IWRY Fic: "Return to Me" 1/3

[thecarlysutra]

TITLE: Return To Me
RATING: R
SPOILERS: Through “Not Fade Away”
SUMMARY: Buffy travels halfway around the world to find Angel, and finds that's only half the journey.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Thank you so, so much to my wonderful beta readers shellybelle, southernbangel, willow_dragon, and omankoshojou. You guys are unbelievably awesome and I am grateful beyond the capacity to express myself.
AUTHOR'S NOTES 2: a2zmom, I totally snaked a Buffy line from you, and I didn't even realize it until just a few minutes ago, because it was so perfect that it was just in my natural Buffy lexicon. So guys, when Buffy says something about not choosing a career as "a first choice" for Dawn? That's all a2zmom's brilliance.
AUTHOR'S NOTES 3: You guys have no idea how close I came to calling this fic "Buffy in Arabia." Just so you know.

She’d left her husband for him. She had figured, in brief moments of fancy – because let’s face it, she was selfish and thought about that kind of thing, him returning all of a sudden to sweep her off her feet – that it would be some sort of grand gesture, like in the movies. Maybe she’d run out of the church, white lace trailing behind her, a chain she’d soon be free of, their friends gasping in horror . . . or maybe she’d sashay to a purring getaway car with chic luggage, Danny at her heels, begging her not to go. But reality delivered passively, as it tended to do. She’d gotten a phone call that was mostly static, and when she’d hung up, she’d gone upstairs and packed her – less chic than she felt she deserved; Danny swore they’d get a new set, but he didn’t really care about that kind of thing, so it just stayed promised and undone – suitcase and booked a flight to a city she hadn’t heard of twenty minutes ago. She’d put the one-way ticket on her MasterCard without flinching, even though it cost more than the trip to Aruba for their honeymoon and that had been first class and not on some crop-hopper that may or may not fail to get her there in one piece. She’d carried the suitcase downstairs and set it by the door and wondered how bad traffic was on the interstate and whether they had in-flight movies on crop-hoppers.

Danny had been roused enough by this sudden odd flurry of activity to leave his study and come to investigate.

“Um . . . what’s with the suitcase? You going somewhere?”

“Sudan. Which car do you want me to drive to the airport?”

He’d blinked a few times, sluggishly, unsure of how to react.

“What’s that?” he’d responded slowly.

“It’s a country in northern Africa,” she’d replied, deadpan. “On the Nile. Lots of sand and camels, but no Charlton Heston movies made there.”

“No, I know what Sudan is, I—you’re going there why?”

She’d let her eyes fall to the face of her watch. She didn’t want to be late for her flight.

“I got a call from a doctor at a hospital in Kassala . . . which is a city in Sudan, apparently. . . . She said Angel’s there, and he’s asking for me.”

She hadn’t bothered to raise her eyes from her watch to look Danny in the eye, so she didn’t catch his expression, but she’d had a pretty good idea what it looked like.

“Angel. Angel your first love Angel.”

It hadn’t been a question. She’d looked up then.

“That’s the one,” she said softly.

“How long are you going to be gone?”

“I don’t know. As long as he needs me.”

Danny’s mouth had hardened into a thin gray line. “If you think I’m letting my wife fly halfway around the world to play nurse to some old boyfriend, you have got another thing coming.”

He should have known better than that. To be fair, it was not in his usual character to go around making bold statements like that, and he normally didn’t throw his weight around with her; she really had just thrown all this on him.

Still, he should have known better.

“Fine,” she’d said quietly. “I’ll make it easy for you, then.”

There had been no malice nipping at her. All she’d been thinking was how difficult and expensive it would be if she missed her flight, and what would be the quickest, most painless way to slither away from the situation. She’d slid the rings from the third finger of her left hand and laid them on the table at her side, the one they always threw their keys on when they came in. The keys from the Range Rover, in fact, had still been sitting there from the last time she’d gone grocery shopping; she’d palmed them.

“I’ll take the SUV to the airport, if that’s okay.”

He’d gaped at her. “Buffy . . . what the fuck are you doing? You can’t be serious.”

She’d shrugged, looking at her watch again. “You drive the Lexus more, anyway. Besides, the keys are upstairs . . .”

He’d come forward, suddenly enough that she hadn’t had time to expect it, and taken her by the arms forcefully enough to make her drop the keys.

“I mean this. Throwing your life away to run off to Africa, I—you can’t be serious . . .”

She’d met his eyes. “You can mail me the papers in Sudan. Get your hands off of me.”

This time, he’d known better, and even though he’d never seen what a Slayer really was, he’d seen her pick up enough furniture one-handed while vacuuming to know not to press her. She’d bent to pick up the keys, checked her watch one last time, then taken her suitcase out to the car. He hadn’t followed her.

Now, sitting in her heinously expensive window seat looking out over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Africa, she wondered if he’d been right. She hadn’t heard from Angel since the last time she’d seen him, almost four years ago; since then she’d gotten married and built up a halfway decent job that didn’t involve killing things, and she and Danny had a house and a yard and a big television, all the trappings that young, professional couples were supposed to have. Was she throwing it all away on some stupid, fruitless trek to the desert?

“I didn’t mention that we love each other,” she said dully to the wisps of clouds outside the thick Plexiglas shield between her and oblivion. The dark-skinned man beside her was asleep, snoring, and didn’t notice her crestfallen face. She thought that two years and three months wasn’t nearly long enough for the love to go out of a marriage.

Buffy looked down at her left hand, at the slight tan line where her rings usually sat. It was barely noticeable to anyone who wasn’t looking for it, but it looked obscene to her. She wished she had something to cover it up with: another ring, makeup, mittens, anything. She was ashamed.

Of what, she wasn’t sure. The little pale line seemed to small to produce such a huge feeling within her. Bristling beneath the unpleasantness, she leaned back in the not-quite-comfort of her chair and closed her eyes, tried to sleep.

