Flashing fire and pain, mass of burning and the smell of his own flesh and the first few times it happens he thinks it is memory, the imprint on his brain of that sunlit intensity of power burning through him, melting, breaking, shredding, his bones disintegrating and his eyeballs exploding in his head.

But it isn’t that.

He knows this when he hears the voices.

Screaming, weeping, squashing, cracking sounds like skulls being smashed with hammers, sounds of fear and pain and mourning, slash of knives through the air and he can feel them parting his skin, cutting him, slashing deep and when he looks down he sees the opening of his flesh and black suppurating out of the gaping, broken flesh but there is no pain until he opens his mouth and then he screams and the brands lie against his back, against his skin on his shoulders and his back and he smells it again, his own burning flesh as he is consumed and broken and obliterated--

And then back, and he smells Angel and it angers him that the smell is comforting.

What the hell is it? Someplace wide and black and dark, where no one is supposed to leave, where it is supposed to pull you in and suck you down and never let you back out again because this is where you went because you were evil and killed and raped and mauled and flayed and this is what you deserve…

“I have a soul!” he howls as the darkness drags him down but it is a place where there is no one to hear, no one to listen, no one to see or help or sympathize.

Is this what it gets you, then, when you give everything you have--your skin, your blood, your bones, your eternity, your love, your hope for having her, your need to be what she’s shown you you can be--is this the reward? The deep dark and the fire and the slash of paper-thin knives through his white-pale skin, pain like sunlight, but it doesn’t burn.

This is it, then, unless they can get him back. Doesn’t matter that he saved the sodding world, gave his life for it, gave his life for her--doesn’t matter, doesn’t make a difference. Short end of the stick this is, so bloody wrong I SAVED THE FUCKING WORLD!

Doesn’t matter, does it, pet, you’re still here and it’s looking like you’ll always be here, nothing left to hang on to and here we go, you’re falling you’re falling you’re gone and it’s over.

Help me.