turned back to Mother Yanna. The old woman peered at him, narrow-eyed, as he said, "You tried to steal my memories of my son, a few days ago."

"Was it your son you mourned?" Mother Yanna said. She smiled a cold smile that showed her yellowing, cracked teeth. "A pity I did not succeed."

Cordelia wanted to smack the old woman's few remaining teeth out of her head, but Angel's only reaction was an almost imperceptible hesitation before he spoke again. "You still have a chance to show your skill," he said, pointing at the other vampires. "Instead of stealing my memories, you're going to steal theirs."

***  

Fred grimaced as she stumbled away from the gypsy wagon, dragging Drusilla roughly along the ground behind her. Fred was pulling Drusilla by her ankles, causing her arms and hair to fan out behind her on the damp earth. "Okay," she huffed, "I know she looks bony and all, but still, very heavy."

"Hang on," Angel said, dropping Spike on the ground. He helped Fred haul Drusilla underneath the small outcropping of stone they'd found at the edge of the forest. If the vampires were still unconscious at daybreak -- which Angel thought likely -- they'd be trapped in place for a little while, giving Angelus time to burrow deeper into the shaded depths of the woods. In order to recreate history, Angel said, it was important that Angelus not encounter the other vampires for a few years to come.

Charles settled Darla beneath the outcropping, handling her more carefully under Angel's watchful eye than Fred suspected he might have done otherwise. "That got us?"

Angel, instead of answering, turned back to Mother Yanna, who was descending carefully from the wagon. Cordelia sat in the back with Angelus; either of them might have helped the old woman, Fred thought, but it was highly unlikely she would have accepted aid even if it were offered. Angel said, "I know you can erase the last couple of days from Spike and Darla. But what about Drusilla? That's more than a century of memory."

"Do you doubt my abilities?" Mother Yanna said. "You of all creatures should not."

"Believe me, " Angel said, "I don't. But it's a hundred and four years, and not just the memory of one person or place."

Mother Yanna stared down at Drusilla's pale face for a moment, then shrugged. "I have never attempted such. Neither has any other. I believe it will be done as you seek. But perhaps there will be -- pictures. Moments. Pieces of her memory that will remain in her mind, but with no anchor to hold them fast."

Cordelia said, "So that means Drusilla's going to be perpetually confused, occasionally seeing glimpses of the future, and -- and exactly like she was before." Her face lit up. "Angel, do you think, just maybe -- the reason we remember Drusilla like she is that we remember her still screwed-up from this memory spell? If so, then, that means we've already pulled all this off, right?"

"No, Drusilla was confused for a long time before this, thanks to me," Angel said. "But you're right; the confusion won't mean as much to her or the others as it would with anyone else. It's still the best shot we've got at restoring history to the way we remember it."

"Then withdraw," Mother Yanna said, "and let me begin."

Charles clambered back into the wagon, and Fred made a move to follow. She hesitated as she saw Angel looking down at Darla -- for what was, she realized, the very last time. Darla's cheeks were smudged with dirt and blood, her dress rumpled around her. Even in sleep, her patrician features carried a hint of the cruel disdain Fred had seen so often on her face. Yet Angel looked at Darla gently, with an expression Fred recognized. She had seen it once before, as the three of them crouched in an alleyway and she and Angel tried to shelter Darla from the rain. "Goodbye," he said quietly.

Fred took Charles' hand as she climbed back into the wagon. Angel, however, walked a few steps away, not looking back at the vampires or his friends as Mother Yanna began to chant softly in a language which was neither Romanii nor English. Angelus hugged his coat around himself, looking from person to person uncertainly, but he said nothing.

Fred glanced at Cordelia and saw that she was watching Angel, a faint smile on her face. With a hint of pride in her voice, Cordelia said, "He's really been strong through all this, hasn't he? I kept thinking he was going to fall apart, but he didn't."

The battered and beaten alternate-future Wesley might disagree, Fred thought -- but even that Wesley had lived to tell the tale. Well, until his reality collapsed seconds later. "I guess if Angel made it through losing Connor, nothing else is going to knock him down ever again."

"Connor --" Angelus said. His voice startled everyone; next to her, Fred felt Charles go tense, and Cordelia whipped her head around to stare. Angelus actually flinched, but he said, "You said -- a son -- was Connor my son?"

Fred didn't answer him, and she thought nobody else would either. But then she saw Cordelia's face soften with compassion as she leaned toward Angelus. "Yeah," she said. "He was."

Charles opened his mouth to protest, but Fred took his hand and squeezed it. When he glared at her, she whispered, "The memory spell works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, the damage is already done. If it does -- then let him have a little comfort, okay? It's the last he's going to have for a really long time."