She wondered why Angel was asking for her. What he was doing in a Sudanese hospital.

And if he was okay.

***

The only major airport in northern Sudan was in its capital, Khartoum, so she had no choice but to end her flight there, even though it was over two-hundred-and-fifty miles away from Kassala. She had asked the doctor, Sana, on the phone about taking a smaller commuter flight to Kassala, but Sana had warned her against it: the planes in Sudan were either owned by the government or they were privately owned. Either way, you couldn’t trust them. Even though it would take longer, it would be safer to take the train.

The airport at Khartoum was hot and crowded, a virtual bazaar; it was like a circus compared to LAX. She looked around for a sign pointing her toward baggage claim; a sick feeling condensed in her stomach when all she saw was the squashed treble clefs of Arabic script glaring out at her from every surface. Sana hadn’t said anything about her needing to know Arabic. Certainly Angel had told her that she didn’t speak it, that she’d hardly been able to wade through two years of French in high school . . . ?

As soon as her eyes found someone in a uniform, she caught their arm, desperate.

“Please,” she said catching the irritated Arab-dark eyes. “I need help, I’m lost . . . I need to find my bag.”

He pulled his arm away from her and said something sharp in a short, foreign tongue to another approaching uniform. The sick feeling in Buffy’s stomach rollicked.

“You’re lost?” the second uniform asked after a moment, his English slightly stilted but not too accented.

The sick feeling dissipated. He spoke English; he was going to help her . . .

“Yes,” she replied gratefully. “I need to find the baggage claim, but all the signs are in Arabic and I don’t speak—”

“Passport,” he said lazily, his heavily hooded eyes dropping over her carelessly.

She frowned but handed him her papers. He looked over them with the same lazy perusal.

“You’re American?”

“Yes, I—”

“What business do you have in Khartoum?”

“None. I’m going to Kassala, I’m meeting a friend there; he’s been injured—”

His eyes flickered up from the blue wallet to her flushed face. “Your visa does not give you clearance to leave Khartoum.”

The blush darkened, pooling deep crimson at the apples of her cheeks and over her breasts. “That can’t be right.”

“This isn’t America. You can’t just traipse around wherever you please. We have regulations to be adhered to.”

She could feel her muscles tensing; her first instinct was to fight her way out of this situation. But she could see five security guards just from where she was standing, their weapons proudly displayed, and there were sure to be more: that would be stupid.

“Fine,” she said tersely. “What do I do to get clearance for Kassala? Is there someone I have to pay . . .?”

The guard she’d been conversing with relayed something in the mystery language to his silent partner; the two of them laughed, and the sick feeling crept stealthily up her throat.

“No, sister,” the guard said. “You have to go through customs.”

***

The catastrophe in Los Angeles had been spectacular enough to attract media attention overseas, although – thankfully – small enough that the coverage had been brief, a blurb on the “What’s Happening Around the Globe” that would have been missed had it been anywhere but LA or Manhattan. A law firm destroyed under freak circumstances, and a cave-in – they were blaming defunct subway tunnels – causing a city block to collapse. Buffy had been curled up on the couch, trying creative ways of dissuading the Immortal of his nightly I-need-to-watch-the-news habit – he was steadfast in his routines; she only succeeded in breaking his concentration about once a week, and the rest of the time she had to suffer through – when she saw it. A knot had condensed in her stomach; Angel had to be there, he had to be involved, she knew it. Why hadn’t he called her for help? An event like that surely had precipitating factors. Desperately, she’d untangled herself from her lover and scrambled from the couch and to the phone, punched in a number she’d memorized but never used . . . the operator’s ominously pleasant voice, telling her the number she’d dialed was no longer in service.

Another half-dozen frantic phone calls to various points around the globe had uncovered the truth – the frantic phone calls that Angel had made over the past year, the calls for help that had been rebutted with her name but without her knowledge and – worse – the trip to Los Angeles to take the rogue Slayer from his hands.

It was months before she spoke to some of her lifelong friends again, her rage slow-burning. The Immortal had barely put up a fight when she said she was flying to LA to find Angel, just said lethargically that if she left, she couldn’t count on him being there when she returned. She’d left stupidly angry, eyes burning with tears of undetermined parentage: sorrow or ire. Fine. She couldn’t depend on him, either; the only constant in her life was chasing Angel.

Her flight had gotten her there by daybreak the next morning, and she’d barely seen two more sunrises before she’d tracked him down. But she’d had help. Giles, realizing immediately the depth of her fury, had given her the names of some contacts in the area to aid her, in hopes of not completely destroying the bridge between them. She’d recognized the gesture; although she was still furious with him, the wound healed clean, and the act was enough that it would have even if his contacts hadn’t led her to Angel’s hospital room within forty-eight hours.

Hospital room. She had blanked at the words when the grizzled little bounty hunter had told her that Angel was holed up in Cedars-Sinai.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Nope. Apparently he’s pretty badly hurt.”

“But . . . he can’t be in a hospital. He’s a vampire.”

The little troll had shrugged. “That’s what I thought, too.”

***

Customs was different in Khartoum. Normally this was the kind of thing she would have beaten a man unconscious for, but she kept Angel’s image in her head and bit her tongue, steeled her body, and took it. The guards led her into a room off the main floor, away from the bazaar bustle, and sat her down at a long, bare table. They opened up her luggage – at least they’d found it – and went through it, piece by piece, taking everything that could be considered objectionable or dangerous. Then they stood her up and stripped her down, had her spread, and searched her slowly. She knew there was no need for this. She knew she wasn’t a suspect of terrorism.

She kept Angel’s image in her head and bit her tongue, steeled her body, and took it. The whole ordeal took under forty minutes, and afterwards they stamped her passport with a one-month visa for Kassala, let her take what was left of her luggage, and pointed her towards the train depot.

***

She had gone to see him immediately, although the strange circumstances of the situation had left her with the nagging suspicion that this could all be a trap, that Angel was really dust in the wind . . .

