His Eyes

Disclaimer: Yeppers, Joss Whedon still technically owns Buffy and Angel in a Wolfram and Hart contract-y way. But that doesn't mean we can't exploit the "But we can still have fun with them too!" loophole.

Feedback: As always- if no feedback for me, then please feedback your favorite writer today. I wished for the same thing last year too. :)

Dedication: To all those who continue to keep the BA faith, I’m right there with you. There’s always something more to write about our favorite supernatural super-couple.

Distribution: Of course you can! Just let me know where you’ll be posting this and I’ll be the first in line to bring over a house-warming present.

Rating: No smut this time guys, but it’s still PG-13/R-ish because I’ve got that whole penchant for violence thing.

Background: General spoilers for all of the seasons of Angel and Buffy. Specific shouts to Buffy Season Seven’s CHOSEN as well as Angel Season Five’s THE GIRL IN QUESTION and NOT FADE AWAY.

His eyes weren’t brown. That was only one of many, many problems that I was faced with when dealing with William the Bloody himself. Beyond being reminded of how a year ago, sex with him was the punishment and he really was the tool. A soul, even if he never actually acted like it made a lot, a lot of difference— was supposed to change that nasty association.

It never did.

If anything, it pretty much cranked that first problem up a few notches short of making me fairly homicidal. It helped that my main mission in life was to kill evil things. The pitch of his voice was never right. He never really could say all the things I needed to hear but never knew I wanted to. Sure, Spike would help occasionally and for a moment I’d try to use that imagination that used to be so overactive when I was young. If I could be Power!Girl, then I could convince myself blue was the old brown too.

But that didn’t work either.

I’d try to form the thoughts in my head, focus on his black boots and his attempts of encouragement and be satisfied with that. But before I ever really completed these half-hearted thoughts I’d be smacked-dabbed with the realities. Those black boots never really were as big as I remembered and the feet inside them smaller still. My flights of fancy were always crashing before they had a chance to take off. Maybe it was lucky for Spike that he burned, before I continued my games of pretend any more than I should have. Mixed messages are never good. But there was never any touching after he came back. I always made certain of that. In some ways it actually gave wings to the project, because I could never really touch the owner of said brown eyes either.

But I let the wanting in his blue eyes continue, focused on more pressing things like the end of the world instead. Occasionally caught myself trying to get the wanting within me to start, another way to fill the void those brown eyes left behind. But I never could want him, and when confronted with the real pair of brown eyes I’d been missing… Any plans I may have made were gone when I felt those eyes on my body and his tongue in my mouth. I can’t say my who-gets-to-live-and-who-gets-to-die decision making process was altogether unbiased after that.

And still the end of the world had come and gone, and I still couldn’t look into those dark brown eyes the way I wanted to. See them glow in the warmth of the afternoon sun. Watch them glimmer with mischief and promises of evening happiness. Look at them for all the years to come, until either his eyes or my eyes or both, finally closed for good.

It was only after I came to Rome, and I learned gray was actually the old brown. Or rather, gray COULD be the old brown, if you let yourself get lost in him. Which I did. I never really knew what his real name was and I honestly didn’t care when he approached me first at an art gallery in Italy. I just knew who he looked like. Who he EXACTLY looked like. Who he EXACTLY sounded like. And if I closed my eyes and let his magic flow through me, who he EXACTLY felt like when his hands were all over my body.

It never bothered the gang that I always referred to him as My Angel.

The Slayer part of me or as Merrick would always say, “my natural reaction to their unnaturalness,” that was the hardest part to ignore. Even if he wasn’t a vampire per se. Even though he looked HIS look and walked HIS walk. Even if he could awaken that lust in me whenever he donned a gray sweater or read me something in a foreign language in HIS voice. I’d always feel myself needing to empty the contents of my stomach post haste, so much that people were forever thinking I might be pregnant.

I didn’t have the heart to tell anyone that I ran to the bathroom first before I even said a word to him at that art gallery. Or that if I centered myself just as Giles had shown me and pulled back the curtain in my mind, I could see the shape of an old decrepit man lying next to me in bed as he snored the night away.

