THE FINAL HOUR

Silence.

Buffy blinked as her legs buckled and she surrendered to gravity. Blinked again. A sob. She started to shake. Tremors ran through her like she was the fault line. Bending, shifting. She couldn't stop shaking...

Everyone converged on her at once. "Buffy!"

People, all over her. Hugging her, crying for her, rocking her back and forth. Noise. Everywhere. Too much... She felt smothered.

Started inhaling desperately for air.

Angel.

Angelangelangelangel...

And then they all backed away as the air started to rumble with the thick bass of a subwoofer on overdrive. Again. "Not another one!" Xander groaned. Everyone began to fan out, but Buffy remained collapsed on the ground, lungs heaving with sobs she wasn't quite freeing from her body.

She closed her eyes. No. NONONONO...

But the portal was high in the air. Gold. Not crimson.

Buffy felt her heart leap and she started to tremble all over again, but for a different reason this time. Please. Please, please, please...

Two screaming bodies got spit out onto the pavement. Angel. Spike. And there was blood all over, spreading outwards from the epicenter in a puddle of coagulating mess. And not all of it was Spike's. "Someone call an ambulance..." she yelled.

Cordelia already had her cellular phone out. Buffy sighed in relief. At least someone was current with the world...

She was next to Angel and Spike in an instant. "Spike!"

Spike sat up with a grimace, shaking his head as he pointed to Angel.

She turned to Angel, whose eyes were open, staring blankly into space as he started to shiver. That was when she saw his arm. The jagged wound trailed from his elbow to his wrist, and his fingers were clutched tightly. Like he had no feeling in them. "Oh, my GOD. ANGEL!" she shrieked.

Eyes watering, she was about ready to rip off some of her pant leg when Spike thrust his shirt into her hand. "Here," he said.

"Thanks," she whispered, pressing it roughly on the weeping tear in Angel's skin.

Everyone else was staying back. Keeping their distance.

Choking sobs rolled out of her, tears blurring her vision as she gathered him up in her arms. He looked so pale...

"Buffy..." Angel mumbled. He blinked, but didn't appear to see her. "I'm okay... Honest," he groaned. "At least in the sense of not being dead..."

"His ankle's screwed up. Don't try to move him," Spike warned, getting to his feet with a sigh and a curse. "I'd better go before the paramedics get here," he said.

He started walking away, limping, footsteps echoing softly on the pavement.

"Spike!"

He stopped, turned, and stared at her.

Angel groaned in her arms, his body shuddering, and she gripped him tighter, hugged him desperately as she kept her eyes on the blond vampire.

"Could you bring Dawn? To the hospital?" she asked, hesitant.

A small, sad smile spread across his face. "Sure, Slayer. I'll get Little Bit."

And then he disappeared into the night.

Angel groaned again, bucking slightly in her embrace. "Angel, shhh," she soothed, caressing the smooth, silk skin across his cheek and his forehead. "The paramedics will be here soon... Don't die on me now..."

He grunted and his eyes closed, face pale and drawn as he muttered, "I won't die."

"Sure you won't," Buffy argued playfully.

"If I was going to die, there'd be that bright light that I'm just not seeing... 'Cept you..." A lazy smile spread across his face.

"Well, I'm not sure if I believe you right now, so I'm going to have to remain frantic."

"M'kay," he said, drifting off even further, but still awake.

She shook him, knowing he was probably going into shock. His skin was cold and clammy, like a wet washrag, and she suspected it was only his incredible pain endurance that was keeping him so calm. "You can't go to sleep yet."

He grunted.

"I'm serious, Angel," she snapped as the flashing blue and red lights of the paramedics flooded into the alcove.

There were people crowding around her in an instant. "How long has he been down?" one of the medics asked.

"I don't know," Buffy shrugged, her arms tightening around him. "Ten minutes?" she guessed, not knowing for sure.

"Ma'am, you're going to have to move..."

An oxygen mask went over Angel's face and they lifted him onto a backboard as she stepped away. "Is he going to be all right?" she asked, dreading what they might say. She knew enough to know Angel wasn't out of the woods yet...

"I really don't know, ma'am."

"Well, GUESS, damn it," she growled, trying to get in the ambulance with Angel, but they blocked her and didn't answer.

"Ma'am, you're going to have to ride in a separate vehicle. There's not enough room and it's against policy."

