Dru sat by the window, tracing a pattern where her reflection wasn't. She stared at the circles of frost, as fascinated as a young child, unbothered by the chill. "Look, Spike!" she breathed, calling to her long-time paramour. "Jack Frost has left us a present. Isn't it pretty?"

Spike was behind her, appearing in absolute silence, without even the noise of a heartbeat to give away his position. Silently, he studied girl and window both, then smiled and reached out to stroke her hair possessively. "It's lovely, pet," he said. "Cold as ice and perfect as snow. Just like you."

Dru turned and smiled up at him kittenishly. "My Spike,"she said.

Without untangling his hand from her hair, he peered out the window. "Any sign of that bloody Angelus yet?" he muttered.

Dru turned her head from side to side, eyes wide. "He hasn't come home yet. He's gone to the yard of bones again."

"To the graveyard, again?" Spike exclaimed. "Sometimes I wonder what goes on in his head. Hasn't he gotten over her yet?"

Dru only smiled vacantly, muttering to herself. "He can't forget."

Spike paused and considered. In the last hundred or so years, the three had been brought close together by the one thing that wore down hate, outlasted war, and relied on the one thing that they all shared: time. Spike and Dru had always been different from most vampires because of their love for each other, and Angelus, their sire, was even more profoundly different. Over two hundred years ago, his soul had been returned to him by a gypsy curse, making him the only truly immortal human to walk the earth.

He had also fallen in love.

Spike rubbed the side of his face, where the scars had long since vanished, and grinned wryly. Even though they had been mortal enemies, he always smiled when he thought of the spunky young Slayer that had captured Angel's heart.

"Come on, Precious," he said, grasping Dru's hand and drawing her to her feet. "Let's go collect our lost sheep. Morning won't be here for a few hours yet, but you know what Angelus is like when he gets this way. He'd sit right through the sunrise if we let him."

"Yes, but he's my sheep," Dru muttered as she stood. "Poor little lamb."

Spike smiled at her as he led her gently out the door. There had been a time when it seemed Dru was abandoning him to go back to Angelus, but now all of them knew that Dru was Spike's and always would be.

"Sacrificial lamb, pet. Let's go find him, shall we?

-- END PROLOGUE --

Angel was sitting in the graveyard, leaning against one specific headstone, eyes closed. One hand rested on the icy stone, running over the engraved letters like a blind man reading Braille, and the other tightly clenched a tiny band of metal. A ring.

Oh, Buffy...

He had stood by her through the hard times which befell everyone at the end of the twentieth century, all the disasters. He had gone through the very fires of Hell itself, he had given his heart -- and later his soul -- in an effort to do all that he could for this girl, knowing -- and caring -- only that he loved her, and he would, if he could, protect her from anything.

Almost anything.

Although it had been over a century, the memories were as fresh as yesterday, and not all the years of eternity would -- could -- dim them.

It wasn't only Buffy, he knew. She was his world, and he had nothing but her, but she had others in her life, whom he grew to love. Her Watcher, the tweed-clad Rupert Giles. Xander and Willow, two of the most ordinary teenagers in the world. His life had centered around these people, and he would gladly have given his life for any and all of them.

But as hard as he tried, they had all slipped through his fingers like water, grains of sand trickling down a deadly hourglass. He had protected them against all, except the one enemy they couldn't fight.

Time.

Time, in its inexorable march, had ripped them away. Oh, he had known that Slayers rarely lived into their twenties, but it was one thing to hear it as a cold, distant fact, and quite another to see it happen, the magic that had sped her life up terrifically abandon her and leave her to face all the demons of Hell alone.

It was quite another thing to watch her die.

Five years -- five years! -- and she was gone. Five years out of three hundred and fifty. He had blinked, and she was gone.

It had never been the same, after Buffy had died. They had all drifted away. Willow had married the werewolf, Oz, and had come home one morning after the full moon to find him and both of their children dead. He had gotten loose and killed them, and then killed himself when he changed back. Before the police arrived, she was gone. She had left a short note on Xander's desk and was never seen or heard from again.

Xander had eventually married Cordelia, and they had stayed together for nearly three years, and had had a daughter. After their painful divorce she remarried, he did not; it was hard for everyone. Until they had all been killed, along with their daughter, by the San Fransisco bombing of 2023, six years later.

Giles had died in a car accident two years after that.

And Angel was left alone.

Again, he had known that this would happen -- that eventually, they would all die, and he would be alone. He hadn't wanted to think about it.

He had loved her.

Of course, there had been another choice. There had always been that other option. He could have made Buffy immortal, as he was, and they could have lived that way. He might even had been able to give her her own soul back, as he had been given his, so that they could have lived together. But though it was a pleasant fantasy, it had never been an option. Because there was no way Buffy would have allowed herself to become a demon. It was her worst nightmare. And Angel could never have made such a choice for her.