A man with gray eyes, not brown.

I’d let myself get lost in the harmless magic, let my friends and loved ones get lost in it too. Dance it away, kiss it away, do anything to keep it away. If brown eyes were what I’d wanted, then brown eyes I would have. It was that simple, he’d said.

Only it violated the first cardinal rule in the world a la Buffy: Nothing in my life was ever THAT simple.

Simplicity would be walking along the plaza, hand in hand with my real brown-eyed lover as we enjoyed the not-quite-evening glow. Slayers ‘R Us (definitely not my idea, totally completely 100 percent and proud of it, Xander’s idea) had ended for the week with a lovely weekend of my sort-of brown eyes companion and no interruptions.

Except for the pastels artist who drew for the tourists. He’d started out asking for euros I knew I didn’t have on me. But after looking at my companion completely waived his fee. Drawing such a profile of a happy couple in love, our artist noted— was a privilege for him. When he was done, I’d looked at the drawing and seen not My Angel but someone else. A man with red hair and green eyes, who looked EXACTLY like our artist’s cherished father when he was young. And what a surprise, to see such a man who looked so much like the man he had always wished to see— his father had died before he was born. He knew his father from only the glimpses he’d seen in old home movies and family pictures.

I could sense the feeling of twitchy beguilement at my companion’s appearance. Our artist caught that uncanny aura in the strokes of this particular masterpiece. I let myself see my companion’s gray eyes stare back at me as he quickly shoved the drawing into his coat pocket. He kept quiet until we got to the dance club, and then I let the curtain fall back down and his magic flow through me again. I ran to the ladies bathroom before we even finished our first and only dance that night. Though for the remainder of the evening the club’s other patrons thought I was just another stupid American who couldn’t handle real Italian liquor, her head permanently attached to the bathroom’s sink.

When the women of Rome had all taken a unanimous vote to kick me out of their facilities, I made my own decision to take myself, and whatever may have still remained in my stomach— to somewhere far, far away. Though my sort-of brown-eyed companion was still dancing the night way, with some strange guy in a sports blazer. Though whether he was a demon or not with that haircut… Nope, too hard for me to tell what with my queasiness and the damn red booster lights in the place making my eyes hurt to boot. It made me close my eyes and clear my consciousness to feeling those gray eyes on me again. I waved my hand to him as I headed out the back door. Sensing no vampires about, I felt confident enough to leave. It was still early in the night and with all eyes trained on him I doubted anyone would be looking for me.

I was wrong. Somebody was looking for me. Vampire somebodys.

Wearing togas.

The good thing about all of this is, I’d been far enough away from him to deal with the cadre. Short of using my new-found projectile ralphing superpowers that would cause vampires to just stake themselves. Any dread or sense of wiggins-ness was away with him and that stranger at the nightclub. And the primal part inside of me chomped at the bit to teach these Sparticus-wannabes that you don’t mess with the Slayer. He was still dancing the night away, in audience of Italy’s glitterati (a fancy word I learned for in-crowd) and here I was… Fighting rejects from The Gladiator. Rejects with fangs and completely anachronistic ninja fight-moves.

This particular group of seven clearly hadn’t visited the surface in a while. The togas smelt of death but sans odor de frat boy beer. That kinda gave their vampire-ness away. Maybe Italy’s catacombs were too inviting otherwise or they just didn’t like the surface world with all its pesky sunlight. Either way, they’d all been way too focused on their appetites to realize they decided to go for a quickie with a Slayer. THE Slayer as some stuffy men, formerly known as the D-Team (who worked from what Giles accented was the “pree-vacey of their flats”) Watchers Council would say. That was neither here nor there when I took them out with my wooden hair chopsticks of death. Who needs an old-fashioned lumpy stake when you’ve got Snakewood sticks of death holding your hairdo in place? Practical and deadly were always my favorite combination in fashion accessories.

