Chapter Text
Angel learned a lot about Buffy, following her through Rome. He learned that she was living in a lavish penthouse, and that she was still with the Immortal. He learned that she liked to go onto the penthouse balcony, but only after dark, and only with a glass of red wine in her hand–- a glass that he’d seldom see her touch.
Her activities were predictable. She'd begin the day with a run around the city, followed by some shopping and then later on coffee, or gelato–- never both. She wouldn’t leave a store empty handed and she never purchased anything that could be described as sensible. In the evenings she’d either stay inside, or go out with the Immortal, and each excursion with him seemed more elaborate than the last. They attended galas and opening nights and fundraisers, balls and auctions and candlelight dinners at restaurants so exclusive they didn’t take reservations.
She spoke passable Italian, which surprised him very much, and then not at all.
But while Buffy’s activities were set, her timing and routes were anything but. She might leave the penthouse for the day anywhere between 6 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon, might jog for miles over rivers and bridges or sprint for 10 minutes around the block, over and over again. She might emerge from a boutique with a neon colored dress he’d never see her wear, or from a bookstore with a magazine he’d never see her read, or from a novelty store with a rainbow rubber duck. Money seemed inconsequential to her, and he imagined that the Immortal had provided her with full access to his bank account.
Angel imagined a lot of things, but in the end he just watched, and he waited.
He had been following her for nearly eight weeks when she slipped into a used bookstore in the middle of the day. This in and of itself wasn’t unusual–- she went into all kinds of stores, constantly. In fact, with the exception of sleep, shopping seemed to be the main way that she passed the time, to the point where he had started to wonder whether she could possibly really enjoy it. What was unusual, though, was that she emerged without having purchased anything. Even years ago, he’d never known her to leave a store without some small bauble.
She went to three other bookstores in rapid succession, following the same pattern, before finally emerging from the fourth one with a book dangling from her right hand. At first it seemed like she was holding it casually, artlessly, and he wondered why she hadn’t had them place it in a bag. But when he looked more closely, he realized that her hand was strategically placed so that the cover of the book was facing outward and slightly up, the author and the title both clearly visible. Sonnets from the Portuguese. Elizabeth Barron Browning.
He understood it for what it was-- an invitation, and also a challenge.
“I was wondering if you were ever going to get up the nerve to approach me,” she quipped, not bothering to look up from the book. Her voice was just a little sharper than he remembered it, and extremely unamused.
“How long have you known I was following you?” he asked, then instantly regretted the question.
Buffy gave a ghost of a shrug, still looking down at the book, even turning the page, but he could tell from the way that her eyes were focused straight down that she wasn’t actually reading, no matter what she might want him to think.
“Known?” she echoed doubtfully, placing just the slightest emphasis on the word. “Maybe two and a half weeks. Suspected? Fifty five days, which I’m betting is the whole time.”
“Yes,” he agreed, not as surprised as he might have been that she had known down to the day.
“So what’s the what?” she asked after he said nothing else and the ensuing pause went on just a little too long, still looking down at her book. “World need saving? Pesky soul gone and here to torture me? Finally decide it was time to let me know you aren’t actually dead? Or did you just miss me?” she inquired almost viciously, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she finally snapped the book shut and looked up, meeting his eyes.
Her expression didn’t change, and if he hadn’t known her so well, once, he would have thought that she had no reaction, but he had known her, and so he saw the way her mouth snapped shut and she tilted her head just the tiniest bit to the left, the way one eyebrow arched and didn’t come all the way back down.
“You look older than I remember,” she said finally, setting the book down with a calm he wasn’t sure she could possibly feel. “Or maybe you are older than I remember.”
She took a sip of cappuccino, then, looking almost like they were discussing the weather, but he didn’t miss the way the fist that wasn't holding her drink clenched, just once.
He decided it wasn’t actually a question. “You don’t sound surprised,” he ventured, wondering why that surprised him. After all, he'd entered through the front door, in broad daylight-- of course she must have known.
“Nothing surprises me now,” she replied, sounding suddenly very tired. She shot him a ghost of a smile that did not reach her eyes, her mouth tightening at the corners.
