DISCLAIMER: See specifics in Part I. No infringement on the copyrights owned by Mr. Whedon, the WB, Fox, Mutant Enemy, Sand Dollar Productions much less any of the brilliant writers associated with BtVS and Ats.

RATING: NC-17

SPOILERS: Rumored ending for season four.

__________________________________________________________________

by
Margot Le Faye

"There has to be another interpretation," Buffy said flatly when her friends tried to tell her what was going on. "Giles, you said yourself that prophecies often don't make sense until the events surrounding them unfold."

"Very true. But it seems to us that some of those events are unfolding. Buffy, you can't just dismiss the interpretation of yourself as the Invincible and Angel as both the Immutable and your destined Shield."

"Yes, actually I can," she argued. "I'm not invincible, Giles. I never was. I lost to the Master, but Xander pulled me out of the water and gave me a chance to go after him again. Even before that…Catherine Madison would have killed me if you hadn't reversed the spell turning my blood to pure alcohol. God, I could list battle after battle where Buffy was Burnt Toast until one of you stepped in. Even Cordelia, with the fire hose, when they were doing the book-and-witch burning thing at city hall."

"Or when Angel saved you from the Judge, or kept that vampire from you while you were an 18^th century noble woman, or pulled the Tarakan assassin off of you in the skating rink or--"

"You've made your point, Willow," Buffy said tightly.

"No, I haven't," Willow said, "Because you are still angry, still resisting. Buffy, something is very wrong here. You and Angel loved each other in a way most of us only dream about. I mean, look at you! Even now when you claim you hate each other you can't keep apart. You have got to take this seriously. You have got to at least consider the possibility that something is behind your anger, that something really, really evil wants to keep you two apart because together, you can accomplish something really, really good."

Buffy frowned, a memory tickling the edge of her mind. Together, you were--

They don't understand, a sudden whisper reassured her. They don't realize that even if he has a soul, Angel is still a vampire, still capable of things no human would ever do. They can't solve the prophecy and they are grasping at straws. Go along with it. But don't pay it any mind. Buffy smiled sweetly.

"Okay. I'll give what you're saying some thought. Maybe Angel is supposed to be this shield thingy, and we are supposed to exchange rings." An image of her lost claddagh rose in her mind, and she gasped in remembered pain. She recovered quickly and went on, before the others noticed. "And so I guess…what? We call him and have the LA bunch over for tea?"

"Not a bad idea," Giles said, pleased that she seemed disposed to be reasonable.

Angel proved unreasonable enough for both of them.

"If you truly think I'm immutable," he said, hurt, "then everything I've done for the past ten years has been meaningless."

"Angel, we know you've changed spiritually," Wesley reassured him. "The Powers That Be would never have anchored your soul again if you hadn't made large strides in your fight to redeem yourself."

"But you are physically immutable," Giles pointed out. "You heal from most wounds within moments. Even serious injuries fade as if they never happened. And you haven't aged since Darla turned you two and half centuries ago. You are about as immutable, physically, at least, as a living creature can be."

"I'm not living," he pointed out.

"Not in the usual sense, no," Giles agreed. "But you aren't dead in the usual sense, either. And that is rather my point. You are uniquely qualified to fit the prophecy. I don't really see any other interpretation."

Angel looked at the girl--woman, he corrected himself--who was the focus of this discussion. She stared solemnly back, clearly uncomfortable with what the others were trying to tell them. Buffy was nearly thirty, now, and more beautiful than ever, fulfilling the promise of beauty that had only been hinted at in her teen years. She had lost the baby fat years ago, almost as soon as he met her, and she had been one of the most gorgeous young women he had ever seen. Her current beauty beggared that, if it were possible. She was more rounded, lush as a painting by Botticelli, her skin was as pure and translucent as porcelain, and her green eyes…a man could fall into those eyes and drown there, losing all sense of who he was, all sense of anything but her…could lose his very soul…

"There has to be another interpretation," he said firmly. Buffy turned away from him.

"That's what I said," she agreed quietly.

"Gees, will the two of you lose the stubborn and just listen," Cordy said, annoyed. "Okay. Maybe there's another interpretation, which six hundred years of Watchers couldn't come up with and which none of us can figure out. Maybe there's this big old coven of warriors for good running around that we've never heard of, and they are going to arrive in Sunnydale just in time for Buffy's birthday, and one of them is going to give her a ring and go off with her to Hell and you can go back to brooding for another two and a half centuries and everything will be just fine. But just in the really small and unlikely chance that that doesn't happen, the two of you need to be prepared."

"Prepared for what?" Buffy asked tiredly.

