He didn't know how long he sat there.

After his nausea passed, he had crawled to the opposite corner from where the bodies lay. He kept his eyes down.

Dimly, he was aware of the sunlight coming through the window. It was moving towards him, but he himself sat unmoving.

On its way across the room, the sun touched his shoe. Just the tip.

The shoe began to smoke, just the very tip, but didn't catch fire.

It didn't really touch him.

The sunlight moved on.

The shoe stopped smoking.

And still he sat there, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, simply sitting.

The sun had been down for some time when he finally roused himself and went to the airport.

+++

I thought I saw a man brought to life
He was warm, he came around
Like he was dignified
He showed me what it was to cry

It had only been a few days since Riley had last seen Angel. Or Angelus. No, Angel. Angel.

So it had been, maybe, four days. He wasn't sure. He was losing his sense of time and of the world. Faith was all he had. He kept wanting to hold her, but she wouldn't cuddle up with him. She was just out of reach. He still talked to her, and she didn't seem to mind that. He didn't know if she was listening, or if it was just the sound of his voice that she liked. Either way, he kept talking about whatever came to mind.

Well, you couldn't be that man I adored
You don't seem to know,
Seem to care, what your heart is for
And I don't know him anymore

"Maybe it'll be Angelus that comes," he heard himself say one time. He didn't know why he said it, but he couldn't stop himself. "He once told me Angelus would kill me if he ever got out, but...." Riley went quiet. What if Angel were right? What if he wasn't coming, because he was Angelus now and he didn't care? Or, even, got off on it?

She shifted then; he heard the chain scrape the floor. He thought she might come over, but she didn't. He felt along the floor, found the bolt at the end of the chain and picked it up. With the chain slack between them, he held the bolt in both hands, caressing the cold metal.

+++

"Thank God!" Cordelia exclaimed from behind the desk. Wesley looked up, relief crossing his face as well at the return of their employer. "We've been trying to reach you on your cell, but we kept getting your voice mail!" Cordy continued. "Didn't you get our messages?" She stopped and looked at him more closely. "You look like hell." She winced at her word choice. "You don't look so good," she amended.

Angel stood in the doorway and looked at them. After a moment he blinked and put his hand in his pocket. Then he tried his other pocket. He didn't know when he'd lost his cell phone, though apparently he had. "What is it?" he asked tonelessly.

"Angel, where are the others?" Wes asked, careful to keep the concern out of his voice.

"They're still in Vegas," Angel replied, still standing in the doorway.

After a moment, Wesley went on, "It's about Faith." He studied Angel's face carefully, but couldn't detect even a flicker of anything there at all.

Seemingly with effort, Angel turned his head in Cordelia's direction. "Did you have a vision?" he asked her.

Cordy shook her head, concern now replacing the relief that had covered her when Angel first came in.

"No," Wes answered aloud for her. "Buffy did." He paused as Angel turned back towards him. "Or, a dream at least. She called and said she thought Faith and Riley were in trouble. She'd dreamt of Faith, and Faith had said something about Riley but Buffy couldn't understand her. She said Faith was shifting out of focus."

Angel seemed to be looking right through him. "Where?" he asked at last. "Where were they?"

Wesley shook his head slightly. "No clues there, I'm afraid. She said it was the white bedroom, where she's been with Faith before. It's where they meet in their dreams, apparently. A Slayer thing."

Angel ran his hand through his hair and crossed to the desk. He leaned both hands on it, looking down.

"Angel?" Wesley asked. "What is it? What's happenend?"

It was another long moment before Angel replied quietly, "They're gone."

"Oh God!" Cordy's hand came up to her mouth, tears rising to her eyes.

Angel looked up at her then, and reached out to touch her hand. "No, not like that, I don't think. Not yet." Cordelia blinked back the tears and looked at him in confusion. "Someone took them. Someone is... Someone has them."

"Who?" she asked, recovering.

"The mob," he told them without a trace of irony. ~If only it had been Wolfram & Hart,~ he thought fleetingly. He knew how to deal with them. But the Crisp Voiced Man was something else again.

