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Author's Chapter Notes:
SQUEEE!! We have been nominated for Best dark fic at the Fool for love Awards! SQUEE!!!
Obviously, all the merit goes to our beta, Pat! Much love, Pat! And to those kind souls who nominated us!;) You rocks!
This chapter is the last but one: I hope to post the last one, Destiny, in a few hours.
But our story doesn't end: this is just the beginning. The sequel, Princes to the noir, is just behind the corner....;) Stay tuned:)
19. Redefinition


He was back.
Burnt, dirty, dishevelled….but she had never seen him so beautiful.
There was something intense and vibrant in him, now, something so bright it hurt her eyes…But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was him. There. Forever. Hers.
She ran into his arms, hiding her face against his chest and discovering again his musky smell, oh–so-persistent… She felt him return her hug, and their lips met, finding each other, drinking in their essences, with an aching casualness…
Oh…what a feeling to kiss him again, to touch him…I can die, now, Buffy thought. She was beside herself with the sheer joy of having him back…she knew he belonged to her, his lips were telling her the truth...he loved her…
Angelus raised her almost painfully, then he let both of them fall on to the bed, devouring her mouth with feverish kisses; and Buffy surrendered, without noticing, without wanting to understand…how much those caresses were desperate and painful, baffled and blind…
“Darling…I’m so sorry…”she whispered, panting “I made you suffer, but that was for love…just love…”
He relaxed, all of a sudden, and pulled away a little from her, in order to watch her, moving his lips slowly on hers with sour sweetness… “Love?”
He smiled, lightly, resting on his elbow. “Are you sure about that? Do you really believe this is love? You wanted me and you took me, you subdued and broke me to get me to change, to be what you wanted…I know somebody who used to act exactly that way” His stare became distant, but then, he looked at her, inexorably, full of self – awareness and sad sincerity. “It was me. I acted that way. And I can tell you one thing: that was not love”
He sat up, loosing himself completely from her embrace. “That was possession. Prevarication. Love…I don’t think I’ve ever really known it. But I suspect…it even goes beyond that”
“Wh – what are you talking about?” Buffy stuttered, deadly pale. “You’re here. You love me…don’t you?”
Angelus seemed to reflect on that, then he shook his head, pressing a hand to his forehead, as if to ease an aching pain. “I told you so. I said you couldn’t understand the heart of a vampire. And I came to you, on my knees, asking you to say that you loved me…” His eyes widened, lost. “And you didn’t understand why?”
He stood, suddenly, with shaking hands. “I have lots of flaws. But I’m not stupid…”
“What?” Buffy was frightened. His gestures, his attitudes…They reminded her of hers, in that horrible fortnight in the psychiatric Institution…that was the effect of a soul?
“Spike” Angelus replied, crouching on the bed and squeezing her hips hard with his hands. “Romance runs in his blood…you could have raised your finger and he would have gladly been your knight for the rest of your life…but you wanted me. And I know why. I was the predator, the dominator, that one you didn’t have power over…the one who could get you on your knees…the wrong boy…” He bent his head down to her knees, his mouth on the sensitive skin of her thighs. “And I adored your innocence…your surrender…another flower…another flower to soil…” He laughed, moving back, falling on to the carpet. “What an idiot…it was just the opposite, instead…you’ve always been on top, haven’t you? And I allowed you to be…”
Large tears ran down Buffy’s cheeks. ”I…I don’t understand you.”
