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DISCLAIMER: Uh... no?
TIMELINE: S2. PG. So AR you can't count the ways. I could be convinced to write
more on this reality...
SUMMARY: It is never about love.
WORDCOUNT: 885
THANK YOU: to Kristi and Sharon for the beta.
DEDICATION: For Lucey, because
she was a complete sweet writing me B/Aus when I was too stressed. *SMOOCH* I miss
you!
POINT OF NO RETURN
by Leni
Angelus wonders what is this they have.
He can't put a name to it. It is not love that drives them together. Angelus could name a
thousand and one reasons, but the simplest is: It isn't love because it can't be.
He still wonders how it really began, how he ended up in her tiny bed with his arms around
her, watching as she slept.
It is always fuzzy when he tries to remember, as if his mind were shying from something it
was too scared of to accept. Angelus doesn't like that, he has always been alpha and
master and this lack of control drives him crazy sometimes.
But he tries to forget that when he is with her.
Because when he tastes her, she isn't the light he once wanted.
When he kisses her, she doesn't hold the darkness he now seeks.
She is something in-between, and Angelus won't lose his time in the past when he can be
trying to discover her secrets. He is impatient to unveil them all. Maybe then he'll go
back to his right mind, the one he abandoned that first night he woke up to find her
contentedly snuggled against him.
Angelus remembers bits and pieces of that night. How it begun, for example. She found him
outside her window and instead of calling for help she invited him in, even when an
invitation was a mere formality between them. Angelus can't even remember why he went
there, but knowing himself as well as he does, he supposes he wanted to scare her, to show
the Slayer who dealt the hands in their game.
It had never been about love.
He had thought Buffy was sleeping, but then she suddenly sat on her bed and looked
directly at his hiding place. She had calmly invited him in, as if she'd been waiting for
that moment for a long time. Her look had been merely curious as he opened the window and
let himself in.
Angelus remembers as she stood up in her blue pyjamas and walked toward him. He remembers
checking her hands and sleeves for a hidden weapon and looking deep into her eyes for any
trace of treachery. But he found nothing and he was interested enough in this new
development to let her go. She held out her hand to him then, and when he didn't take it
she just touched his cheek with it, a movement he recognised too well from the times she'd
wanted to ask for a kiss. Angelus had willed his face to shift then, and he can still feel
her soft fingers on his changed skin.
After that he only remembers blue pyjamas and his own clothes adorning the floor, Joyce's
soft snores two rooms away and always her skin. Touching, savouring, caressing and
possessing it all. Angelus hadn't said goodbye when it was over. He'd thought there was no
need to awake the sleeping girl.
But it wasn't about love.
Even now he kisses her and whispers that it isn't love. He brings her to his bed and
murmurs against her neck that he can't love her. He admires her young beauty as she moans
lightly beneath him and he thinks...
He thinks that maybe it isn't all lost.
The second time, Angelus remembers every detail of that night. How he touched her shoulder
in the cemetery and she turned around with a 'yes' on her lips.
He took her to his brand new apartment then, as far as possible from Dru and Giles and
Spike and her friends. Buffy hadn't cared that there was only a bed in it, as she pulled
him single-mindedly toward it. Angelus hadn't finished telling her that the rest of the
furniture would arrive the next day when she had them both out of their clothes and was
reaching stubbornly for a kiss.
"It will never be about love," he told her as he leaned down to please her,
waiting for tears and denial. But she just stared at him for a second, then shrugged and
closed the gap between them.
It isn't about love. It's wrong and a shame on Angelus and his blood. But he has already
brought her here too many times to count and every time the door closes when she leaves,
Angelus knows he will do it again.
Because it doesn't matter how it began. What matters is that he only has to lick his lips
to taste her when he's alone. Everything important concentrates on the trail her newly
trained hands leave across his skin.
The only thing that matters to Angelus is the swirl of greys and greens in her eyes every
time she looks at him.
---
But what happened that first night is important. Important enough for Buffy to come back
and again to this bed.
Of course she remembers the details, even when she denies it when he asks for them. Buffy
remembers what he said before kissing her for the first time all over again. Words
important enough to forget the stake in her waistband, just in the small of her back so he
wouldn't see it until it was too late.
"I could love you," he had mumbled that night.
And Buffy had realised that maybe it wasn't all lost.
The End
09/04/04
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