But no. She’d come to the room number Giles’s bounty hunter had given her, and there he’d been, looking pale and battered but alive. She had literally run to his bedside and had him under her hands in seconds, just to reaffirm the reality of his flesh.

Angel had gazed up at her oddly, one eye bruised half-shut, the other narrowed in distrust. “Buffy?”

She’d smiled and pulled a chair up to his bed, sat beside him, so that they were roughly at eye level. “Angel. Hi.”

“Are you real?”

She’d closed a hand around his, given it a soft squeeze. “I’m real. How are you feeling?”

He had looked horrible just from what she could see above the blankets, and she’d been a little afraid to hear his answer. To her horror, he had closed his eyes and shuddered visibly before answering.

“They’re all dead,” he’d whispered. “Cordelia, Gunn, Fred, Wesley, Spike . . .”

“And you’re not,” she had answered slowly. There were other things she should have said, but she couldn’t, too distracted by seeing him and by the wires going into him, by the constant music of the heart monitor that was hooked into him, the heart monitor, Angel, how did this happen, how could you not tell me?

“No,” he had replied, tortured. “They’re dead because I wasn’t strong enough, and I’m alive, because . . . well, maybe because I should have to live with it.”

“But . . . how did this happen?”

And he had laughed, an ugly noise. “It’s a gift, Buffy.”

She’d had a thousand more questions, but the look on his face was finally enough that she’d had to stop. She had reached out with the hand not holding his, reached out to stroke his face and comfort him; he had shuddered away from her like a bird with a broken wing, flinching, crying. He’d taken his hand back, too, recoiling into a ball like an injured animal, even though it was obviously painful; he’d moaned with the effort, but he hadn’t stopped. He’d had to get away from her that badly, had to hide his weeping face from her.

“Get out.”

His voice had been barely human. Buffy had hurried from the room before she was sick.

***

She wanted to take a taxi to the train station, but she couldn’t find a driver that spoke English, and after the ordeal with customs she was afraid to enlist the aid of any of the guards to help with translation. In any event, the English-speaking guard had told her that the train depot was less than a mile from the airport, and she could walk it.

Buffy had never been to Africa, although from all the Arabic that was washing over her ears, from the sand that had blown up to meet them as the plane descended, she was identifying Sudan more and more as a country of the Middle East; she’d never been there, either. She’d toured around Europe some, and a little of Asia, but mostly she didn’t have much taste for travel. She didn’t like living out of suitcases, and she didn’t like hotel shampoos and foreign cuisine, and she despised not knowing the language or the lay of the land. There were few things that she disliked more than not being in control of a situation, and trekking the globe brought about too many ways to be helpless. It would be different if she had a tongue for languages, like Dawn, or if she could instinctually know north, like Willow with one of her spells, but when she traveled she ended up getting frustrated and fighting her way out. Diplomacy was not really her thing. She’d always hoped that she’d get more mellow as she got older, because she certainly saw the beauty in things, even things she couldn’t understand – the architecture and, okay, the men of Rome, for instance, had held a particular draw – but it didn’t seem to happen. She wasn’t mellowing; she just kept being Buffy, all wound up and confused.

Khartoum, she had read in her in-flight magazine, was the capital of Sudan, and the second-largest city. It was certainly busy like a large capital city; there was traffic everywhere, although the concept of traffic in Khartoum was somewhat different than the concept of traffic that she was used to. The streets were paved, but they were still clouded by the sand that was flying around everywhere, and crazy with vehicles rushing every which way: buses, trucks, bicycles. Pedestrians and livestock ran manically in and out throughout the melee, and there didn’t seem to be any posted traffic laws; instead of stopping and signaling, people in cars and on the street shouted and honked at one another to signal their intentions.

“Definitely glad I didn’t take a cab,” Buffy muttered to herself, and hurried along in the direction of the train station.

The morning sun was beating down upon her, shining impossibly bright. It was insanely hot, a dry heat that made her body beg for water. It was before noon and she was wearing light clothing and just walking easily along, and still a light sheen of sweat started to rise along her skin. She looked around her; everywhere she could see Muslim women in their hijabs. She didn’t know how they could stand to be out in this unbearable heat under all that cloth for even a second, let alone their whole lives. They didn’t seem bothered; she wondered if they knew something she didn’t.

She heard a familiar noise, and her heart gave a little surge of hope: a train whistle. She quickened her pace and soon she saw some resting engines, and not far beyond, a great fervent crowd. The station.

On her way to buy a ticket, Buffy passed the sleeping locomotives. They looked much older and smaller than any she had seen – not that she had seen many – but she packed her worry away; Sana had said something about the railway system in Sudan being somewhat behind that of the railway system in Europe, about the tracks being narrower . . . Buffy didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but it’s not like she was going to spend very much time on the thing, was she? Kassala was only two hundred and fifty miles from Khartoum.

Buffy prayed for two things as she approached the ticket window: a teller that spoke English, and better luck here than at the baggage claim. She seemed to have good fortune immediately; the teller was a woman, a dark-skinned Muslim with a modest white hijab.

Buffy stepped up nervously, setting her suitcase down so she could get her credit card out of her pocket.

“I need a ticket to Kassala.”

The woman didn’t say anything at first, and a feeling of dread began to rise in Buffy’s stomach; she didn’t speak any English, she was going to be trapped here in Khartoum, she was going to have to fly on the questionable airlines . . .

“Kassala?” the woman asked finally.

“Yes,” Buffy answered, exhaling.

“When?” It heavily accented, but it was English.

Buffy could have kissed her. “As soon as possible. Now.”

“Next one is . . . twenty minutes.”

“Yes, fine, perfect.”

“What class?”

Buffy didn’t understand. “Huh?”

“There are three classes: first class is nicest, costs the most. Then second class. Then third class, which is free. You ride on the roof.”