Wesley and Cordelia exchanged a glance. There was something he was not telling them; they had both heard the capital "S" in "Someone."

"If only we'd been able to reach you sooner." Cordelia looked down as she spoke, almost more to herself than to Angel. "We didn't know where you were staying. We called around, but we couldn't find you. We weren't even sure what alias you were using." She paused, and her voice dropped a little more. "If only I hadn't cancelled that reservation...." Her voicetrailed off and she turned her guilt-ridden face to him.

"No, Cordy," Angel said quietly. "It wouldn't have mattered. If Faith was out of focus, Buffy had that dream after she'd been taken." The description had triggered a memory of his own dream, the one in which that song had started haunting him.

The song which was back. It had come back on the plane, when he'd dozed for a couple of minutes despite himself. Reaching for paper and a pen, he scribbled down the words in his head, then pushed it towards Cordy.

"Do you recognize any of that?"

She picked up the paper and nodded in immediate recognition. "That's from 'Torn.' It was Natalie Imbruglia's big hit a couple of years ago."

Angel held the pen towards her wordlessly. She took it from his hand, and wrote down the information she'd just told him.

+++

Riley was cold to the bone. The cold penetrated every fiber of his being. His body was rigid, muscles contracting against the cold he couldn't keep out. He'd be warm when Faith was up against him, but he usually wasn't awake for it and the warmth would recede as soon as she moved away. The only other time the cold relented was when he tried to move; then a searing pain would shoot up his leg. Sometimes that pain was worth it, just to be rid of the cold for even that brief a moment. He wondered if this cold was how Angel felt all the time.

Angel. He knew it had been Angel who'd walked away in front of the Bellagio. But what if that had been Angel holding on just long enough to get away from him? He knew how Angel felt about him... but what if that wasn't enough? Or what if it was too much? What if Angel wasn't coming, because as his lover had once said in play, there was no Angel?

The pain in his heart was as strong as the pain in his bones. He put his hand to his chest, as if he could massage his heartache. His fingers touched the deep line of scar tissue there, a wound from another part of his life. The Buffy part. The Initiative part, too - but he really thought of that time as the Buffy part now. Touching the scar over his heart, he thought about how it sort of belonged to Buffy, though she'd never claimed it. His hand moved up to finger the scar at his throat, which was Spike's; even his wrist was Jamie's. He wished he had a scar to remind him of Angel.

Thumb rubbing his wrist now, Riley recalled the one time Angel had licked blood from his hand. But that hadn't scarred. He brought his hand to his lips, and licked his own palm, pausing slightly before sucking the skin between his lips and teeth... his mouth slid moistly up to his wrist, softly sucking the skin there. It wasn't him doing it, it was Angel. There had to be an Angel.

+++

The Host wasn't surprised to see the familiar figure enter Caritas. Well, he was a little surprised: the reports he'd had were of Angelus. And this, clearly, was not Angelus. Though he didn't quite seem to be Angel, either.

"I've been expecting you, Big Guy," he said in greeting. "Heard you were playing with matches in Sin City."

Angel looked at him disaffectedly. Then he produced a piece of paper from his pocket. "Do you have this one?"

The Host looked at the title and then up at Angel, fully aware of the vampire's vocal limitations. "That's a mighty ambitious choice. You know it's not the song I read, it's the singer-"

"But you have it?" Angel interrupted. When the Host nodded, Angel told him, "I have to sing this one; it won't leave me alone."

"It's your moment in the sun," the Host said by way of assent.

The music began, but as Angel looked at the lyrics on the monitor, he found he couldn't start.

So I guess the fortune teller's right
I should have seen just what was there
And not some holy light
But you crawled beneath my veins and now
I don't care, I have no luck
I don't miss it all that much
There's just so many things
That I can't touch I'm torn.

His mouth was open, but no sound came out. The stage, the audience, the bar seemed to fall away. He could taste the words, the images, the feelings in his past....

