Switcheroony
by alicorn
Chapter 20
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Angel really wished he was anywhere else but in the middle of a dark damp swamp. He knew where he wanted to be, who he needed to see. But he also knew where he couldn't be.
Recalling how he'd fallen in love with Buffy on that first day when he had seen her happily leaving her school. She had been innocent of her future, unaware of the world she now lived in or of her calling. A part of him wished it had never happened; that he had never seen her. Then all this pain would be gone.
She was leaving him. Her heart destined for another and his soul ached. Although he knew they had no future together, that he could never grow old with her, raise children, make plans, he had allowed himself to hope, to dream. Someday in the future he had seen them together, when all the practical barriers would miraculously be removed. But now ...?
He stared sadly at the blue-grey insipid water that seemed to reflect his future. 'Damn the Powers That Be. How could they allow this to happen? How could they let me feel about her the way I do? Knowing that she would only feel same way for a brief time? Knowing that she was destined to be with another? Wasn't the gypsy curse enough?'
"Willow?" Could it be true? Surely he would have known, noticed somehow? He felt foolish and strangely naïve. There must have been something there, even then. How could he have missed it? When had he become so blind? Then again maybe Cordy was right. Maybe Buffy didn't yet know how she felt.
He thought of Willow - quiet, self-contained, intelligent, caring, supportive and surprisingly strong. He tried to picture her holding Buffy, kissing her. He wanted the anger to rise within him, but it didn't!
"Damn it!" He liked and trusted Willow. She'd fought to re-ensoul him. For Buffy. He would trust Willow with his own life and he had. She had done everything she could to give Buffy what she believed would bring the Slayer a chance at true happiness. She had tried to give Buffy the person she thought that her best friend loved above all others - him.
Had Willow suppressed her own longings just to make Buffy happy? Ignoring her own dreams and desires, pushing them aside to do what was right. How long had she denied herself for Buffy's happiness? Wasn't that what you did for someone you loved?
"Blast." He knew the answer but he didn't have to like it. He didn't want to have to live up to it.
He recalled how Buffy had risked everything to rescue Willow from the Mayor against all their advice. And despite himself he knew that Willow would do the same for her. She had proved herself a loyal friend over the years. Who was he to doubt that Willow loved Buffy or that Buffy felt the same way? Looking back at events he wondered how it hadn't occurred to him before.
After all he'd been the one that had left. He had removed himself from her for both their sakes. Had he actually believed she wouldn't move on? He had told her to move on and he had honestly thought that he had been ready for her to do so.
Just not for a woman! He'd always thought it would be some boy; some juvenile college boy, immature and full of teen angst. Someone who could never hope to compete with a worldly wise vampire of his years; who could never share her battle with evil; who could never have their connection.
But Willow! She'd been there fighting at Buffy's side from the beginning. Supporting her, sharing the battle, the aftermath, the day to day living with Buffy's calling. She, who had from the beginning been there to treat Buffy's injuries, both physical and emotional, could always be by her side day and night. She'd become a powerful Witch, an ally. He respected her. How the hell was he supposed to compete with someone he respected? He wasn't even sure that he could win if it came down to it and that shook him to his very core.
'Oh God.' Something terrible occurred to him. 'What if Willow rejects her?' All of his protective instincts rushed forward at the fear that anyone could reject and hurt his Buffy. But she wasn't his any more! Cordy had said that they were soul mates. That Willow and Buffy were two old souls split apart by time, destined to seek each other out through every re-incarnation, every life time. She had used terms he had thought would only ever apply to Buffy and his love.
Okay this was the modern world; an era more open-minded than many of the eras he had lived through; than the era in which he had been raised. Buffy was hardly what you'd describe as a damsel, let alone a wench. As a young mortal he wouldn't have known how to woo a woman such as Buffy. His centuries weighed heavily upon him, as a dusty coat, reminding him just how old-fashioned he was at heart, what little had changed within him. True, he liked his women strong, confident, and even sassy but still very much in need of or attracted to his masculine strength. Darla, now there had been a wench of sass and fire, but she too had leaned upon him, deferred to him as he had come to expect his women would.
But modern women -- they expected so much more of him. Insight, thoughtfulness, emotion, support, equality among other things. And so he had learned their ways, opening himself up to a side of his nature he had never known, would never have known without them. He had lapped up their lives, their wants and needs so that he could be as close as he could ever be to touching them, knowing their bodies through their minds until it had all led him to this.
What did Buffy need from him anymore? She had been the one to pull him back from the edge, to make him face his humanity, to activate his link to the world and to challenge his place in that world. She had never needed his strength. She had needed his understanding of her calling and the life she had to lead, his support, his belief in her and her abilities. But Willow could give her all of that and more. Yes, she most definitely could.
'Face it — you're out of your depth.'
