DISCLAIMER: Joss owns them, along with a lot of other folks at FOX, various production companies and a network or two. Joss has publicly stated that BtVS was always intended as a show which would inspire fanfiction. Fanfiction he wanted, fanfiction he’s got. No infringement intended.

RATING: R

SPOILERS: Everything through the end of seasons 5/2.

Storming Heaven  part 8

Angel was unsurprised to find Lilah installed in a suite adjoining his own. Her position as his--"concubine" was probably closer to the mark than "mistress"-- made it inevitable, after all. Summoning her from an apartment miles away, or driving there himself, was a waste of everyone’s time. Much better when all he had to do was walk through the door that led from his bedroom into hers. Lilah was smart enough to know that the door was for his use, only. She never importuned him to sate the physical needs he had roused to life in her, or give her the pleasures to which she was gradually becoming addicted, even when her own arousal was so strong, he could catch a hint of it on the air seeping beneath the closed door between their rooms. Angel recognized that he was probably ruining her for human lovers, given how nicely she had taken to being drained during sex, but he didn’t much care. If she survived the apocalypse, she would have enough power through Wolfram & Hart to make her an appealing mate for any master vampire who wanted to court her. And, if she chose one who became a little too zealous and ended up turning her, it would be no great matter. If any woman had ever been born to be a vampire, it was Lilah Morgan. Angel doubted most of her acquaintances would notice a difference if she somehow lost whatever soul she possessed.

Whatever the future held for Lilah, she was useful to Angel now, and not just for feeding. Bringing on the apocalypse wasn’t going to be a simple matter. He had the right sword, and he knew what date would be most propitious for performing the appropriate ceremonies to raise the hosts of hell. If that were all he needed, he would lock himself in his penthouse with a barrel of blood and his photograph of Buffy, drinking one and brooding over the other until the time came to set things in motion.

But, he needed more: rare and deadly artifacts, potent rituals, a few sacrifices. And, a handful of smart and deadly demons to act as generals in the army he would soon unleash upon the world. He had several candidates in mind. He gave Lilah a list, and she arranged meetings. Sometimes his chosen generals weren’t interested in attending any meetings arranged by the human scum polluting the planet they believed to be rightfully their own. Lilah used Wolfram & Hart’s resources to persuade them otherwise. Sometimes force was needed, as well. Force didn’t bother Lilah. It did seem to turn the security guard assigned as her protector a bit green at first, but to give the kid credit, Jerry quickly sucked it up and turned his attention away from whatever brutality he was witnessing, and back toward the matter of keeping Lilah safe from any repercussions that might arise from said brutality. Once, before Angel arrived at a meeting, a particularly nasty demon managed to break the manacles restraining him, despite the sorcery reinforcing the restraints. Correctly assuming that Lilah was responsible for his captivity, he’d made short work of the other guards as he tried to get to her, but Jerry managed to use his stun gun to subdue the creature. After the deal was struck T’rhyloc had apologized for the carnage, and offered to eat the bodies to dispose of the evidence. Lilah graciously allowed him to suit himself in the matter, and Jerry had managed not to lose his lunch as T’rhyloc cleaned up.

The rituals and artifacts were as hard to get hold of as the demons, but Lilah proved her mettle in that area, as well. Angel told her what books contained the rituals he needed, where to find them and how they were guarded, and within a few days, she would place them in his hands. The books were always in pristine condition when she gave them to him, but sometimes his vampiric senses could still catch the scent of the blood that had recently been shed to acquire them.

It wasn’t something he lost sleep over, any more.

Nor did he lose any sleep over what he was doing to Lilah. When the hunger took him, he simply walked into her apartment, fucked her senseless, and drank his fill. Because he was careful to feed right before these encounters, there was no danger of Lilah dying at his hands.

And, because she wasn’t Buffy, there was no danger of his finding any real pleasure in her bed. He would use her and leave her in an exhausted slumber, then return to his own quarters to wash the scent and feel of her from his skin. When he slid, naked, between the sheets of his own bed, the gim waiting beneath his pillow, and closed his eyes to sleep, only one woman joined with him in his dreams. Screwing Lilah was sometimes a chore, albeit a pleasant one, and sometimes an enjoyable distraction, but never was it much more than that. He supposed that his inability to find release with her was technically a form of impotence, but that was something else that didn’t cost him any sleep. His potency was reserved for dreams that were more than dreams; for a woman whose spirit came to him nightly while her physical body rotted beneath the sun-baked summer earth of Sunnydale.

