Author: Meltha
Rating: FRT
Feedback: Yes, thank you. Meltha
Spoilers: Through the end of Angel, "Not Fade Away"
Distribution: Fanfiction.net and the Bunny Warren. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: In the aftermath of “Not Fade Away,” Angel is left reeling. His steadying force comes from the last person he expected.
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.
Author's Note: Written for the Slash Wedding Ficathon as back-up for Tesla321’s request of Angel/Oz, Angel’s cashmere coat, mellow, music, and no bloodplay or wolfdick. Terribly sorry it took me as long as it did to complete it for you. The title is from REM; no copyright infringement is intended.

The End of the World As We Know It

No one had expected Angel to survive his fight against the forces that the defeated Circle of the Black Thorn unleashed, least of all Angel himself. He had seen the others fall, one by one. Gunn had finally succumbed to his wounds and collapsed to the pavement, his final words one glorious stream of expletive curses raining down on the demons, telling them exactly what he would do to them in this life or the next. Spike had been felled by a thrust with a wooden spear through his back and had survived just long enough to pull it out through his own chest and gore his attacker with it before turning to dust. Illyria had survived the longest by far, but eventually one demon had swung a sword at her neck and beheaded her, her features frozen on her face in an expression of disbelief.

How Angel had gone longer than that, he had no idea. Perhaps he was running on pure rage at that point, and he’d always had a vast reservoir to drink from there. But he wasn’t invulnerable, and the hordes of hell were swarming at him. A lance was thrown at his leg, and he was hit squarely through the knee, his feet going out from under him. A peace settled on him as he knew that he was about to die, not through any fault of his own but because it was simply time. He would have a warrior’s death.

He hadn’t heard the helicopter hovering overhead, lost in the sounds of battle. But when the tremendous rush of power had filled the alley, the cries of the damned around him would have woken the dead. The shrieking was unearthly, terrifying, echoing in the empty night and continuing for an impossibly long time.

Then silence fell, save for the hum of the helicopter’s blades above him, sounding like some nauseatingly large insect. It had landed on the roof of the Hyperion, and in a few minutes the alley was filled again, but this time with humans. Angel, the lance still penetrating his knee, lay on the ground, looking at an ant crawling past his face. It was running in a determined line towards the brick wall and carrying a lump of something on its back, oblivious to anything but its own little mission.

A boot came into view, and Angel realized the ant had been crushed.

“Right,” barked a too-familiar voice. “The hostiles have been neutralized and dissolved, so we won’t need to bring in the clean up team. The other three, though, must have been human, so we’ll need to provide cover stories for their deaths and notify their next of kin. Best to use the standard-issue scenario of innocents caught in a gunfight between rival gangs. Check them for ID.”

In later days, Angel took some comfort that his own laughter as he realized he’d been saved by the Initiative had scared the hell out of Riley.

“Sir?” a faceless man asked Riley. “One… one of the bodies isn’t dead.”

Riley had looked down at Angel’s body, then kicked him onto his back with the sole of his boot.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he’d mumbled as he looked down at the vampire’s face.

And Angel just kept laughing.

He didn’t remember the next few days very well. Dim impressions reached him: a loud argument over whether or not to kill him, a flash of red, the world moving beneath him, the mechanical hum and muted beeping of a medical facility.

Then, finally, one day he woke up, or perhaps his mind simply decided to see the world again, and what he saw was Willow sitting at the end of his bed.

“Hey,” she said, a nervous smile turning her lips up. “It looks like you’re… you know… doing better? I hope?”

He stared around the room, which was the typical sterile, white, cramped place filled with unnecessarily frightening-looking hospital equipment, then back at Willow. She was wearing a violet sweater, vaguely fuzzy, something he could have pictured her wearing during those more innocent days in Sunnydale. Then again, the fuzziness could have been his own muddled vision.

“You’re in England,” she said, answering the question before it was out. “It’s okay. You’re with friends.”

“I don’t have friends,” Angel said, his mouth dry. “At least none that live very long.”

“Um… okay,” Willow said, and he watched her twisting her hands uncomfortably. “Oh! Some good news! Connor’s okay.”

