Imagine the usual disclaimers. Set after the finale of AtS, Not Fade Away.

When the sun came up, out of all the hundreds of dead demons in the alley, he was the only one to rise and live again.

Angel walked through the battlefield of his latest apocalypse, pausing only by the enormous corpse of the dragon. The sword which had slain it stood upright from its skull, slimed from pommel to forte with strange ichor; and the vapors which rose from the beast's pit-nostrils made him cough and back away. Crimson embers had burned there . . . before he had hurled his sword, and put the fires out. The dragon's yellow eyes had been eaten out by the acid vapors, which were also seeping from its gigantic jaws, from beneath its scales, and from the collapsed black bat-sails of its wings. Even the pavement on which it had fallen was being etched away in writhing worm-tracks. They had died, they had died, they had died, and the only victor was Angel.

Gunn. He had outfought the last rags of his strength, and still lasted long after he should have been devoured--the way he had moved had been a testament to will and wiliness, to the speed and experience of a born street-fighter. Human or not, Gunn had always fought like a demon. When they had pulled him down at last, it had taken not one or five or a dozen to overcome him. He had died like a panther under a flood of rats. He had died . . . he had died like a man.

Illyria. The shell of Fred, which the King-goddess had so briefly inhabited, lay at the far end of the alley. Her latest grave was a mound of misshapen dead monsters, the legions of Duke Sebassis. Her coffin had been her fury over Wesley. Her shroud was fury. Her grave-lily was an axe, wrested from the fists of a giant. Her new life would have been the stuff of legend, if it had not been over so soon.

Angel bowed his head, moved farther down the alley, away from Illyria's funeral-monument of corpses. When he came to a certain spot, he halted. With the toe of one boot, he scuffed at the battered pavement. And dust, and ashes, swirled up in a brief gust of air.

Spike.

Spike was gone, and Angel had shanshued.

It seemed that the Powers that had always watched over him were of a different caliber from the Senior Partners. It had always been the Senior Partners and their hellish ilk that dealt in contracts, signatures in blood, legalese and the mutinae of prophecy. The Senior Partners had assumed that if the vampire with a soul played at being the CEO of Wolfram & Hart, that put him safely on their side. Even if he worked to bring their building down from within. Even if he slaughtered their most secret inner circle. Even if he signed away his right to shanshu in order to betray them--even then, they still thought he was on their side.

It seemed that Powers were only interested, in the end, in a man's deeds and intentions. The apocalypse was over. The Champion had fallen on the field of battle, but not before saving the world. They had given him his reward, made him human at last. The curse was lifted. His new life began today.

It seemed that the Powers, in their irony, had given him what he wanted. And left him utterly alone in the world--perhaps as he deserved.

Emergency vehicles were everywhere, police cars and media vans. He wondered briefly what the L.A. media would make of the night's events. What spin could you put on an apocalypse? In smaller Sunnydale, things had been easier. But half the editors in town were--had been--in the pockets of Wolfram & Hart; the chief of police certainly was, and the mayor too. They would find a way to hush it up. Biohazard crews would hose away the demon-blood on the pavement, and perhaps they would use flamethrowers to dispose of the bodies. At the former site of the Wolfram & Hart building, all that was left was a hole full of rubble. The whole building had collapsed inward. Like a dragon's corpse after the fires went out, leaving only poisonous vapors. Angel was turned away half a block from the site. The street was cordoned off, and a fireman waved him back with a warning: "Sulphuric acid leakage, bud. Didja used to work here? Well, start looking for a new job, know what I mean?--and if I was you, I wouldn't bother waiting around to get my stuff from my locker, right. Know what I mean? Not lessen you want third- degree burns on the inside of your lungs. Right? Know what I mean?"

"Say no more," Angel answered. He walked away without a backward glance. An hour's work skulking through the sewers, and he was in the bottom of the Wolfram & Hart crater.

Almost fifty feet below street level, this had once been the executive parking garage, adjacent to the secret sub-basements and the vaults. The building had extended seven stories below the ground, though no maps existed of its furthermost depths . . . rumored in the typing pool to plummet right through the mantle of the earth and, during Black Masses at certain times of the year, to be the source of tremors in the California-Pacific faultline. These rumors were untrue, as Angel had cause to know. All Black Masses had been held in the top of the building, to prevent just such unfortunate accidents.

His fleet of luxury cars was gone now, pulverized in the fall of rubble. The air was a haze of smoke, making Angel cough convulsively; he wasn't used to human frailties, kept trying to stop breathing altogether. No glimpse of the world above could be seen, only solid white. More smoke rose from the mangled remains of ventilation shafts, curling thick past warped metal grills. He found Spike's third Viper, the flame-red one, pinned beneath a support beam the size of a Winnebago. The black convertible that could shift dimensions was nowhere to be found; its end of the garage was a sinkhole, a black pit with an invisible bottom. Angel took an unwise breath of the breeze whistling up from beneath, doubled over and gagged till it hurt. Sulphuric acid leakage, indeed! Or sulphur, anyway.

