Angel sat in the basement, one of Spike’s blood packets in his hand. He didn’t like the mass of writhing people that currently existed in the kitchen, mostly because they were all young girls and he didn’t like the thought of the horrible deaths some, if not all of them, were going to experience if the First loosed itself upon the world.

“ Don’t you like it either?”

Angel looked up from his thoughts and there stood Spike, blood pouch of his own to feed from.

“ No.”

Spike came and sat down next to Angel on the cot. There was silence from them both as they drank from the blood filled plastic bags.

“ I can smell her here, you know.”

Spike looked sideways. “Congratulations.”

Angel sighed. “I don’t wanna fight with you, Spike…”

“ Yes you do.”

Angel looked up, puzzled. “I guess you really have changed. Whenever I used to say that it made you want to fight even more.”
Spike shrugged and drank some of the blood.

“ So I hear you have a soul now.”

“ Yup, that’s the long and short of it.”

“ Yet you seem to be like you were before.”

“ What, just because I have a soul means I should be like you and mope about for a century? Don’t bloody think so.”

“ So you don’t feel any kind of remorse for what you did back in the day?”

“ No. What’s done is done. I can’t change it by brooding all the time so why should I? Besides, I didn’t have a soul back then. I was a different person.”

“ So was I, but I don’t going around acting as if I don’t care -”

“ - Oh, I care. I’m sorry that I killed all of those people, but I’m not regretful. That’s the difference between you and me, Angel. You linger, and I move on.”

Angel shook his head, refusing to admit Spike was being so…complacent about all the murders he’d committed.

Spike put his hand on Angel’s shoulder. “You need to let go, mate. Don’t forget about it but don’t give the demon inside of you the satisfaction of letting it get to you. And remember, you and I are different. Angelus was cursed; he didn’t want that soul in your chest. I wanted the soul back and I fought for it and earned it. The demon in me is happy the way I am, yours isn’t.”
He stood up, and shook the now empty packet of blood. “I’m empty. Need a refill?”

Angel looked up at Spike. “No. I’m done here.” Spike wasn’t sure if he was talking about the blood or something else, but Angel stood up and gave Spike a half smile.

“ Let’s go.”

The girl finished her song, and Lorne and the other Potentials clapped loudly.

“ Well done, sugar plum!” Lorne exclaimed. “Now, give me a second.” He closed his eyes in a show for the Potentials. He knew full well what the girl’s destiny was before she’d finished the song but he had a reputation to maintain – Karaoke Demon didn’t have a mystical enough ring to it by his liking.

Like all the other people he’d read in his time, he could only see possibilities for the person, not certainties. So, he saw the First becoming corporeal and gutting this girl with one of its limbs, what must be a Turok-Han burying its fangs into her neck and draining her of blood while she screamed for help that wouldn’t come, and Lisa, as this was the girl’s name, dying a peaceful death at the age of twenty three as she fell asleep at the wheel of her car and drifted across a main road and ploughing into the front of an oncoming truck, killing her and her baby twin daughters instantly.

However, these were the destinies he didn’t want to give to the girl. While the last two weren’t as likely as the first, they were a few of several destinies that were more likely than the several hundred he saw in each person. Lorne had the gift of being able to sift through all of the possibilities of a life, after seeing its past, and choosing the ones which were most likely, after which he could either narrow it down even further to a single destiny or cobble together a likely mixture of the remaining contestants. For example, he didn’t care that if Lisa had chosen a chicken sandwich instead of cheese one day for school that she would have caught salmonella, taken ill and died because of an immunodeficiency caused by a faulty gene at the age of eight, causing her parents to sue the processed food company who’d made the aforementioned chicken slices, despite using the chicken after its use by date (a fact which they’d withheld from both the prosecution and their defence lawyers), making thousands of dollars, moving to a nicer area in Chicago but never being happy with the home, thinking of the money they’d won as blood money, causing her parents to get a divorce, the father to kill himself by a drugs overdose and her mother a bitter old woman who despised everyone and everything, because it didn’t happen.
What actually happened is that her mother had made her cheese, and given the chicken to their pet dog Happy who had incidentally died at the age of seven because of kidney failure and Lisa was immunised against the food poisoning disease a year later, never suffering from a complaint of ill health and being completely oblivious of the absolutely life changing decision she’d made that day. These were the possible destinies which Lorne was rarely interested in. An occasional customer had wandered into Carytos wondering if, but not many. Like, ‘Would my wife have left me IF…’, ‘What would have happened IF…’, but surprisingly enough these questions were rarely asked and so Lorne didn’t worry about it.
What he could do, if he really concentrated, was to find out the destinies of other people linking with the man or woman he was reading – he referred to them as ‘sub-destinies’ – like what Lisa’s parents would have done if she’d have died from salmonella. As he’d never even heard of Lisa’s parents before reading her, he had to delve a little deeper, but he could do it quite easily after years of practise. As the people’s destinies were usually intertwined so closely – like the bond between close friends, family, loved ones – he could almost read them through that one person’s aura, however only relating to what would happen, or nearly did happen, to the person he was reading. It didn’t stretch past that one person’s destiny though – like he couldn’t tell Lisa why her school bus driver was arrested for being a sex offender one day, because she’d never been personally involved with the incident, didn’t know the bus driver and didn’t even know what sex offender really meant until three years later when her red faced father explained a few facts to her.