But she would not do so, he swore, for much longer. And then he would have her in far more than spirit, and he would have her forever.

****************************************

The antechamber to heaven was beginning to bore her, and she told him so.

You cannot return as you are, as you were. You are simply being refitted for earth, the fire crackled in her ear, as she paced restlessly in the chamber of green and red lights.

"You make it sound like I’m a dress that needs alterations," she complained as he walked away from her to sit on a large chair he conjured up for the purpose. "Buffy doesn’t fit into the life we’ve given her, so let’s just take her in at the seems, strip away this and deprive her of that, then sew her up tight and she’ll be good to go." He hid a smile, conscious, as she was not, of the changes already at work within her. She sounded less like the denizen of the celestial realms that she no longer was, and more like the California girl she had been before and would be again. "So, okay. I get it. Buffy has to cut to fit before we let her out of the dressmaker’s and put her back on the Slayer catwalk. Fine. But, I’ve been dead for about a month, and it’s been weeks since Cordy’s vision and my friends still don’t have a clue what they’re supposed to be doing. What’s taking so long?" she demanded. She’d recently noticed her perpetual lack of clothing, and while that was her preferred state for her nocturnal visits with Angel, under other circumstances, she opted for a less naked state. So, the red and green light surrounding them was reflecting off slim-cut jeans and a halter-top, both in black leather. She’d chosen a pair of platform sandals, also in black, to go with them, and the heels tapped against the flagstones of the floor with her movements. Her long golden hair had been pulled into an elegant upsweep that showed off the fine shape of her lightly made up face and the graceful lines of her neck, about which hung the silver cross Angel gave her the first time they met. Or, rather, what appeared to be that cross, just as the other things she wore appeared to be from her wardrobe and makeup supplies in Sunnydale. The real items were still on their hangers in her closet, or tucked neatly under her bed, or in jars and bottles on her vanity, just as the real cross was currently tarnishing over her dead heart in her grave. But, in the antechamber of heaven, reality was fluid and malleable, and Buffy was learning the trick of manipulating it. It was a skill she was going to need, when the time came.

The clothing was another sign that she was changing into what they needed her to be, another indicator that she was almost ready. He attempted to point that out.

It isn’t just you who needs to be changed. The others have to be prepared, as well. And, there are constraints that impede even our actions. It isn’t taking long at all, the fire pointed out gently. A few days--a few weeks--are nothing, in the scheme of things.

"To you, maybe. The rest of us don’t have the perspective of infinite life spans."

The soul is not mortal, child. All of you are infinite.

"But when we wear flesh, we are bound to the earth. We are mutable and we forget what it is to be eternal." Not quite the California girl, after all. But that, too, was as it should be.

Have you forgotten? he asked mildly, one brow arched inquisitively.

"Not yet. But, I can feel it slipping." She stopped pacing, and stood in the center of the chamber facing him. "I need to be with Angel again," she said softly, pleadingly. For a moment, there was silence.

You are with him nightly. Against my better judgement.

"For which you make me pay," she threw at him. He frowned, his displeasure evident and she shook her head, holding out her hands in the supplicant’s gesture meant to placate him. "Don’t think I’m not grateful," she said softly. "I am with him nightly, and I can make love to him which was so long denied us. Once, I thought if I could just have that, nothing else would matter." She shook her head, as if amazed at her own naivete, as, perhaps she was. "All I needed was the simple, ordinary grace of being allowed to give myself to the man I love. I mean, it isn’t some big, special privilege given only to those who are deemed worthy. Otherwise, how would you explain Spike and Dru? But, the things you won’t let us have . . ." She fell silent, throat closed with grief. That it was not a physical throat mattered not at all. It took her a moment to recover. "He suffers, you know. He imagines what’s happening to my poor discarded body, and it hurts him. He drinks from the veins of that pitiful creature I’m going to hate when I remember how, and even that hurts him. I try to comfort him, and because I can’t speak, he thinks I’m reproaching him, blaming him. I know he can feel the fact that I’m dead, and that’s bad enough. But I can feel that he’s dying, that he’s in so much pain that it will kill him if it doesn’t stop, soon. And I have to wonder if maybe that’s not worse."

Do you think we are indifferent to your anguish? That we would not change it, if we could?

"I think that you are the Powers That Be, and that if you wanted us to be free of pain, we would be," she said calmly, meeting his gaze levelly. He said nothing for a moment, but he did not seem unduly disturbed by her words.

You would be free of pain, he acknowledged at last. And you would be useless to us. For then, child, the world itself would be swallowed in pain, and grief and fire. Is that what you want?

