The Road Home Series:
The Road Home
by Gem

Part Three

Cordelia was worried. Make that very worried. Angel had returned from his journey home three days ago, alone, and she had yet to see him. She knew he was back she’d seen his car in the garage again, and she periodically heard noises from the apartment below the office, but he had made no effort to see her or Doyle. In fact, he seemed to be avoiding humanity in general. Not exactly the signs of a man in a successful relationship.

She tried to express her concern to Doyle, but he seemed to view this as an opportunity for "I told you so’s" by the bagful."

She dumped him again, if she even saw him," Doyle insisted that third morning alone in the office with Cordelia. "He was trying to make a life on his own, and you had to stick that pretty little nose of yours in to fix it. When it wasn’t even broken!"

"Was too!" she responded petulantly, sticking out her tongue at him as he paced in front of the lift that went to Angel’s apartment. "He needs her, and she needs him they’re both just too stubborn to admit they screwed up. I just wish I knew what exactly happened. I mean, did she give him the boot? Did he lose his temper seeing her all kissy-face with the neo-Nazi frat boy? What gives?"

"It doesn’t matter," Doyle replied with as much patience as he could muster. "We need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, not perform an autopsy."

"Was that an attempt at a funny, considering the man actually is dead?"

"No, I was trying to use terms you’d be familiar with, darlin’." Doyle wanted to bite his tongue for insulting the woman he worshipped, but it looked like Cordelia might cut it out first.

"You know, I used to get the impression you liked me, but if that’s your attempt at flattering me..." She advanced menacingly on him, forcing him to back up into her desk.

"Cordy, please..."

She stopped suddenly, her quick ears catching the sound of the lift doors opening below. She turned to face the lift, waiting for her erstwhile employer/friend to make a long-delayed appearance. When he did, she wished he would go back and do it over.

He looked haggard, and even paler than usual. His normally impeccable clothing was rumpled, and his hair was tousled far beyond fashionable limits. There was an overall air of hopelessness about him, as if simply existing was more strain than he could bear, but he saw no way out of it.

"Angel..." she said slowly, "you look like hell." She flushed slightly when she realized her gaffe. "Sorry, wrong person to try that analogy on."

"She’s right, though. You do look a sight, man," Doyle chimed in. "We’ve been worried about you."

"I’m okay," Angel replied listlessly, wandering aimlessly around the office. Cordelia and Doyle watched in silence for a few minutes, but when Angel accidentally meandered into a patch of sunlight, and didn’t realize he was smoldering, they came to the rescue.

"God, man, you’re on fire!" Doyle yelled, grabbing Angel’s arm to haul the bigger man into the shade. Cordelia tossed the remains of her Evian bottle onto the other arm to douse the tiny flame.

Angel pulled himself loose from Doyle’s grasp, staggering slightly as he back-pedaled. "I’m fine. Thanks for the assist I didn’t see that patch of light."

"You’re about as far from fine as Sunnydale is from the Riviera," Cordelia said scathingly. "You’re a mess, and I want to know why. Well, actually I can guess why, but I need details if I’m going to fix..."

"Don’t fix!" Angel yelled, her words finally penetrating his protective shell. "Don’t help, don’t even sympathize. Just leave me in peace!"

"In pieces is more like it," she said to his back as he pulled the lift doors open. "She dumped you again, or you wouldn’t be hiding out like a wounded animal. Tell us what happened. Believe it or not, we care."

He didn’t turn to face her he couldn’t. "I saw her, I warned her about the Finn guy and she didn’t care. End of story."

"Not the end if you’re retreating to the bat cave. She told you off, didn’t she?" Cordelia shrewdly guessed. "You walked off without a word after breaking up with her because her mommy told you to, and now she let you have it with both guns. Well, not literally this time, but she gave it to you good."