Lorne also sometimes had difficulties defining reality and fantasy of the person’s future, like he’d seen a destiny where Lisa had married a famous footballer, until he’d realised he couldn’t see the guy’s name. It was because she didn’t know his name, she’d seen the guy being interviewed on a sports program her friend’s brother used to watch while she slept over at her house and fantasized about marrying him so strongly that she actually believed it was going to happen in the future. Then she grew out of it but it had left a mark on her aura and Lorne could see it as easily as you could see one of his suits at night. Also, Lorne was having trouble deciding on whether the girl’s visions of dying were her imagination or what would happen to her. That was the trouble with this situation – the time he’d helped Angel stop the world from ending from a lovesick guy freezing time forever, he couldn’t see past the event but he knew if they stopped him before he did it the world would be okay. He’d also been able to read other people before the guy had thought of freezing time, so he knew it all depended on that one guy, himself and Angel. But now, he had trouble defining reality and fantasy from these girls, as every one of them had lay awake at night, terrified, imagining what dying might be like at the hands of one of the terrible monsters they’d seen and some they’d invented to gouge out their intestines, in their mind of course. The trouble was that because each girl had seen the monsters they were imagining, they could get the detail right down to the last drop of blood. Lorne hadn’t encountered Turok-Han and he didn’t know what the First would manifest itself into so he had no way of knowing if what he was seeing is what might happen or whether it was the girl’s imagination.

But either way, it scared the hell out of him. It was just a name before, ‘The First’, and he knew it’d made Wes flip last night but now he was getting a true picture of what these girls thought the First was capable of, or what it was actually going to do. He preferred to think of it as the former but a part of him knew that some of the things he was seeing had to be real; that this is what the First was really going to look like and do to these young girls.

But he also read that Lisa didn’t want to talk about the First; she wanted to know what she’d do when she was older. That in itself was a question about the Apocalypse – namely ‘Will I survive it?’ – but it was also partly genuine, the girl hadn’t made up her mind on a career yet and she really wanted to know.

Lorne opened his eyes. Lisa was smiling shyly at him. He smiled back.

“ I see big things for you, honey!” She laughed in delight. He decided to go with one of the more stable destinies, one that didn’t involve her death in any form but was still quite certain to happen.

“ You’re gonna work in a big restaurant in Hollywood and make the best of friends with the hottest stars around!”

Lisa gasped and grinned in utter delight. “I always wanted to be a chef!”

Lorne didn’t tell her she was going to be the waitress, but instead smiled at her and turned to the next girl in the line. She wailed a love ballad at the top of her lungs, and Lorne’s heart began to fall in his chest. Every possible destiny, every single one he could explore, all of them, he saw Helen die a grisly death at the hands of some awful creature of darkness. He desperately searched for some other alternative but couldn’t find one. With utter and dreadful certainty, this girl was going to die in the final battle of the Apocalypse, and from what he could tell, that was going to be in the next couple of days. The girl finished the number and smiled at him, so optimistic, so innocent. Lorne forced one of his bright smiles.

“ That was wonderful, honey. I think you touched every one of us here.” He paused, thinking of what he was going to say.
All he could think of was of how Helen was fifteen years old, and how painfully she was going to die. She smiled expectantly at him.

“ Uh…you’re going to be a physician. You’re gonna go to med school, you’re gonna have the time of your life and…” His voice failed him. Then he smiled. “Boy, all this talking sure takes it out of you, doesn’t it? I’ll be back in a minute; I just need to…get a drink…”

He walked hurriedly to the kitchen and down to the basement, which was thankfully empty, and for the first time in a very, very long time, felt so much despair in his heart that he sobbed uncontrollably.

