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Part 5
Angel sat down across from him and set a small .38 revolver on the table between them. Xander just looked at him impassively, the vaguest hint of contempt on his face.“Go on. Take it,” said Angel. “If this is what you really want, then do it. I’m tired of fighting you, Xander. Tired of trying to make you understand who and what I am. So go on. If making ’Lise an orphan is what will make you happy, pick it up and use it. But it won’t bring your wife back. It won’t bring Buffy back. It won’t change anything that’s gone before. But it will destroy everything that comes after.”
For the first time, Angel saw pain under Xander’s anger and hate.
“It hurts so much sometimes,” he said.
“Yeah, it does. It never really stops hurting. You just get better at distracting yourself from it over time.”
Xander rose and picked up his field jacket from the back of the chair. As he shrugged into it, he said, “If it wasn’t for Elisa, you’d be dead now. You know that.”
“I figured.”
“I don’t want to do that to her or to whatever of Buffy is a part of her.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t bother,” said Xander as he turned his back on his old enemy and left the Bronze forever.
Angel emerged into the sunlight a few moments later to find Elisa standing nervously by his car.
“I didn’t hear a gunshot, so I guessed you were okay,” she said.
He looked toward Xander, who was already a block away, and then back down at his daughter. “You really are quite amazing sometimes. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that. After all, you are your mother’s daughter.”
Elisa smirked. “I’m my father’s daughter, too, you know. You set a pretty good example, although as a teenager I’m not contractually allowed to admit that.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” he said.
Elisa put her arm around him and they watched his would-be killer as he walked out of their lives.
“You think he’ll ever stop hating you?”
Angel looked down at the girl who looked so much like her mother, and who carried so much of her spirit and fire. “I don’t know. Probably not. But if anything of your mother’s strength rubbed off on him at all, maybe he can learn to live with it. I feel sorry for him. He’s fought a good fight his whole life, but it’s almost like my demon became his own. He just can’t seem to get it out of him.”
“I wish I’d known him before. I wish I’d known her, too.”
“You do know her, ’Lise. You know her because in so many ways you are her. I look at you and I see her humor, her passion, everything I loved in her reflected in you. Maybe that’s what Xander saw too, in the end.”
They stood quietly for a time, then she said, “ ‘He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.’ ”
Angel smiled down at his daughter. “Last I remember, you were still watching Sesame Street reruns. When did you start quoting Melville?”
“Oh, I’m just full of surprises,” she answered. Then she added, “I go to school, Dad. They teach you stuff there.”
“Let’s just hope he meets a better end than Ahab did,” said Angel, nodding in the direction Xander had departed.
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“C’mon. I hear a couple of double cappuccinos and a big slice of cheesecake calling our names,” said Angel as he opened the passenger door of the car for her.
Elisa punched him playfully on the arm. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re pretty cool for an old guy?”
Angel chuckled. “I’m a really old guy, actually.”
“A really, really old guy.”
“Now you’re pushing your luck,” said Angel, moving around to the driver’s side.
“How on Earth did you find me, anyway?” asked Elisa as Angel pulled away from the Bronze, leaving the old place and its memories behind, part of a past none of them would ever be able to change, a past which they all still lived with every day.
He smiled wickedly at her. “Old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time. You didn’t invent that little transponder trace trick, you know.”
“I wish I had one of those stupid dads sometimes. You know, the ones you can fake out now and then.”
“No, you don’t.”
She grinned and looked back out at the road. “Nah, I guess not. I kind of like the one I got.”