He tossed a fragment of concrete into the sinkhole. It ricocheted off the sides for almost a full minute, before the sound finally faded away.

It was then that he heard the singing.

He found her wandering round the wrecked garage, a madwoman in the most incongruous dress imaginable--a wedding gown. A wedding gown. A half-crushed crown of flowers sat askew on her brow, white rosebuds and baby's breath and curling variegated ivy; they fell behind her where she walked, leaving a trail of petals in her wake. The bodice of seed pearls and ivory brocade was shredding like her wreath, pearls dropping off it and sinister brownish-red splatters patterning the lush material. The long train, too, was drying red-brown. Clots of half-coagulated matter stuck to Drusilla's long shining black leather boots. She lifted the skirt of the wedding gown in one hand and hopped across a hole in the ground, and a skein of human scalp that had been tangled in her heel remained behind, snagged on a rebar.

Something was cradled in the curve of her arm. She turned in circles, dancing in the smoky ruins.

"A true lover now waits for you
Don't say no, whatever you do--"

He looked for a piece of wood underfoot, anything that could possibly serve as a stake. But there was nothing, of course.

Drusilla tittered. Any moment, the smoke might part and the sun shine down upon her oblivious head; but she was mad, and cared nothing for the danger. She kissed the fingers of her free hand deliriously at Angel. "Kites and lambs at the bottom of my tea-cup, three times running! I cast the Celtic cross for you. Five of diamonds in your house, four aces reversed. And the king of cups--the king of c-cups--"

Her face twisted and she began to whine like a dying animal, hunching her thin body over and scrabbling at the skirts of her stolen wedding gown.

Angel spotted an intact doorway, a stair leading up to safety. He took several quick steps in that direction--

She was in front of him, humming, hand raised to stop him. They almost collided. Angel backpedaled in a hurry. "Drusilla," he said in the most soothing voice he could summon.

"You killed my brave true knight," whispered Drusilla, and crimson embers lit in the pits of her dark eyes--like the fire that had burned in the dragon's jaws. "He was put back in the world for me to reclaim, but you gulled him on to his doom."

He was human now. Not a vampire anymore, not a Champion. She had three times his speed, could move in the blink of an eye. She could snap his bones between her fingers. She could tear out his throat and gulp down his blood as it sprayed like water from a firehose--

His heart pounded.

"Daddy's turned into a real boy at last," she crooned, stretching out her arm. Her fingernails-- chipped, black-painted, filthy with dried blood and brain matter and scraps of torn flesh--brushed Angel's cheek like a caress. Every nail was a different length, and the narrow nail of her ring- finger was four inches long, curling upon itself like a snake's tongue. He had taught her to slice a victim's jugular open with one flick of her nails. Long ago, when the world was wild, and they were both inhuman and evil.

"Dru. Don't--"

"Weakling darling nasty father. Give me your hand and I shall read the star on your line of fortune. Weakling darling nasty father husband. Let me kiss that frown from your forehead, Angelus my heart--you might get ugly lines in your face now, you know." She was circling around him, breathing hard through her nostrils, working herself into a rage. "Bad Daddy. Bad Daddy. Bad Daddy. Bad Daddy. Bad little Pinocchio gets everything backward, wants to grow up get old die a man at last. But I'll fox him. Bad, bad Daddy shall become my good little boy today."

Her face became utterly remote. She began to sing.

"Speak softly to your little boy
And beat him when he sneezes
For he can thoroughly enjoy--"

Angel staked Drusilla as her fangs were closing on his throat, using a pencil he had found in his pocket.

Something failed to turn to dust with the rest of her, fell to the floor and rolled along it.

He staggered backward. Dust swirled around him, dissolved to nothing and blew away. Angel bit back a sob of sorrow, too late. His strangest fledgling was gone forever, dead at his hand; he who had made her, had returned her to the grave. In the flicker of an instant before she became dust, there had been a flash of sanity and thankfulness in her dark eyes.

Drusilla was dead. His human family and his vampire family were both gone.

"Angel!"

"B-b-buffy?"

A swirl of blonde hair. A drum of high-heeled ankle boots in gold-stamped white Italian suede. And she was in his arms, the Slayer, his little blonde girl from the valley of the sun--her weapon- hardened hands were fumbling deliriously at his face, clutching his shirt and letting go again to pat his cheeks, his brow, to trace the line of his lips— Angel shut his eyes. It was a dream come true, and it shot him in the heart with disbelief and pure joy, after all the horrors and sorrows of the past night. Buffy. Buffy was with him. Buffy was in his arms at last.

She kissed his mouth, softly, and cupped his face with her small strong hands. Then she drew back, looking up at him with opaque eyes. "I know everything," she said. "Everything."

"But--everything? How? Buffy, there's--"

"The Immortal told me everything when he put me on the plane to come here. Angel? Forgive me. Forgive me for ever doubting you this past year. Forgive me," with tears welling up suddenly in her eyes, "for coming too late to stand by you yesterday." Then she laid one hand over his heart. "You're human. You've got your shanpoo at last."