Buffy blinked. “What? You ride where?”

The woman didn’t look at all fazed. “The roof.”

“Like . . . the top part of the train?”

“Yes.”

“Um, no. No roof sitting for me. First class is fine. Here.”

She handed the woman her MasterCard; she ran it through a machine that looked much too modern to be anywhere where people rode on the roofs of trains. Buffy signed for the transaction, put her card and her ticket in her pocket, and took her suitcase to be stowed at the woman’s request. That was relatively stress-free; she carried it around to the other side of the building and an Arab boy took it and threw it in his little cart with a bunch of other bags to be taken on the train. Buffy was worried about it for approximately thirteen seconds, until she remembered what had happened to her luggage at the airport and that nothing really important was in there and she could always just buy new stuff.

There was a payphone by the ticket window; Buffy called Sana and told her when her train was leaving. Sana said she’d meet her at the station in Kassala, and told her to have a good trip. Buffy was about to ask about what she should expect on the train, but the woman at the ticket window shouted to her; her train was boarding. She pointed, and Buffy excused herself from the conversation quickly and followed a great moving group of people to the only train in evidence at the moment. The woman had been telling the truth; people were climbing to the top of the train and settling down for the ride. There were, at this point, actually more people on the roof than inside the train, which seemed silly to Buffy, but she guessed that if you could save a buck while you traveled . . . she dismissed the thought and hurried to board, slipping in among the snaking line of passengers, hastily pulling her ticket out from her pocket. A uniformed man barely glanced at her ticket before hustling her inside the car and pointing to her seat. It was dark in the car, and a little musty, and the seat was a bit stiff and uncomfortable, but she was by the window and she’d have fresh air and could look out and watch the country pass by until she got to Kassala . . . and at least she wasn’t riding on the roof. You had to count your blessings.

She looked around her compartment curiously; there were only five other people there, and the uniformed man wasn’t leading anyone else in. The other compartments were being filled to teeming; they were bustling, chattering, and above, she could hear people on the roof. She frowned. Maybe there was something wrong with her compartment . . . then she remembered she’d supposedly paid for first class. That was just fine with her. The less fish-out-of-water she had to feel, the better.

Buffy leaned back in her seat and studied her ticket for boredom. Most of it she couldn’t read – it was in the lovely but unintelligible Arabic script – but numbers were the same as in America, and she could make those out. Wait a damn minute. Unless they had a completely different system of time over here – which could be the case, but seemed kind of unlikely – it was going to take almost three hours to get to Kassala. But it was only two hundred and fifty miles away! It would take almost less time to drive there in a car.

Buffy moaned and slunk down in her seat. Crap. Stupid Sudan.

***

A young doctor had seen her leaving Angel’s hospital room and stopped her, a curious expression on his face.

“I didn’t know he had anyone,” he’d said softly.

“I was just leaving,” she’d muttered. She hadn’t been quite sure whether or not she was going to be ill, and she hadn’t wanted to stay and find out there, with an audience.

“How is he?”

That had struck her as an odd question coming from a doctor.

“Um . . . I’m not sure. Aren’t you the doctor?”

The man had smiled a little, sadly. “I meant emotionally. Sorry. Physically, he’s healing all right, although he was pretty beat up; they found him under all that rubble, you know, the cave in?”

Buffy had nodded numbly. “I know.”

“But emotionally . . . ? Survivor’s guilt. He’s on suicide watch—” Buffy’s breath had caught in her chest. “—the first few days, he had a breathing tube, and he pulled that out; he’s pulled the IV’s several times . . . he asked for some basic toiletries, you know: toothbrush, comb, razor so he could shave: he slit his wrists. I used to work on the psych ward, but I’ve seen precious few people so determined to die.”

Buffy had smiled grimly. “That’s funny. Because I’ve never known anyone who wanted so desperately to be alive.”

***

The train ride was bumpy and shuddery and dusty and loud, and it was indeed three hours later that a grumpy Buffy was delivered to the train depot in Kassala. She hastily departed the shaky locomotive, and looked around desperately for Sana, hoping that the woman hadn’t already left; surely she couldn’t have anticipated that the stupid train would take three hours to get there from Khartoum?

A small, light-complexioned Arab woman with pretty features approached her. She was wearing street clothes; Buffy frowned. She thought the doctor was coming to meet her.

“Buffy?” the woman asked. Her voice was light, clear, and slightly lilted with accent, every word a musical question.

Buffy forced a smile and walked toward her. “Hi.”

“Hello. I am Sana. I hope your trip was not too unpleasant.”

“Sana? I thought . . . I thought you were the doctor.”

She smiled radiantly. “Yes. We spoke on the phone?”

Buffy nodded numbly. “Yeah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude; I just thought you’d be wearing a stethoscope or something more doctory. Sorry. It’s been kind of a long day.”

Sana nodded.

“I understand,” she said, leading Buffy through the crowds to the baggage terminal. “But I’m surprised it wasn’t a long three days. Usually, they like to make foreigners wait for their passports to clear.”

Buffy creased her brow. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a game they like to play. Usually the officials like to make Europeans sit around Khartoum for a few days waiting for their passport clearance—”

Buffy spied her bag but did nothing, stilled by a slow-burning anger.

“Wait. You knew something like that could happen?”

Sana shrugged. “Yes. But what could I do? I do not have the power to authorize passport clearance for you, and I thought if I told you over the phone, it would only frustrate you. Angel says you are quick-tempered. You are only lucky this does not happen to you.”

Buffy yanked her suitcase violently from the luggage bin.

“No, I paid the guards in customs,” she snapped.

Sana’s features stilled suddenly.

“I have heard about that,” she said quietly. “I am sorry. They knew you were American; they would not do that to a Muslim woman. But you . . . they could tell. You look American, so—what is the word for your complexion, your hair color?”

Buffy was so startled by the question that it threw some of her anger off-kilter. Sana spoke English so well that she’d forgotten until now that it must be her second language.