When the dust literally settled, there was just me and one I had nicknamed “Maximus Wussius.” I didn’t have time to make a crack about how none of the vamps I ever slayed had any fashion sense before he started telling me everything I didn’t want to know. He surprised me by telling me in English to go to hell. They had been summoned because the forces were in motion to grant them descent toward the divine of darkness. To reach their long awaited goal since ancient times— to be an instrument of the Old Ones. Getting him to Giles’s place while he waxed on poetic about such a communion in Latin lyrical verse before I staked him? That was the easy part. Resisting the urge to brain him in with the circled wreath of black thorns on his head as he SANG about it? That was the hard part.

He was even less cooperative by the time we got him into the holding barn, and at Giles’s attempts at an interrogation. But in the end, Maximus Wussius learned the hard way that an uncooperative vampire was a dead one. Well— a DEADER one, and Wussius met Mr. Pointy up close and personal.

Not before crying out in what even I knew as garbled bastardized half-Latin, “Orbis of Niger Thorn ero rectum iri per vultus of Ordo of Aurelius!”

The blood in my veins chilled to hear the words. I could never spell or understand Latin. I did understand one word: Aurelius.

Eyes-that-never-tried-to-be-brown-but-were-always-paternally-comforting turned at me then, and staring into them the blood rushing inside of me got even colder. Whatever it was that Maxius Wussius had cried out, Giles fully understood what he said. He even expected it. Before I could begin my Buffy patented “You-can’t-keep-me-in-the-dark!” tirade, Giles pulled out a book I hadn’t seen in years. Almost a decade. But I could never forget its leather confines, its yellowed pages that seemed so fragile but yielded words so full of power.

At first, I had feared it. With it’s foretelling of my death and all. And I’d be damned if I read it’s foretelling of my death yet again. Later, I’d steal it away from Giles when he wasn’t looking. Along with any other research books useful for my purposes. Ones that by memory I knew he had handled or previously owned. Looking, seeing— smelling for a sign of my brown-eyed lover. That he had spent decades, maybe even centuries with this particular book as his only companion made me yearn to know its secrets. Not indulge in its uber-lengthy contents, but to know its former master. Which pages had Angel touched? Did he take breaks from reading and lay the volume on his chest or his lap? How had his fingers caressed the soft buttery, brown hide exterior?

The Pergamum Codex was never wrong.

The instrument of the apocalypse, the one to bring about its death and destruction was whoever stood at the head of the Circle of the Black Thorn. The face of the Order of Aurelius.

Angel.

I could have denied it. It was Angel. He was responsible guy. All in control, no way Angelus was coming out with him back home and me… over here. He wasn’t going to let the universe end. Was he? My eyes implored Giles for an answer. His eyes gave me one I wasn’t ready for. He’d sensed it had already begun. Suddenly my eyes were assailed with documents from the Library of Demonic Congress, news clippings from the Los Angeles Magik Revue and finally a blurry but still somewhat readable photocopy that had somehow been smuggled out of the Wolfram & Hart offices. And there, on the page was the unmistakable script of Angel’s signature at its bottom.

My heart sank not because of the deluge of “sound and credible evidence” Giles (and apparently everyone, even Andrew) had uncovered to demonstrate Angel’s evilness. It sank because nobody had the guts to tell me what they feared. It didn’t matter that lives were lost in the process, that any help I could give to Angel’s friend, Winifred, was as dead as her soul.

Or mine at the moment.

In my mind I could only see his brown eyes looking at me in sadness, not a hint of disappointment. Just sadness. In everything. I looked at my friends, my family and flashed back to the days right after Angel had returned from the depths of hell. I wondered if things would always be like this, constantly having suspicion and distrust following us everywhere- locked into this circle by the people who were supposed to love and support me… and by extension, the world. I wished that my gray-turned-brown-eyed companion could give me the same reassurance and love my real lover could.

A cold shudder ran through me at the thought, the pieces of this twisted puzzle suddenly snapped into place. The face… Any illusions I may have had that my pretend-brown eyed lover was my love had vanished. I felt in its place my slayer senses, its ancient need for justice and its inevitable kill, growling at me to act. So this demon thought he could gain ultimate power from the supposedly ultimate evil using Angel’s face?