"Is that it, Angel?" Doyle glanced from Angel to Cordelia, then back again. "Look, I’m sorry, but you’re no worse off today than you were a week ago. She hasn’t been a part of your life for months, so why should her telling you off throw you into such a tailspin? Just count it as her last shot of the war. Bandage your wounds and move on."

"She’s not a part of my life," Angel said quietly. "She is my life, and I used to be hers, but now it’s over. Really over." He stepped into the lift and pulled the doors closed to descend into his own personal version of hell an eternity of life without Buffy.

Cordelia was awakened by a loud banging on her door. Since she began to share "living" quarters with a ghost, periodic bumps in the night rarely disturbed her, but this was very noisy. And somewhat familiar.

She opened the door to find a small blonde waif on her doorstop, which would have been a little more touching if the waif hadn’t been glaring at her. And armed.

"Buffy," she said, with all the warmth fear could induce. "Come in and have a seat. Feel free to leave the crossbow outside." She stepped back from the door, ushering her old friend, and unfortunately her old friend’s arsenal, inside.

Buffy glanced sourly at the prettily furnished mission-style apartment as she laid her crossbow and weapons bag by the door. "Nice place. Angel must pay you well."

Cordelia nervously pushed her hair off her face. "He told you about that, huh? Yeah, well, the pay isn’t too bad, and a lot of it’s at night, obviously, so I have my days free to go to auditions and..."

"Cordy, enough," Buffy said abruptly, to halt the incessant rambling. "All I want to know is why you lied to me. You set me up, you betrayed my confidence and I really would like an explanation. Now." She settled herself on the sofa with crossed arms and an expectant expression.

Cordelia began to pace. Not only was she in a delicate stage of the peace negotiations which required careful handiwork, she also wanted to present a moving target.

"I really think you’re blowing my part of this all out of proportion," she began. "So okay, I was the one who asked you to send the tapes, and I was the one who forced Angel to listen to the first one, and maybe, just maybe, I told him to follow his gut instinct when he heard that last tape. But if he hadn’t left you, none of this would have been necessary. For that matter, if you had simply gone after him when he left the high school, or what used to be the high school, this also wouldn’t have been necessary. So really, when you get right down to it, this was basically all yours and Angel’s faults." She smiled happily and turned to face Buffy, certain her logic would have won over her old friend.

Buffy did not appear to be greatly moved by her explanation, if it could be called that. She stood up slowly and began to advance on Cordelia, who tried to retreat as casually as possible.

"So it’s all my fault that Angel overheard information about my personal life and went digging around in my boyfriend’s past. Is that your best answer, Cor?"

"You mean Joe Commando’s past." Cordelia had backed up as far as she could go, both physically and mentally. It was now time for attack. "Do you know the crowd he hangs with? I was doing you a favor looking up that stuff for Angel. Boy, you sure know how to pick them."

"Leave Riley out of this," Buffy warned. "This is about you and me and Angel."

"And it should just be about you and Angel, but you’re both so pig-headed I had to get in the middle. You two belong together why can’t you just admit that and get on with your life together so the rest of us can get on with our own lives? God, it’s like everyone and everything revolves around you two and the rest of us are just background noise and filler." Cordelia slid past the momentarily stunned Buffy and escaped to the center of the room. "What took you so long to find me anyway? Angel’s been back for three days."

"You only gave me a post office box to mail things to: I needed a real address. That required tracking down the Cordettes, and then persuading them it would be in their own best interests to help me. Boy, I guess saving someone from being devoured by a giant demon snake only rates a Christmas card these days. Come to think of it, Aura didn’t even do that much."

"So, here you are. Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be looking for Angel? Cause I can tell you right where he is. Well, will be come dawn, at least."

"I need to be really clear on why you did what you did," Buffy replied evenly. "I don’t want any ‘helpful’ misunderstandings in the future."

"You’re scared, aren’t you?" This time it was Cordelia who approached Buffy, searching her eyes for the truth. "He knows everything you’ve been feeling for the past few months, and you know nothing about how he still feels, and that scares you to death."