“Huh? Um, blonde,” she answered clumsily.

“Yes. So blonde, it’s easy to tell.”

Sana was flushed beneath her hijab, and Buffy suddenly felt a stab of guilt for telling her what had happened. It hadn’t been her fault; what could she have done to stop it?

To change the subject, she said, “You didn’t know ‘blonde?’ How did you know what I looked like, then; didn’t Angel describe me to you?”

Sana smiled, the blush fading. “He did. At length, and fondly . . . but in Arabic.”

“You talk in Arabic?” she asked, letting Sana lead her to the street, away from the greater bustle near the luggage terminal and the unloading platform. She didn’t doubt that Angel knew Arabic, but for some reason she didn’t imagine him speaking it unless he had to.

“Yes. English, it makes some people nervous.”

“Do you have a lot of people listening to your conversations?”

“It’s always best to be careful. It’s not like America.”

“What does that—”

Sana cut her off. “We’ll take a taxi to the hospital, yes?”

They were at the edge of the manic street – unpaved – bustling with buses and taxis and bicycles, spilling over with fruit vendors and runaway chickens and ambling, arguing pedestrians. Buffy was a little anxious about trusting a cab driver to get her through this mess in one piece, but she was exhausted after the train ride and didn’t want to walk through it, either, so she reluctantly agreed.

“Fine. Yes.”

Sudanese taxicabs were not the big, yellow beetles scurrying about the cities of the US that she had become acclimated to over her years. Buffy had been to other countries, and she knew that even in other English-speaking countries taxis looked different, and she wasn’t quite sure why she was expecting a bright yellow straight-out-of-New-York version here, but when Sana led her up to their chariot-for-hire, she was confused.

“That’s just a car,” she said dully.

“It is a taxi,” Sana corrected her, and started chatting in Arabic with the driver, who was leaning lazily against the hood of his just-a-car, which really wasn’t: it looked like it had been outfitted for some sort of battle: it had super-sized wheels and a big wooden rack bolted – obviously by hand – to the back. Buffy studied it dubiously while Sana talked to the driver – what could be taking that long? – a nervous feeling blooming in her stomach.

“All right,” Sana said finally. “Get in, let’s go.”

“What took so long?” Buffy asked as she slid into the taxi beside Sana.

“I had to negotiate a price,” the doctor explained.

“Negotiate? Isn’t there just a fare?”

“Oh, no. It’s not like America; you bargain with the driver to decide on a fair price for the number of passengers and their baggage and livestock.”

Buffy looked around the car dubiously for signs of recent four-legged passengers.

“Livestock?” she repeated dully. “Is that what the thing on back’s for?”

“Yes, sometimes, although passengers will sometimes ride on there, too.”

“You guys are brave out here,” Buffy said. “People on the backs of cabs, people on top of trains . . . I can’t wait to see the hospital. Do you even use anesthetic?”

Sana was going to answer, but the taxi started moving. In this sense, “started moving” is used in the way you might say, “the rocket started moving” or “the earth started moving.” Buffy was thrown against the door of the taxi; there were no seatbelts in the vehicle; but Sana had ridden in one before and knew how to plant her legs and where to grab for purchase with her hands, so she was tossed about less.

“Jesus!” Buffy yelled.

The driver answered back in a volley of Arabic.

“Would you like me to translate?” Sana offered.

Buffy flinched. “Probably not. It’s all bad, isn’t it?”

Sana smiled indulgently. “Nothing I would say.”

The driver took a wild turn to avoid running over a chicken. On the unpaved sand streets of Kassala, this was a crazy thing to do, and the taxi wobbled out of control as the driver strove to correct. Buffy was tossed around, grabbing desperately at the seat in front of her – the driver’s – to still herself; he cursed at her in Arabic for jarring his seat, and she yelled at him in English for driving like a crazy person.

For a five-minute drive, it felt like hours, and Buffy almost kissed the ground when they arrived at the hospital in one piece.

***

She had appeared like clockwork every day until he was released. The first two days, he had asked her pointblank to leave, and the first day she’d just left again; the second day she’d stayed and he’d asked a nurse to have her removed, and she’d left as security was on their way to escort her from the premises. The third day, he had refused to make eye contact, and the two of them had sat until visitor’s hours were over in a stony silence, four hours of pretending the other didn’t exist.

On the fourth day, she’d arrived when he was having his bandages changed and he had colored in shame, but didn’t ask her to go, even though the nurse had prompted him on the matter. In truth, Buffy’d had to force herself to stay through it; even after hell, he hadn’t looked like that, and she had bitten the insides of her cheeks to ensure against tears. After the nurse had finished with his dressings, she’d helped him back into bed and said in a tone so bright that Buffy knew it was for her benefit rather than Angel’s how nice it was to see someone visiting him, and maybe your pretty girlfriend can convince you to eat something so you can get off this IV. Buffy had been confused; she’d thought the IV’s were medicine. She’d asked the nurse about it; yes, Angel was getting drugs intravenously, but since he had refused to eat since he’d been checked in, they were also giving him nutrients and a saline solution to keep him sated and hydrated. Buffy was so furious with him that she’d stormed out wordlessly as soon as the nurse toddled away.

She’d still been angry the fifth day, but it was Angel, so she’d gone in and didn’t say anything, just went in at the usual time and sat down silently, refusing to look at him. As soon as she sat down, though, he’d spoken:

“I’ll eat something if you’ll keep coming.”

She’d raised her red-rimmed eyes to him. “Do you know you’re on suicide watch?”

No emotional response had reflected in his face. “It doesn’t surprise me. But no one told me, no.”

She’d shaken her head. She’d been so angry with him. “I can’t believe you would throw away this beautiful gift.”

He’d looked at her for a long time without speaking. Finally, he’d said again, “I’ll eat something if you’ll keep coming.”

She’d sighed. “It’s a start.”