The Potentials gathered in the back yard, Faith shouting out instructions to the group which they carried out with admirable precision.

Spike leaned against the wall next to Angel, safe in the shadow of the porch, watching the activities. Spike leaned across to Angel.

“ So, heard you’ve got a law firm.”

“ Yeah, I do.”

“ An evil law firm.”

Angel nodded.

Spike shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Fred burst through the door but no-one looked away from their respective activities. Fred was in her element here. Not even she could have predicted how well she’d fit into the mould of people after how badly her experiences in large crowds had gone after getting back from Pylea – she could function just fine, but to be a buzzing, happy, popular individual with so many people all living in the same place was another thing entirely. She grinned at Angel.

“ Hi!”

“ Hey Fred.”

“ Buffy says can everyone come inside because she needs to speak with everyone together.”

“ Sure.” Angel walked inside, Spike trailing after him. Faith had overheard the conversation and called for the Potentials to fall out and go inside.

Buffy was standing in the living room waiting for everyone to arrive. She smiled at Angel and Spike when they walked in, Spike guessed it was because he and Angel were actually attempting to get along. The Potentials wandered in and soon after them came Faith and Fred, chatting amiably. Willow came in with Kennedy after the other Slayer, arms linked and smiling at each other. Giles and Wesley were already inside, in full research mode, and Anya sat on the windowsill looking quite impatient. Lorne walked in from the kitchen looking quite deflated, and finally Xander and Andrew came in from the dining room.

Buffy smiled at everyone. “I’m glad you’re all here. There’s something I want to talk to you all about.”

She took a pause and took in the faces of everyone there.

“ Giles and Wes have found out something interesting about the First. We know that it’s trying to corporealise but we don’t know what it’s going to form as. However, the good news is that it can only do it until after the Hellmouth has opened and Sunnydale becomes so filled with evil that it forces the First to come into being.”

“ We know all of this already, love,” said Spike.

“ Yes,” agreed Anya. “Please stop your incessant ramblings so that these girls can find their peace with whatever deity they worship.”

Buffy nodded and continued, trying to ignore the worried looks of the Potentials. “What we don’t know is why it wants to corporealise. It seems a bit strange that this almighty being of power would want to limit itself to this one dimension, doesn’t it? I mean, Glory wanted to do nothing except escape because she was so limited here, and she was just a hell goddess. This is the thing all evil in every dimension comes from and it wants to stay here?” The incredulity she spoke with was written all over her face. “Well, the Brit Boys here have unearthed something in one of Wes’s books he brought from the archives at Wolfram and Hart in L.A. It’s…it’s an ancient prophecy.”

Angel groaned at the same time as practically everyone else in the room.

“ Listen!” shouted Buffy over the ruckus. “We think it’s actually real, things in the prophecy have already happened and there’s indications that some things are about to happen that go with what the prophecy says.”

“ Like what?” said Angel.

Buffy blinked, surprised Angel was countering her so openly in her own home. “Well it says that the First will want to become solid in this dimension. It mentioned it confronted you and nearly killing you and that it’s gonna summon forth an army to attack this world but not when the final battle’s gonna be or who’s gonna win.”

“ Of course not, then we’d have nothing to worry about…” snorted Angel.

“ Look, I know you hate prophecies but I really think we can use this to our advantage! Spike and Andrew found a tablet in the church they went to see, it said ‘It is for her to yield alone.’ Or something like that. I don’t really remember.” She drifted off, thinking. Then shook her head. “The point is this – Caleb, when he found it, he got really pissed and killed all but one of the monks there. This type of thing’s real, they can predict what’ll happen in the future!”

“ Not everything, though! I mean, if a Slayer’s the only one who could take that scythe out of the rock then ‘she’ is a pretty good thing to put on a tablet, isn’t it? You know, half the population of the planet’s female and a Slayer can only be a girl…” Angel left it trailing.

“ Alright,” conceded Buffy. “I guess it was a little vague…”

“ Plus, y’know, Giles not being the only scholar here, I mean maybe some of us’d like a look at some of the books now and then!”

Giles stood up with a start. “Now see here - !”

Willow stepped forward. “You have kinda hoarded the books with Wes after he arrived, Giles…”

Wesley looked hurt at Willow’s comment.

“ Some of these prophecies do turn out to be a big pile of crap, sis,” said Dawn from the side. Buffy tried to accept what Dawn said but there was something sinister about her eyes when she said it…almost like she was hiding something from Buffy.
Buffy opened her mouth to respond but Anya beat her to it.

