Fallen AngelsBy Kristi
Falling Down
@--Buffy--@
I shut my eyes against the colors. I put my hands over my ears. It’s so loud. Everything is so grating. I scream, trying to shut everything out. I am locked in my room, sitting in a corner in the dark. I can hear them outside my door. I know eventually they will send someone in to check on me. They have done this every few hours since I returned. I’m not sure how they expect me to act.
*
They did this to me. Willow decided I was in Hell and needed to be rescued. I know she meant well, but what would make her think I’d gone to Hell. I died saving the world. Doesn’t that give me a place in Heaven? I can’t tell her. No matter how much I want to scream at her and ask why she ripped me out of Heaven I can’t. No one can ever know where I was. I don’t want them to feel badly. I’m also afraid that because God allowed me to return here, that maybe He didn’t want me either. Just like my Dad, or Angel, or Riley. Nothing good and beautiful wants me, not even Heaven.
It took Willow a long time to decide she needed to call Angel. I don’t know how long. I can’t remember how time works here. Everything passes in a rending painful torrent of noise and color. He wants to see me. I think he just needs to ease his guilty conscience. If he’d been here maybe I’d have hope. Maybe the strength that I always drew from would have been enough to prevent Glory from opening the portal. Maybe, my entire life, and unlife, since Angel left has been a lot of maybes.
*
There’s this really beautiful spot of private beach on the way to LA from Sunnydale. I’m meeting Angel there. I get there before he does, but then I planned it that way. I’m standing in the wet sand, letting the water wash over my feet when I feel him. I’d forgotten he did that to me. His presence sends tiny fingers walking up and down my spine, even before I see him. I never really understood it. I suck at feeling vampires, even though Giles says it should be as natural to me as my strength or my healing. I felt Angel from the moment he followed me to the Bronze though.
I don’t turn around. He left me. He can come to me. He does. I feel his arms wrap around my waist. He turns me around. Maybe he needs to look in my eyes. He doesn’t say anything. He falls to his knees before me, his arms wrapped around my legs, his face buried in my stomach and sobs. I am reminded of when he came back to me from Hell. My hands tangle in his hair.
I feel something. For the first time since being torn out of Heaven, I feel. I hurt, I ache. He feels like mine. I know he’s not, he can’t be for more reasons then I have time to recite.
*
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*
@--Angel--@
I thought when I became I vampire I lost the ability to have my breath taken away. When I saw her standing in the ocean there were no other words for my reaction. She took my breath away. I felt her long before I saw her. I had tried to forget that she did that to me. It starts as a tingling at the back of my neck and it spreads out and I swear my heart starts to beat. I told myself I was going to handle this with composure, control. The only thing I could do is fall before her on my knees and cry, thanking a God that hates me and my kind for this amazing gift he’d given me. Just knowing she’s alive somewhere in the world make my world better.
It is a long time before I can stop sobbing, stop thanking God. I stand and step back, ashamed at my reaction to her. I notice things about her for the first time. She’s much to thin. Willow warned me she hadn’t been eating, even before she…left. I can’t bring myself to say died and her name in the same breath. Her eyes are filled with pain and longing. I stare into those hazel eyes I’ve always loved so much, and recoil. I thought I’d mastered the art of pain, of feeling it, giving it. I have never felt or seen pain as deep and hard as what existed in my beloved’s eyes. It was the pain of loss, not the pain of places seen.
I enfold her into my arms, unable to do anything else or say anything. I smell her. She smells like vanilla, just like she always has and I know Willow was wrong. I know what hell smells like, I spend a few hundred years there. It smells like brimstone and sulfur and death and it lingers. No matter how many showers, how much soap or scented shampoo, the smell of hell lingers in the skin, the breath, the blood. I smell none of that on her and I understand the awful pain in her eyes.
*
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*
@--Buffy--@
We didn’t speak for a long time. It’s okay. We never needed words between us. We held onto each other. Finally he pulled away, taking my hand and leading me up to dry sand. He sits down and pulls me with him. He is unwilling to break contact between us, as if he needs confirmation that I am real. He is my confirmation. Where he is, I _am_ real.
“You haven’t told them?” he asks
I know what he’s asking. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to talk about it. Can we just go back to the part where you’re holding me. I want to ask, but I don’t . I know the answer. I shrug instead.
“They need to know you weren’t in Hell, Buffy. They need to know they took you away from Heaven. That’s where you were wasn’t it?” He asks. It hurts him to know where I was, that I don’t have that anymore. He has broken my heart and killed my soul many times before, but he did it because he wanted me happy. He hates it that I’m not happy. I shrug again in response.
He sighs. “Buffy, I wish you’d talk to me.”
I start to scream but I can’t. “Why? Would talking change that when the sun rises your going to get in your car and leave me again?” Is that hoarse, rough voice really mine? I wonder. I know it hurts him when I say things like this, but I can’t help it.
“Buffy, don’t you think I’d stay with you forever if I could?”
Again I shrug. It’s easier then hearing my own voice. He shakes his head. He knows he can’t win this argument with me. Instead he pulls me into his lap and holds me. He rocks me. When was the last time someone rocked me? I wondered. He whispers to me how much he loves me, how much he misses me and it soothes all those ragged nerve endings. It quiets the noise and dulls the colors. It makes me feel _almost_ alive.
*
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*
@--Angel--@
I rock her. I wonder if I’ve ever just rocked her. I’ve seen her cry so many times. I’d almost rather she cry now instead of this quiet. How could her friends not have known she was in Heaven. Where else did angels go? She is so tiny, so fragile and vulnerable in my arms. It makes me love her all the more.
I wonder for the hundredth time if I could have prevented this. Maybe if I hadn’t been in Pylea, not saving Cordy from being a Princess, I would have known. That tingling would have told me she needed me. Just as I knew she needed me when her Mom died. It’s the biggest guilt on top of all the guilt I’ve got to face.
If I had known what they were planning, that they were bringing her back, what would I have said? Would I have stopped them, reminded them that no matter what God, or the Powers, would never be so cruel to send a pure soul like hers to Hell. Or would I have helped them, selfishly, wanting to know that she only 2 hours away, that my reason for living, for fighting lie only 2 hours away. I couldn’t answer either question honestly.
Our lives had gotten so separated. I was trying so hard to move on, like everyone encouraged me to do. They didn’t understand. They never will, moving on without Buffy is like moving on without a limb. You can get prosthetics and they work but they never fit and it’s never like having your own limb and you always miss it with an ache.
The sunrise is coming. I can smell it and I mourn it, more then I have in two hundred some odd years. When the sun rises I’ll have to let her go. After all, nothing has changed. I put my finger under her chin and lift her face to mine. The hollows under her eyes are black in this half light. I kiss her lips and she tastes the same. Vampires don’t taste food like humans do, it’s all ash in our mouths, but when I kiss Buffy I taste ice cream and chocolate and peanut butter, preferably extra crunchy. I say the words I know will break her heart, but she needs to know.
“I love you, Buffy.”
She responds by kissing me again. The kiss tells me all I need to know. Nothing has changed. She loves me and I don’t blame her for not saying it. The words are painful. They hurt. I know I have a heart that beats when I’m holding Buffy, because leaving her rips it out of me.