I don’t think so.

I was convinced, had always been convinced, on a certain level that it was totally true. People would automatically think that’s because Buffy plus Angel equals suffering. But I think it’s really a question of Buffy minus Angel equals world devastation, and this situation could have only come about because of our separation. But… how to make the rest of the gang believe it?

I was sadly not surprised when no one had believed me. Oh that Buffy, always thinking with her heart and all selectively Miss Likes To Fight. I had no evidence, just a hunch and when had my hunches ever been—

And then the room got quiet after that.

Everyone did the whole mulling it over thing- but eventually Xander, Willow, Giles and everyone else assembled for our staking of Maximus Wussius had rallied behind me on the matter. What I was left with was just how exactly to trap my gray-eyed companion without letting him get the wiggins on us. That was key. The undercover this time wouldn’t be too difficult- said by me, notorious for being the worst undercover slayer ever. I already had his trust, sort of. Now I needed to keep up that trust long enough for us to figure out how exactly did he plan to get comfy with the Old Ones and how the Circle of the Black Thorne played into it.

As Giles droned on that night about strategy, I felt a tingle in my stomach. THE tingle. This time a vampire somebody was out looking for me, and I wanted him to find me. Did he ever know that how much I resisted his pull? Not just some stupid gypsy thrall that danced on the surface of my nerves. But a magnetic longing that drew me to him in ways beyond magic, beyond existence? The rational Buffy part of me desperately tried to ignore that calling- that need inside of me for him. I felt him now and knew he was at the club, searching for me. Probably seeing just my gray-eyed companion and no one else. It made me wonder what Angel would see if he were to look at my now gray-eyed enemy. If Angel could see the body he most desired… who would it be?

I ached to go to him. To dance with him. To love him. But Giles’s questioning voice brought me back to the present. Later that night we finished our first of many stratagemical plans of assault from within. I died a little again, knowing eventually he’d have to leave. I could already feel Angel wandering away. He’d get to leave, but my burning for him would remain.

For the next two weeks, I fought every tinsy, tiny bodily urge to run off to him and just be held by him. I could not be seen by my gray-eyed enemy to be cavorting with my eternal brown-eyed lover. And a darker part of me worried that should I freely be with him, let myself consume and be consumed by him… the prophecy to pass would have nothing to do with my gray-eyed enemy but the with the brown-soulless eyes I did not want to see again. That morning when I felt him finally slip away from me- his presence receding further and further away, I felt too broken to cry. My sadness was silent, as quiet as when my gray-eyed enemy when he finally came back to my apartment to find me alone in bed for him.

That night and every other night, I fought even harder to pretend that gray was brown. The curtain in my mind, kept falling away and I was left with an old decrepit thing rather than the illusion of my dark and quiet brown-eyed lover. Still our plans were not ready yet. Intel needed to be gathered and big plans of death for this immortal bonehead still weren’t 100 percent focus-y with the gang. So we gathered, and we tacticalized our brains out for weeks. And weeks. And, yet again, more weeks.

But as per Giles somewhat biased advice, I shut down any contact with Angel I had. We couldn’t risk the chance of alerting our gray-eyed enemy that the jig was up. So I just continued to what I had done before- the chosen veil of illusion over my eyes or not.

That didn’t stop me from trying to be super-spy submissive though.

Not that I was going to let the whims of my emotions mess up our plans. But there were little things. Thinly inconsequential things I’d do, while I knew he was having me tailed. I’d known for some time my real brown-eyed lover was having me followed. I even perversely referred to them as “Angel’s Angels,” in my own Buffy inner monologue. But suddenly, after all of this- I was more deliberate in my actions. In my own ways, I did what I could to try to show his eyes (literal eyes and private-eyes) what my heart was really saying while we were still forced apart.

- I openly wore his leather jacket with his silver cross, and his claddagh ring that never left my thumb.

- I’d go to a quiet, shaded café table and silently read from “Sonnets From the Portuguese.”