“No… of course you don’t ….” Angelus sighed. The sunlight was almost touching him, but he ignored it. “A few hours ago…it was still dark…I attacked a man…I was hungry…terribly hungry…but I didn’t kill him…I let him go… and I vomited up the blood…Do you get it?…No…obviously you don’t” He opened his arms. “I can’t hunt now. Hunting was my essence…and you took it from me, in giving me back my soul…the predator you love is dead, Buffy. He doesn’t exist anymore…” He waited, gulping. “And in his place…I still don’t know what there is”
She let herself fall from the bed, anchoring herself to his shoulders. “No…please…listen to me…”
“I feared nothing” Angelus interrupted her, caressing her hair. “I didn’t need a purpose. The only one I had was to pursue my pleasure, the challenge of the hunt …until you gave me back all of this…emotion, fear, the necessity of a goal…you’ve truly defeated Europe’s Scourge…”
”No…no…I beg you…” she took his sleeve, so dirty and burnt. “You must listen to me. I love you and…”
“And…what?” He asked her, all playful tenderness. “What do you want from me? At this moment, I can’t tell right from left, babe. What could I do? Stay put here, in your little room, like a good pet with bad teeth, waiting for you to bring me back a fresh stash of blood? Would you really like it that way?” He took her face in his hands, and it was wet with tears. “I tell you again: the predator is dead. You killed him”
Buffy hugged him, sinking her nails in his back, shocked, terrified. “I didn’t love the predator. I loved you…”
“Me?” Angelus loosed himself again from her embrace, tiredly this time, and stood up. “How could you love me? You don’t even know me…”
“I just want to stay with you” she insisted, in a small voice.
“I don’t” he said, towering over her, sad and resolved. “You’re the predator, now…And I have already had too many of them. I don’t need another.” He took the blanket and stepped to the window.
Furious, Buffy kicked out at the bedside table, breaking a lamp.
“Then…what? Why did you come back to me? Why did you kiss me so passionately?”
Angelus leaned on the window - sill. His right side was smoking.
“Because you’re right. All in all…I love you” He looked at her, sadly. “But in our case, love is sadly not enough…”
She was shaking with sobs. She almost didn’t see his form jumping down from the window, covered by the blanket, but she extended her hands, in a last, useless, mad attempt to stop him….


“They both have a soul, now…” Mayor Wilkins mused.
“This is the stuff of legend, seriously…and you Wolfram & Hart types knew it, didn’t you? Terrific.”
“It was not certain, obviously” Lindsey admitted, his blue eyes glinting in the sun. “But our mystics were quite sure about it. Sunnydale’s slayer had to be the key for change, and two souls were on the road already…two very important souls” He smiled, toying with the gold cuff-links of his expensive shirt. “Darla played her part and revealed herself to be a good diversion, taking our target’s attention…”
”Angelus…a dark desire for everybody…all of them want him, all desire him….” The Mayor laughed, amused. “I don’t envy him. And…what are your projects for him and his bleached companion, now?”
Lindsey rose from the chair, adjusting his jacket. “Sorry, Richard…I’m not authorized to discuss the Senior Partners’ plans. Why don’t we talk instead about your future Ascension? A year goes by very quickly, here on the Hellmouth…”
They moved out of the office, chatting amiably, and Faith moved too, to the window, leaving the sofa she had been sitting on cross-legged, eating candies.
She saw the black limo down in the street, fitted with necro–tempered glass. The chauffeur was waiting for Lindsey, Darla and that psycho vamp, to take them to the City of Angels. She frowned, and rubbed her sugar-coated fingers on her jeans. Souls…they were everyone’s favourite topic lately. Vampires didn’t have them but…what a surprise…it looked as if it wasn’t too difficult to get a second–hand one, in case of need.
A soul…what was that for?
She had had hers from birth and it didn’t seem to matter that much. Humans killed, raped, lied and maimed. And they didn’t need the excuse of a demon inside to do so. Not at all. No different from demons themselves.
She tossed back her dark hair, stretching. Shit. There was no reason to lose time and sleep on that topic: her boss petted her like a lovely father; dear old B. was still begging to be annoyed a bit, and the whole of Sunnydale was waiting to be conquered…fuck the soul!