Buffy pulled herself free of Cordelia’s hypnotic gaze, turning so only her words would reveal her emotions. "I’m not scared, I just don’t know where he is."

"Bull." Cordelia circled round her like a terrier treeing a cat. "You’ve already been to Giles you wouldn’t disappear again with telling him first. Giles didn’t know about me, but he knows where Angel is he’s known all along. And you knew Angel would have told him, in case you needed help. No, the great and fearless Buffy needed to scope out the terrain first because she’s terrified Angel might not still want her. Maybe he really did just come out of friendly concern. You think?"

"Just quit it, Cordelia! This isn’t getting us anywhere." Buffy whirled around to escape Cordelia, accidentally knocking a lamp off the desk. She grabbed for the lamp, scorching her hand on the suddenly exposed bulb in the process. She was almost grateful for the pain as she stuck her hand in her mouth it excused the tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

Cordelia rested a gentle hand on Buffy’s shoulder, suddenly ashamed of herself for mocking her friend’s pain. "Buffy, I’m sorry. I really am. I saw how miserable he was, and Oz said pretty much the same thing about you, so I thought that maybe I could help. After all, who’d ever suspect me of caring enough about anyone else to play Cupid?" She and Buffy both smiled at the truth of her words.

"He was really miserable, huh?" Buffy murmured, glancing shyly at Cordelia.

"Total Brooding Guy," Cordy assured her, steering her over to the sofa for a long, comfy session of girl-talk.

After several hours of Angel-update, Buffy finally fell asleep on Cordelia’s sofa. Cordelia, unfortunately, had to be up for work not long after Buffy crashed. A gracious hostess, she left detailed directions to the office on the end table, bagels on the kitchen counter, and hid every last one of Buffy’s stakes and crossbow bolts before she went to earn her daily French bread.

Cordelia was just backing out of her parking place when she saw Buffy running out of the door, map in hand. She rolled down her window as she struggled to put the car in Park. "What gives?"

"Cordy, the map is great, but I don’t have a car. I hitched here." Buffy didn’t bother to ask Cordelia’s permission, she simply climbed in the passenger’s side and fastened the seatbelt.

"Oh. Sorry."

"You are going to the office now, right?" Buffy had waited too long for this confrontation, the one where he couldn’t leave until she was done. She didn’t want to waste a moment of daylight today.

"Yeah, after I get some coffee. So, you hitchhiked. Isn’t that...dangerous for others?"

Buffy settled herself more comfortably in the seat and checked her wallet for money for coffee. "I figured I’d combine business with, well I suppose I can’t say pleasure, but with not business."

"It’s called a personal life, remember?"

Buffy grinned ruefully. "Been too long since I really had one, I guess. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many vamps trawl the highways for hitchers. It’s kind of a combination of drive-thru and drive-by for them. So, I thumbed a few rides, but no vamps. I did scare the hell out of a flasher, though, when I showed him my crossbow. That’s why I had it out when you answered the door, by the way."

Cordelia actually found this conversation strangely comforting it reminded her of simpler times when Buffy was on the front lines and all she had to do was carve stakes. They were nearing the office, however, and she had a few things to tell Buffy before she saw Angel again.

"Buffy," she interrupted, "there were a few subjects we didn’t get to last night, and we need to get to them fast. Like now."

"Such as?" Buffy drawled, waiting for the other shoe, or rack of shoes, to drop.

"Women. He hasn’t been dating I don’t want you to think that. But he has a friend, a cop, named Kate, and she’s kind of been chasing him. So if she calls while you’re there, ignore her."

Buffy had expected that bit of information women always chased Angel. Cordelia herself had pursued him until she realized he was "cardiologically-challenged." It was helpful to know the enemy’s name though.

"Go on," she said steadily.