This time the silence dragged on so long that Angel thought he’d have to break it himself, and while he knew that telling her his story was inevitable, since it was why he had come to her, it wasn’t something he’d actively prepared for. He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d thought or expected, but he’d believed that, once they actually started talking, the conversation would progress naturally, if not easily. “How long-” she began, jolting him out of his thoughts, before she looked around the crowded cafe and grimaced slightly. “I mean-- how old are you, now?”
He hesitated, not entirely sure what she was asking, and decided to take his best guess. “My driver’s license says I’m 32.”
“My age,” she said dully, sounding more disinterested than he would have thought possible. “Cute.” She looked around again, not exactly uneasily, but perhaps the slightest bit warily. “And– how long have you had the license?”
“It’s been 8 years since it happened,” he replied, carefully.
She nodded as if this, too, was what she had expected, taking another small sip of her cappuccino before the corners of her lips tightened again. “So you pretty much the opposite of died, and decided it would be best not to tell anyone.” She shook her head, just once, but her facial expression still didn’t change. “Cute,” she repeated. Something did flicker in her eyes then, just briefly. “You should probably call your son and let him know. I’ve got his number, if you need it.”
“I don’t,” he admitted, looking down, away from the eyes that always seemed to see just a little too much.
“You don’t like you have it, or you don’t like you have no intention of using it?” she questioned, just a bit caustically.
“Both,” he replied after a long moment. He felt her gaze on him and he forced his eyes up to meet hers again. Her brow furrowed and she shook her head, looking defiant, and perhaps the slightest bit angry.
“Why are you here?” she asked flatly, her tone making clear that any attempts to dodge the question would not be well received.
He hesitated anyway, unsure how to deal with this new, acerbic Buffy, but ultimately decided to tell the truth. “You know why I’m here.”
For the first time Buffy seemed to hesitate, not just pause, and a brief flicker of uncertainty passed across her face, almost immediately suppressed. “Honestly, Angel,” she said finally, slowly, “I’m not sure that I do.”
This seemed impossible to him, and so he leaned toward her, forcing her to meet his eyes before he repeated, his voice lower, and slightly more urgent, “Buffy. You know why I’m here.”
She met his gaze for a long moment and even though her face remained blank, nearly expressionless, her posture maddeningly casual, her eyes hadn’t quite mastered the vacant indifference that the rest of her had. Something flickered deep inside them, then flared as he continued to stare at her, but when she spoke again her smile was sharp, her tone harsh.
“Does it have something to do with whisking me away from my terrible existence here? Some idea about rescuing me from my obvious distress? Because if so, you’ll be sorry to hear that my existence is pretty good. I have everything I want. I’m happy. So you can just go home, wherever that is.”
Something about her words resonated with him and he thought about the countless hours he’d spent contemplating the idea that he probably should, indeed, leave Italy and not come back, leave her to her shopping and galas and untouched glasses of wine.
Not because he wasn’t sure that he still wanted her but because of how sure he was that he did.
“I’ve thought about it,” he admitted, after a long moment. “Going home.”
“Then why haven’t you?” she asked, seeming exasperated, now. “I’m glad you’re alive, honest,” she added when he didn’t respond, sounding anything but glad, “but I don’t want or need you here.”
“I haven’t gone home for the same reason that I came here to begin with,” he said, more forcefully than he intended as he leaned forward. “I’m still in love with you. And I came to tell you that, and to see if you might still be in love with me too.”
She blinked distantly, blankly, before giving him an almost teasing smirk, and for a minute he wasn’t sure if she had heard him, but then she tilted her head. Her mouth dropped open slightly and the smirk dropped off her face. “Oh, my God,” she said finally, her tone disbelieving and oddly distant. “You’re serious.”
He nodded, just once, having never felt more sure of anything in his life. “Yes. I am.”
She blinked again, and then to his shock she started to laugh almost uncontrollably, causing a few people at nearby tables to turn and look at them. At the stares she pulled herself together with visible effort, her laughter reducing and then stopping, her face so serious it was hard to believe that moments before she’d been laughing at all.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, her voice lower than it had been, now that they’d attracted attention, but there was some real emotion in her tone for the first time since he’d sat down, masked beneath her derision but definitely there–- something that might almost have been sadness. “You don’t love me. You couldn’t possibly. You don’t know me, not even a little bit. And I don’t know you.”
He shook his head, sure that, if he was right about nothing else, he was right about this. “You’re wrong. I know you.”