Angel closed his eyes a moment, letting the news sink in that his son was alive. Part of him expected to feel relief, but none really seemed to come. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel a level of contentment that Connor was alive, and if Willow had told him his son was dead, he knew he’d be reeling even lower, but just now the aversion of one tragedy wasn’t enough to make up for the dozens of others he’d gone through in the last few days, the last few months, the last few years, the last few decades.

“That’s good,” he said, trying to smile and failing. “That’s really good, Willow.”

Willow’s smile faltered at his expression and the dead tone of his words. “Is there anything I can get you to make you more comfortable?”

A shanshu he wouldn’t be forced to sign over, he thought silently. His friends alive. Lorne not hating him for making him a killer. His son’s childhood. Cordelia. A sliver of hope that wouldn’t get taken away. A stake.

“No,” he said.

“Okay, well, just so you know, you’re in the Council headquarters. They say that your last battle left you kind of… well… you were exposed to a lot of dark magic in L.A., and it sort of poisoned you,” she said awkwardly. “Kind of like you got soul sick.”

Angel didn’t respond.

“It doesn’t have to be permanent, though,” Willow said, seeming to grasp at straws. “Oh, Giles is here. And Oz. I’m just visiting from Brazil, making my yearly report, but I’ll be here another week or so. I think I’ll just… let you rest.”

“Thanks,” he said in a flat voice.

Before she reached the door, Willow turned back around, biting her lip before saying “I’m sorry, Angel. I really am. But it’s going to get better, okay?”

Angel just returned her gaze, and he knew she could read in it that he didn’t believe it would ever get better. She lowered her eyes to the floor and left quickly.

Angel learned a few more specifics from a white-coated doctor who regarded him with a mixture of disdain and fear: he had sustained an unknown form of mystical injury from the battle. He eventually came to the conclusion, after trying to make heads or tails out of the technical terms, that he was essentially suffering from spiritual exhaustion. That, and a hole in his knee.

He lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, the occasional Council member wandering in and out making rapid, scrawled notations on clipboards that reminded him of Spike. When they arrived in pairs, gabbling in jargon, he heard Fred’s rambling explanations of her latest projects. They all reminded him of a Wesley he’d known long ago with their almost prim ways and their ever-present scent of tea. But there was no music for Lorne. There was no one who spoke the truth like Cordy or Gunn.

Willow still came in occasionally. She smelled different to Angel. He hadn’t been around her except for one brief instance since Buffy’s second death a few years before, and he hadn’t noticed much of anything then, but there was a definite note of something about her. She smelled… fallen, somehow. He’d always been able to savor the tang of innocence in the air, and it had often led Angelus to his most interesting victims. Willow had retained that scent for a long time, longer than most, but something had happened. He found that he really didn’t care what.

Giles never came.

Angel still slept occasionally, though the world seemed lost in a strange, hazy vision even when he was fully awake now, so sometimes he wasn’t entirely certain whether he was asleep or awake. But one day, when he awoke, it was to the sounds of quietly played guitar chords from the hallway. It had been a long time since he had heard music, and while he couldn’t say he enjoyed it, he did, at least, not object to it.

At that point, a blue-tinged head peered through the door, and a quiet voice said simply, “Hey. You’re up.”

Angel took in the face slowly. “Oz,” he finally said.

“Yeah,” Oz said, sitting down. “Didn’t mean to wake you. Just thought I’d pass the time. Forgot about the super-sensitive hearing thing.”

Angel said nothing.

“So,” Oz said, beginning to quietly pick out some notes in a random pattern, “female werewolf, huh?”

“You can still smell her?” Angel asked, slightly surprised.

“Little bit,” he said. “How’d that work out for you?”

“It didn’t,” he said tersely.

“Yeah,” Oz said, nodding down at his guitar. “Been there.”

There was no more talking for a good long while. The sound of Oz’s guitar wafted through the air, his music subdued but, oddly, more alive than anything else in this place. Time passed, though Angel wasn’t sure how much. There was no clock in the room, and it had never occurred to him to ask for one. Eventually, though, Oz glanced at his watch.

“Gotta get going,” Oz said. “Willow stopped by this morning and mentioned she was leaving. She’s going back to Brazil tomorrow.”

Angel nodded. It seemed like the proper response.