>From the dubious expression on Charles' face, Fred could tell he didn't much care about Angelus' comfort. But he didn't interfere as Cordelia began speaking quietly to Angelus. Instead, he wrapped his arm around Fred and cuddled her close. "We've been on a hell of a ride," he said. "I don't think I'm gonna believe it until you and me are back at the hotel, wrapped up in our bed, same old drippy faucet keeping us awake, same old crappy reception of Telemundo on the TV set."

"I never thought I'd be grateful to see Telemundo again," Fred sighed. She thought back over the past few days, an almost-forgotten enthusiasm bubbling up inside her. "Do you realize how many principles of theoretical physics we've proved and disproved the last couple of days? I can't exactly share our time-traveling stories as empirical evidence, but I bet I'm going to get a couple of papers out of this. Winifred Burkle, published physicist." The old dream gleamed even a little brighter for having been set aside for so long.

"Sounds mighty nice," Charles said, snuggling against her. "You know what theory I think we proved?"

"What's that?"

"That I should get to come up with the plans more often."

***

The wagon jolted as they went back toward the cave with the time machine, driven by Fred's increasingly sure hands. Next to her, Mother Yanna sat, shawl draped around her, stern face looking resolutely ahead. Gunn was stretched out in the hay, exercising his uncanny ability to catnap anywhere, at any time; Angel remembered him explaining that once you learned how to fall asleep in a juvenile detention hall, you could fall asleep anywhere. For his part, Angel sat next to Gunn, deliberately breathing in the lost scents of another century -- pine and straw and horses and leather -- and silently watching Cordelia and Angelus.

Angel wondered what he should say to his former self and came up with nothing. The other's presence was profoundly disquieting on both supernatural and psychological levels; more than that, in some ways he seemed more a stranger than anyone Angel had ever encountered. He remembered what it was like to be that man, how he had felt, what he had thought. All of that was preserved within himself, dried and pressed, fragile and faded but eternal. But Angel could not think of how to talk to that man -- the best of what he had to say would, he knew, be drowned out by pain. It would be like enunciating clearly for the benefit of a deaf man.

Cordelia had no such qualms.

"You're a good detective!" she was telling Angelus. "Well, an okay detective with a really good staff. And you help a lot of people who really need help, and we only charge the ones who can comfortably pay."

Her voice bubbled on and on as she marshaled evidence for something Angelus would be decades in learning to accept. For his part, Angelus huddled near her, listening in disbelief.

"You've saved my life -- how many times, Angel? -- he doesn't know. We don't keep track. You're my best friend. The best friend I've ever had. Ever will have, probably."

Angel smiled and spoke for the first time in a long while: "Thanks."

She glanced back at him, suddenly abashed; apparently it was easier to say some of what she'd been saying to an Angel who wouldn't respond. But she was smiling as she curled her knees up to her chest. "Almost over."

"Yeah," Angel said. "Hopefully. Are you feeling okay?"

"Just tired," Cordelia said. "Can't wait to go back to my apartment and get some sleep. Assuming, of course, that the future we're going back to has my apartment in it."

"We'll think about that when we get there," Angel said. "Don't worry about it now."

"Easier said than done," she said. Then she thumped Angelus on the arm. "See? This is just the kind of relaxed, friendly repartee you have to look forward to. Plus the invention of leather pants."

Angelus finally spoke. "We've had leather pants for centuries."

"Millennia," Angel added. "For as long as there've been cows."

Cordelia made a face. "Of COURSE this is what you can both talk about."

"We're there," Fred said, half-turning around as she slowed the wagon.

Angel peered around in the darkness; he had expected the gypsies to stay behind, awaiting Mother Yanna's return, but none of them had remained. Mother Yanna, unfazed, carefully lowered herself out of the wagon. Angel followed suit. Angelus hesitated for a moment, visibly uncertain, and Cordelia quickly hugged him. "You'll be okay," she said. "Not right away. But someday. And I'll be waiting."

Angel felt absurdly jealous for a moment. Then he realized: She's still taking care of me. He smiled at her as she, Fred and a drowsy Gunn headed into the cave, to the portal to the time machine.

As Mother Yanna walked down a different branch of the cave, Angel and Angelus walked side-by-side after her. Angelus kept glancing back at the way Cordelia had gone, then at Angel. At last he whispered, "What she said -- is any of what she said true?"

"It's all true," Angel said.

"Then -- then it must get better." Angelus looked at Angel, entreaty in his face. "Tell me it gets better."