"Prepared to exchange rings," Cordy said bluntly. "Prepared to put aside your mad and work together, not just for a few hours, but for…as long as it takes. And Angel, you have to be prepared to swear to protect her." Cordy's voice softened, knowing how much her words would sting. "The way you used to, without needing to swear." Angel and Buffy exchanged uneasy glances…and it was too much. Buffy broke away first, turning to the others in the room. She could see the struggle going on inside him, and it hurt, knowing that even if the others were proved correct and he was her destined shield, that any oaths he took would be bitterly reluctant ones. He would agree to protect her only because she was a weapon for good…not because he cared anything about her personally. Hell, personally, he was probably one of the things she needed protection from.

Angel had felt himself hovering on the brink…until she turned away, her own disdain made clear. He opened his mouth to speak, instead shook his head and stormed out of Giles home without another word.

She felt the cool air on her back as he opened the door, and she knew that she had been right. Buffy closed her eyes, then shook off the momentary weakness. An old memory surfaced and she smiled wryly, finding the energy to turn back to the gang and give them a light response.

"'Prophecies are tricky beasts,'" she told them as the Master had told her, so long ago. "This one is bound to have meanings we haven't guessed at."

"Buffy, we can't just leave it like this," Willow pleaded softly. "We have to do something!"

"No, Will, you don't," Buffy said firmly, sure of something for the first time in what felt like ages. "You guys have done everything you can do. I'm the one who has to do something now."

"Go after Angel?" Cordy said hopefully. Buffy threw her a sad smile.

"No, Cord. I just have to turn thirty." And with that, she, too, left Giles house and walked off into the night.

Desperately hoping things weren't as bad as they looked, the gang kept researching. Within days, they all came to the conclusion that things were every bit as bad as they looked. Reluctantly, Giles informed his contacts in the Watchers Council of the dire turn of events. As far as he could tell, if the Prophecies were true, the Slayer was going to turn thirty without fulfilling them, and the world would lose its opportunity to truly turn the tables on evil.

When the Traditionalists intercepted the message, they decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. After all, the Prophecy concerned a Slayer who reached thirty. If the Summers woman didn't reach thirty, the Prophecy would have to apply to another Slayer, a Slayer who would be more malleable, more amenable to her duties. They grabbed the excuse to justify their top-secret assembly of the hit squad that would ensure that Buffy Summers didn't get to see her thirtieth birthday.

Angel was getting drunk. If he could just stay drunk for another forty-eight hours, everything would be fine. Buffy's thirtieth birthday would be over, the prophecy would be fulfilled, and she would no longer be his problem. She would be off in the demon dimension with some other poor sap who thought she needed protection, fighting evil…and leaving him the hell alone.

Alone. He had been alone for two and a half centuries, and no matter how fond he had become of Cordy and Wesley, only one person had ever been able to really ease that loneliness…Angel pushed the thought away and took another drink. All she did was leave you lonelier than ever, the comforting whisper came. That was right. Buffy had taken his heart, stomped on it, cut it into pieces and thrown it back into his face. He hated her so much, he trembled with rage at the mere mention of her name.

Angel frowned, trying to remember who had said that and when. Doesn't matter. Old memories, best left in the past. The future will be here soon enough. That's what you should be thinking about. The future… Right. A future without Buffy Summers. Angel gasped with the pain of that thought. He wouldn't think about that, either, he decided, lifting the bottle to pour himself another drink, and deciding that he'd skip the glass and just finish off the bottle…

...which Wesley twisted out his hands.

"You had bloody well sober up bloody quickly," the Englishman said in the most furious and determined voice Angel could ever recall hearing him use. "Because we have got real trouble here, old man."

"Demons?" Angel said, shaking his head to clear it, and discovering that that was a huge mistake as the room seemed to spin nauseatingly around him.

"Almost as bad," Wesley told him, handing him a cold cloth that Cordelia had wisely fetched from the bathroom when she saw the shape Angel was in. "Watcher's Council."

As the room steadied, Angel looked at his helpers incredulously and burst out laughing.

"The WC? What could that bunch of old maids possibly--"

"They've sent a team of assassins after Buffy," Cordy said.

Angel looked at her, the alcoholic fumes dissipating as the anger that name always evoked cleared his mind.

"More fools they," he shrugged, grabbing the bottle back from Wesley. This time it was Cordy who snatched it out of his grip, showing her own temper by flinging the bottle into a wall."

