The silence in the library was heavier than the dust. It was a weighted, knowing silence, filled with the ghosts of whispered conversations and frantic, last-ditch research sessions. Buffy paced the length of the main table, the soft scuff of her boots the only sound. Each circuit brought her past Angel, who sat perfectly still, a leather-bound book open before him, his posture so unchanging he might have been carved from the shadows themselves. The sight of his focused stillness grated on her raw nerves. She needed action, a fight, something to hit. This quiet waiting was a special kind of torture.

"Find anything?" she finally bit out, stopping at the far end of the table and leaning her hands on it. "Or are you planning to wait until the book crumbles to dust around you?"

His eyes, dark and unreadable, lifted slowly from the page to meet hers. "This isn't a vampire, Buffy. We can't just find its lair and charge in." His voice was low and even, a deliberate calm that felt like an accusation against her own restlessness.

"No? Because that's kind of my brand," she shot back, her voice tight with frustration. "We know where it is. It's in that alley. We go back, we wait, it shows up, I introduce it to Mr. Pointy."

"And what happens when it hits you with that wave of despair?" he countered, closing the book with a soft thud. "You felt it in that apartment. I felt it in the alley. It's a psychic attack. Your strength won't matter if you don't have the will to lift your arms."

"So what's your plan? We sit here and read until it gets bored and leaves town?" She pushed off the table, the urge to move overwhelming. She stalked toward the stacks, then spun back to face him. "People are being hollowed out, Angel. Right now. While we're in here enjoying the smell of old paper."

He stood then, a fluid motion that unfolded his large frame from the chair. He was a solid wall of darkness in the moonlit library. "My plan is to understand what we're fighting before we get ourselves killed. This thing is drawn to powerful emotions. Rushing in, full of anger and aggression? We'd be lighting up like a beacon for it."

"So we should go in full of calm, zen-like nothingness? Not really my strong suit." The space between them crackled. Every word was layered with years of unspoken arguments, of his caution against her fire. His body was a solid presence across the room, and she was intensely aware of the way he held himself, the sheer power kept under rigid control. It was the same control that had always driven her mad, the same control she had always, on some level, wanted to break.

"I didn't say that," he said, his voice dropping lower. The argument was escalating, the air growing thick with it. "I'm saying we need a strategy that isn't just you, a stake, and a prayer."

"It's worked out for me so far!"

"Has it?" The question was quiet, but it landed like a punch.

Before she could form a reply, a throat cleared from the office doorway. Giles stood there, glasses perched on his nose, a heavy, dust-jacketed book held in one hand. He looked between the two of them, his expression one of weary resignation.

"If you two are quite finished," he said, his voice cutting cleanly through the tension. He walked forward and placed the book on the table with a definitive thud. "I believe I've found our malevolent entity."

Buffy and Angel both turned toward him, their argument forgotten. Giles opened the book to a marked page, revealing a disturbing ink drawing of a formless, shadowy creature with weeping eyes.

"It's a Grief-Harrow, as Buffy so aptly named it," Giles read, his finger tracing the ancient text. "A psychic parasite of the lower astral planes. It does not kill in the physical sense. It is drawn to those carrying immense burdens of sorrow or regret. It latches on, feeding on those emotions until the victim is but an empty vessel. It grows stronger with each soul it consumes, and its psychic field becomes a lure for others in similar states of despair." He looked up at them over his glasses, his gaze pointed and serious. "The lore is quite specific. Its most potent targets are those with profound, unresolved emotional baggage."

The words settled into the silence. Buffy looked from the book to Angel. His face was a mask of stone, but she saw the flicker in his eyes. Sorrow. Regret. Unresolved emotional baggage. They weren't just hunting a monster. They were its ideal prey.

The lead came an hour later. A frantic call to Giles from a contact at Sunnydale General, a nurse who had seen her share of the town's weirdness. She described a John Doe, brought in by paramedics after being found staring blankly at a wall in his apartment. No drugs, no trauma, just… nothing. An empty vessel.

The drive to the hospital was silent. Buffy stared out the passenger window, the streetlights smearing across the glass. The earlier anger had evaporated, leaving a cold dread in its place. Beside her, Angel drove with a grim focus, his hands tight on the steering wheel. The words from Giles’s book echoed in the tense quiet: drawn to those carrying immense burdens of sorrow or regret. The car felt small, cramped with the weight of their respective histories.

The hospital was a place of sterile white and the smell of antiseptic, a stark contrast to the musty library. The nurse, a woman named Carol with tired eyes, led them down a quiet corridor to a private room. "We've run every test we can think of," she whispered, her voice strained. "EEG shows minimal brain activity, but he's physically fine. It's like his mind has just been… erased."

She pushed the door open. The man in the bed couldn't have been much older than Buffy. He was lying on his back, his eyes wide open, staring at the acoustic tile ceiling. There was no flicker of awareness in them, no recognition, no life. He breathed in a slow, steady rhythm, a biological machine performing its function. But the person was gone.