"You know it isn’t. But . . .I need more than his dreams."

The fire sighed, knowing what she was asking. That was why he had thought permitting her to return to Angel nightly was unwise. He knew that dreams, no matter how sweet, no matter how truthful, would only stir their hunger for the more concrete expression of love which could only be realized when they were both flesh. And he knew the impossibility of such a thing. Angel’s curse had been given to him for a purpose: everything had a purpose.

Can’t you look to the end of all this, to what is promised for you, and be content?

"You are the Powers That Be," she told him. "And if you were the only Power at work in the world, none of this would be necessary. But you’re not. You can promise me that you’ll give those things to Angel and me, and I know you’ll keep your word. But you can’t promise that the evil we fight won’t raise all the power of Hell to keep us from getting them. And you can’t promise that they won’t succeed."

He smiled, but did not deny her claim. Neither did he affirm it, but she did not notice this.

There may be a way. Not a permanent change, but something. A reminder, or, if you prefer, a foreshadowing. He explained what could be managed, and how. She asked him the limits. He told her. She wouldn’t accept them. They bargained. She won.

Anything more might distort time, he warned her. Temporal folds are delicate things.

"I remember," she said dryly. "I plan on continuing to do so." He favored her with an amused smile. "Now," she went on briskly. "When are you going to let me tell Willow what she needs to know?"

********************************************************

As Buffy bargained over their future, Angel brooded over their present. The idea of leaving her in the ground a moment more than he had to was intolerable. Thinking of what was happening to her while he was forced to wait for the right time to begin his battle to get her back was a circle of hell designed especially for him. He tried not to contemplate the matter, but every now and then, images would flash across his mind, and he could almost smell the sick-sweet stench of decaying human flesh, or glimpse the phosphorescent green of skin corrupting back to its native dust. Angel was no stranger to such images. As Angelus, he had been responsible for more than a few of them. A few months ago, he would have believed that envisioning Buffy’s sweet, beautiful, tender body being subjected to such horrors was yet one more penance along his road to redemption: what was happening to her and to him no more than what had happened to his own victims, and to those who had loved them. But he no longer believed in guilt or penance or redemption, and the only resurrection that interested him was the one he was determined to bring about. So, he refused to dwell on the images that would sometimes haunt him, pushing them firmly out of his mind. If anything, they spurred him on to greater efforts in his preparations for the coming battle. He would not allow them to remain true.

But sometimes, the images drove him near to madness, unrelenting in their obscene and visceral reminder of his failure to protect her, his failure to ensure her happiness, his failure to, at the very least, die at her side. The moment he had seen her, he had vowed to himself that he would do as Whistler asked: help her, guide her, guard her. He had failed in all of his vows, and was thrice foresworn, his promises as broken and shattered as her fragile human body in its sacrificial dive from that tower.

The images reminded him of his failure. Sometimes, after a particularly horrendous vision, he would catch a fleeting glimpse of Buffy, looking as she did when she came to him in dreams, standing across the room, gazing at him sorrowfully. She never spoke in his dreams, and she did not speak after he sustained one of his hideous visitations. But her sorrow seemed a reproach, and he felt the sting of time, then. Soon, my love, he would promise, but the time he was constrained to wait wore on him, the prorogued absence of her wearing away at whatever was left of his soul.

One evening, the unspeakable visions, Buffy’s sorrowful glances, and his own raging desire to have her returned to him combined to drive him out of his suite, and into his car with its conveniently tinted windows, to make the two hour trip to Sunnydale.

It was something he had avoided, refusing to visit her grave, as if the sight of the hungry ground that had devoured her would make her death somehow more real. But with the reality of her death intruding upon his waking mind in such an abhorrent fashion, he found he needed to visit the site hallowed to her memory in order to make one final vow: he would be damned--utterly, literally condemned to eternal torment-- if he would permit that reality to remain permanent.

The florists of Sunnydale did a booming business in funeral arrangements. Several had set up shop within a few blocks of the cemetery in which she had been buried. It was no trouble to find one that was open after dark, and no trouble to buy what he required. His offering in hand, Angel found her grave with no trouble. He remembered where Joyce had been laid to rest, and of course her friends would see to it that she rested nearby. Within moments of leaving the florist’s, he was kneeling by her headstone, the offering clutched in his hands.

He was so lost in grief, that it took him a moment to realize who else made offerings here, but his vampiric senses were soon screaming to him, overloading him with input. The scent was unmistakable. His nostrils flared, assaulted by the unexpected and unwelcome odors, pushing back his grief with a fresh wave of rage.