"Nothing more to say about her. There is something else, though. Corde"lia pulled the car into Angel’s garage and turned it off. She undid her seatbelt and moved on the seat to face Buffy. "We need to talk about the curse."

Angel was giving to the punching bag for all he was worth, which didn’t feel like much at the moment. No matter how hard he tried to block it out, all he could see was the look on Buffy’s face when he left her in the cemetery. Anger, pain, frustration all the little gifts he was so adept at giving were sketched in the lines of her face that night. If only he could punish himself half as much as he was punishing this bag...if only it would help.

He had just landed a punch designed to send the bad bag to its final reward when he heard a voice on the stairs.

"Is that bag you or me?"

He stiffened, then reached out to still the wildly swinging bag. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." He dared to risk a quick look at her, then instantly regretted it. She was so beautiful, even when she obviously needed a good night’s sleep.

"You left without letting me finish what I was saying. Again." She slowly walked down the staircase and across the room to stand next to him. "It’s starting to annoy me."

"There really didn’t to be seem much left to say." He slid away from her to grab a shirt from the dresser. To her disappointment, he then proceeded to put it on and button it.

"I think there’s a lot left to say." She began to wander around his apartment, surreptitiously looking for momentos from their time together. "I had a little talk with Cordy in the car she even gave up her morning cappuccino to fill me in on some things I missed. Like my mom being the one to scare you off."

"She didn’t scare me off, Buffy. She just pointed out some things I hadn’t wanted to face. And she was right. There’s so much the world has to offer you, and most of it I can’t be a part of." He stood in the center of the room, head bowed with the weight of his inadequacies.

"As Cordelia would say, bull."

His head popped up. She sounded so matter-of-fact, not at all like the angry young woman he’d faced just three days ago. This woman knew exactly what she wanted to say, and she obviously intended to get in every word this time.

"You heard me," she insisted. "Bull. I said it before and I’ll say it again: You were scared. And so was I that’s why I let you walk away."

"And now you have a new life, and a new boyfriend. Why did you come here?"

"Because the new life I’ve built is a fake, and so is the new romance. I was scared before: I admit that. I was scared of how much I love you and need you." She sat gracefully on the arm of the sofa, inspection tour completed. "I’m eighteen years old. I’m not supposed to be this much in love, at least not for real. When you left, as much as it tore me up inside, a part of me thought maybe you were right. Maybe we were just supposed to be a short-time romance the kind you read about in your diary twenty years later and can’t believe you were ever that young. But I was wrong, and I realized that as soon as I saw you the other night."

"All you wanted to do the other night was stake me," he said ruefully, taking a few steps closer to her.

She caught her breath, feeling a familiar warmth sweep over her at his proximity. He was beautiful to her, inside and out all taut muscle and classically sculpted bone structure surrounding a gentle and loving spirit. "No, all I wanted to do was take you in my arms and make the pain in your eyes go away," she confessed softly. "As much as you hurt me, and we won’t even be going there it hurt so much, when I saw you all I wanted to do was take care of you. And you came to Sunnydale, knowing how mad I would be, because you wanted to take care of me. Face it, lover, we’re stuck with each other. And on each other."

"Buffy, nothing’s changed," he said hopelessly. He stood a few feet away from her, not daring to get any closer to her scent or her warmth. "I’m still a vampire, you’re still the Slayer. All the old arguments are still valid. We’re stuck with them too."

Buffy nodded and began to tick off all the old familiar phrases on her fingers. "Let’s see, argument number one: You can’t give me children. Well, my love, Cordelia made a good point to me this morning on that score: who’s to say I could have had them anyway? Somehow I doubt when they were drawing up the Slayer blueprints they said, ‘ Hey, fertility, there’s something she’ll need.’

"Buffy, you don’t know..." he protested.

"And neither do you. I don’t come with guarantees, you know. Umm, next I believe was sunlight. Sunlight I tried to give to you, but you refused it when you destroyed the ring. Why did you do that?"

