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The air was balmy. Unexpectedly, the tune on the radio went from psychedelic rock to the acoustic twang of a familiar song. It was a kind reminder of her childhood, one without any ghosts coating it with their ectoplasmic angst, and Buffy set down her magazine to tilt back her head and close her eyes, stretching her limbs across the couch. A gentle smile touched the corners of her mouth. Heaven was no longer a word that burned her; it was every day, a constant. It was life.
She remembered being little and listening to cassettes with her mother in the kitchen. Dawn was not yet an idea—but she was, of course, with her days spent slinking through dimensions in a great vortex of light. Or maybe not slinking so much as stumbling, a clumsy ball of celestial energy.
In the earthly realm, a young Buffy would dart about their Los Angeles kitchen with great efficiency, grabbing things from drawers and using whatever tools she could to try to help out. She wanted to be useful like grownups were: to aid and please and be needed, not knowing how much a burden it was to be depended on. Joyce would just laugh and have her stir pasta or crack eggs (which she eventually learned to do without leaving in bits of shell) while she plugged their clunky stereo into the wall outlet.
Sometimes it was Seals & Crofts, or Billy Joel, or Eric Carmen. The occasional Bowie. Some of the best moments, though, were spent with sunlight trickling through the windows and turning everything to a watercolor painting or Cummings verse, smiles on their faces as they listened to Simon & Garfunkel and tried their hand at singing along.
Buffy favored "Patterns" while her mother liked "Scarborough Fair." When Buffy turned thirteen she was allowed at last to watch The Graduate, since she was deemed old enough to understand what S-E-X was and handle seeing a bit of nudity (strictly of the female variety). And it was filled with music she'd grown up hearing, so she fell in love with it wholly for a short while before moving on to the next big thing in her life.
The last time she watched it was when Dawn was that unhappy age of thirteen and their mom's health was declining. The girl laughed at all the right parts but spent much of the film looking perturbed and uncomfortable. When it was over she furrowed her brow and stared at the screen with crossed arms and a watery frown.
"Dawn? What's wrong?" Buffy asked, extending a comforting hand.
"What do they do after that? What's supposed to happen?"
The two women exchanged glances; Joyce's was one of bittersweet acceptance, Buffy's that of confusion. "What—what do you mean? They get their happily ever after." She said this like it was an obvious truth, but even as the words tottered out of her mouth she began to question them. They did live happily ever after, didn't they? Wasn't that how it worked?
Dawn whirled around to stare at her with incredulous eyes. "Didn't you see their faces? They were lost. She can't go home and he doesn't know what he's doing with his life. How are they supposed to make it and be happy when he doesn't have a job and her family doesn't want her, and what happens if they realize they don't love each other? Where's she supposed to go?"
All Buffy could do was gape stupidly. But she'd thought—wasn't Benjamin and Elaine's romance a story of love prevailing and redeeming? That was the whole point… wasn't it?
She looked to her mother for help. Joyce let out a sigh. "Some people say the moral is not to rush into things," she said. "It was what got Mrs. Robinson stuck in a loveless marriage, and for Benjamin it's…"
The rest didn't matter because Buffy was wrong and love didn't conquer all things. And that was when she first started to wonder if love itself wasn't something of an exaggeration. All it had done for her, after all, was complicate an already complicated situation until her life was a spider's web of conflict.
In the present she heard the bedroom door open. The song was on its last chords as her eyes snapped open, and with the slightest turn of the head she caught sight of him. His shirt was starting to look a tad on the tight-fitting side from months of human food and human fitness and… just being human. But he was as beautiful as ever and his complexion had a soft glow to it, a color the likes of which would have turned her to a tearful wreck in years past. Happy tears. Disbelieving tears.
He regarded her with warm affection and asked if she'd been asleep. She shook her head; it was just a slow afternoon and she was taking a minute to relax, that was all. Then again, she hadn't accomplished enough that entire month to merit further relaxation, but neither of them pointed that out.
She knew how he had spent his day so far. Creating an identity took time and effort, and a lot of his old contacts weren't in the business of being alive anymore—or didn't find him all that persuasive sans fangs. He had had to make a lot of phone calls and send quite a few letters and emails. It was all a major hassle, but at the very least his expression said it wasn't going too horribly.
Shifting into an upright position, she patted the cushion next to her. "C'mon, shut off the radio and join me in doing absolutely nothing." He did, and in moments they were nestled as comfortably as could be expected with how intertwined their bodies were. Her cheek was pressed against his chest so she could keep listening to the drum of a heart that had seen centuries of disuse. The fabric of the almost-too-tight shirt was soothing against her skin and she let out a happy sigh.
"Will it always be like this?" she asked suddenly, then winced.
He didn't seem to have clued in that anything was wrong. "Like what?"
"Like…" The right words refused to surface, so she said, "Remember last week when I accidentally turned our dinner into a bonfire and you decided a multiple orgasm was needed to make me feel better?"
A sound of acknowledgement came out at a low octave. Of course he remembered. She knew him well enough to know he now wore a smirk, and the pink tingeing her cheeks showed just how well she remembered it, too. In fact, she'd remembered it in great detail the other night when he was too busy making calls to come to bed. She'd remembered it a few times over, then remembered it again in the shower the next morning.
But there was a point to her example, and she quickly directed her thoughts away from that particular memory. "We couldn't do that before. And then, y'know, that first month together we hardly left our room." Now she grinned. Another fond memory. "Ever since that shanshu thing, it's been perfect. And we—"
At once her face fell. She thought of forbidden love and all the danger and excitement that went along with it. She thought of passion and need and desperation, of longing, of the certainty of young infatuation. The words We got our happy ending died on her tongue like a rabbit in a snare.