Buffy’s grave stank of Spike. Clearly, he was haunting the spot, drinking himself senseless each night. Bitterness and love and despair and anger: Spike fairly reeked with them, and now, so did the grass over which he had wept, and the ground which had drunk up his tears, and the whiskey that he’d spilled when he was too drunk to lift the bottle cleanly to his mouth. Angel wasn’t sure which angered him more: Spike’s daring to aspire to his Slayer, or Spike’s drunken carousals on her grave. Perhaps the latter, if only because Angel understood it wasn’t disrespect that caused Spike’s behavior, but the depth and breadth of love Spike had come to feel for her.

He had no right. Angel would make that plain to him, soon. But not, he told himself as he forced his rage once more under control, tonight. Luckily for Spike, Angel hadn’t found him already engaged in his nightly binge, or there would have been no question of the younger vampire’s surviving the encounter. Angel briefly toyed with the idea of remaining around long enough to confront the whelp, as the anger within him demanded he do. But he knew that nothing less than Spike’s bloody, violent death at Angel’s own hands, would appease that anger, and Angel still had a use for him. Not in his army: not when the annoying blond carried a torch for the woman who belonged to Angel. If he fought at Angel’s side, he would expect a reward beyond the mere fact of having his chip removed. Buffy would become a bone of contention between them and then he would have to kill the boy. No, the use Angel had for him involved those Buffy loved. Angel would order his armies to disarm rather than destroy them, but he had no illusions that this would guarantee anyone’s safety. Demons were unlikely to put his orders above their own lives in a kill or be kill situation, and Buffy’s friends were entirely capable of mounting a strong enough counterattack to warrant such a desperate response. They would need Spike to use his own demonic strength, cunning, and fighting skills to defend them, and his protection might make the difference in their ability to survive the apocalypse.

So, Angel did not wait for Spike to show up. He did what he came to do. He read her headstone, his fingers lightly tracing over the carved letters of her name. His mouth tightened when he read the final lines. She had indeed saved the world "a lot." Too often, he thought. Angel closed his eyes against the words of her epitaph and schooled himself to stillness.

He had always been able to feel the pull of her blood, calling to his, even before he had drunk near his fill of her two years before. That blood no longer pulsed through her veins. It had gone still, had become dried and desiccate in her gave, breaking back into the dust to which all flesh returned.

But even in this decomposing state, it was still there.

In some ways, this was worse than his visions. He sent his awareness beneath the ground, through the summer dryness of the soil and the torpid insect life burrowing within it, through the rubble and stones of the earth and the chill enamel of her coffin, until he could sense it, faintly, the pull between them. And, it was a horror, now, to encounter not the warmth and vibrancy he had always found before, but the cold, grim fact of death and corruption. He felt as if he were touching not her sweet flesh, but the decaying remnant, and as if the elixir of her blood, which he could still taste on his tongue, had turned to ashes in his mouth, choking him with dust. He ought to run screaming from such a horror, or fall prostrate, weeping on her grave. Instead, Angel sought that pull, that connection, accepted the horror and embraced it willingly.

Because even corruption and dust were better than the utter void left without them to cling to.

Rancid. The ambrosial savor of her blood was putrid with decay, and he could almost taste the ruin of it, bitter on his tongue. Angel was beyond shedding tears for her. Only the shedding of blood seemed an adequate expression of his grief, and he began to reconsider his decision to spare Spike. He was grasping the roses tightly, unmindful of the thorns, which had been driven deep into his flesh.

Then he felt the cool, thin streams drip from his palms to stain what he held, and he gasped in relief, because it seemed that as his blood flowed out of his body and onto the roses, that some of the agony which had seized his spirit was a little eased. He was grateful for the cathartic cleansing, as another might be grateful for the catharsis of tears. He watched as drops so dark they glistened black in the moonlight fell upon the petals, tinting them with the precise shade of his agony. Only then did he place the two roses--white for purity, red for passion, both steeped in his blood--upon her grave.

"It is never over," he said to her, as fiercely as she had once said those words to him. "I won’t leave you to this. Soon, my love. Soon." The final vow made, sealed with more than words, he rose from her grave and headed back to his car.

He did not look back, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing to see that would have interested him until several hours later, when Spike, satisfied that the Nibblet was safely tucked up in her bed and that none of the other lot needed him for anything took up his nightly vigil.

And finding the two roses, drenched in blood and rage and despair, Spike knew they were all in more trouble than even Cordy’s visions had prepared them for.
_____________________________________________________________________

Still not the end.

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