"You stupid, arrogant bastard!" she screamed at him. "Do you know what it cost to get this message to you? A man bled to death in my arms, Angel, and I couldn't stop it! I couldn't keep him from dying! He and three others fought their way out of Council headquarters --which, by the way, is in the midst of a revolution bloodier than the Reign of Terror. The four of them tried to make it here to the states to warn us. And they had something they said would be crucial, something they said had been recovered from the demon dimension of Hell, something only you could use. Only one of them lived to get it here. Just long enough to get it here."

She held out a small black box. "I don't know what it is or why it's important," Cordy said. "But people are dying, here Angel. And if your redemption is worth anything at all…you can't let that happen."

"No," Angel said as the truth hit home. "I can't." He got unsteadily to his feet, and came around to the front of the desk, taking the box from Cordy's hand. He opened it.

It hadn't been particularly elaborate or expensive. He hadn't wanted to frighten her with anything too obviously permanent. So there were probably a million of them floating around the world, each indistinguishable from the other.

But he knew in his aching soul that this was the one, which he had never thought to see again.

The claddagh he had given Buffy on her seventeenth birthday.

"They recovered this from the demon dimension?" Angel said now, wondering how it had gotten there, as a vague memory stirred.

"Sutcliffe, the man who got that to us, wasn't terribly lucid, poor chap," Wesley said. "But I gather this was used as some sort of key to open a portal into Hell, for some reason. And once it opened that portal, it was lost. He said he and a few others realized it had to be there and used a spell to get it back. But he wasn't clear about why they thought it was important. He insisted you would know. Do you?"

"I think so," Angel said, closing his hand about the bit of silver. "Call Giles," he tossed over his shoulder as he headed for the elevator to his apartment. "Warn him about what's happening. If there's out and out warfare in the Council and they've sent a team after Buffy, we have to pull out all the stops. You guys ready to roll?"

"Well, no, I haven't packed--," Cordy began, following him toward the elevator while Wesley made the phone call to Sunnydale.

"No time. We'll buy what you need there," Angel called up to her as the elevator began its descent.

"And what are you doing going back to your apartment if not packing?" she demanded angrily.

"Fulfilling a prophecy," he said, stepping out of the elevator, and heading for his bureau. He hadn't looked at in years, not since he had taken it off in pain and anger nearly eleven years ago. But he knew exactly where it was. He shoved aside the old letters and the few other mementos he'd kept. Before he found it, his hand brushed across something else, and he spared a few precious seconds to pull out the object and look at it. The photograph was worn because in that first year in LA, he had spent endless hours just staring at it, hiding it in a book so that Doyle, and later Cordy and Wesley, wouldn't know how deeply he missed her. Buffy at eighteen, taken after he had returned from hell…

Returned because she had set her claddagh down in the spot in which she had sent him to Hell, her love strong enough to call him back from there, his love strong enough to call him back to sanity…

Maybe she wasn't worth the love he had poured out on her so unstintingly. Maybe he wasn't either, if it came to that. But the world deserved better than to lose its strongest champion just because that champion was a selfish little bitch and her lover a bloodsucking fiend. Hell, maybe they deserved each other. With an ironic grimace, Angel put aside the photograph and found what he was looking for, tossed into a corner of his bureau drawer. His hand closed over the cool metal, and he drew it out. He stared at the two bits of metal in the palm of his large hand, the matched pair of claddagh which he had never had the courage to tell her the complete truth about. He told her that his people had exchanged them as signs of affection. He had neglected to mention that the exchanges had been very specific and very formal declarations of affection, or that, in his time, the claddagh were wedding bands.

When he had come across them in the antique jewelry store, the elderly shopkeeper said they had belonged to distant relatives.

"I get engaged couples, every now and then, looking for something special. And I always show them these rings, and even the ones who know what a claddagh is look right past them to the fancier rings, or to something just as plain but a bit different. Once in a while a young man or a young woman will even come in looking specifically for a claddagh but they never settle on this pair."

"You almost walked by my shop, but you hesitated. And you walked in and asked that I show you rings, something for a young lady, you said. But when I got out the tray, your eyes went right over the other rings, and lit on this pair, these plain bits of silver. There are other rings in here, lovely pieces any young lady would adore. There are even other claddagh. But you saw this pair and you didn't even notice anything else. So the only real question is…this young lady, just how special is she to you?"

She was still his beloved, he finally admitted to himself. If her thoughtless remarks all those years ago had shown him how thin the line was between love and hate, had made him cross over it, he had long ago crossed back. Even if he hated her, the stubborn love refused to completely die.

And in the end, he couldn't really let her die, either. He put the two rings into the box, grabbed a fresh shirt and his duster, dressing as he walked back to the elevator. Wesley was still on the phone when Angel returned to the offices.

