Title: Scattered Thoughts: A Silence Falls
Author: JR
Email: JRR42@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: Angel, Willow, et al, are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the WB. All characters are used without permission. This story is not intended to infringe upon any copyrights, nor is any profit being made from it.
Episode spoilers: Angel: ‘Heroes’; Buffy:

“When your soul is tired and your heart is weak,
Do you think of love as a one way street?
Well it runs both ways, open up your eyes.
Can’t you see me here? How can you deny?”
-- Private Emotion, Ricky Martin


The minute I heard the phone ring, I knew something was wrong. Don’t ask me how, but even as sleepy as I was, I just knew *something* was really out of place in the universe. Call it intuition or maybe just some sixth sense. Okay, so I don’t see dead people or anything...

...then again, I take that back.

I do live in Sunnydale, after all. We see dead people all the time here, well, the living dead, anyway. Par for the course in this town. I guess my life is hardly what most people would define as ‘normal’.

Take tonight, for example. I spent my evening in a meadow attempting to do a locator *spell* to find out where my *werewolf* ex-boyfriend has been hiding for the past three months. Giving up after three unsuccessful attempts, I was careful to avoid *vampires* on my way back to the dorm room I share with my *slayer* roommate and crawled into bed. *Spell*, *werewolf*, *vampire*, *slayer*. See what I mean about my day-to-day life being a little outside the mainstream?

I’m babbling, aren’t I? Get back to the story, Willow.

I was talking about the phone call, right?

It’s funny, but a person tends to learn a lot of stuff when living on a Hellmouth. Try these on for example. Never leave the house without a stake and some holy water. Never make a date without checking with the local Watcher to find out which demon is in town to ruin it first. When captured by a lovelorn vampire, *do not* give in to your urge to make out with your best friend. And finally, learn to trust that little voice in the back of your head that tells you when something ‘just isn’t right’.

And boy, oh boy, was my little inner-voice screaming at me from the first sound of the phone’s ring, which just happened to jar me out of yet another rather naughty dream of my roomie’s ex.

I was kinda surprised that Buffy actually managed to grab the cordless before I could get to it. It never ceases to amaze me just how deeply she sleeps. I mean, she’s the Slayer after all. Isn’t she supposed to sleep with one eye open for possible danger all the time? But not my roommate. Slayer or no Slayer, once her head hits the pillow, Buffy sleeps like...well...like the dead.

“Heelllooo,” Buffy mumbled after finally finding the ‘talk’ button. Granted, she probably would have had an easier time of turning it on if she’d actually bothered to open her eyes as she fumbled with it.

“Hello?” Buffy repeated in a more awake... and annoyed tone of voice. After another short pause, she continued, even more p.o.’ed than seconds before. “Look, since you’ve already disturbed my beauty sleep, you might as well say something.”

“Who is it, Buffy?” I asked when my curiosity got the best of me. My answer, however, came rather rudely.

“Fine, be that way, asshole,” Buffy grumbled as she ended the call with a rather forceful jab of her thumb. I could only make out a few of her more colorful word choices as she flipped over to a more comfortable sleeping position. “Eight o’clock exam...some idiot...middle...night, y’know...” By the way her words trailed off, I knew she was falling back asleep even as she complained.

Not me, though. Suddenly, I was wide awake. Of course, my innate curiosity as to whom exactly would call us in the middle of the night was probably the reason for that.

Well, that and the fact that my inner-voice was telling me that the call was important.

‘At least it *better* have been!’ I remember thinking angrily to myself. Anything that pulled me out of an NC-17-rated dream of Angel darn well better be life threatening. And if it turned out to be Xander playing a joke on us, the only life that would be threatened would be his, by my own hands, no less.

Of course, if I hadn’t been already awake, that one, lousy stray thought of Xander would have guaranteed my full state of consciousness. What if the caller was Xander or Giles? What if they were in some kind of trouble, something that kept them from speaking? What if something terrible had grabbed them? What if...?

“Buffy?” I questioned, my voice pathetically fearful.

“Huuuuh?” My half-asleep roomie begrudgingly answered.

“You don’t think that call could have been from Giles or Xander? You don’t think they might be in trouble...or something, do you?” I babbled softly.

“Uhhh-uhhh,” Buffy groaned.

“H-how can you be sure?” Her lack of concern was beginning to annoy me.

“N...spidey sen...,” Buffy answered, her voice muffled by the pillow she was burrowing into face first.

Huh? It took me a minute to fill in the missing blanks, but eventually I figured out the gist of her words. ‘No spidey-sense.’ Or, roughly translated for anyone *not* in the Scooby gang, Buffy’s Slayer instinct of impending danger wasn’t going off. Therefore, the call most likely didn’t have anything to do with the supernatural.

Okay, so Xander and/or Giles were probably all right. Buffy was already asleep again, which was exactly what I should have been doing.

But I couldn’t. Buffy’s spidey-sense may not have been going off, but my own seemed to be going off like an air-raid siren. There was just no way I could fall back asleep, not without figuring out what was wrong.

Fortunately, there was an easy solution to my problem. Stealing a glance over at my roomie, I looked to see if Buffy’s breathing was the deep ‘I’m asleep’ kind. When I was sure that it was, I slowly moved off my covers and inched my way out of bed. Moving with as much caution as I could, I reached out and carefully lifted the phone straight up off the dresser in between our beds. That accomplished, I tip-toed toward the door. I had a ‘I need to go to the bathroom’ excuse all ready to go in the event that I woke Buffy as I made my escape. Fortunately, she never so much as stirred as I opened and closed the door with painstaking care.