When the chorus came up, the familiar words that had been tormenting him snapped him out of his daze. Faltering badly, even worse than usual, he stammered out a few lines before he halted and crouched down, head in hands, still holding onto the microphone, unable to go on.

He was only vaguely aware of the mic being taken away, words and scattered applause coming to him through a cotton haze, and then green hands were helping him up, the Host escorting him off the stage.

As Angel regained a semblance of composure, the Host simply looked at him.

"What did you see?" Angel asked, desperation coloring the edges of his voice.

The Host hesitated. "I can't help you," he said at last.

Angel gave him a hard look. "But you saw something," he insisted, grabbing the Host's shoulder. "Tell me what you saw!"

The Host extricated himself from Angel's grasp and paused again, regarding him thoughtfully. "I never thought I'd say this - but maybe you should start listening to the voices in your head. You know which ones I mean."

After a silent, unreadable moment, Angel turned and left.

+++

That's what's goin' on.
Nothing's fine I'm torn...
I'm all out of faith,
This is how I feel,
I'm cold and I am shamed,
Lying naked on the floor

//She awakened chained to a wall. She didn't know how she'd gotten there. All she remembered was hanging out on the Commons with some of the big kids, and then the sun started to go down and she'd started home in the twilight. Just as she got off the Commons, someone had come up to her. He'd called her by name and she'd turned; he looked like a college guy, maybe. She'd seen him around before but didn't know him. He wasn't from Boston, by his accent. He'd offered her a drink, and even though her mom always said don't take candy from strangers, that wasn't candy, exactly....

And now she was here. Wherever "here" was. It was dark, and she was cold. She couldn't move her arms or legs. She could feel the wall, she suddenly realized, against her bare back, her bare ass... she was naked and chained to a wall. She started to cry.

She cried for she didn't know how long, and then she just stood there, breathing ragged. Then she heard his voice and even though it was pitch black, she turned towards the sound. The crisp voice from the park, she recognized. And then she felt his hand on her face. It was warm, and so large his palm was easily cupping her entire cheek, his fingers curling around her ear. His other hand was on her breast, squeezing it. She tried to squirm away, but there was nowhere to go. When she moved, he squeezed harder. That hurt, so she stopped. The hand on her face moved down between her legs. She couldn't close her legs because they were held apart by shackles, leaving her completely exposed to him.

"Please," she started crying again. "Please don't. Please don't."

But he pushed one finger inside of her roughly, and she cried out in shock and pain. He added another finger, began pushing them in and out. She screamed at the pain and tried again to squirm away, but he slapped her face and then her breast before he placed that large hand against her throat, cutting off her air. Her body kept twisting, and he released his hold just to slap her again. She felt a warm trickle from her nose, more than the mucus and the tears streaming down her face. Blood.

Her heart was beating so fast, too fast, and her body shook violently as he continued to jab his fingers in and out of her tender folds, in and out, in and out, in-and-out, in-and-out, inandout, inandout, inandoutinandoutinandout....

And then it stopped. She went limp, sagging, held up only by the chains attached to her wrists.

But the respite was temporary and brief; in an instant, she felt something else pressing against her down there, and she knew what it was, but she couldn't believe this was happening and she started to sob again as he shoved his penis into her and began thrusting brutally. He choked off her air and she sobbed again as he ground against her. She didn't know which was worse, the hard thick organ inside her now, too impossibly big to accommodate; or the poking, probing fingers before....

She wanted it to stop. She just wanted it to stop, and she almost wished that hand at her throat would choke her to death, or at least to unconsciousness. But he wouldn't let her go. His hands were everywhere, prodding and squeezing and slapping. His penis was splitting her apart.

Then he grunted, and a few seconds later he finally did stop. He pulled out of her and she heard his footsteps walk away.

Her throat was scraped raw from crying and screaming, and between her legs there was something besides the pain. She was cold and scared and naked and sore - and dripping. Something warm was trickling down her legs....//

+++

As he made his way back to the Hyperion, Angel felt utterly hopeless. There had been no vision, and now no aura reading. The Powers had forsaken him.