She smiled openly at the sun flooding through the windows, and from the other side of the street Lindsey saw her, beautiful, dark and controversial. Promising. The Mayor had chosen himself a fledgling with a lot of character…
He opened the limo door and jumped in, careful not to let the light enter. Drusilla was whimpering like a frightened pet on Darla’s bosom, and the blonde was stroking her dark hair with a bored expression.
“What’s up with her?” Lindsey asked, irritated by the dark vampire’s voluminous velvet gown, which separated him from the blonde.
Darla smirked. “She is totally mad. That’s ‘what’s up with her’.”
“And you?” Lindsey whispered, his voice lowering and getting pleasantly deep. “How are you doing?”
She recognized that tone as one of desire. Why not, after all?
Fucking was better than nothing, when you needed to set your pain aside.
“Me? I’m hungry…” Showing her little white teeth, she raised Dru’s chin. “Darling…what about stopping crying, uh?” She put her thumb in her mouth and the other vampire, widening her violet eyes, started to suck it.
“Good girl, fine…”Darla nodded, stretching. “Now, let’s play with uncle Lindsey…all right?”

.
In the Sunnydale underground network there were many deserted tunnels and galleries, and one of those led directly under the Crawford Street mansion. Angelus ran the last few metres that separated him from the building’s entrance, covered by the smoking blanket which still smelt of…her. There was something good in his burns, after all. They shredded his body to pieces. It was not bad. He would take care of them, eventually. Now, he was safe. The oldest burns had already started to vanish, and the recent ones…well, they hurt. Hell, a lot. Good. Physical pain warred with the other pain, the one that burned his mind. The sun was almost a comfort.
Somebody was moving around the silent mansion, alarming him. Damn it, that story had clouded his senses but he realised, at last, he was not alone. He walked slowly, cautiously, across the big hall: he wasn’t sure of his reflexes now, if they were good enough to deflect an attack. Then he saw the figure crouched against the fireplace. Spike. Dirty with ash and burns. The same burns as his.
Shocked, Angelus bent down to him. He looked at him and it was like hearing off-key music, some notes were missing, another was overwhelming….What the fuck…. ?
Spike’s eyes answered him, a little less blue than usual, changing, open eyes reflecting a mutable sky, impossible to look at…
“Your soul…” Angelus murmured, astonished, raising a hand toward his face. “They have…damned you, too?”
Suddenly, hysterical, grim laughter burst out. It was Spike. “No!” He shouted. “It was me! I got it back!” The laughter deepened. “I ask you…could I have been more idiotic?”
Angelus stared at him.
And he laughed too.
Heartily, as he had never laughed in the last dozen years. Maybe centuries. They laughed, together, to exhaustion, for long, tiring minutes, until they both fell back on their elbows, exhausted, empty, groggy.
“Why?” Angelus asked. “Fuck, why?”
“Don’t you know?” Spike replied. “You got yours…so now I get mine too. It has always been like that, between us, hasn’t it?”
“God…Spike…you and your unquenchable competitive spirit…” Angelus sighed. He wanted to laugh again, but at a certain point laughter died, like tears, and only silence remained, an emptiness in the chest. “And I even tried to get rid of it…”
Spike shook a finger. “Never, Sir. Damnation is irreversible. Our precious souls are back, irremediably” He looked at his grandsire and his mouth slackened, the expression of an amazed baby. “You have been with her…I smell her on you…”
“Yes” Angelus tossed his head back, discovering he still had laughter in him, after all. “As you can see, it is possible to be even more idiotic…!”
“Stop, please” Spike moaned, drying his eyes. “If you laugh, you’ll start me off again…And I don’t want to. My stomach aches…”
“If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry” Angelus threatened him
“No, please…then let’s laugh…” The blonde vampire massaged his abs, shaking his head. “How did it happen? How could we both fall in love with that girl, allowing her to reduce us to the trembling shadows of what we were? To reduce us so…” Spike smirked. “Look at us. What a mess. Europe’s Scourge and the Slayer of Slayers crouched on the floor like a pile of rags, laughing madly like lunatics waiting for a lobotomy…”
Angelus got serious, and turned on his back, his face raised towards the high ceiling. “You killed two slayers, right…and do you recall what you told me about them? They wanted it. They had desired death and danced with it. Maybe it was the same for us. Maybe we were just tired…and we wanted it”
“Wanted…what?” Spike looked sceptical and at the same time tempted by that theory.
