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Angelus’ foot catches her square in the stomach, sending Buffy onto the soft riverbank with a thud. She tries to breathe but her diaphragm isn’t listening, so she lies there for an agonizing moment, gulping like a fish and staring up at the late-night-almost-morning sky.
Oblivious to her distress, cicadas sing around her and fireflies dance in the void between her and the glittering stars. The summer wind glides through the weeping willow nearby; the rustle of the leaves on the branches mirrors the soft crunch of their dead brethren under Angelus’ boots.
“C’mon, baby girl.” His vamped-up face appears above Buffy and he gave a disappointedtch. “You can do better.”
With rough hands, Angelus grabs her wrists and yanks her limp body from the mossy ground. River water laps into her shoes as she stumbles backwards into the shallows before she can regain her balance. This is what she gets for studying, she’s sure. She’d just been out for an early-early-morning walk after her algebra all-nighter, stupidly assuming that Angelus and his various vamp cronies would be headed back underground well before the sun rose.
“You and Mrs. Jones can get together and chat all about ‘living up to expectations,’” Buffy wheezes. Mud squelches under her feet as she heads back to dry land, keeping a healthy berth between her and Angelus.
Lack of sleep and mental fatigue from hours of staring at equations have dulled her reflexes—Angelus’ right hook catches her off-guard and his knee to her stomach leaves her gasping for air yet again. All she gets in before stumbling and falling to her hands and knees is a series of long scratches to the side of Angelus’ face.
She aims an elbow to his knee, but he ducks out of the way and kicks her shoulder. Buffy spins in the air and lands face-down in the slick grass. Her ribs scream, her lungs spasm, and her eyes water as she tries to breathe in air, not dirt. Angelus approaches from the side, whistling a jaunty tune, and Buffy’s brain must be scrambled because all of her orders to her limbs to roll her body away fail somewhere between her head and her hands.
“Well, I have to say that I thought that our final rumble would be more…epic.” Buffy hears his boots straddle her ankles, feels his knees thud down into the earth on either side of her hips, sees one of his hands (strong, sweet, soft for someone who’s lived for so long) press the grass down in front of her face. “But I guess these are the cards we’ve been dealt.”
Buffy’s hair slides away from her neck and she hears him say so long, and even as she accepts that this is it, this is how she dies (again), she wrenches a hand up and under her body. Somehow, it gets there before his teeth do, her palm out and ready to push his mouth the two or three inches from her carotid that the unforgiving ground and the awkward twist of her arm under her body will allow.
So it’s the center of Buffy’s palm and her mound of Venus that Angelus’ teeth graze, not her neck. The points of his incisors dig into the flesh, but don’t break the skin. He’d been aiming to pierce the delicate skin of her neck, not rend it, and the change in skin texture is what saves her life in that brief heartbeat. Later, a century later, Angel knows that if he’d tasted her blood that night, it would have been all over. For both of them.
She still feels the cold edge of his teeth, but she feels his lips now, released from their snarl. It’s what leads her to say please, though half of it is lost into the crook of her elbow and the ground below.
His hand on the other side of her neck twitches and he makes some sort of noise in his throat—a growl or a groan, Buffy’s never sure—and pulls back. Her bruised ribs scream in protest when he grabs her shoulder and twists her upper body between his thighs. With the moon sinking, she sees his face—his normal face, the face she loves—but she wishes she could feel more than just the slightest twinge of relief.
Don’t let it trick you, he doesn’t have his soul, she reminds herself and tries to think of a way out from between his knees. A muscle jumps in his jaw as he stares down at her, eyes running over her face and her messy ponytail and down to her neck. Just when she thinks she has it all worked out (heel to the groin, punch to the nose, tuck and roll), he leans forward and snatches her lips into a bruising, feral kiss, all teeth and tongue and nothing like what they used to share before Angel became Angelus.
He makes that growling-groan again into her mouth, fingers clenched so tight on her shoulder that Buffy has to wear long sleeves for a whole week, and then he’s gone, sprinting up the riverbank and vaulting over the low wall to the park path.
Buffy lies there on the dew-dropped grass and listens to the sound of Angelus’ boots on the asphalt fade, until she’s left alone with the cicadas and the swaying willow tree once again.