And who was he? What was he? How could he be other than what he was born to be? - A vampire. He tried to wear a mask, to give others an illusion of something that he was not. It should have sufficed that he could live with the mask but he knew what lay within, what he held within him, forever fighting to escape. He listened to it, almost reaching to it; he had lived with it for so long. What others considered his usual brooding was often nothing more than an internal conversation with his inner demon.
And as if he had called it, he heard its voice. 'Don't do yourself such an injustice, my dear boy, by forcing yourself into these shoes of humanity that do not belong to you and that can never fit. You live a lie. Feel the essence of who you really are. Live it and breathe it. Life is there to be taken as you and only you can. You try to live the life others wish you to live. Life is and should be a dreadful adventure - there for the tasting. Enjoy, savor each drop of life that crosses your path. You can walk my path firmly if you remain true to the essence of your being, true to me. Walk in my shoes. You know them so well,' the voice suggested temptingly.
But Angel replied firmly, 'This path that I am on will contain lessons and obstacles you are incapable of appreciating but it is mine. My own life, without you, and the lessons I need the most can only be found by walking my own true path and not by walking in another's footsteps, especially not yours. Only I can find my truth. You cannot answer my questions for me.'
The voice seemed to laugh! 'Even when you try another's shoes on for size, to sneak into their lives and find out who they are and why they are the way that they are, you know, dear boy, that the shoes will not be theirs as such. You will adapt them to your own feet by turning the situation and adjusting it so that you can see it from your point of view. For your feelings are never going to match theirs entirely and who would want them to? You'd have to drown in all that love,' it almost spat. 'Fine - walk in another's shoes, but remember who you really are. And just remember that I'm here — waiting. You have walked in my shoes before making them fit you, using them happily. Together we could make her ours.'
Angel let the truth of his demon's words and the associated guilt sink in before he replied, 'Yours were a dead man's shoes. I walked in them but I was never able to alter them. You are not who I am. This path, this life I may adapt to my feet and I will still have a better understanding of humanity than you ever did. My perspective will never be the same as yours. That's what you're afraid of; that I will learn to love humanity more than I already do and that I will be able to hold you in place forever. You only want to make them feel pain and to enjoy it, not to relieve their pain or make it easier to bear as I must,' he accused it before becoming reflective. 'I used to think she felt exactly the same way that I still do, and I wish she still did but that's not the way it is and nothing can make it so. I used to think I knew her but I would have had to get inside of her toes and crawl up inside her soul to know her the way you would want me to. But that would have stopped her from growing. She would have had to alter, change herself to suit me. I knew that it would have suffocated her very being, made her life impossible and burdened by my many crimes. I had to let her be who she was meant to be and what she was meant to become. By being true to herself, by walking her own path, growing and developing as she should even if that meant she would have to walk her life with another ... she would have a life, her true life, instead of living one for me.'
It laughed at him, long and hard. 'How stupid your pain is. It tastes like poison, sickly, selfless and sweet. You deny yourself what your very core wants.'
'No, what I do is to allow what her very core needs. That's how much I love her. You'll never understand,' he said shaking his head in despair.
Cordy was right. This was right. He finally understood. He accepted what had to be and his heart shattered as the tears flowed. Tears of sadness for what he had lost. Closely followed by tears of contentment at the knowledge that Buffy would now have what had always been missing from her life, what she needed to make her complete, what he could never provide. She would finally have the only person who could give all of this to her. And he allowed himself to be happy for her, because he knew that he would always love her and be grateful for what she had given him — love, humanity, friendship and trust.
As he let the tears fall, he accepted that he was ready to let her move on with her life and he felt content that it would be with the person he knew would always love her, would always take care of her and would always put her first - - Willow. He now knew that he would be ready, when the time came, to give them both his blessing and mean it. Then again, considering who and what he was maybe he would just give them his best wishes.
The demon retreated in the face of his newly found resolve.
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While the vision quest continued in the back room, Anya was relegated to the front of the Magic Shop where she moved the cheaper candles further back and the pricier candles to the front of the shelf. She hated it when Giles tried to help with the displays since he seemed to completely ignore her frequent advice on product placement. He had no idea that it was all about appealing to the laziness of the customer, where and when ever possible.
Giles said he was listening and he even asked the odd intelligent question but he wasn't really listening at all. He was doing that thing she had once seen a parent do to an annoying child — making noise in all the right places.
She'd told them that the curse was about sex but they had all tried to ignore her and even when they did get on board, no one said anything aloud. Xander had even given her a whole lecture on why talking about Willow and Buffy having had sex was another inappropriate topic of conversation. She was really getting pissed at the long list of things that she couldn't talk about. She'd thought that Willow, with all her new found Lesbian knowledge and sexual experience, would loosen up about sex, talk about it, revel in its pleasures and joys, but oh no — it was all angst, shy, blushing, babbling and still with the shocked looks every time she mentioned the subject.
It seemed no one ever listened to her, except possibly about demons, curses, evil and such. It was like a weird kind of phobia that they just couldn't get past. It really made her furious that everyone could forget or ignore the fact that Willow had been straight and was now gay, but oh no, they never forgot she had been a demon.
