Angel looked up from his book as he heard the scrape of a key in the lock of his apartment door. He lay sprawled across his satin sheets, shirt and shoes missing, enjoying a collection of fluffy short stories by easily forgotten authors. Marking the page and setting on a nearby shelf, he sat up on his bed and re-arranged the sheets, hoping to make himself as presentable as possible.

The door opened, emitting a rather harried-looking blond girl.

Even as angry and rumpled as she obviously was, she was beautiful. Angel took a moment to appreciate how her goodness managed to shine so strongly, no matter what mood she was in.

"Hey." He finally said, softly.

She shut the door, turned, and smiled at him - a tired smile, but it reached her eyes. "Hey."

Angel patted the bed, next to him. Buffy tossed her jacket on the coat-stand and walked over to him, settling on the soft mattress. Tension was etched in her every movement. He stretched out an arm and put it around her shoulders. She sighed and sagged against him, allowing him to comfort her with his strength.

"You seem... tired," he observed.

Buffy chuckled, darkly. "I don't think 'tired' even comes close."

"Why were you at school so long? I was under the impression that high school students left as quickly as possible right before a vacation."

"Demon-ness. What else?" She sighed. "I just spent four hours doing the research gig. We still didn't find out how to kill the guy without killing half of our team and turning the whole thing into a gore-fest on ick parade."

"Sounds like fun," he replied simply. Buffy gave and unladylike snort.

With the arm surrounding her, Angel started making slow, comforting circles over her tense shoulders, his palm pressed flat to her skin.

"Mm. Feels nice." She smiled, blissfully. Tension slipped away from her, flowing out of her body through her neck and shoulders and leaving pure exhaustion in its wake. After a few minutes, she began to blink sleepily in the dimness of the room.

Angel continued to rub, letting a comfortable silence permeate the room.

"So, do you have any plans for your break?" He asked, eventually.

There was no answer. He looked down and found the peaceful slackness of sleep on her face.

Giving her inert form a genuine smile, Angel slowly lay her back against the covers. He positioned her head carefully on the pillow, and pulled the blanket over her, covering her to the neck. She shifted in her sleep, settling herself under the warm covering.

Angel watched her for a long moment, still smiling. Then he went about making an impromptu bed for himself, just at the foot of hers.

Angel was dreaming, and he knew it.

Angel hated dreams.

Because they never really *were* dreams - only memories. But his memories might as well have been the darkest nightmares of the subconscious. They gave him the same level of misery.

In this dream, he was slaughtering children. He ripped four school-aged siblings from their pre-Christmas dreams of roasting goose and warm fireplaces, and sucked every last drop of blood from their veins. He left them under their fresh-cut fir Christmas tree, because parents needed presents, too...

And, no matter how many times he cried out in his mind to stop, he could only sit and watch it happen, over and over.

Then, suddenly, as he was about to feast on the throat of the youngest boy, there was something different. A minor change, at first -- just a dark shadow where he could have sworn there had been a light. Before long, however, the darkness grew. It slowly began taking over the entire memory, as if an invisible fire was turning the edges of his memories into ash.

Angel's mind, already aggravated by his inability to stop the onslaught of Christmas Past, was soon reeling around this new phenomenon. He began to panic, instinctively fearing this encroaching blackness. He ignored the memory playing like a movie in surround-sound about him, and concentrated on the dark. On stopping it from growing any larger.

It worked. But only for a moment. The black eventually began to grow again, this time at an even faster rate.

Before his mental "eyes", the darkness began to take form.

Part Three

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