For a second, the contempt Angel had felt for his past self returned, stronger than ever. He had caused so much suffering, committed so much evil -- and yet he still saw his punishment only in terms of his own pain. It would be almost a century, Angel knew, before he learned to see past self-pity and bitterness and despair, before he started making amends.

Angel remained silent. Beside him, the hope faded from Angelus' eyes, and he stumbled on, his body curled over in what looked like physical pain.

No, Angel remembered suddenly -- it was physical pain. In the hours and days immediately after the curse he had clawed and beaten and torn at himself, driven by desperation to try to drown out the mental and emotional anguish with physical pain. All he had succeeded in doing was breaking several ribs, splintering the bones so badly that even with a vampire's recuperative powers they had taken days to heal. In the meantime, his tense, exhausted muscles had cramped almost constantly, stabbing him somewhere deep inside with shards of bone, invisible knives buried in his chest.

The memory of that pain was suddenly more real, more vivid to Angel than it had been for years. Watching Angelus stumble next to him, he remembered how heavy his body had felt, as if waterlogged, sodden with guilt. He remembered the pain in his side, the bloody crescents his fingernails had made in his palms. More than anything, he remembered how it felt to be sure that eternity would hold nothing but pain.

In a few minutes, Angelus' memory would be wiped clean of the past couple of days, of every event since Darla discovered he had been cursed. Nothing Angel said or did right now would exist for Angelus after that.

But even this moment mattered.

Angel quietly said, "It will be better than this, someday. Not for a long time. But someday you're going to have a life worth having."

Angelus stared at him with wide, bewildered eyes. "How?" he whispered.

"You -- you're going to find people who believe in you," Angel said. "People willing to give you a chance. And you're going to try to deserve them. You won't always get it right, but you'll learn to keep trying. When that happens, everything you're going through now, everything you'll go through later -- you'll know it was worth it."

Angelus considered that for a moment; though the anguish did not leave his eyes, his posture almost imperceptibly straightened. His voice was steadier when he spoke again. "It would help, if it all meant something."

"It will," Angel said. "It always means something. It's always going to be worth it." Angelus nodded, for one instant allowing himself to believe.

When they reached the cave, Angelus sat on the ground as Mother Yanna instructed, calmly listening to her chant the spell that would remove his memories. He remained focused on Angel's face until the moment Mother Yanna was done, when he slumped, unconscious, onto the ground.

Mother Yanna sighed and began shuffling away. "It is done. He will awaken soon, and we must be gone from this place."

"We'll have gone through the time machine in a few minutes," Angel said. "And we won't come back. We've done all we could do to restore this timeline. I don't know what we'll find when we go ahead, but we'll have to accept what it is."

"See that you do," Mother Yanna said. "You suffer because your son is dead, vampire. And I am glad your son is dead, so that you can suffer. But it is not enough for me." Her glassy eyes narrowed. "You cannot suffer enough for me."

The words echoed in Angel's mind -- glad your son is dead, GLAD -- and for once the instincts of demon and father were in perfect accord. He felt hot rage flood his mind, and his hand curled into a fist. For a moment it was as if he had already done it, as if he'd heard her fragile old bones shattering beneath his blow. Only the sheer depth of his fury kept him from striking; it paralyzed him for a few seconds -- but not, he knew, for long.

Mother Yanna, perhaps oblivious to his rage, began hobbling toward the mouth of the cave. "Do not think you will find the others," she said. "They have gone to a place you do not know. We shall not meet again."

She was so certain, and so wrong. With a jolt, Angel remembered that in the history they had fought to restore, the gypsies would be found. Even without Drusilla's suggestion, Darla would eventually hit upon the idea of attacking the gypsies and ransoming his soul. Spike wouldn't have been properly warned. And so he would still kill them, and they would all -- even Mother Yanna -- still die.

She was smiling at him cruelly. "You do not like what I say?"

Angel forced himself to relax. "I don't take pleasure in the thought that innocent people have to die," he said. "But you do. And no, I don't like that."

"So noble," Mother Yanna crooned. Then her face was more serious. "I know how wretched it is, this hate inside me. I know it for the wicked thing it is. But then what do we think of the one who put this hate there? Hmmm?"

Angel thought, all the evil that flows from Mother Yanna flows from what I did to her. Cycle after cycle.

"Evil never dies," Mother Yanna said. Then she turned and hobbled away, leaving Angel alone in the cave.

***

Cordelia stared up at the mouth of the time machine. "This looks less red to me. Like, way less red. Shifting to orange. Bordering on a kind of tangerine."