”To change?…dead people don’t change. And we’re dead. But that girl was toxic. Toxic with life…” Dark eyes met blue ones. “And now we have another chance…”


“Mr. Giles!” Buffy shouted, entering the library. “I need Willow, have you seen…”
Her words stopped dead in their tracks. And it was not the sight, either…
Willow sat on the big square table, around which all of them used to gather to solve problems…and Giles was walking, back and forth, sleeves pushed up, glasses in his hand. A normal scene. If only…
No. She was silenced by the expressions her best friend and her watcher wore. Willow seemed to have been crying. A lot. Her face was swollen, pale, and Giles…God, Giles’ stare could have frozen a desert.
“So, you need Willow?” He asked, icily. “For what purpose, may I ask? Which other cosmic law do you plan to overturn today?”
Buff tried to smile, uncertain. A dark foreshadowing shook her. “I don’t…follow you…”
“He knows” Willow muttered. “All of it, Buffy. Everything.”
“Exactly” Giles confirmed, coldly. “I know you were the lover of both Angelus and William the Bloody…I know Angelus killed Jenny, and I know you were aware of that and, notwithstanding, you planned to have that monster back…and I know about the spell. I know…” He stopped, noticing eventually that he had crushed his glasses to splinters in his hand…”What I don’t know is…where did I go wrong? Where did our ways part, and when did I stop knowing you…?”
He stared at her, blood flowing from his cut fingers. “I don’t know, maybe I never knew you…”
“I wish I had an explanation for you…” she stuttered, fixing her empty, large green eyes on him. Void of resistance, of any desire to defend herself, to deny.
“But you haven’t. No explanation, no excuse. You don’t have one, nor has Willow…nor I. I, the grown-up, the one who didn’t see or understand anything, who didn’t want to see and understand…” Giles tossed the broken glasses into the trash basket and took out of his jacket a clean white handkerchief to stop the small blood loss. ”I will forgive you, Buffy…I’m sure I will. Eventually. But not now. For now…I want you to go away. Please. I need to be alone”
Buffy nodded, her legs weak, incapable of moving. Willow took her kindly by the arm and guided her out, down the crowded corridor, a river of anonymous faces to hide in, with the illusion of belonging. But that was just the latest of her lies.
“He will forgive you” Willow repeated, with a resolute face and a toss of her red hair. “He’ll forgive us. According to his own admission, it’s an adult’s duty to forgive teens’ mistakes, isn’t it?” She smiled, encouragingly, at Buffy, but she saw that the other girl hadn’t even heard her.
She kept walking, slow, small steps, avoiding everybody, without even noticing which way she was going.
Willow forced Buffy to stop. “Are you okay?”
“He doesn’t want me…”
”Mr. Giles? Bullshit. It’ll pass…”
“No…not Giles. Angelus… “ Buffy ran her fingers through her hair, her brow wet with sweat.
“I betrayed my watcher, I put my best friend in danger, I ignored my mission …and all for nothing. He doesn’t want me. He loves me, right, but he doesn’t want me…”
“That was the reason you were looking for me? To help you again?”
”Yeah…no…”Buffy put her head in her hands. “I don’t know, Will…I don’t know anymore…”
”I couldn’t” Willow commented, sadly. “I’m exhausted. I’m still not strong enough for a spell to manipulate feelings. All in all, you got what you wanted. He loves you. But you know the old saying. Be careful what you wish for…you may get it. I’m sorry.”