Climbing the stairs, he knew someone had joined Cordelia and Wesley. "I didn't expect to find you here," he said to the third person as he entered.

"Hey, man, just because I'm not with you anymore doesn't mean I don't care!" Gunn replied. Angel could barely bring himself to nod in acknowledgement at the man's presence and of the sentiment in his statement, though he appreciated them both.

"This came while you were out," Cordelia said, handing him a manila envelope marked "PERSONAL." She didn't bother to ask how it had gone at Caritas; they could all see it in his face and demeanor. By the painful recognition that flickered in his eyes at the sight of the envelope, she feared its contents. "It's about them, isn't it?" Angel didn't respond, but that in itself was response enough. She touched his arm lightly. "Do you want to us to leave?" she asked softly.

Angel looked at her and shook his head. "No," he said. "You should all see this. Maybe you'll catch something I've missed." He crossed to the entertainment unit and put the tape in the VCR. They all gathered around as he pressed the "play" button.

The screen went blank, and then the infrared images came up.

Legs bare, Faith stepped out of her panties in one corner and squatted against the wall. The others looked away as soon as they figured out what was going on; Angel badly wanted to fast forward it, but he was transfixed and afraid to miss a detail. After she urinated, she tore a strip from her shirt in lieu of toilet paper. The image cut, and it was Riley's turn. He was moving slowly, painfully, and she had to help him get his jeans and boxers down far enough so he wouldn't soil himself.

The next scene was shorter: Riley was slumped against the wall - unconscious or only sleeping, it was impossible to say. Faith approached him, stood over him, then removed her jacket carefully and, though it was clearly inadequate to the task she set it, tried to cover his large body as best she could with the small item.

Angel wanted to cry.

In the third scene, Faith and Riley were lying together, her head on his chest, her body heaving - she was crying again - but she had the jacket on. He realized the tape had been edited in non-sequential order, and he wondered if there was a meaning there. But that thought left his mind as Riley raised Faith's face to his own and bent to - it looked like he was kissing her face. Angel's stomach tightened, and again the others looked away discreetly, but Angel couldn't take his eyes off the picture. He reached out to the monitor, his fingertips resting lightly against the cathode ray tube, unable to touch them. ~It's okay,~ he reassured them silently as Faith's mouth found Riley's, ~you do what you have to.~

Abruptly, a different sequence came up. Now it was well lit, but Angel knew it was the same room; he could see the chains in place on the wall. Riley and Faith weren't there. A wave of nausea rushed through him at their absence, but then he realized the importance of that detail - the chains were in place. This had been taped before they were put in.

As he was realizing all this in the blink of an eye, the Crisp Voiced Man entered the frame and turned to address him. "Thank you for playing, Angel. I do hope you enjoyed your consolation prize. We can't all be winners." He laughed then, and they all shivered inwardly at the sound as the tape went to static.

No one spoke. Then Wesley went to the VCR and hit rewind, just back to the beginning of the well-lit sequence. He knelt as he played it forward then paused it, studying the Man's face intently. They all watched him.

"You got something, Wes?" Gunn asked.

Wesley nodded, still staring at the image. "I believe I might. This face is very familiar to me. I can't quite place it...." He turned to them as he stood. "I'd like to consult with Giles on this." Without waiting for a response, he went to the phone and dialed.

+++

She awakened shaking, so bad she couldn't stop. It was so real. She was back there. With one hand, she checked between her legs for blood. Nothing. Of course not. This was now.

Riley was calling her name, worried. She must have been whimpering in her sleep. She hadn't fucking whimpered in her life, since he'd first done it to her. She'd whimpered and cried out the first few times... the first few weeks. But then she'd stopped.

+++

After Wesley had explained the nature and urgency of the situation, Giles had immediately driven up to review the tape in person. They didn't have the necessary equipment to digitize the video, and by the time they could have acquired it or sent a messenger, Giles was there.