She shook her own head, and suddenly she did look sad, and much, much younger. “No, Angel, you really don’t. You did know me, once, and you loved me then, I know that. And I loved you once, too. But that was before and this-” she hesitated, seeming to really search for the right words before settling, rather anticlimactically, on “is now.” She shook her head, looking down, and when she looked up to meet his eyes again her face had resumed its careful blankness, and her voice had reacquired its unnatural sharpness. “Anyway, if you were really in love with me all this time, what kept you? I know that in vampire land 8 years isn’t much, but for us mere mortals that’s a really long time. What did you plan to do if I got married or had kids or died?”
He hesitated, not sure whether the question was rhetorical, her face and tone giving him no real clues as to whether she actually had any interest in the answer. He decided to answer anyway.
“I– wasn’t ready to find you until now, for a lot of reasons. But-- if I’m being honest, if you’d done any of those things, it wouldn’t have stopped me, once I was ready. I still would have come looking for you now, even if you were married with four kids. I’m not sure I would have approached you, if you’d seemed happy, but I would have come. I would have needed to know. I would have needed to see .”
She tilted her head, something flashing in her eyes again before she asked, voice casual, uncaring, despite the nature of her words and the fact that her mouth had, yet again, tightened ever so slightly at the corners. “And what about me, though? Would I have just had to accept it, if I had made that kind of decision without all the information? Did you not think maybe I deserved to know you were out there somewhere, if you were still in love with me? That maybe your son deserved to know?” She shook her head before continuing matter-of-factly, emotionlessly, “I admit that you probably didn’t really owe me anything, by then, whether you were in love with me or not, but a courtesy call would have been nice, and Connor?” She shook her head again. “You destroyed Connor. There was a time I thought you were selfless, but the truth is you’re probably the most selfish person I know.”
“Yes,” he nodded, not feeling up to denying it even though it was unfair, by some measures. By others, she was absolutely right or at least had every reason to believe she was.
Surprise flickered across her face, and she didn’t bother to try to mask it this time. “So what was the holdup,” she repeated. “Why weren’t you ‘ready’ until now?”
He hesitated, not because he didn’t want to tell her but because he had no idea whatsoever how to begin to explain it. “I–- didn’t care, right after it happened,” he began carefully, honestly, after what felt like several minutes had dragged by.
She scoffed. “Not about me,” she agreed, firmly, as though that were that, but this inaccuracy of that statement was so profound that he couldn’t let it stand. He reached for her hand without thinking about it, then flinched as she pulled her own hand back, using it to grip her cappuccino so tightly her fingers were white, the blood red of her manicure standing out in sharp relief against them. He leaned forward anyway, really wanting to make her understand.
“No Buffy. No. It had nothing to do with you. Those first few years I didn’t care about anything.” He hesitated, thinking about softening the truth but finding he didn’t have the energy, even now. “I was–- I was pretty preoccupied with trying to kill myself for all of the first year and most of the next two. Finding you-– talking to you–- didn’t play into that.”
Buffy’s mouth dropped open what might have been comically under other circumstances, and the mug she’d been clutching so tightly somehow managed to fall to the floor, shattering into dozens of pieces with an underwhelming klink.
A waiter rushed over to assist them, then, and Angel realized he had underestimated the strength of Buffy’s Italian as he’d watched her from a distance. He’d known a great deal of Italian, once, but he could barely get the gist of what Buffy was saying, now, her hands moving expressively as her mouth curved into a smile so sincere he almost believed it was real.
The pieces of the mug were quickly disposed of, though–- far more quickly than Angel had expected–- and then it was just him and Buffy, as it always seemed to be, in the end.
“I guess I was wrong,” she broke the silence, her voice oddly brittle. A new cappuccino was placed in front of her, but he knew, absolutely, that this one was going to remain untouched. “Something can still surprise me.” There was an extremely uncomfortable pause which Angel struggled to know how to fill, but she spoke again before he could, her voice less brittle and more curious, now. “What made you stop?”
He wasn’t sure exactly what she was asking. “Stop?”
“Trying to die,” she clarified, baldly, and he fought a surprised expression of his own, trying unsuccessfully to reconcile the sweet, funny girl he had known with this blunt, hard woman.