***

From the outside, the hospital was fairly small, and generally undistinguishable from other Sudanese buildings except it had a white flag with a red cross hanging from the front. Sana showed her inside with an obvious air of pride, and rattling off figures Buffy would soon forget concerning the building’s construction and how many doctors and nurses were staffed there, and so on.

“Right now, we have just under thirty patients; there are no infectious disease patients – cholera, typhoid – we send them to the big hospital in Khartoum if they’re foreigners or wealthy, or to hospices if they’re not. Angel, he was kind of surprising; we don’t usually see many Anglos in here—”

And then the realization struck her that Angel was just moments away . . . suddenly there were butterflies in her stomach, fluttering wildly. She brought a hand to her hair abruptly, girlishly; she probably looked awful, all day spent in transit, in heat and dust and humiliation.

She stopped walking.

“Sana . . . is there someplace I could shower and change my clothes first? I-I probably look terrible from the train and everything . . .”

She could feel her cheeks heating, and she wasn’t sure how ashamed she should be. Weren’t Muslim women all about modesty? But Sana looked amused, knowing even, as she nodded and showed her to a tiny bathroom on the ground floor.

“I’m going to go upstairs and tell him you’re here; he’s been worried about your travel. We’ll be on the second floor – just up one floor – when you’re finished.”

“What room?”

“It’s an open room. Don’t worry, you’ll find us.”

She glided quietly away; Angel was in good company here, Buffy thought, closing the door behind her and starting to strip. Nobody else made any noise when they walked, either . . . maybe it was the shoes. Everyone wore sandals or slippers. Big on stealth.

She let down her hair and stepped into the shower. It was a bit of an older model than she was used to, but the mechanics were basically the same, and in a moment she had it on; she’d worried, briefly, about the water, but it was clean, clear, and cool, and it felt like heaven. She let the torrents rinse away the sand and fatigue from her weary flesh and then shut it off. She located a towel, dried off quickly, and put on fresh clothing and light makeup from her suitcase, brushed her hair and pulled it up off her neck in a loose chignon. (It was so hot here!)

Buffy took a deep breath and walked upstairs to meet Angel.

***

Angel had been released on the ninth day. Buffy had double-checked his sizes and gone out and bought him some clothes for the occasion, since the ones he had arrived in were tattered and bloody and burnt. All showered and dressed up in brand new clothes, he had looked almost healthy, but he’d hurt. Additionally, the young doctor she had spoken to her first day in LA hadn’t wanted to release him, but there had been no physical reason to keep him anymore, really. All of his sutures had been holding, most of his wounds had stopped weeping, and the majority of his bruises had faded to yellow and gray. Buffy had gotten him to eat, so he had been weaned off the IV’s for sustenance, and he had never complained of pain, so he hadn’t needed them for narcotics. But the doctor had worried about the suicide watch, and had wanted to move Angel downstairs to psych to be watched for a little while, or maybe just have him come in for outpatient therapy. He had come by and mentioned this; Angel had stared at him stonily and told him to fuck off. He was a grown man and he would kill himself if he liked.

Buffy had been staying in a nearby hotel. When Angel was released, he’d moved in automatically, without question; there was never really a decision made, it was just the immediate actiont. They’d taken a cab from the hospital to the hotel and Buffy’d lain in the king size bed with Angel until he fell asleep. They needed an apartment, but first they needed to figure out where they wanted to go; Buffy had an apartment in Rome, an apartment she shared with Andrew and Dawn, but did they want to stay in Rome? And was she automatically taking Angel with her, was this permanent? She’d kind of adopted him like a hurt puppy, without even talking to him about it. She knew she didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles, and knew that he probably didn’t either, knew for sure that it couldn’t be good for him to stay in the city where all of his friends’ bodies were buried. He would heal best away from their ghosts.

She’d left him sleeping in the bed and went through the bag the people at the hospital had packed for him. Gauze and cotton batting and surgical tape for dressing his wounds, which the chatty nurse had shown her how to do; a pamphlet on outpatient therapy probably stuck in there by the young doctor, Angel would be thrilled; and several tall, slim orange bottles of prescriptions and little pamphlets of instructions for each of them. Buffy had taken them out of the bag, lined them up on the bedside table. She’d wanted to make sure that he was taken care of, and she hadn’t known much about doctoring. There were three bottles: two painkillers – a narcotic and an anti-inflammatory agent – and an antibiotic. The antibiotic he had to take on a schedule, but the painkillers he could take whenever he liked. She’d frowned. That would be more difficult; Angel didn’t talk about pain. He had to work through all the pain.

The dumbass.

She’d sighed, made a mental note of the schedule for his antibiotics, and had carefully replaced everything in the bag. Then she’d crawled back in bed with him, careful not to bump any of his tender spots, but still getting as close as possible. No substitute for TLC.

***

They had been in the hotel three days when it came time to bathe Angel and change his bandages. She had thought it would be hard or sexual, but it turned out to be neither. The only part that was hard was when she was almost finished, the bandages at his wrists where he’d tried to kill himself.

“Angel, we have to talk,” she’d said, circling gauze around his forearms.

“Okay.” He was more laconic than ever.

“I love you. I love you so, so much, and I want to be with you . . . and I’ll do anything to be with you, but . . . but I won’t watch you destroy yourself. If you . . . I can’t do it, okay? If you do this kind of thing again, I’m gone, all right?”

He’d tensed. “You don’t want me to go therapy, do you?”

“What? No, it’s not about that. But I’m not strong enough to live through watching you die. No suicide attempts. That means you eat, and everything, okay?”

“Okay.”

***

For a few weeks, everything had been good. Angel had healed under her tender patronage, and eventually his hard veneer had been sanded down enough that sleeping in the same bed and sharing the same living space had meant cuddling, then kissing, then making slow, sweet, passionate love for hours on every surface of the hotel room. As Angel’s body had gotten its flexibility and resiliency back, they had taken it for test drives doing things that made them both keen and moan. (Angel had had a game that had involved making Buffy scream, to her delight – obviously – and his, though not their neighbors’; Buffy had sworn she was waiting until he was up to his full strength to try a similar version on him, but he’d suspected she just didn’t have the moves).