Just to be safe, I wandered about halfway down the hall before I dared to turn the phone on. Taking a deep breath, I keyed in the magical numbers.

* 69. The call-back feature that Pacific Bell offered as a bonus incentive when you signed up for call waiting.

I didn’t have to wait long. Three quick rings passed before the line connected -- with an oh-so-familiar voice, or at least a recorded version of it.

“Angel Inveeeeeessssssssstttttiigations. Wwwweeeeeee help the hoooopppeless...”

I knew it! I just knew it even before I pseudo-traced the call. In fact, my only surprise as to the source of the call was my utter *lack* of surprise.

My triumph, however, was extremely short lived. Why had Angel called us? Assuming that it was *Angel* who had called, that is? And at five in the morning, too? And what was up with the garbled message on the answering machine?

I had so many questions, but no matter how I thought about it, I kept coming back to the same answer that I knew beyond a doubt to be true: I was certain that Angel was in trouble. Of course, that led to another question, and it was quite the doozy.

Just what in the hell was I going to do about it?

With another hour before Buffy’s alarm clock was set to ring, I was in no hurry to return to my bed. My mind was in *way* too much chaos to relax, let alone to try and go back to sleep. That being the case, I sat out in the hallway alone, driving myself crazy with a never-ending string of horror-filled ‘what-if’s?’.

The dozen or so phone calls I made to Angel and, after a call to long distance information for the number, Cordelia’s all went unanswered. I would have even tried calling Angel’s vision guy, except that I wasn’t sure if Doyle was his first or last name.

There were a few times I almost gave into the temptation of contacting Giles to see if he’d heard anything, but the little voice inside me told me that it would have been a bad idea. Although there really isn’t any love lost between Giles and Angel these days, I’m sure that Buffy’s Watcher would have told us if he knew that Angel was in any kind of danger.

Heck, I even entertained the notion of waking Buffy two or three *hundred* times to see if she had any idea of what to do. But after that whole mess with Thanksgiving and Buffy’s trip to L.A. afterwards, she and Angel weren’t exactly on the best of terms at that moment.

Damn. I needed a plan.

By the time the sun began to creep over the horizon, I was more certain than ever that Angel was in real trouble. Fortunately for me, it was about that same point in time that a few loose ideas started to gel together into a workable solution. The bad part was that I was going to have to fool a lot of people -- mostly my friends -- in order to pull it off. Well, that and the fact that I would have to wait another half an hour before I could get started on it.

The first hurdle was my illustrious roommate. I hate waiting, even at the best of times, so imagine how frustrating it was having to lie there pretending to be asleep for those *loooonnnggg* minutes before Buffy’s alarm clock went off. But there wasn’t anything else I could do about it. Buffy’s first class that morning was at eight. Since my first class wasn’t until ten, I always slept through her getting dressed and ready for the day. If I had any hope of pulling my scheme off, I had to go through the normal motions of a typical day; otherwise Buffy would be suspicious from the get-go.

I almost groaned out loud when Buffy slammed her hand down on the alarm snooze-bar -- twice! Eventually she practically stumbled out of her bed, grumbling about how Fascist eight o’clock exams were. I swear I don’t think she even opened her eyes the whole time while she was getting dressed. Pulling her hair back into a ponytail, she grabbed a juice box from the fridge and her backpack off the floor. After what seemed like an eternity, Buffy finally walked over to the door, opening and closing it as quietly as she could in deference to me ‘sleeping’.

I managed to force myself to stay put for three whole minutes -- just in case she forgot anything and came back unexpectedly. Lucky for me, Buffy didn’t, so after one-hundred-and-eighty agonizing seconds, I was up and out of bed like a shot.

At least that half-hour I spent waiting for Buffy’s alarm to go off wasn’t a total waste. After a quick shower it only took a few minutes for me to pack up everything I thought I might need in a small overnight bag. Tearing a sheet of paper out of my psych notebook, I scribbled Buffy a quick note saying that a family ‘thing’ had come up and that I might not be back for a day or two. It seemed like a good solution at the time. And with my parents out of town for yet another of their conferences, there was no way anybody could question my explanation.

Right before I left, I called Angel and Cordelia one last time -- just in case. Once again, I got Cordy’s machine, but the one at Angel Investigations didn’t seem to be working anymore. Double damn.

Sighing heavily, I shouldered my bag and headed out.

Once I had crossed the first hurdle, I started in on the second: transportation. I didn’t have a car, neither did Buffy for that matter. Xander did, but there was *no* way I was going to ask him. I’ve never been able to lie to Xander in my whole life, not without him seeing right through me; and if I told him the truth...well, that wasn’t even worth thinking about. The same thing applied to Giles except that his car was so old, I didn’t think it would even *make* it to L.A..

I briefly thought about asking Anya, but since she really doesn’t seem to like me that much, it probably would have been a waste of time.

My fourth alternative was kind of surprising. Spike. I knew he had a car -- somewhere here in Sunnydale -- and ever since that night he tried to bite me, Spike’s been...well...not exactly nice to me, but he’s been...well...less evil toward me at any rate. But given that he was chained to Giles’ bathtub at the time, I was afraid that our old enemy would be less than willing to loan me his car.

All in all, that left me with one last option. Fortunately, I caught him literally walking out the door. From the way he was dressed, I gathered that he’d been about to go on a morning run.

“Riley!” I called.

“Hey Willow,” Buffy’s potential boyfriend replied. I could hear the surprise in his voice at my unexpected appearance.

“Remember when you told me that you owed me one for helping you out with the insider info on Buffy?” At his reluctant nod, I continued. “Well, I was wondering, if it’s not too much trouble or anything, if you could do me a favour...”




Next Chapter