“We’re having dinner tonight,” Oz said as he adjusted one string of his guitar slightly. “I don’t think she’s stopping by again… You kinda depress her, and she thinks she’s annoying you.”

Angel opened his mouth to deny it, but realized that Oz was right. He liked Willow, but just now he didn’t think he could take her company without feeling even worse. It made his own internal darkness seem even more bottomless in comparison.

“Tell her thanks,” Angel said.

“Will do,” Oz agreed, then left.

Angel realized a very strange thing a few minutes later. He missed Oz’s quiet companionship.

The next morning, at least Angel believed it was morning in the windowless room with no clock, he heard steps in the hallway, and in spite of everything, he found himself hoping it was Oz. When it was, complete with guitar, he didn’t smile, but there was something akin to a pleasant expectation that accompanied his arrival.

“Hey,” Oz said, sitting again in the colorless and, Angel noticed for the first time, probably very uncomfortable chair in the corner of the room.

“Hey,” Angel said. “Dinner go well?”

Oz gave him a sly smile. “Pretty well, but not too well. Willow has someone back in Brazil. I can’t remember her name… something like Nixon? Eisenhower?”

Angel fought back a small smile. He couldn’t help it. Willow had mentioned Kennedy to him, and it was nice to see Oz displaying his human side by showing the smallest bit of jealous snark.

Angel also chose not to question why Oz’s declaration that Willow still wasn’t interested had made him feel slightly relieved.

The day passed without much conversation. Oz played for hours at a stretch, mostly soft music, things that didn’t jar him too much. Then he left, saying he had a gig in one of the clubs in London’s less trendy spots.

The next day, he returned. And the next. And the next. Until finally, Oz became a part of Angel’s life, the only part of it that he felt truly connected to, the one part that wasn’t filled with sharp edges that made him bleed, the one part that wasn’t a source of never-ending nightmares.

“I’d like to come to hear you play tonight,” Angel suddenly blurted out one day as Oz was playing a new piece, one he had written himself.

Oz looked up, his eyes a little wide for a moment with surprise, the guitar falling silent, then a pleased smile slipped over his face, warming it like sunshine.

“I’d like that too,” he said. “Think the docs will let you go?”

“I don’t know,” Angel realized. “I’ve never asked before.”

Oz nodded, then walked out of the room. Angel could hear voices in the hallway as Oz asked a nurse to bring one of the Council members into the room. Footsteps clicked away down the hall, and soon a woman in her mid-thirties entered the room. Angel vaguely recalled seeing her before, but he’d never really paid much attention to any of the Council who had flitted in and out.

“You wish to leave your room?” the woman asked almost suspiciously.

“Yes,” he answered.

The woman peered at him over the top of her spectacles, regarding him carefully.

“Why?” she asked bluntly.

Angel had several answers on the tip of his tongue: because Oz is the only thing I’ve found interesting in weeks, because I want to remember a world exists outside of these four walls, because getting out sounds moderately appealing, because he’d been a good boy and hadn’t eaten anybody…

But then he frowned.

“Why the hell am I asking you?” he said.

The woman looked offended, sniffed reproachfully, then stated in icy tones, “You are not a prisoner here, despite what the Council would normally wish. Mr. Giles seems to believe you should be accorded some measure of leniency for your… extenuating circumstances, and he is the head of the Council now. Therefore, you are free to leave at will.”

She turned on her heel and left, her shoes clicking disdainfully down the hallway. There was no doubt that her own opinion, and most likely the opinion of many others on the staff, didn’t jibe with Giles’s. A moment of silence followed.

“Cool,” Oz said, shrugging off the terse meeting and snapping shut the locks on his guitar case. “Let’s go.”

Angel got out of bed to find himself a bit shaky on his legs, but then he noticed an obvious problem at the same moment Oz did

“You kinda need some clothes that don’t open in the back,” Oz said, half-smiling.

“I think there might be something in the closet,” Angel said, slightly embarrassed. He waddled over to it, carefully clasping the back of his hospital gown, and opened the door to see the clothes he had worn the night of the final battle hanging too neatly on hangers. Although they had been washed, one knee of his pants still gaped widely. His watch, shattered and stopped with the hands pointing to midnight, along with his wallet and his shoes lay on linoleum floor.