He, too, thought he recognized the Man. He disappeared into the office to make some phone calls, while the others awaited the results of his research anxiously. Angel sat on the floor in a corner while the others took turns pacing about.

He emerged several interminable hours later, trying not to look grim. "His name is Peter Fairfax," Giles told his expectant audience. He removed his glasses and wiped the lens on his shirt before continuing, "He was a Watcher, expelled from the Council seven years ago for corruption, abuse, and betrayal of the Watcher's code."

"That it?" Gunn asked as Giles put his glasses back on. "That all you got?"

Before Giles could reply, Wesley exclaimed, "Ah yes! I knew he was familiar, but I didn't quite recognize him. I remember the rumors now. He was a little before my time. I was trained as his field replacement, in fact."

The import of this sank in for all of them in the silence that followed.

Slowly, Angel asked, "Would he have been aware of Faith?"

With equal reluctance, Wesley nodded. "Almost certainly."

+++

//She learned to leave her body during their sessions. "I'm not myself, but a different person of the same name." She'd heard that once, she couldn't remember where. She'd thought it was funny then... but now she got it.

One time he came in and blindfolded her. He told her he wanted to look at her, and turned the lights on. She heard him inhale, knew he was kneeling, his face inches from her cunt, stretching and widening the lips with the thumb and fingers of one hand.

His cruel fingers probed, curling and stroking inside her; and when his thumb touched *that* spot, which she had only recently discovered herself, her body shuddered involuntarily in a different way and she couldn't stop her tears at her body's betrayal.

He loosened the chains so they were just long enough for him to flip her around, arms crossed in front of her, face to the wall, so he could fuck her that way. Telling her how she looked to him, telling her how good she was.

The next time it was in the dark, back to the wall. He gripped her jaw in one hand and squeezed it as he pulled down to force her mouth open.

"Stick your tongue out," he commanded. "Roll it up and stick it out."

She complied, not knowing why, and then felt his mouth against hers as he sucked on her tongue. Startled, she let him, hating herself but not knowing how to prevent it.

"Like that," he said as he released her. At first she didn't understand. But then she felt the chains from her wrists go slack, and he was forcing her to her knees faster than she could fall. Then he shoved into her mouth, stretching her jaw open, grasping her hair, pulling her head at the angle he wanted as he thrust in and out. She choked when he pushed all the way into her throat. This new agony seemed to awaken her, and she mustered up the courage to bite down.

But not hard enough. He pulled out immediately, exclaiming in pain, and slapped her across the face. Then he laughed and, leaning in close, pressed his mouth against her, sucked in her lower lip, and bit almost through it. The blood streamed down her chin and neck, but she didn't cry.

She thought again, like she had before, that it was her own fault. She never should have stopped to talk to him. She shouldn't have taken the drink. She'd brought it all on herself. She had no one to blame but herself.//

+++

Before he left, Giles took Angel aside. "I didn't want to say anything in front of the others."

"Thank you," Angel said.

"Whatever you choose to tell them is at your discretion."

Angel swallowed and nodded. Then, almost reluctantly, he asked, "Buffy...?"

"Doesn't know," Giles finished. "I didn't know myself, until now. After the incident with Mr. Fairfax, the records were removed from general circulation. It took some persuading that there were special circumstances, in order to convince them to divulge."

Angel nodded again and let Giles show himself out.

Angel was badly shaken. He recognized the room now and didn't know how he'd missed it. That pricking he'd felt before hadn't just been their pain, the pain he'd focused on - it had been recognition.

The Man, Peter Fairfax, this renegade Watcher - he'd gotten his ideas from reading about Angelus. The room was intimately familiar to him because he'd created it, though this one seemed much larger. Angel had always felt a special connection to Faith, and now he knew why. She was his living legacy, his legacy of living pain.

+++

//One day he freed her entirely from the chains. She collapsed to the floor, and stayed there, her muscles stiff with the strain of being held in place. Then he dropped something warm and fluffy into her lap.