“ I happen to know several prophecies which coincide with current events,” she stated matter of factly.

Angel snorted and Spike looked over at him. “Hey, man, lay off will you?”

Everyone seemed to talk at once, arguing amongst themselves. Buffy stood in the middle, utterly unable to regain control of the situation. Dawn sat in the corner glaring at Buffy, which made her want to leave the room. She looked over at Angel who was arguing heartily with Spike, and decided that she’d take it out on him for starting this whole thing off.

She marched over to him, saying “Angel, outside, right now!”

She reached out to grab him by the shoulder.

Her hand passed through his body.

It took her a second to realise what had happened, and both Angel and Spike were continuing to argue seeming not to have noticed.

Slowly, she reached out and pushed her hand through his head, causing Spike to shut up and stare in amazement. Giles looked up from across the room and saw what was happening.

Angel stepped sideways and turned to Buffy, grinning.

“ Well now…that was easier than I thought it’d be.”

Buffy stared grimly up at Angel. “Where is he?”

Angel just smiled and vanished.

Suddenly there was silence in the room, everyone too shocked with the realisation of what had happened.

Giles opened and closed his mouth a few times, then punched the table next to him. “Bugger it!”

Buffy instantly sprung into action before everyone hit something – or more worrying, someone – in their rage.

“ Look, we’ve been fooled before, let’s just make sure it doesn’t happen again, alright?”

Everyone looked at her, tension gripping their jaws.

“ All this proves is that the First is really just powerless…that this is the only thing it can do to attack us.”

“ You’re right,” said Giles. “We should’ve thought ahead that Angel is technically dead and the First can manifest as him if it wants to.”

“ Yeah, we should have. But we didn’t. I’m done lingering on the past. I’m taking the fight to the First.”

“ Buffy?” asked Willow.

Buffy nodded. “Tomorrow I’m going down into the Hellmouth, I’m going to find Angel and I’m going to finish this once and for all.” She gave everyone a look then stormed out of the room, fully aware of the same look Dawn gave her.

Giles, Faith and Willow followed her, everyone else sat or stood in silence, contemplating what the Slayer had just announced.

Buffy smiled. “How’s it hanging?”

Angel looked down at her, suspended in the same place as Spike had hung several weeks previously. “You’re not her. You sound like her, but you’re not.” Blood crusted from his lip from his previous struggle.

“ Wow. Clever. No extra brownie points for you though.”

Angel thought back to the moment Spike had walked up the stairs to get another packet of blood.

“I’m done here. Let’s go.”

“ I don’t know, mate. Andrew’s still on the prowl.”

“ He is? Damn. Uhm…”

Spike smiled. “ I dunno why you told him you’d seen bleedin’ Star Wars. I’ll tell him there’s a Bringer down here you’re torturing. He hates the things.”

“ Alright. Thanks.”

“ No problem. Glad we had our little chat, sorted a few things out.”

“ Me too.”

Spike walked up the stairs, and Angel sat back down on his cot, contemplating how the hell he was going to avoid Andrew for the indefinite future in a house filled with sunlight.

There was a small pop, and Angel looked up at the figure which suddenly stood there.

“ Angelus. You have been summoned.”

It reached forward and grabbed Angel by the temples. Before he could scream in pain, he dropped several feet onto a cave floor with the same figure in front of him.

Angel jumped to his feet, and charged the individual. He (as Angel was sure it was male) reached out with both hands and Angel felt a deadening sensation in his chest before he hit the cave wall, which was several dozen feet away from where he thought he was standing, and blacked out. He woke up, suspended in mid air, Bringers with long, sharp objects reaching up over a large metal disk embedded into the dirt and started carving symbols into his chest.

Now he screamed.

“I’ll die before I help you,” he grunted.

The First smiled. “Well I guess that suits both of interests nicely, doesn’t it?”

***********
Okay, I’ll try to make this ASAP (As Short As Possible). I watched the last season of Buffy and was truly disappointed, so I thought, what if I re-write it with Angel and his buds? I was gonna stick to pretty much the same structure of ‘Chosen’ but then I thought…what the hell? It’s the last ever episode of Buffy, and I can make Angel an AU of mine, so I think I’m going to be here a while. Which should hopefully be a good thing. Review please, and I’ll update soon! Also, I'm updating all of the chapters with better spacing...just give me a bit of time to do it :).