”Are you sorry? Really? Then why did you open your big mouth to Giles?” Buffy’s voice was hard, chock full of unspoken frustration. She couldn’t stand her friend’s compassion, nor her faux vulgar show of wisdom.
Willow paled. “It wasn’t me!” she exclaimed. “It was Spike!”
“Spike?”
”When I got back from the funeral, he was at my home. He kidnapped me, he made Giles come to us and he forced us to..” Willow stopped, lowering her gaze.
“Forced you to do…what?” Buffy pressed her.
“To give him his soul back” Willow answered, her eyes still full of wonder for the weirdness she had witnessed. “His soul”


The artificial lake was surrounded by graves, a bench, a dark, damp, humid night. All exactly as it had been a few weeks ago. But several eons had passed and nothing was the same anymore. Nothing at all.
Buffy sat, her shoulders hunched, her face expressionless. She had wandered for hours and now a dead tiredness weighed on her. If I had killed Spike as soon as I saw him, she wondered, maybe…no. She shook her head, touching her breast. There. Angelus had always been there. Maybe even since some superior power had chosen her. Her destiny. Maybe since then somebody had written about the slayer drawn to the forces of evil and her dark prince, about the passion which would have burnt both, eating their flesh and their hearts. And the irony was that she hadn’t lied. She really loved what was behind the predator, the boy she had seen suddenly, in his eyes, his gestures, his words…despite everything. But she couldn’t convince him of that. And now she knew it, with terrible certainty…she could never love anybody else as much as she had Angelus…All who followed would pay for that love, destroyed and lost…
She noticed his presence immediately, and it felt absolutely natural. The circle had to close where the game had started.
“You did it for him, didn’t you?”
Spike exited the shadows and sat down at the other end of the bench. He hugged himself, caressing the duster, feeling cold. His bleached hair was a mess of rebellious curls.
“Yeah. But for different reasons than yours” He smiled vaguely. “I still haven’t found anybody able to resist him, to avoid falling into his trap…You, me, Darla; Dru…God knows who else…All of us running after him, to have him, to be with him, to subdue him…But Angelus keeps running a step ahead, to evade us. He belongs to nobody. He never will”
What an elaborate concept, Buffy thought. And she stared at him. He didn’t seem changed, but his eyes burned, making twin holes in the dark. “Is it…painful?”
”The soul?” Spike nodded “Very”. He smiled again, sadly, understanding what she didn’t dare to ask. “It hurts him even more, pet…does that give you any sadistic satisfaction?”
Buffy didn’t answer and after some minutes of silence the vampire stood up. “Let’s go, I’ll take you home. This is not a night for patrolling”
She followed him without resisting. She was tired. Not so much dead tired as tired like the dead.
“Are you …leaving?” She asked, at last, when they were in her yard.
“We don’t have any reason to stay” Spike admitted. He was as tired as she was. And so fully alive too…
“Tell him…tell him I’ll miss him..:” Buffy avoided his crystal clear eyes, looking down at her shoes. “Tell him I’ll never stop loving him…”
Strange. Just a few days back those sentences would have hurt him, but now…Spike just saw in front of him a pale creature with a broken heart, for whom he couldn’t do anything.
“Right”
She breathed in, finding herself moved by him, by his quiet acceptance of what had passed between them. “I’ll miss you too…Spike…”
The vampire raised her chin with a finger and lifted her hand to his lips, pressing on it one of his delicate, sweet, gentlemanly kisses. “I know it” Another smile, a true one this time. “Take care of yourself, Slayer”
Buffy watched him vanishing into the darkness, inexorably, as her innocence had, her dreams, her delusions…swept away by a black duster and a dark eyed angel….
“Buffy?”
Her mother’s voice scared her. Joyce was in the yard, a few meters from her. Oh…And how long had she been there? ”Buffy? That was Mr. Shelby, wasn’t it?”
Joyce frowned. “Why did he call you Slayer?”
Buffy gulped.
Uh-oh.





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