"That was quick," Cordy said, and Angel realized he had only been gone one or two minutes.

"I found what I needed right away." As Angel spoke, Wesley hung up the phone, his expression grim.

"Buffy's already had one visit from the assassins. Giles was getting ready to call me. He's trying to keep Buffy from doing anything foolish, but she's furious and she wants to take the fight to them."

"And he's trying to keep her under wraps until her birthday passes and the danger is over," Angel guessed.

"Yes," Wesley nodded.

"You'd think he'd know better by now," Angel sighed, shrugging into his duster. "Let's go."

He pushed the speed limit all the way to Sunnydale, but it was still too late.

"They grabbed Joyce," Giles said.

"We should have anticipated that," Wesley said.

"We did," Giles said. "Buffy sent her out of town. The bastards intercepted her."

"How long ago did Buffy leave?" Angel demanded.

"Less than half an hour."

"Where is she?"

Giles told him all he knew.

"Stay here," he told the others. "There's nothing you can do but get in the way, now. The Council assassins are deadly, and they are the kind of fanatics who can justify murder and torture in their own minds because they think they are serving the 'greater good'." Reluctantly, the gang did as he --and Buffy before him-- had asked.

Less than half an hour…

Angel knew he might be too late. If Buffy just walked in to their set-up, expecting them to honor their bargain, she and Joyce might be dead before he could get there. Angel hoped to God she was still too sharp for that.

The crash of a large table through a window, Joyce fleeing out the front door of the long-abandoned school building reassured him that she was.

"Where is she?" he stopped Joyce long enough to ask.

"The old library," Joyce gasped out. He laughed. Right over the Hellmouth. He should have realized…

"Go to Giles," he told Joyce, "Everyone's there. They'll take care of you." He started to head off, but Joyce reached for his arm, restraining him.

"You'll help Buffy?" she said, mindful of the estrangement between the two. Angel smiled at her ruefully.

"Count on it," he said. She looked him in the eyes, and seemed satisfied by whatever she saw there. Joyce let him go.

Angel raced into the building, unerringly following hallways he could still remember, despite the fallen masonry and dust from demolition that had, for one reason or another, been constantly delayed. He found himself on the balcony, overlooking the scene as Buffy punched and kicked her way through a wave of assassins that kept coming. He wondered why one didn't just use a gun, saw the telltale infrared light on her temple an instant before she moved to counter another blow, and knew he had his answer. He located the source, diving off the balcony to take out the sharpshooter before his aim got any better.

They were prepared. They had crosses. He howled and retreated…just far enough to pick up the remnant of a chair and toss it at the nearest assassin, who went down, cross and all. A side kick to another assassin took a second cross out of the picture, and three other assassins had their hands full with Buffy. Angel spun, finishing off the sixth assassin, and sprinting across the room to pull one of the other assailants off of her. He roared in pain as a vial of holy water exploded across his chest, but his clothing absorbed the worst of it, and he gritted his teeth against the agony, knocking yet another cross out of the way as he grabbed his assailant and twisted his neck. He turned back to Buffy, just as she dropped the last man. She looked over at Angel, and he noticed she had grown thin again, though not as thin as before.

"You need to get out of that shirt," she said calmly. "It'll just keep burning you until the holy water dries." He was already stripping out of it.

"You need to do something, too," he said fishing the box out of his pocket.

"Like, get out of this crumbling heap before it collapses and we find ourselves inside the Hellmouth?"

"That too," he agreed, pulling out the rings and striding over to her as he shrugged back into his duster. Distantly, he heard a clock chime, and realized it was midnight…and Buffy Summers thirtieth birthday. Time was running out.

"Put this on," he said gruffly, reaching for her hand. She let him take it, but her eyes widened when she saw what he held, recognizing it instantly.

"Is this your idea of a sick joke?" she said in a strangled voice, snatching her hand back.

"Buffy, "he snarled, grabbing her and trying to hold her still despite her struggles, "there isn't time..."

And there wasn't. Just then, the weakened floor collapsed beneath them, and they fell, not just through the basement, where Xander had had his long ago confrontation with Jack, or through the stone foundations, split apart by the bombs Buffy had used against the Mayor, foundations under which the Mama Bezoar had once hibernated. They plunged beneath all manmade structures, which had been weakened by time and exposure to the elements; through to a cavern lying just above the entrance to Hell, where something that had taken on the form of Jenny Calendar impatiently awaited their arrival.

"No," the First told them pleasantly as they landed in front of Its throne, Angel having instinctively twisted his body to cushion Buffy's fall. "There isn't any time at all."

FEMFIC      PART 8      PART 10       FEEDBACK

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