Without
You
Disclaimer
~ Joss is an evil heartless bastard, but
that doesn’t change the fact he owns all the characters mentioned and I don’t.
Notes
~ Oh look, it’s another post-‘The Gift’ Angel
mourns Buffy fic, only this one’s slightly (not hugely) different. It’s
mega-dark, and I mean this girls and boys – Buffy’s dead and Angel’s world
collapses (even I got teary re-reading this and I cry at practically nothing). It’s rated
‘R’ for somewhat violent and sexual imagery. And now that I’ve totally
put you off reading it, I’ll shut up…
Dedication
~ Thanks to Nortshell for my lovely award
for this fic!
Without You
I love you. I don’t think
I ever told you that enough. I don’t think I ever told you half the things I
wanted to, like about our forgotten day. Now I wish I’d done things
differently, that I hadn’t turned back the day. I did it to save you; I gave my
life in return for yours, like a deal with the Powers. But they pretty much
reneged on that agreement, didn’t they?
I should be angry at the world. At first I was. I dealt with my
emotions the only way I knew how – I went out and ripped the heads off a couple
of things. The emphasis here, though, is on things, you’ll be glad to
hear. Those demons didn’t have a clue what hit them. They barely got a chance to fight back before their bodies were
in pieces on the floor all around me. I stormed in to see the new Oracles,
demanding that they bring you back, that they take me instead, that they do
something, anything, so that the world doesn’t have to live without you. So I
don’t have to live without you. They just gave me their ‘what is done cannot be
undone speech’ and threw me out.
Then I found I wasn’t angry anymore, the pure, senseless rage was
gone, to be replaced with a crushing pain. I thought I knew suffering. I
thought I had experienced heartbreak, but I had no idea – none at all. I
started crying then. Huge racking sobs that shook my body and made my chest ache.
And once I’d started I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to stop. Blood
tears fell in rivers from my eyes until everything turned red around me. I
couldn’t see anything but I didn’t care – you were gone and there was nothing
to see anyway.
I think I wondered through the caves and the sewers under Los
Angeles for a couple of weeks. Time has never meant much to be, considering I
have an unlimited supply of it. But when Wesley and Gunn finally found me they
said I’d been missing for a while and that they were worried. When they spoke
to me it was difficult to even understand them, it was like they were talking
in a foreign language. I barely even recognised my own name back then. I had
been starving myself alone in the dark for so long, trying to withdraw into my
head where I could be with you, that the outside world meant nothing to me
anymore.
They insisted that I go with them, however, and they led me back
to the hotel. They tried to talk to me in sympathetic voices that I all but
ignored. What could they possibly say to make me feel better? Eventually, they
got the message and left me alone. I switched the light off and sat in the
darkness, thinking of you.
I thought a lot about how I wasn’t there. I had promised to
protect you always, to never let anything happen to you. But in the end I
couldn’t even do that for you. I should have been there helping you battle
Glory, there to give my life for yours, but I wasn’t even in the same dimension
as you at the time. Maybe that’s why I didn’t know, I didn’t feel you leaving
me, like I always thought I would. Why I never got the chance to say goodbye.
I wondered if, given the choice, I would have gone to help you.
Would I have left Cordelia in Pylea in order to save you? Could I have
exchanged her life for yours? And I could never come up with an answer. Of
course I thought, yes, I would do anything, give up anything in this world to
get you back. But Cordelia‘s life isn’t mine to bargain with, and if you’d just
asked me for help dealing with Glory, then I probably wouldn’t have gone. You
had your own friends to back you up, we weren’t a part of each other’s lives
anymore, were supposed to fight battles on our own and I was in the middle of
one for Cordelia at the time.
I suppose, in the end I was glad I never got to choose, because
I’m sick of making life and death decisions. I’ve had enough of it all. I want
to tell the powers to shove their redemption, because it doesn’t mean anything
to me anymore. There won’t be a Shanshu now, because I won’t be working
towards one. I won’t save the world again – it’s not worth it. There’s nothing
left I want to save.
There’s nothing inside me anymore. There used to be a space where
I kept all my memories and love and burgeoning humanity, but now that’s gone.
It’s hollow and empty, and I’m just left an emotionless shell. It’s like being
Angelus again, except without the evil depravity and the socio-psychopathic
leanings. It’s sort of similar to how I was over Darla. I just stopped caring
about everything and everybody. Now, though, I don’t even feel the guilt that
was my constant for so many years. Those hundreds of thousands of lives I took
don’t mean anything to me, because life as a whole now seems pointless.
Why do we bother? Why does anybody bother? People are born to die.
