Title: End of Time
Author: Kat Lee
Fandom: Angel
Characters/Pairing: Angel/Cordelia, Spike/Buffy
Rating: Soft R/M
Challenge: #59: Photo
Word Count: 1,797
Summary:
Disclaimer: All characters belong to their rightful owners, not the author.


Explosions rattled the city as they walked back into their headquarters. Every one was gone, dead, killed in the line of duty. Only the two of them remained. They had seen hundreds die that day and millions the night before. Angel dropped his battle axe, swords, shield, guns, and other weaponry to the floor while Spike prattled on.

"You can't be serious!" the blonde Vampire snarled. "You can't really mean you just want to give up!"

Angel didn't speak. He'd been talking for hours, and although his throat wasn't tired, his heart was. There was no way for them to win this fight. They were battling an opponent whom they could not even touch. Even the best scientists had finally concluded that God was ending time. That's why the fire wouldn't stop, why it had spread so quickly, and why no amount of water even seemed to touch the flames.

He walked to his bookcase, pulled out a book, and turned to the page to which he had turned for well over two hundred years now. "If you want to go back out there, Spike, go. I'm not stopping you. But I have no more answers. It's the end of time." His big, dark eyes looked imploringly up into the younger Vampire's equally tired orbs. "How do you want to spend it?"

Then, he handed him a photo. Spike looked down into the blue eyes full of wonder, light, and merriment. He looked down, and he instantly began to cry. He dropped his weapons to the floor and himself into the black leather sofa that lined their office's back wall. Angel was right: The time had come. He was done fighting.

Angel lowered himself into the chair where he had spent too many hours deciding how to handle the world's fate and fighting his own. He looked down into the brilliantly smiling face captured in the photograph he kept for himself. He had originally kept the photo he'd just handed over to Spike for himself, as well, but that had been before he'd gotten to know Cordelia better.

He'd thought he'd loved Buffy, but he'd barely comprehended, back then, what love was. Spike had been the Slayer's true soul mate, not him. Angel could admit that now, that and a lot more. It was Cordelia who he loved, Cordelia for whose memory he had fought over the last couple of centuries, and Cordelia with whom he now looked forward to being reunited at last.

He traced her smile and trembled inside. She had loved him; he just wished it hadn't taken him so long to see it and understand his true feelings for her. He wished, yet again, that they could have had a life together, that they could have raised Connor together, that they could have lived, fought, been happy, and eventually grown old and died together. He had never grown old, but he had never once stopped thinking about her. He went into every battle with her encouraging words and smiling face in his mind. He had stopped every apocalypse not simply because he'd known it was the right thing to do but because he'd known that it was what she would have wanted him to do. He had saved the world time and again . . . until now.

They had tried everything. The fire couldn't be touched. It couldn't be stopped. It had already devoured well over half the Earth, and now it was coming for Los Angeles. It was kind of funny, really. He'd wanted to get out of LA for a long time, but after spending a hundred plus years away, he and Spike had finally ended up coming back. It wasn't home -- nowhere was home without Cordy --, but it was the closest they'd known to it, even closer than Ireland where they'd spent another hundred years.

"What do you think's going to happen?" Spike asked as he, too, traced his love's image in the photograph he held as tenderly as if it were a babe. Actually, Angel knew, Spike was holding that picture with more care than he'd ever hold a baby. His eyes lifted to his, and for a moment, Angel could see his fear. There was no humor, chastising, or snap to his voice, just the fear and uncertainty of a man who had reached the end of his existence at last and was now terrified that he'd not get the one thing in all the world which he wanted far more than he'd ever wanted anything else.

"They're waiting for us." There was no doubt in Angel's mind to that. He'd sensed Cordelia over the centuries, seen her in his dreams. He knew she was waiting in Heaven for him; she'd told him as much herself.

"But will we get there?" Angel's heart ached for Spike. The younger Vampire was the closest thing he'd ever known to a grandson, and although they'd had their issues over the centuries and nearly ripped each other to bleeding shreds as recently as last week, he hurt for him now as he saw how much he hurt, how terrified and sad he really was. He opened his mouth to reassure him but shut it again as he realized he had no answers.

They looked up as another explosion sounded, this one within a half mile of their location. "Angel?" Spike pressed. His eyes darted to their piles of weaponry on the floor. "Shouldn't we go out fighting?"