"Shanshu."

"Whatever. Happy birthday, Angel. Welcome to the human race."

He choked up. He couldn't answer. Averting his eyes, he saw something quite nearby on the floor, a small shining object; it was what Drusilla had been carrying, before she had gone to dust. A sudden frown came over his face, because he recognized it. An ornamental box, just a piece of junk really, with bits of cheap metal and velvet inlaid along its sides--but she had been cradling it like something precious. Angel picked it up mechanically, fidgeted with it. Buffy looked curiously at it, distracted.

"Huh. Pretty. Is that something to do with your, your shang-chi?"

"Shanshu. And no, it isn't. Funny thing--she must have dug it up it in the vaults, because--" It had been locked in the deepest most secure mystically triple-guarded vault, but all of Wolfram & Hart's security precautions were by the board now.

"Drusilla?"

"Yeah. And then she--" And then he noticed the other thing that he had overlooked.

His jaw dropped. His head swam. His knees began to fold.

"Buffy!" Angel blurted out.

Buffy glanced down at her own belly, which rounded out her party-girl summer dress in an unmistakable and distinct mound. Then she blushed. "Um. Ah. Er. Guess you can tell I'm working on a new life of my own, huh? Surprise."

"The Immortal," said Angel, backing away from her, stunned.

"Hey! Not contaminated here, mister! Just, um, grown out of my cookie-dough phase and now embarked on a new, bold bun-in-the-oven stage, kitchen-metaphor-speaking." She was babbling just as she always had, snapping out the Buffyspeak without a second's hesitation, but there was still that opaque gloss in her eyes. Nor did it have anything to do with the pregnancy, he could tell. Or the Immortal. It was connected to something different, but he couldn't quite put his finger on the cause. "And yes, Immie's the father. Funny story, that. You know Immie, don't you? Well, he turned up on my doorstep a few months back, and he had the weirdest pickup line I ever heard in my life. Seems there's this prophecy . . ."

"A prophecy?"

"Seems he's been kicking his heels eight centuries, waiting for me, because of this centuries-old prophecy that someday he'd meet ‘the twice-slain Slayer, mother of ten thousand Slayers, the golden child from the vale of the sun' and he and this twice-born Slayer would have a son of destiny, blah blah blah blah and I forget all the things this baby's gonna grow up to do, got it all written down somewhere--" Buffy began to pat her pockets in a panic. "A list of things a mile and a half long. The skinny is, future savior of the world in the offing."

"Savior?"

"Yep. Young King Arthur. Captain Marvel. Man o' War. A champion."

"Champion?"

"Don't repeat everything I say." She lifted her face toward his, and her lower lip pushed out and began to quiver. "Immie kinda swept me off my feet, and th-th-th-then as soon as the tests came back positive--" The quiver became a defiant pout. "--he doesn't really love me for myself, y'know? Just for the prophecy. And he says he'll marry me in a minute, but he can't lie, it's just for the sake of the baby, and anyway he's over eleven hundred years old and he's already been married a hundred and twenty-six times, so what does that make me? And he says he quite understands, which is ugh, sickening--just like something my Dad would say. And he used to date Anya, yeeech. Anyway, I said no."

"You said no?"

"He wasn't exactly broken up about it, either. Besides, I don't believe in prophecies." Buffy tossed her golden head. "Good thing, too. I had an ultrasound, and I had Willow double-check with her Sight, and guess what? ‘Captain Marvel' is really Wonder Woman. I'm carrying a girl."

"My god," said Angel after slowly taking all this in. "Have you told the Immortal yet?"

"Naw. Haven't got the heart. He'll find out at the hospital, no doubt. I'm gonna name her Joyce." She touched Angel over the heart, tentatively. "We're not together. We never will be. You're the one I want to be with, Angel."

He understood at last, looking into her opaque eyes, exactly what was going on in her heart.

"You know about Spike."

"Spike's . . . dead."

"But you know he came back, that he still loved you. That he was afraid to come to you. That's the everything that the Immortal told you." Angel swallowed. "And you know that Spike died last night."

"Yes," whispered Buffy, and the opaque distance left her eyes, which became wells of utter grief.

"I'm so sorry, Buffy."

"Doesn't matter anymore," and she took the step that brought them together, with her face buried in Angel's chest. "Hold me. Just hold me, okay?"

He understood, gazing down at her, that everything he had ever wanted was now in his grasp. He could have Buffy, and humanity; they could have their future together, which was all he had dreamed of, for years, for years. They could live happily ever after. But only at the price of a lie; he could only win Buffy if he lied to her. The sharp corners of the little box bit into his fingers like knives. All he had to do was hold his tongue, and the world was his.

He put the little box into Buffy's hands, and folded them around it.

"There's an amulet in this, with Spike's essence bound to it. Take it far away before you open it. He'll come back as a ghost, at first. Then call Willow and Giles for help--they'll be able to figure out what to do."