The pool of light overhead was dimmer and more sluggish, too; it had little of the eerie energy it had possessed before. Next to Cordelia, Fred was chewing on her fingernails. "The door's gotta still be open, though, right? Or else the phenomenon would be completely absent, instead of continuing to manifest."

"It ain't closed," Gunn said from his place nearby, with a confidence Cordelia was sure he didn't really feel. "It's just -- closing."

"That's so reassuring," Cordelia said, then yelled, "ANGEL!"

"I'm right here," Angel said. The moment after she heard him, she saw him, walking toward them in the gloom. His face was shadowed, somehow -- darker and more withdrawn than she'd seen him in the past few days.

Cordelia ignored the pain in her shoulder as she went to him and took his hand in hers. "Hey," she said. "You okay?"

"I'm good," he said flatly. "It's done."

So Connor would live again. They'd get the Hyperion back. All good things. So why was Angel back in despair mode? Cordelia chose her words carefully. "I thought that would make you happy."

"It does. It's just --" Angel turned his head from her, clearly searching for words. Although Gunn and Fred's impatience was visible -- and Cordelia's wasn't far behind -- they both remained silent, looking up at the orangey glow overhead. When Angel spoke again, he said, "I told Angelus it would all be worth it. And then I remembered how much evil I've done here, how far into the future the repercussions go. Evil never dies. It all goes so far past me, Cordy. I don't know that I have the right to say it's going to be worth it someday."

Cordelia brushed his cheek with her hand. "Maybe the evil you do never dies," she said. "But the good you do doesn't die either, does it? The repercussions of the good things you do keep going too." She cocked an eyebrow at him. "The ripple effect works both ways, you know."

Angel smiled at her, and the darkness had fallen from him again. He spoke -- not to her, but to Fred and Gunn. "Let's go through this thing."

Gunn clapped his hands. "All right. Last one out's a rotten egg. Or something else skanky."

They all gathered around Fred, who pulled one of the rings out of her pocket. Immediately, the portal above them began to spark and shimmer anew, which Cordelia figured was very good news.

Fred didn't hold up the ring. They stood in silence.

Cordelia spoke first. "What if we didn't get it right? What if we show up back in Rome, with the world on fire?"

Angel said, "That's not going to happen. I think we've stopped that reality from coming to pass." Cordelia hoped he was as confident about that as he sounded.

"I'm on board with that," Gunn said. "Question is -- did we start our reality up again, or are we gonna find some other freaky-ass future waiting for us?"

"It's got to be better than the one with the world on fire," Cordelia reasoned. Everyone looked as though they agreed. But Fred still didn't hold the ring up, and nobody was rushing her.

At last Angel said, "No matter what -- we can't return here."

"The damage is done," Fred said. "We affected this timeline. We know that much. We won't find out just how until we go back. So -- I guess we should return and take it from there."

"Got it," Cordelia said.

"Agreed," Gunn said.

"Okay," Angel said.

They all paused for another moment, and Cordelia reached out and grabbed Angel's and Gunn's hands in her own. Both guys grabbed hers right back, and Gunn swung his free arm around Fred. "Let's see what kinda world we made," Gunn said.

Fred took a deep breath, straightened up and held the ring above her head. And then Cordelia was falling upwards, gravity in reverse, her friends around her as the world spun away.

***

Darla was spinning, clinging to a raft that twisted and pitched dizzyingly on a stormy sea. Her mind was a vision not her own -- painted by Gericault, voiced in screams. Phantoms rose up out of the spray around her, faces she recognized but couldn't name speaking fragments of sentences that seemed to be important but somehow slipped from her mind immediately. Only one apparition was more memorable than the others -- Angelus rose out of the turbulent waters, wearing a look of sadness unlike anything Darla had seen on his face before. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry." He started to sink back into the darkness, and Darla reached out a hand to grab him back --

-- And cried out in pain.

Darla snatched her hand back and opened her eyes. Immediately the glare of hated sunlight bombarded her and the ugly smell of her own scorched flesh filled her nostrils. Now fully awake, she sat up, cradling her burnt hand to her chest.

She was sitting beneath an rocky outcrop, its shadow protecting her from the sun. She started to shuffle backward, as far into the shade as possible, and stopped when she bumped against another body. It was Spike, curled on his side, one arm slung protectively across an equally unconscious Drusilla.

Angelus, Darla thought. Where was Angelus?

His name triggered a flood of unpleasant memories -- the gypsy girl, the clan's revenge, the curse. Angelus, her glorious lover, her creation, turned into a sniveling and tearful wretch, a caricature of himself. She had thrown him out of the house. And after that --

After that, her memory was fragmented, unclear. Music, dancing, mayhem. The forest on fire and a flame-colored ballgown. But, as hard as she tried, Darla couldn't marshal the scattered impressions into something coherent, and she couldn't remember how she'd come to be laid out unconscious under a rock.