But it couldn’t last.

***

She’d gone shopping one afternoon and was gone too long or Angel saw something on television that reminded him of Fred, or any number of things. She didn’t know; she’d never asked. In any event, when she’d gotten home, she had found the bathroom painted in blood: Angel had broken the mirror and used an angry knife of glass to slice open his throat.

She hadn’t even been angry. She had not been angry, or even that worried. She had been disappointed. Just once, Angel, couldn’t your love for me be more powerful than your grief?

She had thought ironically of all those prescription bottles . . . all those narcotics he’d never taken, because he didn’t really understand what they were for. . . . He had known, from a theoretical standpoint, that they were to cure pain, but he had not reconciled that with the actual use of the drugs. Angel didn’t understand that sometimes death could come on little cat feet and pull you under quietly; to him, it was always bloody and fast, a quick jerk at the throat.

She had helped him sit up, propping his back against the wall, and staunched the bleeding with a towel. She’d called 911 from the hotel’s phone and explained the situation with amazing calm – she really hadn’t been that worried. She’d felt like she should feel more concern for him. – and then went back into the bathroom and sat with Angel, kept him awake, comforted him until the ambulance came. He had not been upset. He had not been raving or crying or telling her his last rites, he had just been a little tense because of the pain and because it was hard for him to breath.

When the paramedics arrived, they had walked in on the calmest attempted suicide they’d ever seen: he with his throat cut, her watching to make sure he didn’t remove the towel keeping the wound shut, the two of them sitting on the bathroom floor and covered in blood, at a standoff but both still and quiet and calm in each other’s presence.

She had ridden with him to the hospital, and she had donated some of her blood to fill his veins. She’d waited until they’d stitched up his throat and pronounced him okay and strapped him to the bed and put him on suicide watch again, and then she’d gone into his room and kissed him goodbye.

“I love you,” she’d said.

He had smiled sadly.

“That used to be enough,” he’d rasped slowly, choosing his words carefully. The voice afforded by his slashed throat was so tiny that she had to be so, so close to him . . . his lips brushed her ear from necessity rather than intimacy. “Just thinking that you did . . . ? That used to be enough.”

“What changed?”

“The whole world.”

***

She’d met Danny at LAX waiting on her flight back to Rome.

***

An “open room” meant a long corridor of white beds four feet apart, nothings but half-drawn curtains in between. There were perhaps a dozen on each wall, and nearly all of them were filled with dark, bandaged, sleeping bodies. There was no air-conditioning in the hospital – or anywhere else in Africa, as far as Buffy could gather – and the only relief from the crippling heat came from fans turning overhead and in the windows; they added a constant, rhythmic noise akin to crickets or cicadas. The room was not nearly as clean as hospitals in America or on television: the sheets had spots, the IV bags were somewhat limp, and the whole place had a kind of sickly, desperate pallor to it; even the white looked like it had been created by repeated bleachings by hard-working hands, and not by true sterilization. But she couldn’t care, because her eyes found Sana at the second-to-last bed on the opposing wall, talking to the only white face Buffy had seen in Sudan. Her heart gave flutter.

“Angel.”

He smiled, his eyes immediately capturing her golden figure against the blinding white.

“Buffy.”

He held a hand out to her, and she all but ran to his bedside. She was blushing again, she thought. Blushing and dizzy, but she didn’t care. Before she knew it, she was collapsed against him, her skin on his, her hands cradling his face, her mouth crushed against his, kissing him desperately like he belonged to her. Nowhere did the words ‘this is wrong’ register, nowhere did the message ‘you left your husband less than twenty-four hours ago’ surface.

When she finally let him up for air she was panting, they were both panting, clinging to each other.

“You missed me?” Angel guessed breathlessly.

She laughed quietly against the joint of his jaw until she had regained enough personal stability to press kisses there, and then she did that.

“Yes,” she gasped between kisses. “Missed you.”

Behind them, Sana made a quiet noise and Buffy drew up suddenly, embarrassed. She’d forgotten that they had an audience. She’d forgotten . . . everything.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her face flaming, unable to turn around and face the woman.

“It’s all right,” the doctor answered anyway. “I understand.”

“Um, how was your trip?” Angel asked in the absence of smooth, trying to rearrange himself and Buffy so that they were in a less compromising position. He couldn’t move far without flinching; Buffy instinctively placed a hand on his rib cage to steady him and met the unnatural plushness of bandages coiling around his middle. She winced and slid delicately from his lap, pressing a kiss to his temple. She hadn’t known, and more immediately, she hadn’t thought, her excitement upon first seeing him overweighing her good sense.

Sana helped Angel sit back more comfortably, relaxing against his pillows.

“She had a little trouble at the airport,” she reported.

Angel looked alarmed. “What do you mean?”

Buffy forced a plastic smile.

“Oh, you know,” she interjected quickly. “They lost my luggage, not enough salt on the peanuts, the usual.”

Sana eyed her questioningly, but Buffy kissed Angel quickly and he missed the exchange.

“And the train was so not my style, but I’ll survive,” she added. “How did you get here?”

“I hitchhiked.”

She regarded him incredulously. “Of course you did. Why wouldn’t you?”

He ignored her. Instead of responding to her tease, he took her hand, looked at her fondly. “I’m so glad you’re here.” He paused. “I can’t believe your husband let you come alone . . .”

She lowered her eyes. “He didn’t.”

Angel’s jaw tightened. “Oh. So you . . . so you brought him?”

Surprised, she immediately met his gaze again. “What? No. So I left him.”

Angel let them suffer a long, pregnant beat before speaking.

“Oh,” he said finally. “Oh.”

