Tea offered no solace. Still he sipped at its bitter murk, as unclear and odoriferous as the matters of his mind and heart.

Lifting his glasses aside, he rubbed wearily at the swollen sting of his eyes. Eyes that never knew rest. Eyes that had broiled forth rare tears as he'd collapsed in Bfy's arms, collapsed within himself, loss overwhelming the rage. Raging that somewhere He...It, was laughing. Laughing as they wept.

And now It was back, though now it was Him. Beast of beauty, saint in a devil's shoes or a devil in a saint's, the fallen Angel. The pretty irony mattered not. He was cloaked now in that tortuous shroud of a soul, his own personal, perpetual crucifixion. A soul tenuously nailed to him by the one thing that he should never have been able to experience, the one thing that Buffy was and would forever be to him.

But somewhere in there, behind the brooding, sombre liquid of those eyes, It lurked. The thing that had taken Jenny from him, the thing that had tortured him physically and emotionally to the brink of madness. It had forever wounded his spirit, forever wounded them all. A great blood-black shadow over all their lives he hoped had past.

And Buffy had not told him. Had not trusted him. Had not even thought of him. It burned in his veins like a fire without home, the hearth of his innards utterly vacuous. The fire of a spurned family, a spurned father. The fire that would gladly rent a hole in that bastard heart and consume the wave of ash. And all this after trying to help Buffy with his passing, after it making the cold of Jenny's that little semblance of bearable.

But the piety was not his. He would have Jennifer back in an instant, the world be damned. It was what had finally broken him, what had played its part in forcing Buffy's hand, literally and figuratively. That promise of Jenny, alive, living, loving...lost. A twinge of jealousy added fuel to the fire, she had her Angel back, his was gone forever.

Selfishness would be quashed however, he must be selfless, stalwart, the rock for his battered little brood to break upon. Children. They were only children, children who never should be in these places. Children who had enough of their own home grown horrors without those of the underworld. His world. The world that had become theirs by harrowing necessity and not by choice.

He set aside his tea, chill now and stagnant. He exhaled a long, exhausted sigh. The dereliction of the bruise that was his heart resounded like a metronome in the silence of the room. The inner fire was running its course as it always did and always would, it cooling now into a glacial flow of glass and razors. From feeling all at once he knew he would soon feel nothing at all. Nothing but the numb envelopment. The silent dark of emptiness.