She put a hand to her head, and winced in pain. Her skin was unbroken, but her hair was matted with blood -- she'd suffered a bad wound which had healed while she'd slept. Spike and Drusilla bore the marks of similar injuries.

Spike groaned and rolled over on to his back. Immediately he winced and threw his arm over his eyes. "Too bright..."

"Wake up," Darla said. When that didn't work, she slapped him hard.

Spike groaned again and started to stretch his limbs; straight away he discovered, as Darla had, why that was a bad idea. He sat up, pulling his legs up to his chest and grimacing at the brightness around them. "I've been burned," he coughed. "Drusilla's been burned. What the hell happened?"

"I don't know," Darla said. She hated to say no more than that, but it was as much of an answer as she had.

"Well," Spike said at last, "I don't know how we got here, but it must have been one hell of a party. Wonder how long we've been out?"

"We've all been asleep for a hundred years," Drusilla's voice lilted. As she sat up, a faint flicker of confusion passed across her face. "Or -- we will sleep a hundred years. Like the princess in the story. I'm a princess, aren't I, Spike?"

Spike put his arm around Drusilla's waist, drawing him closer to her and kissing her languidly. "You're my dark princess. My wicked fairy."

The sun, Darla noted, was low in the sky. It wouldn't be long before dusk fell and their temporary prison dissolved into shadow around them. That was a source of relief -- the prospect of spending interminable hours cooped up with no escape from Spike's posturing and Drusilla's jabbering was wholly unpleasant. Already, Darla could feel her patience beginning to fray as Drusilla prattled on.

"I'll sleep a hundred years, while the tall buildings grow like grass and all the lovely wars are fought again," she said, her frown of confusion deepening. "Is this the end of the story, or the beginning? It's all a ring, a circle, a merry-go-round. We go round merrily, and round and round and round, back where we started." She tugged Spike's sleeve urgently. "I can't remember the story, Spike."

"There, love," Spike said soothingly. "If you've forgotten the story, we'll just make up a new one. Like this: Once upon a time, there were two vampires called Spike and Drusilla, and they killed everybody they met and lived happily ever after. The end."

"Happily ever after," Drusilla echoed softly and, perhaps, a little sadly.

Happily ever after, Darla thought sourly. For Spike and Drusilla, maybe. But not for Angelus. And not for her.

The sun dipped behind the tree-tops, and the pool of shadow widened into a black expanse. Darla got up and stretched her cramped limbs. The night settled around her, dark and refreshing.

Not far from the outcrop, she found a track, rutted by the recent passage of a cart. The cart had come from deep within the woods, stopped, then turned around and left at speed back the way it had come.

Darla was trying to make sense of this when the noise of someone approaching along the track made her look up. Spike and Drusilla had heard it too, and stopped exploring each others' throats with their tongues long enough to join her. A man was walking purposefully toward them, and for an instant Darla was certain she knew him.

"Angelus?"

"Beg pardon?" the man said in a pronounced English accent which was distorted somewhat by his fangs. Now that Darla could examine him more closely, she realized his accent was the only pronounced thing about him. He was short and unremarkable and wore glasses that sat awkwardly on his ridged nose, magnifying his yellow eyes so that they looked foolish instead of terrifying.

"You're a vampire," Darla said.

"Oh," the man said. He seemed pleased. "Is that what I am? How splendid!"

"Bloody hell," Spike said. "Whoever turned this idiot didn't make a good job of it."

"Actually," the vampire said with a polite cough, "that would be this lady." He nodded at Darla.

Darla stared at him. "I don't think so. I have better taste."

"I must beg to differ, ma'am." The vampire made a stiff little bow. "Allow me to introduce myself -- Percival, Lord Dalton, at your service. I woke up with a headache, a terrible thirst and a remarkably strong desire to find your good self. And, well --" He gave an apologetic shrug. "Here I am."

Had she actually turned this pathetic creature? Without any clear sense of memory for the past few days, Darla had to admit it was possible, if extremely unlikely. Perhaps they'd been drugged, or ensorcelled. That was no doubt it; the gypsies hadn't just punished Angelus, but devised some vile -- though thankfully more temporary -- revenge on the rest of them.

"He smells like Grandmummy," Drusilla said, leaning close to Dalton and sniffing him. "Dead lilies and poison ivy. He's a little puppy. Can we keep him? He will amuse Daddy --" She broke off suddenly, her face clouding again. "Where is Daddy? Something happened, and I don't remember --"

"Angelus --" Darla began. "Angelus has --"

She stopped.