“You might need a shopping trip there,” Oz said, looking over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Angel agreed.

A few minutes later, Oz and Angel had walked out the front door of the Council headquarters. It had never occurred to Angel to wonder what the building looked like from the outside. It was housed in an old Georgian building, almost anachronistic even in London’s antique atmosphere, and its brick and stonework façade showed no signs of the beehive of activity that swarmed behind it.

Typical.

Angel broke out of his reverie when Oz gently touched his arm and motioned him to follow. In a few moments, they were in the midst of the whirlpool of humanity that made up London in the evening hours. Despite its being summer, and he could tell now that it was by the occasional trees and the clothes of passers by, he felt chilled, and the presence of so much life around him was starting to becoming almost grotesque.

“Okay?” Oz asked, and Angel could tell from the concern in his voice that he must be showing signs of being far from at his ease.

“Yeah, fine,” Angel said quickly.

Oz maneuvered him into a small men’s clothing store off a side street. Without fanfare, Angel purchased a pair of pants and changed into them in a fitting room, leaving the tattered ones he had been wearing stuffed into a garbage can. He added a cashmere coat to his clothes, a vain attempt to try to keep out the cold that lurked just beneath his skin, but comforting none the less. Oz nodded approvingly at the choice, then moved back to the street, threading the two of them through a maze of streets until at last they were outside a small pub not far from a college district. Oz gestured towards an empty table in the back of the dark, smoky room, and Angel automatically took a seat. Perhaps it was the heavy shadows or the sense that he didn’t really have to interact with anyone if he didn’t want to, but he felt more relaxed and less nauseous from the press of humanity than he had on his way to Oz’s job.

Oz had disappeared soon after entering the bar, and perhaps half an hour later Angel directed his attention to the stage when he heard a familiar few bars of music come through the air. It was something Oz had played for him many times in his room, soothingly slow, almost cradling the listeners in a sweet embrace. The room seemed almost hypnotized to the beat as people came to the dance floor in ones and twos, the lights above painting splashes of color of their moving bodies like flickers of firelight.

Angel watched from the shadows. He had always been good at that. Now his eyes moved over the band onstage, sparing a glance for the lead singer, a man in his mid-twenties with multi-colored cornrows. The drummer, seated near the back of the stage, seemed in his own world, as Angel noted was the case with most drummers, existing inside of the beat. A girl with startlingly crimson lips stood at a keyboard, her eyes downcast and lined in glittering silver. But it was Oz his eyes sought out, the guitarist somehow almost seeming too small for his instrument, and logically he should have been half-lost in the swirls of movement and light, but it was to him that Angel was drawn. Eventually, he realized why. Oz was the only one of the group who was looking out at the audience instead of down or into himself, and soon, Angel realized that he wasn’t merely taking in the entire writhing spectacle of listeners, but Oz was instead searching for one person: Angel himself.

In later years, Angel was never entirely sure why he made the choice he did that night. Maybe it was the sweetness of the music, the weeks of being alone save for the one person who had stood by his bedside and not asked for lies about feeling better, or maybe it was centuries of being the one alone in the dark. But, when the moment came, he decided to leave the shadows, to allow the faintest glimmer of light to play over his own face, in short, to allow Oz to find him and return his gaze. It formed a simple loop, this looking and being looked at in turn, and for once there was nothing hidden behind his eyes. He chose to let Oz in.

Eventually the set ended, and the band left for their break. Angel remained where he was, still in shadow, waiting and silent. The noise and commotion of the room seemed oddly removed from him, and when he felt Oz’s hand against his arm once more, he simply closed his eyes and enjoyed the brief moment of contact. With a single backward glance, Oz moved through the room fluidly, seeming to almost melt around the others, and Angel followed, drawn by his eyes.

The door to the alley behind the pub was just swinging shut as Angel reached it. For once in his life, he decided not to question himself or his actions, not to think of the repercussions and the thousands of reasons he shouldn’t. He opened the door and went through.

A long moment passed when nothing at all happened. Oz stood facing him, then a hand reached towards him, softly touching Angel’s shoulder.

“This is okay with you, right?” he asked, looking up into Angel’s face.

“Yeah,” Angel said, moving to return the touch. “It is.”