- When I’d go out dancing with my gray-eyed enemy, I’d request “Wild Horses” by The Sundays.

- On trips to the market, I’d insist store managers stock cookie dough for me to eat raw.

More often than not though, I’d find myself oddly craving more for cookie dough fudge mint chip ice cream and would buy that instead. On the really terrible nights, when all of our work took one step forward only to take ten bazillion steps back- I’d slip from bed and eat it straight from the carton. Somehow, it kept me sane as the days stretched into each other and I wondered if I’d ever survive this.

What would bother me the most was the silence. Wall o’ darkness…chilled me in the heat of the upcoming Roman summer. The streets of Italy seethed with heat, firing themselves up as if nature knew Hell was looking to make an appearance. But I could only pretend sickness and wrap a shawl around my shoulders to keep out its cold loneliness that threatened to devour me. That shutter ran through me every minute, every hour constantly- as I asked myself, “Does he really know?”

Does he have any idea at all? That not only do I still love him but I NEVER stopped loving him? That everything I’ve done, wherever I’ve been, I can’t be me without him? My eyes close at the thoughts, I worry the gray-eyed enemy can see them bursting inside of me. But his eyes are somehow blind as the days get longer and his plans steadily moved forward. For him, the finish line is all his eyes see and he’s catching his final wind.

For many nights he’s closed his eyes, smugly safe in assuming that there will be a tomorrow for him.

It’s his last night.

Once he closes his eyes, I close mine. And I don’t open them again- not until after.

Not until after the bloodshed. After the tears. After the death. After beating back the darkness with literally the last breath in my body, only to find out I SHOULD have been more focused at what was happening in LA.

After I told Giles I would be leaving him as well as the rest of the slayers in his charge for a while. After I looked into his eyes and told him he needed to seriously rethink that whole “selective honesty” thing he has going on with me. After I could see that Dawn didn’t want to go with me, if this really was me marching off to my actual death-death. After I told her it was okay if she didn’t. After I gave her a kiss goodbye and told her I’d comeback to visit everyone soon. After I knew it could very well be THAT apocalypse I was racing to get back to. After I knew I didn’t care as long I could just get there in time, for him and for the world.

Before Giles could say anything back to me about what I was going to do.

My eyes open to a new world— full of ashes and fire. I see a blur of blue around the alley, something female, mystical, ancient and powerful around me as the legions of the Old Ones descend upon us. She has a corporeal shape and I feel that she looks me with her cloudy blue eyes but does not see me. I see the dust of vampires in the street, a part of me wondering if I should feel anything for the bodies or souls forced to rot in this darkness. I can’t.

I see a blood stained shirt, a guy in that shirt— hacking away at the monsters around Xander and Willow, even as we all run into the fray. He’s not completely steady on his feet and his face gets paler with every swing of his battleaxe. The rain is washing his blood away, leaking away from his body and it’s too thinned out to stain the sidewalk as they push him away to safer ground. But he’s still itching to fight.

And in the shadows, I turn and suddenly brown eyes meet mine. I don’t see the rain, or the bodies or the hellfire. Just him. And me. I hope to see our future. I want to see tomorrow night and more nights far into the future staring into those warm brown eyes. Skanky demons could stomp snarling past us now, but all we’d see is each other. I see a long battle right smack in front of us, but we’re both ready for the fight. My overactive imagination kicks in again and I even see the glimmering hope of making love. Hey, the thought is strictly swimming in the not-remotely-real side of the pool. But it’s in my heart for me to see and I can see hope that way if I want to, especially if we’ve got the assorted masses from hell hot on our tracks. Happy thoughts while I work, I always say. The idiots don’t see their deaths by our hands. We’ll see this thing through.

There’s a flapping of leathery wings and a screech of something very distinctly unnatural circling above us, like the sound of a whistle blowing at us to get back to the job.

I see a puff of air escaping my lungs and evaporating into the wet night, “I see you.”

“I see you too,” he says as the rain crashes around us, and the thundering steps of an unearthly army booms ever louder.

THE END OF THIS FIC... THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER.

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