Then he turned his attention to Sana, spoke to her quietly in what Buffy assumed was Arabic. It was a quick, rounded language; it was consonant-heavy and short, like you chopped the first half off of English words and just used what was left.

Sana nodded and left, and Angel turned back to Buffy.

“I—” he started, but she cut him off.

“What did you say to her?”

“I asked her if she’d please give us a minute alone.”

“Oh.” Buffy reflected on this for a moment. “Why is she helping us? I mean . . . I like to believe in the goodness of mankind and everything, but—”

Angel laughed. “Because I’m paying her.”

Buffy was confused. “Huh?”

He smiled good-naturedly. “Never travel to a foreign country without a good supply of cash. Wits and charm will get you so far, but it always, always helps to be able to bribe people. Did you bring any money with you?”

She squirmed. “I have a credit card . . .”

He shook his head. “Most people in Sudan won’t even believe that’s money.” He sobered. “You left your husband?”

She frowned. “Yes.”

“Why?”

She fidgeted. “Well, Sana called, and she said that you were asking for me, and . . . he said not to go. And I had to make a choice.”

“I didn’t mean for you to . . .”

“Does that mean that you’re sorry I did it?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Angel?”

His cheeks hollowed. “I don’t think I should answer that.”

“Why not?”

He flinched. “Buffy, please. I didn’t call you halfway across the world to fight with me. I don’t have the strength. Please. We can fight when I’m well, I promise.”

She smiled despite herself. “Okay.” Something caught at the edge of her mind. “Why did you call for me?”

He looked down at their joined hands, then back at her green eyes, searching him imploringly. He sighed.

“I thought I was dying. I mean . . . I was dying. And I was afraid . . . well, I was afraid. And all I could think of was you. I wanted you near me, and I wanted to say goodbye, and to tell you how sorry I was that I had wasted all of this time not being with you.”

Something thick welled in her throat.

“If you’re lying to me . . .” she said hoarsely.

“Now’s not really the time to lie,” he replied honestly.

“And now?”

“And now I’m getting better,” he answered slowly, weighing his response, “and I have to figure things out. But I still want you near me, and I’m still sorry that I wasted time not being with you. For what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth a whole lot,” she said quietly, and started to take him into her embrace . . . and then stopped.

He frowned. “What’s wrong? Why’d you stop?”

She studied him, concerned. “Where can I hold you without hurting you? I felt bandages . . .”

He chuckled. “It doesn’t matter. Hurt me. Just touch me.”

She slipped her arms around him, brought her body flush against the length of his. She could hear him moan a little, even though he tried to keep it contained within the vault of his chest, and she couldn’t block the sensation of the bandages from her sense memory. She let up, released him, and settled for lying beside him.

“What is all this?” she asked quietly, resting her hand on his bandaged midsection. “What happened?”

He smiled sadly. “The usual. Fairytale beasts with big teeth and sharp claws.”

She ran her fingers over the contours of his face, neck, collarbone, adoring the tiny shivers and the hitches in his breath as she traced over the sensitive flesh of his lips and throat.

“How about a little more information, Cryptic Guy? I find it hard to believe that you were in Kassala on accident, especially if you got this thrashed. What’s the what?”

He shifted slightly to be closer to her, wincing with every move.

“I was in Egypt doing some routine demon slaying – demons like to party there, you know, because of the pyramids; it’s touristy for them – when I heard about Kassala. It started that local seers in Egypt were getting all up in arms because there was some sort of psychic disturbance east of there; they did a little fine-tuning and pin-pointed Sudan. I really wasn’t too worried until the bodies started showing up. Lots of them, always in pairs. Massacred. That got my attention, the violence of it, and the volume. Twelve in a week. Since I wasn’t too far from Sudan, I trekked my way out here: like I said, I hitchhiked; I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going, so I just kind of felt my way out here, followed clues, that kind of thing. It took a week and a half or so, two weeks to lead me to Kassala, and by that time, the body count was high. Thirty, forty people, all just torn to pieces, and the psychic energy problem – if I can rely on the witches I’ve talked to here – is a mess. Big disturbances, holes everywhere. Everyone’s suffering.”

“You should have called me sooner,” Buffy murmured.

He frowned. “I didn’t count on calling on you as Battle Buffy. I thought I could handle it.”

She patted his arm reassuringly. “What happened?”

“Part of the city is bordered by a range of hills called the ‘jebels,’ and very close to that is a tiny village called Khatmiya, where there’s a village well that’s a traditional place for newly-wed couples to drink; the well water is supposed to bring good luck and fertility to the couple—”

Buffy stared at him blankly. “Why are you telling me this?”

He sighed. “I’m getting to it, babe. Be patient.”

“Sorry. I’m not good at history. Go on.”

“The problem here is this: traditionally, the jebels are inhabited only by a tribe of baboons that occasionally come down off the hill and drink from the well, and the rest of the time the jebels are pretty much free for the honeymooning couples that drink from the well. Kind of a rent-free motel, if you will, under the stars. However, in the last few weeks, people have noticed that the baboons have stopped coming to drink from the well . . . and that that the honeymooners who have gone up to the jebels have gone missing.”

“You’re thinking that’s where your demon lives.”

“I know that’s where my demon lives, because I went to investigate. That’s how I ended up in here.”

Buffy frowned. “How many were there?”

Angel made a sour face. “That did this to me? Just the one.”

Buffy winced. “That bad, huh?”

“Oh, it gets worse.”

She blinked. “How does it get worse?”

“The demon, as far as I can figure, feeds off of sexual energy, which accounts for the big disturbances in psychic energy that everyone’s feeling. That’s why he’s parked by the honeymoon spot, and from what I can make out, as long as people are getting hot and heavy around there, he just gets stronger and stronger. Additionally, I’ve heard rumors from the local witches that the well water is actually magic; that it has sincere aphrodisiac properties, which just makes things worse for us.”

She sighed. “Perfect.”

***