Angel seemed to tower over the other man, but they fit together perfectly in their embrace. There was no prelude of kisses leading up to a grand finale. There was hunger. Angel was obsessed with pulling him closer, their bodies so tightly meshed together that the light of the streetlamp couldn’t pass between them. There was desperation in the vampire’s need to feel something other than alone, a tremendous drive that would have sent most people running even if they hadn’t known that need could express itself in draining the life from the one it was aimed at.

But Oz didn’t run. He gave as good as he got, the fingers of one hand weaving themselves through the hair at Angel’s nape while the other scratched almost savagely at his lower back, sliding lower, stopping just at the sweet curve of Angel’s ass. Angel panted wildly into the kiss that went between them, his lips running over the other man’s cheek and along the line of his jaw.

“You sure you want this here?” Oz finally whispered in his ear.

“Here,” he said firmly, drawing the skin of Oz’s neck into his mouth and sucking hard, marking him as Oz all but howled in pleasure. “Now. I need to feel you. Need it so much…”

“Right there with you,” he murmured as he felt the coolness of the night air spread quickly over his body as Angel stripped him.

It was a hurried coupling, and in the aftermath of it, Oz lay gasping for breath against Angel’s chest, both of them shaking.

“That,” Oz said, “was good.”

“Yeah,” Angel agreed.

With that, Oz re-dressed himself with trembling hands and went in to finish the second set. Angel remained in the alleyway, staring at the stars he could barely make out through the smoke and light pollution of the city. There was no danger of losing his soul from this. Too much darkness still surrounded him and would always surround him after the loss of so many friends, lovers, dreams and hopes. But there was contentment.

Angel did not return to the Council that morning. Oz and he spent the day twined in each other’s limbs in his small flat. The lust Angel found himself feeling seemed nearly inexhaustible, and it was returned in spades by his new-found lover. It was two days before they left those walls again, and when they did, it was with a sense of purpose. Angel went back to the Council and retrieved the few other belongings he had there, leaving them a note as to where he could be found in case of any emergency arising. He also left a much longer, less rude note for Giles, expressing his gratitude for his intervention in keeping him alive.

Days turned to months, and months into a year. Angel and Oz were still beside one another, and what had begun in that spare, despairing hospital room continued and grew deeper. Angel had seen love enough to know he was in it, and the idea that it was with Oz somehow frightened him far less than it should have, he supposed. Maybe it was because Oz had within him a shadow of the same demon that lurked in his own soul, or maybe it was because he had been so calm, so utterly peaceful in his own acceptance of Angel that it became easy to return the same to him.

“I love you, you know,” Angel blurted one night as they were walking home from a different pub than the one the previous year.

“Yeah, I know,” Oz said, smiling up at him. “Love you, too.”

“I don’t want anyone other than you,” he said, delicately broaching the subject that had been on his mind for weeks.

“Not even Buffy?” Oz said, stopping in his tracks and turning to face him.

“She’s happy where she is. Maybe she’s found some kind of peace with her life. She never had it with me, and truthfully, I never had it with her, either,” Angel confessed. “What about you? Willow?”

Oz tilted his head to one side for a moment, and a smile ghosted over his lips. “I love her, but it’s the past, not now. You’re now.”

Angel rested the palm of his hand against Oz’s neck, and the shorter man all but purred in contentment as he closed his eyes and nuzzled into the touch.

“I wanna marry you,” Angel finally said. He’d thought it would be difficult to say, almost embarrassing, but it had come as naturally as saying Oz’s name.

“Sounds good,” Oz agreed, opening his eyes.

So it was that on a mild spring evening, in the depths of a London park, beneath a canopy of rustling leaves, the two faced each other before their friends, including a silent but not obviously disapproving Giles. Angel wore the cashmere coat he had bought that night, still soft as a dove’s wings and practically begging to be touched, while Oz dressed in a suit that hadn’t seen the light of day since his senior year yet still fit him to a tee. They exchanged brief vows, the words simple but heartfelt, and slipped rings onto one another’s finger, unpretentious bands of gold that seemed to glow in the light of the quarter moon.

What had begun long ago with a loss that seemed to be the end of Angel’s world had at last turned into a rebirth, and if shanshu was to be denied him, then at least the contentment of a heart at peace was his at last.