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“I think you heard the lady correctly, Peaches,” Spike rasped out. Angel’s grip on his throat had eased enough to allow him to speak – sort of. “Not so bloody hard to figure out – she never loved you. *I* could have told you that!”

Speech turned out to be a bit of a mistake at the moment.

Angel’s attention immediately returned to his childe, dark eyes blazing with vindictive fury as he tightened his grip on Spike’s throat again, cutting off his oxygen and effectively silencing him again.

*How am I supposed to keep him distracted exactly, when you keep pissing him off?* Buffy demanded, her obvious irritation with her mate a poor cover for her concern.

*Sorry, love – couldn’t bloody well help it.*

“Shut up, Spike!” Angel ordered with a cold smile, referring to the actual audible words he had spoken, completely unaware of the mental conversation that had just occurred. “I’m talking to *Buffy* right now. Be patient. We *are* going to finish this! Just – give me a minute…”

He punctuated his words with a brutal punch to the younger vampire’s stomach, which doubled him over in pain, followed up by a vicious blow that slammed his head back against the wall again with blinding force. Angel released him then, allowing him to drop to the floor on his hands and knees, gasping and choking for breath, as his sire turned dismissively away from him and back to face Buffy.

The message of his actions was clear. He would deal with Spike – but only when he was ready to do so – and in the meantime, he wanted him enough out of commission that he could not interfere.

Angel had more important things than Spike to think about at the moment.

“Buffy – how could you – what – what are you talking about?” he managed to get out, his eyes wide and disbelieving. “Of *course* you loved me…I was…”

“My first love, my forever love, no one else can compare,” Buffy finished for him in a bored voice, rolling her eyes as she added, “Blah, blah, blah…”

Angel’s eyes widened even further at her unconcerned words, as Buffy simply stared at him and went on in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.

“No, Angel. I was a sixteen-year-old girl and you were like – what? Two hundred? That in itself is a world of ick. But at the time,” she shrugged slightly, looking away for a moment as she remembered, a slightly wistful look in her eyes, “you were all – dark and heroic and mysterious --- and kinda sexy – and – of course I was – well – intrigued…”

The hopes that Angel had allowed to rise at her softened tone, the affectionate expression on her face, were shattered instantly when she shrugged again, looking up at him blankly.

“But you know – I grew up – got over it.”

“You – you *told* me that you loved me!” Angel insisted, his voice trembling slightly.

“I was sixteen. I didn’t even know what love *was*, Angel. Not really.”

“I *showed* you!” Angel countered, his voice rising with desperation, trembling as he took another step toward her.

Behind him, Spike watched the scene carefully as it played out, his eyes on the slowly decreasing distance that separated his mate from his emotionally unstable sire, as he struggled to catch his breath, waiting for just the right moment to catch Angel off guard. Angel’s desperation was an almost tangible thing – and at the moment, with his control on his demon so tentative, Spike did not think that Buffy was all that much safer than he was.

Well – aside from the whole healthy, ready-for-a-fight Slayer thing she had going on – in sharp contrast to his weary, fight-worn condition.

“No. You really didn’t,” Buffy stated softly, shaking her head, a sad resignation in her shining emerald eyes. “What you showed me was– an obsession – and it turned brutal and painful and – and like nothing I’d ever want to feel again, Angel.”

Her voice quavered slightly over the words, and she shook her head again as she added, “Spike – he showed me what real love feels like, Angel – when he stood between me and my mother – when I was intent on *killing* her for getting in my way – and allowed me to torture *him* instead, just to protect her. Because he loves her. And he loves me – too much to let me do something that would have – would have killed me.”

“Buffy – that wasn’t you – that couldn’t have been you!” Angel reminded her, momentarily distracted by the horror of the scene she had just recreated in his mind with her description.

“It wasn’t,” she agreed softly. “And yet – it was, Angel. In a way – it was.”

The blank look he was giving her in response told her that he really did not understand at all what she was trying to say.

“Buffy – that’s really not the point,” he shook his head dismissively as he tried to redirect the conversation back toward the topic he *really* wanted to discuss – his and Buffy’s doomed relationship.

“But it is!” Buffy cut him off, taking a step closer to him, holding his gaze. “Angel – can’t you see what I’m trying to tell you?”

“Buffy – I *know* you were in love with me,” Angel bulldozed blindly past her words, focused only on one aspect of the conversation – not the point she was trying so hard to make. Without changing his tone or turning around, he suddenly added, “Try to get up again, Spike – and I’ll come over there and make sure that you *can’t*.”

Only when his words were finished did he turn his head to meet the slightly startled eyes of his childe, who had frozen in place, his hand braced against the wall halfway through his attempt to pull himself to his feet. Without a word, his gaze arrested by his sire’s cruelly gleaming eyes, Spike sank back to his knees on the floor.

