Angel opened his eyes, curious about what the cold, hard surface against his forehead might be. Apparently it was a garbage can.
He shifted his weight on the hard pavement, wondering how on earth he'd ever let himself smell this bad for such a long period of time. But back then, it had been easy; it had been just one more way to make sure the world hated him as much as he hated himself.
Is that the last good plan I came up with? Angel wondered. Possibly so.
From the nearby street, he heard music blaring from a tinny speaker, maybe one attached to a hot-dog cart. A cab driver screamed something obscene, probably at another driver. And, even for garbage, the local odor was particularly bad.
Angel thought: I'll make a brand-new start of it, in old New York. King of the hill. Top of the garbage heap.
Brushing off his filthy slacks, Angel got slowly to his feet. Even the flashy, Whistler-approved stuff he'd worn in 1997 would have been welcome now.
So, no money. That could be remedied easily enough; he had a few hoarding-houses of things that could be resold. Once he looked presentable, he could get himself an apartment; basement places were plentiful in New York. And then -
--and then, what?
"God, you are disgusting."
Angel turned toward the voice to see Whistler walking toward him, shaking his head. Last time, Angel hadn't known what to make of him; this time he did. "You've got the wrong guy."
"I'm looking for a vampire with a soul - so poignant. Though poignant is not the first word that comes to mind. Pungent, maybe. Vampire, soul, that would be you, right?"
"You'd think," Angel said. "But what you're really looking for is a guardian for Buffy. I agree with you - she's going to need a lot of help, But I am not the guy."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Whistler looked startled. "You're psychic? That wasn't in the file."
"I'm not psychic. I've just - been there and done that and screwed it all up. Find somebody else for her, okay? Somebody good. Somebody so much smarter and stronger and better than I am, because Buffy deserves that. If she has the right person taking care of her, maybe all the others will get to lead better lives too."
Whistler readjusted his hat, clearly unable to deal with a conversation going so differently than he'd planned. "I don't understand you."
"Nobody understands me," Angel replied. "That's my curse. One of them, anyway."
"See, I think you're MY curse," said a third voice, back in the alley. "Because anybody else could've figured out how to use that doohickey after screwing up the timeline just once or twice."
"Who the hell?" Whistler said as both he and Angel turned around. Then Whistler grinned. "Hey, it's my old buddy Flip!"
"I'm NOT Flip! I'm Chip! Humans and protohumans - what is it with you? If the demon's gray, stereotyping's okay?"
"Chip," Angel said, quickly feeling around in his ragged clothes until he came across the device, tucked into a chest pocket. "What are you doing here?"
"I figure that's a question you should be asking yourself, big guy," Chip said.
"Did the Powers send you, too?" Whistler said.
Chip gave him a withering stare. "I can't even start telling you how extraneous you are right now. Why don't you go do something useful? Like, get us some hot dogs."
"Hot dogs. Okay." Slightly dazed, Whistler started backing toward the street, then paused and said, "You want relish?"
"Yeah. And heavy on the onions." Once they were again alone, Chip folded his arms. "I knew you were gonna screw this up. But the stunts you've pulled? Unbelievable. I believe we are dealing with a vampire of very little brain, gentle reader."
"I did my best," Angel said. But it was never good enough. Story of his life.
"You think I'm talking about the mistakes you made, don't you?"
Angel held out his hands, gesturing at the filthy, garbage-strewn alley that surrounded them and all-too-perfectly symbolized his predicament. "What else is there? It's ALL mistakes."
"And this is different than anybody else's life - how?"
Caught short, Angel had to consider this for a moment. He'd never quite looked at it this way.
Leaning against the brick wall nearby, Chip said, "You've got at least a dozen friends who singlehandedly brought the world to the brink of apocalypse. Did you stop liking them? Hanging out with them? Thinking they were good people? No. Faith killed innocent people, by mistake and on purpose. Wesley kidnapped your kid, and you weren't happy, but let me tell you, most parents would've offed that guy for real, not made it up with him later. Willow tried to fry the planet, Gunn killed a man to make his girlfriend happy, and your precious Cordy fell for the oldest trick in the book and got herself possessed by primordial evil. Buffy? A LOT of red ink on that permanent record. They're ALL a bunch of fuck-ups, Angel."
"They're my friends," Angel said, wondering if it would hurt as much to punch Chip as it had Skip.
"We have at long last arrived at my point. Don't you get it, Angel? It's not the mistakes people make. It's how they respond to those mistakes."
"I tried to face what I'd done." This was true, wasn't it? Angel knew a century of guilt hadn't been for nothing. "I always tried to start over again -"
"Start over. Start over. Throw everything away and start over. Yeah, that's you." Chip held out his gray, leathery hands. "You never needed that device to go jumping around from place to place, Angel. You always kept trying to get to a place where the mistakes of the past didn't matter. You always tried to start over. You never just learned to live with all the wrong you'd done before. But that's what people have to do. They have to accept that their pasts go with them - no matter what."
Angel hesitated, then said, "I never forgot any of it. I never denied any of it."
"Well, a couple of white lies here and there, but if you mean you never denied it to yourself, yeah, I'll grant you that. But you never learned to live with it. You never stopped looking for that clean slate you were never gonna find."
"I just wanted to change some of the mistakes," Angel said tiredly. "I just wanted to - to hurt them a little less."
"You can't give people the good of yourself without giving them the bad, too. And they're the ones who decide if it's worth it. Not you." Apparently bored, Chip shrugged and pointed at the device. "The Powers are getting dizzy, watching you spin around like this. So pick a destination - any destination, forward or back - and go there. After that, I wash my hands of you."
"I choose again?" Angel said. "And this is the very last trip?"
"Until you get yourself killed again." With a frown, Chip added, "Definitely looking forward to that. Not."
Back to his turning? Forward to Connor's birth? Angel tried to balance all the variables, then realized there was no way. "You know how it will all turn out, don't you?"
"I have an idea. And no, I'm not telling you."
Slowly, Angel relaxed and said, "Send me where I can do the most good."
After a moment, Chip said, slowly, "Well, well, well. You might have learned something after all."
Then the alleyway dissolved into gold, into gray, into -
--Angel Investigations, in its first incarnation. Cordelia, carrying a feather duster and a box of supplies, walked from the front office into the area Angel was thinking of as his own; Doyle stepped closer and said, "She's a stiffener, all right."
"That's kind of crude," Angel said, automatically. When was this? What was - oh, wait. This was the first day Cordelia had come to work for him. This was the day his work in Los Angeles had really begun.
Doyle raised his eyebrows. "A bit possessive, are we? You don't say you fancy her yourself - do you?"
"We'll find you a nice girl," Angel promised. Relief swept through him, along with something that could only be called joy.
He patted his pockets; as he'd expected, the device was no longer with him. What was past was past. The future - he still wanted Connor, but the rest of it, he'd take as it came. It was enough of a gift to stand here again, enough of a gift just to try.
"Can't help noticing that you used the future tense there," Doyle said. "So, does that mean you're game?"
Angel let out a sigh and smiled. "I'm game."
THE END