She had shared one hundred and fifty years with Angelus, had been there to welcome him as he clawed his way up through the cold Irish earth and into the waiting night. The pathetic, miserable cursed creature she had cast out was not the man who had enthralled, amused and delighted Darla with his inventive cruelty for more than a century. She could still bring back that man, and they would laugh together as they killed the gypsies, one by one.

Darla could not explain it, but she was filled with a sudden and absolute certainty that her history with Angelus had not ended. The future was a ripe fruit hanging heavy on the branch, theirs to claim. Darla intended to pluck it down and devour it.

"Angelus went to find us new sport," she lied. "He told me of a camp of gypsies, ripe for a slaughter."

"That's more like it. What are we waiting for? Let's get to the killing," Spike said. He threw a fraternal arm around Dalton's shoulder. "Dalton, my boy, you're going enjoy this..."

"Dalton, is it?" Darla said coolly, appraising the newcomer. He stared back raptly, with all the adoration of the newly-turned. Even in this ridiculous creature, it was vaguely gratifying. He'd be useful for running and fetching, she supposed, if nothing else. "Very, well, you'll come with us. And you'll obey our rules. Meaning that you'll obey me."

Spike added, "And when you're not obeying her, you'll obey me." Dalton nodded happily, accepting it all as gospel.

"Gypsies?" Drusilla repeated uncertainly. Then a slow smile spread across her face, overtaking her confusion. "Slaughter..." She followed Spike and Dalton.

Darla smiled. Then her lips curled into a sneer of hatred as she thought again of the gypsies, their peasant mobs, their cheap little magic tricks they substituted for strength.

She'd show them who could hate the most. She'd show them who could write in blood.

***

Angel felt the wall of the pyramid knock against his head a split second before he heard Cordelia yelp. "Owww! Ugh. Somebody's gotta find the brakes on this thing."

The others were all crowded up against him, confined by the narrow interior of the time machine. Gunn was groaning from the nauseating trip back through time, and Fred sounded a little queasy as she said, "Let's open the door. No matter what future we find out there, it's got to be a better place to barf than in here."

"Seconded," Cordelia said quickly.

Angel, closest to the door, pushed it open carefully. The faint lighting showed him a room lined with dark wood paneling, a floor covered in threadbare carpet. An old sewing machine stood in one corner, and next to them was an early X-ray machine. Barely daring to hope, he climbed out of the pyramid; as the others followed, he checked the sign above the door. It read "The Old Curiosity Shop: Victorian Inventions and Curios."

Just as it had before.

"This looks like the Museum of Victoriana," Fred said. "I mean, looks just like it --"

"Smells like it too," Angel said. He breathed in again, checking it: the same musty smell of old lace and older books, the stink of industrial cleaners, and still hovering in the air, just a little, the familiar scent of Drusilla. "This is it. This is where we left."

Gunn was the last to stumble from the pyramid. As he stretched his limbs, he said, "Sounding real good so far. Now, let's just hope we don't find out L.A.'s on fire too."

"Wait," Angel said, tensing. "Someone else is in the building." He said it the moment he sensed it, and he sensed it even before he heard it -- footsteps coming down the hallway, directly toward them. The others heard the sound a few seconds later, and they all drew closer to one another, protecting each other's backs.

"Only bad thing about showing up in the museum we originally left?" Cordelia said. "Not so many weapons in the curio shop."

"I think I could do some damage with that X-ray machine if I have to," Gunn said grimly. "Show some monster just what bones I broke in his ass."

Angel motioned for quiet, and they all stood there in total silence until the through the doorway came --

"Groo?" Cordelia said, her face melting into a smile.

Groo grinned back. "Indeed, my princess. How goes your quest for the Drusilla beast?"

Angel looked at the others, then at Groo, then back at the others. Finally Fred said, "Groo -- just go with this for a second -- what do you remember about earlier today?"

The Groosalugg, ever eager to help, nodded and smiled. "Cordelia was helping Angel with -- was helping Angel." The pause was slight, just enough to tell Angel that Connor was still dead, that Cordelia had still been helping him box up Connor's things. He had been expecting it, but it stung nonetheless. "Then Angel realized the vampire Drusilla was near, and you all came here to seek her. Lorne and I went to the airport, where great metal birds go into the sky and a fine selection of perfumes can be purchased, and we killed a Velga demon that had gone into the baggage area and sent many people's luggage astray. We defeated this evil and reunited the travelers with their belongings. Then we came here; Lorne remains in the car, ready to speed us toward a quick getaway if one is necessary." Groo's pleasant face shifted into a worried frown. "Is such a getaway necessary?"