"We could," Angel replied. "They'd probably like that, but I'm tired of fighting, Spike. I know you are, too. We've done everything we can. All we can do is get burned faster. And as for the other, we've done all the good we can." There were no innocents left on the Earth at this point; they had been amongst the first to go when the fires had started, long before they had become one giant, raging inferno spreading quickly across the globe.

Sweat splintered out over their faces. The fire was closer now. It was roaring faster and stronger and would be upon them soon. They could open their doors, go out and meet their deaths within a matter of seconds. Spike's gaze dropped from Angel's to look back into Buffy's smiling face. "I loved her, you know."

Angel's gaze returned to Cordelia's picture. He again traced her flesh, her hair, her beautiful, hazel eyes before letting his fingertips linger on her lips. He would give everything and anything just to kiss her once more. "I know," he said quietly, and those were the last words he ever spoke.

The Vampires didn't have another chance to look at each other, to speak or to think. The inferno swept mercilessly into their office as it covered the Earth in one final explosion. The world didn't go black; it was the crimson, bloody red of the fire that engulfed them instead. Their deaths were not quiet. They could hear each other's screams and the inferno's loud crackling long after their flesh was stripped from their bones.

And then it stopped. They could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing. It was Angel who first moved as his fingers reached for the photograph to which he had clung as he'd died and it had turned to ash in his pale hands. He was met with something soft and giving underneath his questing fingers.

"Angel." It was the most beautiful voice that spoke to him. It seemed almost to twinkle like music as it came closer. "Angel, baby, open your eyes."

He did, and he screamed in an entirely different sound than the ones that had been ripped from him as he'd died. "CORDELIA!" He didn't hear Spike's shocked reaction, didn't see the blonde Vampire open his eyes or the waiting Slayer run into his arms. He didn't see their dead friends growing closer around them or the white light that filled every other space. All he saw was what he'd wanted to see ever since he'd buried her: his beautiful, beloved, wonderful, treasured Cordelia!

She rushed into his arms with sobs of joy, knocking him backwards onto a surface that didn't feel hard at all. Both of them tried to touch each other all over at once while kissing one another with the passion they'd been holding at bay for well over two hundred years. Angel didn't know how long he'd been kissing his love when the laughter around them finally broke into his mind. "I'd suggest you two lovebirds get a room," Lorne said, "but Cloud Nine was made for loving."

Only then did Angel lift his head from Cordy's full, sweet lips and look around them. Clouds seemed to drift everywhere except for where his friends smiled down at him. Lorne, Doyle, and Wesley stood nearest, all grinning at him, but Connor was there, too, as were Fred, Faith, Gunn, Willow, Dennis, Giles, and Xander. Even Jenny Calendar was there, smiling at him despite his Demon having slaughtered her so cruelly.

"Welcome to Heaven, Angel," Cordelia cried, throwing her arms around him and beaming up at him. "You did it!"

He felt almost as though he was dreaming, but out of the corner of his dark eyes, Angel saw Spike rolling through the clouds with Buffy. The two Vampires looked sideways to each other. Spike smiled and nodded, his head gently bumping Buffy's. He would have mouthed to him, "We did it," but it was a little hard to do with Buffy's tongue thrusting excitedly in his mouth. He rolled over, giving the others his back and giving her what he'd longed to for centuries.

"It's not a dream, Angel," Wesley's gently lilting voice assured him as he still kept kissing Cordelia. His friend's voice seemed to penetrate his haze of joyful pleasure from a long distance away, although he stood right next to him. "This is reality, and this is Heaven."

"You did it, Angelcakes."

"Welcome to Paradise, buddy." Angel could hear Doyle's grin in his voice, but he had no time to respond to his friends for Cordy wouldn't stop kissing him. He wrapped his arms tightly around her as he returned every one of her kisses with more pleasure and happiness than he'd ever felt before, and then he realized it must be true. This must be his Shanshu, his Heaven, for he was happier than he'd ever been before in all of his existence and, yet, Angelus was nowhere to be found.

His smile was brilliant against Cordy's lips as he realized the truth. He had done it. He had survived it all. He had survived until the end of time itself, and this was Heaven. He'd made it to Heaven: He'd made it back to Cordelia's arms. He kissed her again.

The End