Buffy felt a wave of nausea. She had seen death in countless forms—violent, bloody, tragic. This was worse. This was an erasure. She stepped closer, her boots silent on the linoleum. She could feel the lingering psychic residue in the room, a faint, cold echo of profound sadness, like the ghost of a scream. This was what the Grief-Harrow left behind. Not a body, but a void where a person used to be.

She reached out, her fingers hesitating before touching the back of the man's hand. It was warm, the skin soft, but there was no response. No reflexive twitch, no spark of energy. It was like touching a doll. She remembered the suffocating numbness after she was pulled from the grave, the feeling of being disconnected from everything. This was that feeling, made manifest and permanent.

Angel stood near the door, his face a grim, unreadable mask. But Buffy knew him well enough to see the horror in the rigid set of his jaw, the darkness in his eyes. He had lived without a soul, a creature of pure impulse and malice. He had fought for a century to reclaim his own. To see a soul not damned, but simply scoured away—it was an abomination he understood on a level she couldn't. A fate worse than any hell.

They left the room without a word, pulling the door softly shut. In the hallway, under the merciless fluorescent lights, the petty anger of their earlier argument seemed like a lifetime ago. It was stripped away, burned off by the cold, blank horror in that room.

Buffy looked at him, really looked at him, and saw not the brooding vampire or the ex-boyfriend, but a soldier staring at the true face of the enemy. He met her gaze, and the chasm between them seemed to shrink. There was no strategy to debate, no past to rehash. There was only the chilling reality of what they were up against.

"We find it," she said, her voice low and steady, devoid of its earlier heat. "Tonight."

Angel gave a single, sharp nod. "Tonight."

The cemetery was a maze of crumbling stone and long shadows under a sliver of moon. They moved through it with a shared, predatory grace, two hunters on the same trail. The cold night air was a relief after the sterile stillness of the hospital, but the quiet here was different. It was a listening quiet, ancient and watchful. Buffy kept her stake in hand, its familiar weight a small comfort. Beside her, Angel was a deeper shadow among shadows, his senses stretched, his gaze sweeping over the rows of forgotten names.

It started not with a sound, but with a feeling. A sudden, plummeting drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the autumn night. The air grew thick, heavy, pressing in on Buffy from all sides. A shimmer distorted the air near an old, weeping angel statue—a patch of darkness that seemed to absorb the moonlight, coalescing into a formless, vaguely man-shaped blot of pure misery. It had no face, only the impression of one, and from it radiated a palpable, soul-crushing despair.

The Grief-Harrow didn't scream; it exhaled. A wave of pure psychic agony washed over Buffy, and her defenses crumbled. It wasn't a physical blow, but it hit her harder than any fist. Suddenly, she was drowning again, the cold water filling her lungs. She saw her mother's face, pale and still on the living room couch. She felt the weight of every life she'd failed to save, every friend she'd buried. The loneliness of her calling, the bone-deep certainty that she would always be alone, crashed down on her. Her knees buckled. The stake slipped from her numb fingers, clattering silently on the damp earth. Her breath hitched in a sob she couldn't contain.

She was going down, sinking into a black pit of her own sorrow.

Then, a blur of motion. Angel was there, his face a mask of primal urgency. He didn't shout her name. He didn't hesitate. He slammed into her, his shoulder hitting her midsection with the force of a freight train. The impact drove the air from her lungs and sent them both careening sideways, tumbling through the wet grass. They landed hard behind the solid granite base of a large mausoleum, Angel’s body covering hers completely.

He was a dead weight on top of her, pinning her to the cold ground. The psychic wave washed over them, but the solid, unyielding reality of his body acted as a shield, an anchor. The crushing despair receded, leaving only a hollow, trembling echo.

For a long moment, there was only the sound of their breathing, harsh and ragged in the sudden silence. Buffy’s mind was still reeling, but her body was acutely, shockingly aware of the man on top of her. The hard muscle of his chest pressed against her breasts. One of his legs was thrust between hers, his thigh a band of steel against her inner leg. The leather of his jacket was cool against her cheek, but underneath it she could feel the impossible heat of him, a warmth that always defied the nature of his existence. His hips were settled against hers, an intimate, perfect fit.

The shock of the attack gave way to a different kind of jolt, a current of pure physical awareness that shot through her veins. It was raw and immediate, a reminder of a chemistry that had never faded, only been buried. She could feel the coiled power in his limbs, the solid strength holding him impossibly still above her. His breath ghosted across her temple, and she inhaled his scent—leather, night air, and something else that was uniquely his. A sharp, undeniable heat pooled low in her belly, a traitorous response that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the man whose weight was a familiar, forbidden pressure. He shifted slightly, and she felt the muscles in his abdomen tense against her stomach. Her own breath caught, and she knew he felt it, too. His body was rigid, frozen in place, as if he was suddenly terrified to move, to breathe, to acknowledge the very thing their bodies were screaming at each other in the silent, haunted darkness.