This time she had posed the question with a gentle exasperation far removed from the anger of the other night. She deserved the true answer, not the one he gave to Doyle about staying in touch with the victims of the night.

"What good would sunlight do me without you? Why else would I want to be in it except to see the light in your hair and the shadows making patterns on your face?"

"If I had brought the ring myself, would you have kept it?" she asked after a brief pause, during which she tried to clear the lump from her throat.

"I don’t know," he replied honestly. "Maybe I would have seen it as a sign you still wanted...that you still needed...I don’t know."

"Okay, so now we move on to point three. Growing old, right? Not something I’m likely to do, especially without adequate back up. Point four...point four is the frustration issue." She sighed, knowing this would be the hardest part for him to discuss.

"Buffy, you can’t pretend it doesn’t matter anymore. You’ve had...you’ve been with other men. Sex is obviously a consideration to you now."

She slowly approached him, as she would a skittish animal. She finally stood in front of him, close enough to touch him if she dared. Which she didn’t, yet.

"That’s exactly what it was, Angel. Sex, nothing more. What we had was making love, and that always mattered. It just didn’t matter as much as being together." She saw he was about to protest, and dared to lay a gentle hand on his lips to forestall him. "But that isn’t a problem anymore anyway, thanks to Oz and Anya. They translated your curse again, well, completely for the first time, actually, and discovered something. The curse Jenny found doesn’t have a happiness clause. You’re free to do whatever you want, with whoever you want." She stepped away from him and turned her back to him, for fear she was not the one he wanted after all.

A gentle hand came down on her arm and forced her to turn back to face him. "What do you mean ‘whoever?’ Who else?"

"What about this Kate person Cordy told me about?" She looked up at him with some of her old flirtatious manner shining through. God, how he had missed that! No other woman could so entrance him with that certain blend of innocence and feminine wiles.

"Kate is a friend, nothing more," he assured her. "She doesn’t even know about me. You know, the..."

"Vampire thing," she finished for him. "And Riley doesn’t know about the Slayer thing, though I was going to tell him before you showed up."

"I know that’s why I came. I was worried about how he might use the knowledge. And I was jealous." He slid his arms around her waist, daring her to slip so far away from him again.

She had to smile at his admission, because she knew what it cost him to say. Angel tried so hard to be a modern man, but it was still difficult for him to overcome the emotional reserve he’d been raised to believe was proper.

"I never gave him my heart, Angel. Whatever else I shared with him, or thought about sharing, I could never give him that. It’s been yours since the night we met." She caressed his face, relearning all the planes and angles. Suddenly a thought occurred to her. "Angel, did you hear me before? Really hear? Your curse isn’t much of a curse anymore. You don’t seem excited or anything."

"I think I’m in shock, actually," he said with a puzzled look. "You’re here, and you’re in my arms and you seem to be forgiving me. I don’t think my mind can process a curse-free curse on top of all that."

"Does this mean you’re not up for..." she murmured, glancing suggestively at the bed in the corner.

"Interesting choice of words, love," he said with a smile, before his mouth closed over hers.

Several hours later they lay blissfully intertwined, temporarily sated but unable to let go of each other yet. Angel periodically ran his fingers through Buffy’s tangled blonde tresses, while she stroked a possessive hand across his broad chest.

"I have never been so happy in my life," she said at last, dropping a gentle kiss on his chest. "This has been everything I’ve dreamed of since I met you. I don’t want this night to ever end. S"he smiled as she gazed down at her hand, which once again wore his ring.

"How do you think I feel? I’ve waited almost two and a half centuries for this night," he teased. He pulled her even closer to him, breathing in the scent of her hair and her skin and her...essence. All that which made her Buffy, and thus infinitely precious in his eyes.

"It’s not going to ever end, right?" she asked anxiously, tilting her head to gaze into his deep dark eyes. "We’re going to make it work this time. We’ll commute, and I can switch schools or you can move the business. Whatever. No curses this time, or interfering loved ones or guilt or fear or...the past, or..."