*Not ‘cause I’m bloody scared,* he told himself emphatically. *Just waiting for the right time is all. He doesn’t scare me – can’t anymore…*

But his mind could not erase the memories that Angel’s knowing smirk had brought back to him, memories of the time he knew he sire was remembering as well – a time when he could not have even attempted to get up – a time when he had been paralyzed and helpless to in any way escape his sire’s vicious attentions.

And more chilling than the memory, and Angel’s subtle threat of recreating it – was the expression in the older vampire’s darker-than-usual gaze as the memory played through his mind as well. His reaction to the memory was unmistakable.

Soul or not – Angel was enjoying it.

“I was never in love with you, Angel,” Buffy’s unyielding voice repeated, thankfully drawing Angel’s attention away from Spike, and he turned to face her again as she continued, “How could I have been? I never even *knew* you! Only – only the side of you that you wanted me to see…”

Angel flinched, the words hitting him harder than a blow would have, every bit as effective as a slap in the face. “Buffy – how can you say that?” he asked softly. “I gave you all I had, Buffy – let you see all there was to give – how can you say that you didn’t know me?”

“Because you *didn’t* let me see all there was, Angel,” Buffy replied simply, but with certainty in her voice. “You hid parts of yourself away from me – until it was too late. The darkness – the violence – anything you thought might make me think less of you – you held back from me. In fact, you held it back so long and so hard that eventually you couldn’t hold it back anymore – and it nearly killed me, and everyone I loved.”

“Buffy – that wasn’t me! That was Angelus! If we hadn’t…”

“*No*!” Buffy cut him off sharply, her voice suddenly trembling with anger as she met his eyes, her own shining with tears, but blazing with defiance. “I am *not* going to take the responsibility for that anymore! It was *not* my fault that Angelus got loose. *You’re* responsible for that, Angel. You *are* Angelus!”

Her harshly spoken words stopped the argument that the vampire had been preparing in his mind, before it ever left his lips, as he stared at her in stunned hurt and disbelief. Before he could even begin to formulate a response, she was going on again.

“You were cursed with a soul, Angel – but that didn’t change who you were! If you wanted to do cruel, evil things before you got the soul – you still do – you just feel guilty about wanting to do them, now.” She paused, glancing past him at her mate before turning an arresting gaze, smoldering with anger, on Angel again.

“Most of the time,” she added pointedly.

Angel deliberately chose to ignore her reference to the battered form of his childe behind him, the cruelty he had unleashed upon him only moments earlier. Instead, he focused on the part of the argument that he still felt he had a chance of winning.

“Buffy – you’re wrong. I’m a completely different person now. I’ve changed – I’m not evil anymore...I’m good…”

“Angel,” Buffy shook her head, a sad, ironic smile on her lips as she pointed out softly, “no, you’re not. *I’m* not even good. That’s what I’ve learned through all of this. We *all* have darkness, Angel – and trying to pretend it’s not there doesn’t make it go away. You tried that – and in the end, it got out anyway – and it ripped into everything and everyone you cared about…”

“No,” he objected – and Buffy could almost see the emotional walls going up around him, as he struggled to protect the concepts and mindsets that had made his existence bearable for him for the past century, in light of his previous guilt. “No, Buffy – you’re wrong…”

“Please just listen to me, Angel…” Buffy pressed him, as gently as possible, but with her frustration still evident in her voice. “Your soul doesn’t mean that Angelus doesn’t exist – if anything, it just makes it easier for you to keep that side of yourself under control…but you can’t say that you’re not responsible for the things he’s done…because when you get right down to it…Angel and Angelus are *not* separate people. Angel is just Angelus…who happens to have a soul.”

Angel stared at her for a long moment, struggling both to come to terms with what she had said, and to block it out of his mind completely.

“Er – excuse me…”

The light tap on his shoulder took him by surprise, and he turned without thinking – directly into a fight that he was utterly unprepared for at the moment.

The powerful blow that landed in his face, knocking him backward and nearly to the ground, was even more startling, as the blonde vampire watched his reaction to the blow with grim satisfaction, visibly readying himself for the older vampire’s attempt at retaliation.

Which he had no intention of allowing him to get.

Angel was now sufficiently distracted and overwhelmed, that even in his weakened state, Spike was certain that he would be able to take him on – and win. Over a century had been spent, with the fear and the scars from his sire always in the back of his mind – if not the forefront – but not after tonight.

“Come on, Peaches. Get up,” he urged him, flexing his hands into fists and then opening them up again. “I believe I’ve waited long enough for this.”





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