"A kitten for my kitten," he said. She didn't know why and she didn't question it, didn't care, just so desperate for contact. She just cuddled the kitten desperately. She tried to take care of it, keeping it warm against her and giving it her water... but there was no food. The kitten wouldn't eat the bugs, even when she mashed them up. After nearly a week, it began to go mad with hunger, howling, clawing and biting her hard. She tried to help - but nothing she could do herself could help. She even broke down and begged him to help. She offered to do anything, anything at all that he wanted. He laughed. And she knew why - because there was nothing she could offer him that he couldn't simply take. Mewling piteously, the kitten began to weaken. It was dying. Faith finally broke its neck, quickly, painlessly, mercifully.

She cried again then, for the first time in awhile.

But that was the last time.//

+++

"Faith" Faith was gone, leaving only Slayer Faith. She was pure slayer now, as far as Riley could tell, attuned to survival and protection. He wondered if this was what the first slayer was like, the one Buffy and the others met in their dreams. Somehow Riley felt safe, not threatened - because she was so attentive and responsive when he made the smallest movement or sound. Whenever he'd say her name, she'd snap to his side, even if she wouldn't stay. She paced the perimeter and was constantly touching him at regular intervals, as if for reassurance. He wasn't sure whether it was for his or her own. Maybe both.

Her descent had alarmed him at first, but she had reached a holding point now. Riley prayed for Angel to hurry, so they could get Faith back. All of his earlier doubts were gone. He believed Angel would come for them. Or if not for him, at least for Faith. He fully expected Angel to end it with him after that. To tell Riley that he couldn't take chances with his soul, couldn't let Riley be used against him.

Riley pushed his thoughts out of his mind, because he has to stay focused on survival. Like Faith.

+++

Angel looked from Wesley to Cordelia to Gunn. "It's not too late," he told them. "You don't have to do this. I don't even know what I'm going to do when I get back."

"What *we're* going to do," Wesley affirmed with reassuring stoicism. Gunn nodded his head in agreement.

"Besides, maybe I'll get a vision if I'm closer," Cordelia offered hopefully. But they all knew it didn't work that way.

"This is the last call for flight 738 to Las Vegas, departing from gate A21," came the announcement over the PA system.

Sometimes a false hope was better than no hope at all, and they clung to it as they walked down the jetway.

+++

Illusion never changed,
Into something real,
I'm wide awake and
I can see the perfect sky is torn,
You're a little late,
I'm already torn

She wanted to get back to B., to ask what she'd said. But she only found *him* in her dreamscape. She stopped sleeping because he wouldn't let her. But even waking, she couldn't fully escape him. He was coming through the hole he'd torn in her mind, like the one he'd torn in her body. She dropped the chain and started dragging it to drown out his voice. He dominated her waking thoughts, but he couldn't make her shake like that when she was awake.

It was two months after her twelfth birthday when he'd snatched her from the park. She would be thirteen before she saw the sun again.

That first time he'd come in, he'd told her she had to be prepared for this, "to face it and survive it." She hadn't known what he was talking about. It wasn't until she'd gotten the call years later that she understood: he'd thought someone would do this to her. Some fuckin' big shot vamp, like Dracula.

He'd thought he was helping her, that very first time. She knew he hadn't wanted to do it the first time. She'd sensed his reluctance. But once he was inside her, he'd changed. B. thought it was just Angel who was like that - but Faith knew different. He'd liked it, and he'd wanted more, and he'd done whatever he wanted, as often as he'd wanted.

He'd used her birth name at first, and then for nearly ten months she had no name. After the Council got her out, she chose "Faith" herself.

But now she had to put Faith away until she got out again.

She thought about the Council, those fuckers. They'd kicked him out, that was it. That was all they'd done to him.

They never thought she'd make it or be chosen. She remembered clearly their words, talking about her like she wasn't there: "It won't be this one now. She's broken." Yeah, and when she'd been chosen at Kendra's death, wasn't that a surprise to them? She'd fucking shown them. She wasn't broken. She was a Slayer.

*****