He loved her too much. So he had to let her die.

And in thirty short years, he had found himself alone.

Forever.

Oh, Buffy...

He did this every night. Had done this every night for forty years. He came to the graveyard and sat by her tombstone and remembered her.

And every night, like tonight, the tears spilled down his cheeks as the emptiness inside him became vast, all-encompassing, and each time he wondered if maybe it would just be better to end it all, to let the sunlight take him and to become dust on the grave of his beloved.

Better than flowers any day.

He heard footsteps, coming along the road towards him, but he didn't open his eyes. Because this, too, happened every night. This was the reason he was still here, after more than half a century of unbearable loss. Not that he wanted to live, but because his companions would not allow him to die.

The pairs of feet stopped in front of him. Neither of them spoke, and neither would he. The longer this silence extended, the longer he could stay here on Buffy's grave.

It was Spike who first spoke. "Matey," he said, "you do realize that you've been wallowing in this ceaseless rut of yours for eight hours now, and we are no longer on Daylight Savings?"

He didn't open his eyes, though his peace was irrevocably shattered. "What does it matter?"

Dru pouted at him. "Come, Angel, we still need you."

Spike shrugged agreement with Dru. "R&R time is over. There's work to be done. There's a world out there with a Hellmouth under it, and nobody's around to be sure it's closed except us. And I don't fancy having a pile of ashes for a business partner. So let's get inside before the farm report, eh?"

Angel sighed. What Spike said was true enough, but it wasn't the only reason they were here for him, and all three knew it. Truth be told, Buffy had touched all three of their lives, and over the last century, as the world changed, Angel found himself more than ever in kinship with his progeny. For some unknown reason, there was never another Slayer sent to the Hellmouth after Giles died, so it was the three of them against Hell. And they cared for one another. In their own way, they had all loved Buffy, and now, as the mortal world went about its self-destructing way, they were the only constants they had. Their brotherhood was one of duration as well as blood.

'Do you remember,"he said softly, "when you first showed up in Sunnydale? It took you bloody long enough, I'd say, you arrived nearly two years after I did."

Spike grinned at the memory. "We got distracted on the way. But once there, we had a grand old time, eh?"

Angel's lips twitched slightly. "Oh yeah. You were the perfect villains. You certainly made life interesting. I particularly liked the way you handled the Annoying One."

Spike's grin widened downright predatorily. "Our pleasure. Really. That little blonde girl was the best opponent we'd had in years. Not to mention the fun of the game, as well." His grin faded, his ice blue eyes studying the still-sitting Angel with worry. "Nobody expected you to fall in love with her the way you did. Not me, not Dru, not even that order of loony demons that Whistler belonged to. Nobody saw it coming."

Angel closed his eyes again, his fingers resting on the tombstone. "No. Especially not me." Neither of them wanted to talk about what had happened next, when Angel had reverted back to being the demon Angelus, and they had started working at cross-purposes. Angel's fist clenched, then opened, and the ring fell onto the frozen earth.

Dru's throaty voice broke the silence. "It was a bad time," she said, materializing out of the shadows, "for all of us." She had collected a bouquet of old dried flowers from somewhere, which she held with both hands against her chest. "The violets all withered when she died." She held them out to Angel.

Angel reached up and took the flowers from her. "It was a catch none of us expected, that's for sure." He lapsed into a brooding silence, contemplating the dead blossoms.

Spike scowled. They could reminisce some other time, but dawn was nearly here. "That's all in the past now. We worked it out years ago. The present calls."

And how. Time continued its march, as it always had done and always would. The Slayer/Watcher system had held good for nearly four thousand years, but for whatever reason, it no longer functioned. Only the three vampires stood in between Earth and Armageddon.

Not good odds.

The time was coming, soon, when they would not be enough. The time would come when the portal opened, at last, and apocalypse would swallow the world whole. And the fewer of them there were, the sooner that time would come. Nobody could deny that the end was near. Fimblewinter was here already. Dru, as if reading the unspoken thoughts in the air, shook her head slowly. "Soon, no-one will want tea," she muttered.

Spike, of course, did not entertain such thoughts. As long as there were dog races, he reasoned, there was cause to fight. He clasped Dru's hand and pulled her towards him. "They were good times, I know, but that's all there was to it." He held out his other hand to Angel, an offer of support and assistance. "It's over."

Angel looked at the two of them for a long moment, then wearily reached up and took Spike's hand, pulling himself up. "Is it?" he wondered aloud. Nobody answered. Nobody had an answer. Concealing the gesture by laying the dead flowers by the old grave, he scooped up the silver ring in his other hand and stuffed ring and fist into his pocket. Without looking back, he walked away with his brothers in eternity.

It's over.

It will all be over, soon.