"No," Gunn said. Then he started laughing. "Hell, no. We are RIGHT where we want to be! Yes!" He grabbed Fred up in his arms and spun her around.

Cordelia was beaming, and Angel was sure she would run to Groo. Instead, she flung her arms around Angel, holding him close. "We made it," she whispered. "We gave Connor his five months."

Angel hugged her back, taking comfort from her words and her touch. Five months. He remembered holding Connor, and for the first time the memory brought him joy instead of anguish. The words he'd said to Angelus echoed inside him -- so much so that he wondered if the memory had always been within him. It was worth it. It will always be worth it.

At last, Cordelia let go of him. Groo seemed confused, perhaps dismayed, until she ran toward him and hugged him too. "This bracelet you gave me?" she said, holding out her wrist. "Best. Gift. Ever. You're not going to believe the story."

"Speaking of jewelry," Fred said, "we should probably get those rings out of the time machine."

Gunn stared at her. "What, one crazy, reality-bending trip through time wasn't enough for you? You want frequent-flyer miles with this thing?"

Angel understood her. "We have to deactivate the time machine," he said. "We've seen what can go wrong. If Dru was able to find out about it, then others might find out eventually, and then anything could happen."

"Grabbing the rings now," Gunn said, quickly ducking inside the time machine. Fred held out her hands to accept the handfuls of gold rings as Gunn shoveled them out.

"You have had some great and worthy adventure," Groo said. "I look forward to hearing your courageous exploits."

"We'll tell you all about it," Cordelia promised. "But first, we are going to enjoy some 21st-century luxuries, like warm showers and dry-cleaned clothing." Her voice was dreamy as she added, "Take-out pizza."

Angel accepted the last handful of rings from Gunn. Fred was peering down at them. "What should we do with these?" she said. "My first thought is to find the local equivalent of Mount Doom and toss them in."

"We should probably check and see if they're under a specific enchantment we could remove," Angel said, looking down at the rings. "If we can't, then we should destroy them. But we might be able to disenchant them."

Cordelia caught on first. "And if we can disenchant them, then we just came into a big chunk of gold that we are ethically obligated to steal. And sell. And make some money off of."

"Could fix up the Hyperion with that," Gunn said, lifting one of the rings. "I know this guy --"

"We could buy you another bracelet to match this one," Groo said to Cordelia.

Angel watched her face shift from dismay to a tact as she said, "I'd rather try some of those perfumes you found at the airport."

"They are duty-free," Groo reported solemnly.

Cordelia gave him a proud smile. "You're really growing as a shopper." Then she laughed and clapped her hands. "I can't believe it! We did it! We fixed time up like we never left!"

"Maybe," Fred said. She was staring down at the gold in her hands, a little sadly. "It's more likely that we did change reality. We must not have changed anything major, or else Groo wouldn't remember the same day we do. But somewhere, somehow -- things changed because Drusilla went into the past, and because we followed her."

Angel considered that for a moment. "The changes are going to be small things," he said. "At least, to us. Maybe not to the people who felt them. But we'll never know."

"Probably not," Fred said. "The differences will be -- in the details. On the margins. A few turning points where it just took one tiny sliver to make a difference, and we did."

"Guys, chill out," Cordelia said. "The world's the world we remember. Today's the day we remember. And if the world's a teeny bit different -- well, so what? We're not in Rome, the streets aren't on fire and, at least as far as we knew this morning, the world's not ending. Maybe we switched something here or something there. But we didn't have any choice. We did what we had to do, and I think we did it pretty damn well."

Fred sighed. "When you put it that way -- yeah. We did our best and, really, we did okay. If you leave out the wrong-Dru mixup and the stampede in the theatre and lemur-kabobs, I guess we were fine."

"What's wrong with lemur-kabobs?" Gunn protested. "I was winging it!"

"It's easy to say the changes don't matter now," Angel said. He could tell the others' spirits were lifting, but he couldn't quite feel the same. "We don't yet know what they are."

"We'll deal with the changes just like we deal with everything else," Cordelia said. "I only ask for a few constants in this universe. As long as the Nehru jacket is still out of style, Ben & Jerry still went into the ice-cream business and Al Gore's still president, everything's okay by me."

Everyone smiled, and Angel let himself relax. "Let's get back to the hotel," he said. "I think we could all stand to be home."

"Amen to that," Gunn said. He slid his arm around Fred's shoulders, and the two of them followed Cordelia and Groo out. Angel could hear Cordelia's merry voice, telling stories to Groo even as they started down the hall.