Angel was pale and still on the gurney as they slammed the doors shut in her face and she backed away, shocked as the ambulance sped away.

"Sunnydale paramedics suck. You’d think with all the practice they get, they’d learn to be more compassionate," she said as Willow and Xander came and enveloped her in a hug. Tears streamed down her face as they guided her into Gunn's truck, the only vehicle that they'd brought.

Through the rearview mirror, she could blearily see her and Angel's friends assembling into a big group, getting ready to trek back to the house and find enough cars to relocate to the hospital in.

Gunn smiled as he hopped into the driver's seat. "I wouldn't worry," he said with a grin. "Angel's been through worse." And then he gunned the engine and sped away toward Sunnydale General, Cordelia's shakily scrawled directions guiding him when shocked Buffy couldn't.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Annoying.

He groaned, coming out of the fog and into an immaculate white room with some reluctance. White, like the Oracle sanctuary. Everything felt sluggish, like he wasn't thinking quite as fast as he could have been.

He squinted, rotating his neck a bit, surprised to find that he didn't feel any pain at all, even as he lifted his bandaged arm to examine it. He looked down. There was a blond head, hair sprawled out like a golden halo off to his left.

Not the Oracle sanctuary, then. "Hi," he whispered, finding that his voice cracked and sputtered and barely came out at all.

She snapped awake like someone had poked her with a stick. "Angel!"

Buffy practically shrieked with joy, attacking him with kisses. He grunted under her assault, giving in quite happily as he wrapped both his bandaged arm and his un-bandaged one around her in a tight embrace.

Warm.

"You're awake!" she cried enthusiastically.

"How long?" He didn't finish his sentence, but she seemed to understand.

"Couple hours," she shrugged. "It didn't take them long to fix you. Cordelia was pacing a trough in the waiting room, though. She'll probably come barging in here, soon."

He sighed, leaning back into the pillows, suddenly more tired than anything else. Closing his eyes, he sighed. "What am I on?" he groaned, lifting his uninjured arm to examine the intravenous line running into it, barely able to open his eyes far enough to see.

"Morphine."

"Mmm," he grunted. "Good stuff."

"The doctors say you'll probably need therapy to get your hand back in working order, but other than that, you're fine. You know, you're in pretty good shape considering you went through Hell to save the world... AGAIN. You, mister, 'what if I can't protect you?'" she mocked him, a prominent glower suddenly overcoming her features.

He couldn't help but smile.

Her lips turned upward the second his did, but then she grew serious. "They want to know why that wound was self-inflicted..." she warned. But the serious look bled into another infections grin. And, for some reason, as he stared at Buffy's smiling, happy face, he didn't seem to care about anything whatsoever. Not one bit. She was even better than the morphine.

"I'll think something up," he said. He closed his eyes and she was silent for a moment. All he could hear was her breathing and that annoying beeping.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

If he hadn't been so damn tired, he would have punched the thing into a billion silent pieces. He could just picture it now, shattering apart under his fist's savage attack... BAM!

And then that fuzzy feeling came. The feeling between wakefulness and sleep that always was his favorite, because he didn't have any nightmares until after it was gone.

"Angel?"

Hesitant.

Forcing sleep away, he opened his eyes again. His eyelids were droopy, and heavy, but he managed.

"Are you going back to L.A.?"

He sighed. Tired. Very tired. "I think so. I've still got a job there. We'll see what we can work out, though, okay?"

She smiled at that, but was still wary. "You're sure."

"Yes, Buffy. I promise I'm not leaving you again. Honest," he assured her with a wheezy chuckle.

The smile widened. "Okay," she whispered as she stood up, stretched, stretched again. Yawned.

"Where are you going?" he asked, surprised and a little dismayed that she was moving. It felt so comfortable with her there. So right...

She shrugged. "Home."

"Oh." He felt his lofty, foggy feeling start to darken, his smile start to sink, the Buffy drug flooding out of his system and leaving him with the gaping maw that was the morphine.

But then she stretched her body out along next to his like a lithe cat, draping her arm across his stomach. Her entire body heaved with a yawn as his own wakefulness started to drift away. The beeping noise faded into the oblivion that existed around their warm bodies, and he let himself drift away in the arms of his soulmate.

Yes, he agreed.

Home.

FIN