They enter this world, have a few sad times, a few happy times, then they leave
it again. What’s the point of it all? I used to think that life was all about
moments, that what made it worth living were the little things. Like the way
your hair smelled of kiwi fruit after you’d washed it or how my dead heart
seemed to come to life again when you smiled at me. I could suffer hundreds of
years of pain and torture and Hell – in fact, I did – if I could just see your
smile one more time…
But there aren’t going to be any more smiles. No more moments
shining like diamonds, like stars in the night sky. All there is now is the
darkness, the pitch black of my world, my heart, my soul. You were my rose
tinted glasses. With you in my life I saw the best of everything, because you
saw the best of me. Your beauty reflected on the surroundings and your light
illuminated even the darkest shadows. You gave me the ability to hear laughter,
to see happiness, to touch other people and to be touched. The world was a
wonderful place just because you were in it.
Now, everything is ugly. The streets are dirty and pollution hangs
in the air. People I meet are callous and uncaring. Evil spreads like a cancer
throughout my city and I’ve given up the search for the cure. All I can do is
stand back and watch people suffer and die. Even then they are luckier than I
am, because in death they have their final escape, they don’t have to fight
their way through the pain and the heartbreak of life anymore. They are
released. I long for that – for the oblivion of not existing, for an end to
everything and everyone. There would be no you, but there would be no without
you either. That is what I work towards now, not humanity, not happiness, just nothingness.
I would kill myself to achieve it. I would walk out into the sun
in a second if I knew it would end everything. I would drive a stake into my
own heart without a moment’s thought if I weren’t convinced the action would
send me straight into Hell and to even greater torment than I could possibly
face on earth. In Hell I would have to suffer your death over and over and over
again, and I’m having problems enough dealing with it happening just the once.
I remember more of Hell than I ever let on, mainly because I didn’t want to
hurt you by describing sufferings your hand had ultimately condemned me to. And
I suppose I got good at pushing these memories to the back of my mind – there
was always something bigger, something more immediate to deal with. The First,
leaving you, Darla, they all consumed my thoughts with a sharp pain that far
overshadowed the dull ache of Hell.
But now I’ve shut life out. I live inside my dreams and my
memories, because there’s nowhere else for me to go anymore. Maybe it makes me
worse, more depressed and more insulated from the world, but I don’t care. I
have eternity to waste, I’m not going anywhere, so I may as well wallow in pain
and self-pity while I have the opportunity. Perhaps the pain will fade one day
and the break inside me will gradually be mended. Perhaps my memories of you
will slip away and things will start to resemble okay again. Somehow I doubt
it, but this is the excuse I use when concerned people come to bother me.
Cordy, Wesley, Gunn, Willow, Giles, even Spike, they have all tried to talk me
out of my fugue state. I always respond the same. I offer polite reassurances. No,
I am not going to attempt suicide. Yes, I know you’re all there for me. I just
need a little more time…
Strangely enough Spike was the only one who understood well enough
to leave me alone and to advise the others to do so too. He even stopped
Cordelia from coming, something I am grateful for. Seeing her awakened the last
vestiges of the person inside me. I couldn’t bear to look at her strained face
as she took in my red eyes and my even paler than usual skin. I hated the hurt
she projected when she saw me, her empathy towards my grief. I don’t need other
people to help me get over this. There is no getting over this.
And Spike, to my amazement, gets that, I think because he is a
vampire like me. For humans life is short. Everything that they do or feel is
finite. They are going to die someday, often someday soon, so they cannot
possibly pledge anything forever. Vampires, however, have eternity to play
with, there are no constraints on what they spend their time doing, because
time is the one thing they will never run out of. Humans rely on the maxim that
time heals all wounds. That’s not true. It is the lack of time that
heals most wounds. People are afraid that they’ll squander their short
existences on grief or pain or other things that their meagre life experience
tells them are not good. It is fear of dying without having accomplished
anything, fear of the pointlessness of their own lives that makes them forget.
They push the hurt down in their own mind so that they can leave it behind them
and move on to bigger and better things.
But vampires don’t forget. We spend huge chunks of our unlives
replaying incidents in our heads, revelling in our glory, cursing our failure,
generally overanalysing every memory and experience. We can forge alliances
that last for centuries and hold grudges for even longer. While I was Angelus,
I spent literally years fixating on how I murdered my father. I relived the
moment over and over again in my head, savouring the taste of his blood in my
throat, resenting the way it turned bitter when it was all over, trying to
understand his hold over me. I even passed on this obsessive legacy to one of
my childer – Penn. I never told you that story, did I? The way he recreated the
deaths of his family, trying to get back that same high, but also trying to
correct the many mistakes he made with them.
That’s what vampires are – fanatical, fixated creatures. That was
never something I let you know, because I thought it might scare you. I didn’t
want you to worry that you were just another one of my obsessions, that you
replaced the screaming voices in my head that I’d been hearing ever since I
regained my soul. I know that Spike loved you like that. He obsessed over you,
he had to possess you, he was fascinated by your power and beauty. I can’t
honestly say that it wasn’t the same for me, at least partially. Maybe that was
all it was at first, another attractive woman in the long line of them I have
had over the years. I was like a moth to a flame, throwing myself at your
light. But later it was different. Things changed. I loved you like a man not a
demon and it made it too complicated. I wasn’t a man so I had to leave. It
wasn’t about what I wanted anymore – it was about what you deserved.