For one moment, he looked back at the time machine, black and solid and now forever still. He thought of Connor again, wondering for an instant -- for only one instant -- if he was a fool not to take even this desperate chance to get his son back.

But then he thought of a world on fire, and Wesley's crumpled body, and of what he had said to himself so long ago. The pain that had happened all served a purpose -- just because he didn't see it now didn't mean he never would.

Angel followed the others out through the museum, listening not to their words, but just to the happiness in their voices, the laughter that echoed from the walls. He felt himself begin to smile.

It was time to stop thinking about the past. Time to face the future.

***  

They were laughing and laughing, and something was terribly funny, and Angel didn't think it was funny, but he was smiling too. It was all very strange, but then everything was very strange, and none of it mattered, so long as they came back inside when she needed them to.

Drusilla was pretty sure they'd come back inside if she started screaming.

It would be easy to start screaming -- she wanted to scream. Of course, she always wanted to scream, because it was fun, but now it would be easiest of all. Because now was when she was going to go back and write the story all over again. She would change the ending, and this time it would end well.

The story had ended very poorly this time, in Drusilla's opinion. Spike had gone away. They put metal in his mind, and now he couldn't drink. It poisoned him from the inside out. Then Darla had crumbled into dust. As far away as Drusilla had been she had still felt it -- Darla dying with remorse in her heart.

"And little feet in her hands and belly," Drusilla whispered. She knew the story. She had told it to herself many times before, hoping it wouldn't be so sad the next time. But this was the first time she knew she could change it. This time it would all come out right.

Drusilla was very certain about this -- more certain than she was about most things. She'd learned that it was very difficult to be sure about much of anything: which person was least likely to scream loudly, whether or not Spike truly loved her, if the tulips in the wallpaper were really speaking to her or just whispering among themselves. Thoughts got all tangled up sometimes -- tangled up like thread, if you weren't very careful with your stitches, and that kind old voice always told her to be careful with her stitches.

Now all the sewing was coming out straight. An even hem. When she'd found the book, she'd been able to understand it -- she'd understood so well! It was as if she'd read it all before, as though her clever plan was there in the pages too. Dru knew it backwards and forwards. Find the time machine. Trick Angel and his friends into coming after her, so they could kill the one she used to be. Then let them go home, all alone, wagging their tales behind them. That would leave her with Spike and Grandmummy, and they could make those nasty gypsies bring Daddy back the way he was supposed to be. Drusilla could see it all in her mind, out-of-focus, the sound all tinny, like a drive-in movie from the very back row. But she could see and hear it all the same.

It seemed like a story she had heard before, somehow. That made Drusilla happy, made her sure it would all come out just the way it did in her dreams.

All she had to do now was make sure the time machine would work -- it had to be exactly the way it was in the book. The story had to begin right for the ending to be right. If she found the time machine just as it should be, why then she would scream and scream, and the others would run back in, and wouldn't they be surprised when she rolled inside and went away?

Laughing to herself, Drusilla skipped to the time machine. It was big and black, just like the book said. Hieroglyphics danced across its surface. "And the Chinese know," she whispered. "They're walking like an Egyptian."

She pushed open the door, and there were all the lovely switches, and --

Drusilla's face fell. She stamped her foot. "Where are the rings?" she whimpered. "Can't go anyplace without the rings!"

But the rings weren't there. The nasty book had lied. All the visions had just been dreams, stories, like the ones on television. Dru had thought she could write it all over again, but she couldn't. She couldn't at all. The tulips probably weren't talking to her either.

She felt the tears running down her face as she slumped to the floor. The tears were cold. She remembered that they used to be hot, and she didn't know why that made her cry harder than ever. "It's ended all wrong," she sobbed into her hands. "All wrong, all wrong. I haven't any dollies at all."

Dollies?

Drusilla lifted her head, considering. It seemed as though, on her way in, she had seen some pretty dollies --

She tiptoed down the hallway until she found them. A very silly man had gotten himself killed, too long ago for her to enjoy the leftovers, but he had a nice bear tucked under his arm. Such a fluffy little bear. Just the sort of bear she would choose for herself.

Drusilla lifted the bear up and hugged it close. Then she chose a baby doll, and another, and then the prettiest doll of all, one with long black curls, like her own. "You can be my dollies," she said. "And YOU can be Miss Edith. Won't that be fun?"

They all thought it would be great fun indeed.

Dru laughed and laughed, spinning around the room with her new dollies in her arms. They could dance and sing, and then they could play hide-and-go-seek, and tell each other stories. She would always be able to find new stories to tell.

The End

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