She occasionally wished she still had her powers, fondly recalling her first act as a full-fledged vengeance demon. Carloman, the King of Bavaria, was an old charmer who had little or no regard for the wife upon whom he so frequently cheated. D'Hoffryn had chosen her first charge perfectly. She recalled how the all-powerful king had whimpered and begged for her charge's [his wife's] forgiveness for his poor husbandry skills, for his dalliances. He had sought Anya's advice, her counsel to better please his spouse. He had tried every trick he had ever used to keep from having to pay for his behavior.
Anya had watched in amused satisfaction at the familiar look that had filled her charge's eyes. She had known he didn't mean it. She had heard all these words before many, many times.
After an hour of pleading he had turned to accusation, blaming his wife for all his failings, accusing her of foul deeds until her charge had finally snapped and wished he would go fuck himself.
The shock killed him.
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Buffy watched the image before her in complete astonishment. 'Cordy trusted Faith?' She couldn't get this obvious fact out of her head. Even with Willow still ranting over the fake tan, her mind was running at sixty miles an hour trying to make sense of what she was seeing. 'I'm cool about my body but there's a real short list of people I'd trust with a secret like that one. Let alone a job like that one,' she stated to herself as she heard Xander calming Willow, as only he could. Suddenly her mind filled with images of her spray painting Willow. 'Oh no! Not now!'
"We need to concentrate," Giles said annoyance evident in his tone.
'Oh no we don't,' thought Buffy as she desperately tried to chase the image from her mind. 'Think Cordy. Think Faith. Think anything but this'
"Could we please try to focus? Thank you," Giles stated as Xander and Willow attempted to reconnect with Buffy and the vision rod.
'Oh please, please,' Buffy begged, her mind fearful of the vision that her thoughts could lead them to. 'I wish I could just go back in time before I knew, before I felt like this.'
[Concentrate please,] Giles reminded all concerned.
Buffy threw her mind back to high school reaching out to the simple days. 'Yeah, right!'
She saw a corridor begin to appear, a school corridor. Familiarity flooded over them as the corridor just outside the old Sunnydale high library came into focus. Peering in through the portholes of the library doors were two figures they immediately recognized -- Oz and Cordy, who seemed to be making no move to enter the library.
[Why are they staying outside?] Xander asked.
[Xander!] Giles said, his tone becoming more strained.
"Leave them to it," Oz commented. Faint voices could be heard from beyond the doors.
"If it gets me out of the volunteer squad, I'm happy. My wardrobe is starting to suffer. Buffy should get a clothing allowance or something," Cordelia responded, without turning to look at him. "I don't know how she does it," she added, her tone serious.
Oz seemed to stare at Cordelia for quite sometime before he turned and cast a look into the library. "It's okay, you know," he commented.
"Huh?" she responded with an absent-minded shrug of her shoulders.
"It's easier here - on the outside. We'll never really be in the in, you know. Much as they might try to make us feel like they are including us. And being jealous - that's normal," he explained.
"I just ... I am not jealous," Cordelia stated but as she looked at Oz she sighed. Turning back to the porthole for a brief moment she seemed to fix her gaze. "I see what she does ... how much she gives up. But what can you do or say? She needs nothing that I can give her. Would I want to be her? No way. Do I look crazy? Who'd want to give up a future? Who'd want to have to hope that the friends and family you've got will stay with you ... survive? Because that's all you'll ever have. And there's nothing I can do to make it any easier. Like she'd ever let me." Closing her eyes briefly she turned to look at Oz. "How do you cope? Hell, how do we cope? We're always going to be second string, stepping aside so they can help her deal with the new big bad. And we know we're doing it." She shook her head at the futility of her annoyance.
"Yeah, but saving the world. That sorta makes stepping aside a given," he pointed out.
"Well I think it sucks. Do you think they even realize? You know ... how linked they are?"
"Nope ... and I don't intend to make them look too hard at it," Oz replied in his casual manner. "I get to be close to her. That's all I can ask. If I made her choose ... I'm not sure ..." Oz ended looking back into the room.
"Yeah ..." Cordelia responded, returning her eyes to the group in the library. "Some choices should be ours."
"But it will happen. Eventually we'll leave because staying and always being on the outside will just hurt too much. They won't mean to push us away but they will and we'll let them," he added.
"I'm not there yet," Cordelia replied. "But sometimes when I see the way they are with each other ... you know. You don't have to read minds to know ..."
Oz gave Cordelia a side glance, his face briefly concerned. "So ... we'll leave them to it," he said firmly, ending any further discussion on the topic.
"Yeah ... I'm not really the hero type anyway. Anyone could tell you that. I don't even know what I'm doing here," Cordelia replied turning from the door and moving down the corridor. "Leave them to it."
Oz watched her go and quietly he mumbled, "Walking away seems easy. But we never really will." With that said, he briefly glanced into the library before turning to follow Cordelia down the corridor.
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Thanks to Lilly a beta treasure