Now, though, I am obsessed once more. With you, with everything
about you. Your life, your death, what it felt like to kiss you, what it felt
like to bite you and drain that magnificent life force from you. I examine all
of my feelings for you. The soul deep, pure romantic love, the unwavering
certainty that you were the One, my other half, the only person who could
complete me and give me a reason to carry on in this world. My lust, red like
passion, burning my body, my heart. Angelus’ urges – his desire to harm, to
kill, to taste your blood, to take you and make you his for eternity. The
protective instincts I possess, the way I want to wrap you up in my arms and
stop any dangers ever reaching you again. My anger, my pain at the times you
hurt me – when you promised never to forget then you did, when you threw your
relationship with Riley in my face, just because you wanted to look into my
eyes as you did so and see my heart break there.
All these emotions mingle together, so I don’t know where one ends
and the next begins. I love you. I hate you. I want you in my bed, in my arms.
I want to kiss your pure white skin and revere you the way a goddess should be
revered. I want to taste you like vanilla and honey, like warmth and sunshine.
I want to rip your throat out and drink the red river that pours from it. I
want us to curl up together and fall asleep with one another, a picture of
contentment and love.
I think of you tenderly, gently, softly – my love, my little
innocent girl. I imagine you violently, hurting you, taking you sexually. If
you knew, if you’d ever known some of the dreams and fantasies I had even with
a soul about you, you would have staked me on the spot. But you always refused
to see that darkness inside of me, always just loved me blindly, so how could I
not have loved you back equally? I want you to know now, now that I’m laying
the whole of myself bare to you, that I never would have hurt you like that, I
never would have acted upon any of the dreams. Because my soul understood where
the limits between us lay. These aren’t my soul’s urges that I speak of, but
the demon’s. The demon loves you too in it’s own way, in the same way it loved
Darla and Drusilla and abused them as a result. Vampire relationships have so
many levels, so many facets to them. Some I let you see, like the fiery passion
and the eternal loyalty – other’s I kept hidden, like the bloodplay, the
submission and the domination, the violence and the claiming. I was afraid you
wouldn’t understand, afraid you’d shy away from me – maybe I underestimated
you, it’s too late to ever know now. It’s too late for anything.
I have so many regrets. Too many to count even. But I’ve stopped even
caring about the biggest ones, like letting Darla turn me, or losing my soul
with you again. I think some things are so huge and unchangeable that they must
have been predestined, like my being cursed. Sometimes I even wish that never
happened, because if I’d just stayed as Angelus I would have been spared so
much pain and grief, but then I wouldn’t have met you either and how can I
possibly regret that? But I’m getting sidetracked, what I wanted to tell you
was that I wish I never left you. That I’m sorry, I was wrong and you were
right – we weren’t better off apart. I wish we had those last two years
together, that final extra bit of time. I wish I’d never changed the day back,
that I’d stayed human and we’d been together. I only did it to save you and if
it didn’t work then I may as well have stayed mortal. At least we could have
had some brief happiness before the inevitable happened.
I think it was inevitable. I’ve been thinking a lot about fate
recently, about the idea that our lives are controlled by outside forces. And
I’ve concluded that they must be. I know there’s no way I ever would have
chosen for my life (or unlife, if you want to be exact) to turn out like this.
If I’d had a choice I never would have fallen in love with you. I never would
have let you fall in love with me. I wouldn’t have hurt you. I would have
killed myself that Christmas on the hill above Sunnydale. But whatever, I tried
to do to change things, however strongly I tried to exert my freewill; there
was nothing I could do to stop it. The whole of your life was building up to
that moment when you sacrificed yourself for the world. All the hurt and the
pain and the love and the joy and the friendship you experienced it was all to
make you strong enough for that single second. It was all to make you the kind
of beautiful, noble, passionate woman who would give away the greatest gift she
ever possessed, all for another.
I regret hurting you, I regret leaving you, I regret not being
there to help you at the end or to say goodbye, but I don’t regret what you
did. You wouldn’t be the woman that I love with my entire being, the one thin
thread that still binds me to this earth and stops me slipping away completely,
if you hadn’t jumped into that portal to save Dawn’s life. I always knew that
would be how you’d die, that it wouldn’t be old and riddled with disease or
unsung in a dark alley. I knew you’d go in a blaze of glory, saving the world.
And if it’s possible I love you even more for it.