"You think it won't last?" She hesitated, then nodded. "Why?"
It was that singular word of inquiry that broke the dam holding back her worries, and now they all came rushing out with tides higher than a biblical flood.
"What if we've been wrong this entire time, Angel? What if the idea of giant, unstoppable, scary, crazy love is all that's been pushing us along and it turns out to be a lie? What if you wake up one day and the novelty's worn off and you realize you've spent almost a decade waiting around for some girl you don't have anything in common with, but now you're stuck because you don't know what else to do with your life? Or what if I decide I'm not ready and I'll never be ready 'cause forever is a long time and I'm still getting used to being an adult and not the college-age defender of the world? Or maybe we did love each other when I was a teenager, but now I've changed and you've changed, and we might not love the new Buffy or Angel but we keep fooling ourselves into thinking we do just because of our history, and we're never going—"
"Stop it."
She did stop, because his tone was irate and, unless she imagined it, a little hurt. From her place in the cage of his body she remained still and didn't look up to meet his eye. His grip on her arm was hard, but he was just a man and she still had a demon rampaging through her soul, and he couldn't hurt her anymore—not that way.
"I love you," he said eventually. He was gritting his teeth and it made the words come out harsher than usual. "If you believe one thing, believe that. I can't control your feelings, but mine haven't changed since I met you, Buffy, and they're not going to in this one lifetime we've got. It's up to you whether or not we spend it together."
"What makes you so sure it'll work out like that?" she snapped, lifting her head to shoot him a furious glare. She was reminded of a conversation in a sewer where he was the one giving up. It was funny how things changed, how she had gone from a certain girl to a lost and frightened woman—funny how she was the one with the power to bow out. But her parents had been crazy about each other once, and look how that turned out in the long run.
She thought about how much he meant to her and didn't want to imagine that feeling would ever go away. But there was every chance that it would, and it killed her.
So she demanded, "You love me now, but how do you know you will ten, twenty years from now? How long can we keep this up before you start to resent me for my powers and purpose when you're left being normal? And what if it stops feeling peaceful and starts feeling boring?"
She had been kissed a million times—and not just by him, but Riley, Spike, Scott, Parker, and all who'd come before Sunnydale. And she had slept with a few guys, too, and been loved more often than she deserved. Angel, though, was the only one who'd ever given her this look, one that wasn't just full of love and need but of being loved and being needed, because she was reflected in his eyes with all her deep and foolish and insatiable devotion. When their gazes locked she saw eternity, but the fallible, mortal kind. She saw a future she was almost afraid to keep hoping for, even though it was finally right in front of them.
"I just don't want this to be our bus moment," she whispered hoarsely.
"Our bus moment," he echoed, frowning. "What are you talking about?"
It was going to sound stupid, she just knew it. "That scene at the end of The Graduate where Benjamin and Elaine escape from the wedding and get on the bus. At first they look really happy, like they've got their whole lives ahead of them, but then the music plays and you can see everything sink in. They don't know what they're doing because they never planned that far ahead. And maybe it was all for nothing and they don't feel as strongly as they thought they did." She shrugged, or came as close to shrugging as she could while still locked up sturdily in his hold. "Pretty dumb, huh? But I—I just started to panic, I guess. It could happen to us. I don't want that," she said.
His eyes widened, expression dumbfounded. "You're worried I'll stop loving you because of some characters in a movie? Buffy, that's—"
"Ridiculous? Well. Yeah."
"Besides, I really don't think the ending is that simple. Just because they're not sure how things are gonna work out doesn't mean it ends badly. Being scared of the future is normal. You just can't let it keep you from trying to make things work. I seem to remember a girl who heard a prophecy saying she'd die, and instead of staying dead she came back to life." With a half-smile he let his arms drop. "Only person to do it more than once, as far as I know."
"And you never have doubts about… this? You're sure this is what you wanna do?"
"Are you?" he shot back.
She surprised herself with her immediate answer: "Yeah."
Equally surprising was his out-of-the-blue declaration, "I don't wanna deal with a useless last name I'll never use, so I'm working on getting a marriage license forged so I can take yours instead. I figured you wouldn't mind."
"Well, as far as proposals go, not the most romantic," she said. "But that's very twenty-first century of you. Not worried a name like 'Angel Summers' might be a danger to your masculinity?"
"Believe me, it's not nearly the worst alias I've had." He wore a pained expression. "'Geraldo Angel' is a tough act to beat."
She giggled in spite of herself. "Sounds like it."
Later that day she called Dawn, and after catching up on things here and there she paused, then asked her sister why she'd thought the end of that film was so bleak.
"I didn't, Buffy," Dawn answered, sounding surprised. "I was just upset about Mom. It was a nice movie. Didn't it have that one band she liked? Funky Garfield or whatever? Yeah, it was cute."
The call ended with Buffy feeling silly. She laughed at herself for her baseless anxiety; all of it was sliding off of her now and she was impenetrable (not in the imminent Ascension way, but the young-and-in-love way). She and Angel had been dealing with obstacles in their goddamn love life for years now, and if they could make it this far, a stupid thing like falling out of love wasn't going to pop up out of its groundhog hole and ruin everything.
When he got back from meeting with a friend of a not-friend regarding something not entirely legal, the sight that greeted him was a nude Buffy lounging on the couch, legs crossed. He blinked once, twice. She smirked.
"Hello, Benjamin," she all but purred.
"That," he said, "is a weird direction to take this analogy in."
She just raised her eyebrows. He smiled.
She could pinpoint the exact moment when he stopped caring about analogies. She didn't care for them much, either.