“Oh.” He hesitated again before beginning, haltingly, “I-– for a long time, after the apocalypse, I didn’t feel like I had anything to live for. I–- had thought, that when I got my humanity-- that if I got my humanity–- it would be worth it. That everything I’d done and everything I’d lost would be worth it.” He shook his head. “I have never been so wrong. None of it was worth it. None of them were worth it. All of the pain, and all of the sacrifice, and then I was human and nothing had changed, and I had nothing. It was all the same-– a soul, with all of the pain that a soul entails and none of the happiness.”
He shook his head again. “It wasn’t worth it. If I could go back I would do everything differently.”
“Everything?” she interrupted, softly, and he understood the real question that she was asking, and considered carefully before answering.
“Yes,” he nodded finally, heavily, not really sure if it was the truth, but sure that he wished it was. “Everything. Not for myself, but for them.” He hesitated. “For you.”
She rolled her eyes and the expression of bored indifference was back on her face. “Oh God, not this again.”
He shook his head. “No. Not this again. What’s done is done and I–- that’s obviously not where I’m trying to go with this.”
“Obviously,” she echoed, doubtfully. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Question?” he echoed blankly.
“I didn’t actually ask why you were trying to die,” she said, not unkindly, but not with any particular interest, either. “I asked why you stopped.”
“Oh.” He hesitated, not exactly sure how to explain it to anyone, much less her. “That–- feeling, that I had. The feeling that there was nothing left to live for. I tried to hold onto it, because it was actually less painful than trying to go on. But eventually I couldn’t keep ignoring that there was something else.” He frowned before amending, “Someone else.”
“Connor,” she supplied, and he wondered at the fact that even though she’d never known him as a father, even though she evidently did know he hadn’t so much as emailed his son, she still understood him well enough to know he cared about Connor more than life itself. Enough to come back to life. And enough to stay out of his life.
“Yes,” he nodded before bracing himself and meeting her eye. “But–- not just Connor.”
She was silent for so long that he again started to think the silence would never be broken if he didn’t break it, but she finally shook her head, biting her lip just slightly. “You should call Connor,” she said for the second time, and he shook his head without even thinking about it.
“No,” he said with finality. “He’s better off without me.”
She looked at him with something resembling incredulity. “And I’m not?” she questioned doubtfully, echoing the question he still asked himself dozens of times every single day, the question he had deliberated over for several years before getting on a plane to Italy, the question he had spent almost 2 months abroad trying to divine the answer to.
“You probably are,” he admitted, finally. “But I always was selfish with you. You were right about that.” He hesitated, and then decided he had to say it or he would always regret it. “And–- you aren’t happy, here.”
She expelled a deep breath before standing abruptly, with an air of finality. “Well,” she said almost formally, distantly, “Good chat. Don’t forget to write, I suppose. You have my address for Christmas card goodness, maybe the occasional congratulations or get well soon–”
“Buffy–” he tried, but she was throwing far too many Euros carelessly onto the table, looking at him and finally fully meeting his eyes with her own.
“Angel, you’re wrong. I’m as happy as I’m ever going to be. I don’t know what you expected, when you came here, or what you hoped for, or whatever, but I’m fine. And I don’t have any desire to re-enter the–” she hesitated before saying, anticlimactically, “the total disaster that was our relationship.” She hesitated again but this pause was different. “I–- do wish you well, mostly. Honest. I’m sorry it’s been so hard and I hope it will keep getting better. But I’m not going to do this with you again. Not ever. You have to let me go. You have to finally, really let me go.”
He swallowed, standing and fighting hard against the urge to reach for her. “I’ve tried. For over 13 years all I’ve done is try over and over again to let you go-– for your good, for my good, for every possible logical reason–”
“Keep trying,” she interrupted dully, and with that she turned and walked away. She reached the door without having hesitated, and he thought that this really might be the end of their story, but then she stopped and stood there for a moment, and then another.
She didn’t turn to look at him but tilted her head, slightly, so that her voice would carry, and in that moment she sounded exactly like she used to and he felt real hope for the first time since beginning to speak to her. “But-- if I did want to find you, some day? Where will you be?”
“If you want to find me you’ll find me,” he said, surprised by how certain he was of this fact. “I’m not hiding anymore and you’re–- you.”
She hesitated for the final time, then nodded, just once. “And you’re you, too,” she said softly, pushing out the door, the attached bell tinkling discordantly behind her.