I wish I could kiss you just one more time, could feel your soft
lips on mine, entangle my hand in your hair, inhale your sweet scent. And then
I’d know that it was the last time, I’d know to make the most of it, to commit
every little sensation to memory, to psyche myself up to the prospect of living
without you forever. I never thought there would be no more kisses. I told
myself over and over again that I’d left you for good, that we couldn’t be
together, that our relationship was doomed, but I never once truly believed it.
There was always this spark of hope buried deep inside me that one day all the
obstacles surrounding our relationship would be removed. And that spark only
got brighter once I’d found out about my possible Shanshu. My heart’s
faith in our love never once dwindled and I always thought there would be
another time, a brighter future for us.
It was like the night of your prom, when I held you in my arms and
we danced together. At the end of the evening we kissed, softly, sweetly, with
tears in our eyes. It wasn’t a frenzied kiss or a hungry one, it wasn’t
desperate or passionate as if our lips would never meet again, because we both
knew that they would. Then we didn’t say goodbye, just goodnight.
And of course, we were right. Things didn’t end there. We couldn’t
just stop loving each other, and wanting each other, and needing each
other, just because we thought we should, or because other people thought we
should. There were more kisses, dozens of them on the day that never happened,
the day that I hope you remember now and forgive me for. Then there was that
night after your mother’s funeral, the time we spent sat together underneath
the tree. You asked me to stay forever and then you kissed me. We kissed. The
Last Time. And I didn’t know. I just smiled at you and brushed away your tears
and left again like I always leave. I didn’t know it would be the last time I
ever saw you.
It’s strange how people always think the most important moments in
their lives – the ones that define them and that they’ll remember for the rest
of their days – should always be the biggest things, the most significant
things. But they’re not. I hardly remember anything from that night Darla
Turned me in a dirty alley somewhere. I just have vague images of pain and
blood and sex. Everything is fuzzy and indistinct. I can’t even recall what it
feels like to die, other than the experience of a hollow, dizziness and the
world fading to darkness. But that night when I kissed you with a brief touch
of our lips (nothing compared to the passionate embraces that have gone before,
or the nights of soulless sex with multiple partners) – that I can remember
with perfect clarity. That single second, seemingly insignificant at the time,
is burnt upon my soul.
I go to Sunnydale a lot now. Cordelia used to beg me not to, to
get on with my life, that there were other people who needed my help, needed me
to be more than just a broken man obsessing over his ex-girlfriend’s death. I
never listened to anything she said after that. I knew then that she didn’t
understand, she could never understand. So, I just pushed her away and went to
Sunnydale. I pushed them all away eventually. Now they don’t even bother coming
to check on me anymore. They’ve just given up on me and I like it that way,
because I already gave up on myself.
I’ve thought a bit about moving back to Europe, there’s lots of
towns there to get lost in, nobody notices another passing tourist. I could
travel from city to city, flitting through countries I haven’t visited in one
hundred years, none of which have the vaguest association with you. Maybe even
the colour of life there would distract me for a while, away from the greys and
the blacks that LA is cloaked in. But I can’t bring myself to leave here, to
get too far away from the place where I met you, where we shared so much
together, where you rest now…
Many nights I used to stand in that patch of cemetery where we saw
one another for the last time. I watched over that spot where you stood at your
mother’s grave, waiting for me to arrive and I waited for you to come back. I
thought that if I waited long enough you’d be there, standing with your head
bowed, knowing I was there without even being able to see me, because you could
feel my presence, like I can feel yours. Except I can’t anymore, because you’re
not here to feel, or you are here, but it’s not really you, it’s just the shell
of who you used to be.
You never appeared standing above that grave, so eventually I came
out of the shadows. I stopped waiting for you to come back and I walked over,
past the tree where we kissed for the last time, on to the headstone with your
name on it. Buffy Anne Summers 1981-2001. It’s really you under all that
earth. I can’t believe it, but it’s true. It’s really your body rotting away,
your beautiful face distorted with decay. I saw the words, I traced them with
my fingers, as if to make sure they actually said what I thought they did,
because I couldn’t believe my eyes anymore than I could believe my heart.
You’re not dead – you couldn’t possibly be dead. I thought you’d live forever,
because I could never bring myself to contemplate the alternative.
But now it’s not an alternative, now it’s a reality. You’re dead
and I’m standing at your grave. I’m falling to my knees, because my legs won’t
hold me up anymore. I’m covering my eyes, because I don’t want to see, don’t
want to be faced with the harsh truth. And I’m not crying because I have no
tears left inside me, I’m empty now. Without you.
I’ve seen so much death in my life, caused so much. I should
understand it now. But there’s one thing I will never comprehend. How can you
possibly be gone? How can the world carry on without you in it? How can I
survive another day, another hour, another minute… knowing I will never see you
again?
I can’t.
Fin.
“The
stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack
up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour
away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For
nothing now can ever come to any good.”
‘Funeral
Blues’ – W.H.Auden