He silenced her with a gentle kiss, which kept her occupied for several minutes. Finally, though, at least one of them needed air.

"You didn’t answer my question," she said, a trifle breathlessly.

He caressed her cheek and looked deep into her eyes, promising his devotion with more than words. "Nothing will keep us apart this time. We have a lot of things to work out, but we’ll do it together. I swear, Buffy."

She pillowed her head on his chest once again, reveling in the cool silky feel of his skin on her cheek. "I couldn’t stand to lose you again, Angel. It’s been so hard to try and build a life without you, and then to realize it was all a fake...I worked so hard to convince everyone else I was fine, I almost fooled myself. For a little while, at least. But I don’t think I could ever be that gullible again."

He smiled tenderly at her and lightly kissed the top of her head. While he gently stroked her back with one hand, he ran the other down her face to the column of her throat. She all but purred at the sensation, until she noticed his hand stopped just above her collarbone. Suddenly he stiffened, and she could almost feel his mind pulling away from her even as his arms did.

"Angel, no," she said firmly, wrapping her arms around him to keep him from retreating. She sprawled across his chest to hold him down and risked releasing her grip with one hand to apply it to his face, forcing him to look her in the eye.

"No guilt, remember? Jeeze, we said it not ten minutes ago. The past is the past it’s over and done with. We can’t change it."

"You had a necklace on before," he whispered. "I didn’t see the scar."

The pain in his eyes tore at her heart. He suffered so much for things he didn’t do, or couldn’t have helped doing, and nothing she said could ever truly erase those memories. She acknowledged now that her earlier mandate for a fresh start was wishful thinking. There would always be dark memories between them.

"There are much deeper scars we can’t see," she replied softly. "I can’t see the scar I gave you when I stabbed you with Acathla’s sword, but I know there was one. And I know those centuries in hell left scars, but they only show in your eyes."

"You did what you had to do," he insisted, as he always had. "But when I bit you..." He pulled his head free of her loving force, unable to look at the evidence of his guilt any longer.

"You did what was necessary too." She didn’t want to have this discussion, not in the middle of their perfect night. But maybe this was just the first step to future perfect nights, and if that was the case she wasn’t going to give up now.

"I..."

"Was dying," she finished for him. "There was no other way to save you, and I couldn’t let you go. You would have taken me with you, you know. And what about all the people you’ve helped here in LA? What would have happened to them if you had died that night?"

He couldn’t think of a reply. He was awash in shame and guilt, compounded by the sneaking suspicion that she was right. There had been no other way, but he still hated himself for drinking her blood. He would always hate himself for that, and he would always know he’d had no choice, and he didn’t know how to reconcile those two feelings.

"Angel. My love. My destiny. I would give anything to be able to erase that memory from your mind, or go back in time and break Faith’s neck before she ever put you in that situation. But I can’t."

He risked looking in her eyes again, and saw the same helplessness he felt overwhelming him. Even as he watched, however, a growing determination began to shine from within her. He gazed in rapt attention as her fighting spirit reasserted itself.

"We have to move on, Angel," she continued. "Together, this time, but we have to move on. We won’t pretend the past never existed you’re right about that. We made some big mistakes, we took some really stupid chances and we caused each other unbelievable pain. But that’s not the end of the story."

In the end, he joined her, as he was always destined to do. Two halves of the same whole, united in life and death and whatever came after that. No matter that sometimes they seemed to be subject to the whims of some torturous puppeteer, jerked this way and that for his own private amusement. They had been created for each other, and this was the truth to be held above all else.

"No, it’s not," he agreed, smiling ruefully at his very beautiful, very stubborn, mate. "We’ve barely begun."

The End

It took me a while to write this (sad to say), so it would be nice to know it's being read. It would be really nice to know it's being appreciated, but I'll settle for read. Feedback please!

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