If it wasn’t for what they’ve just been through together, Buffy Summers would normally be thinking that ‘this is nice’ or ‘just like old times’. She and Angel are standing back to back, defensive positions, arms raised, ready for battle.

“It’s a trap,” she says, taking in paradise around them.

Angel tells her it’s not, but she’s convinced: it’s always a trap in her experience. First, you get one moment of peace. Then, you catch your breath and then turn around and as soon as you figure out where you are, it’s then that the army of orcs comes up over the mountainside to kill you. It’s our lives.

“The orcs aren’t coming.” “But the orcs always come,” says Buffy quietly, looking at him in what Angel thinks is mass confusion. He also thinks it’s kind of cute.

“Until the day they don’t,” he smiles.

Buffy is still disbelieving, turning to face him, arms wide open. “No. The moment you look away the bad guy jumps out, or there’s a bomb under the car, or the apple’s been poisoned.” She just feels weird, and not in the ‘after-sex’ way. Which she is also still feeling, she feels the need to say.

Angel looks down. The setting has changed around them, from a lush, fertile forest with sunshine to a beach, the most perfect – and most romantic – one there ever was. The sand is warm between their toes, the sea reflecting the dazzling light. Their clothes have changed too. The whole world is changing around them. He thinks, he tells her, that they’re in…

“Twilight is a place?” Willow doesn’t understand. Giles begins to interrupt, telling her there’s nothing to understand, but she fires back at him: “What I don’t understand is that you knew about this! Before you even met Buffy, you knew!” Giles tells her that it was a myth, so there was no need to mention it. Xander demands to know: “I wanna know why Angel dressed like a fetish bad guy and became a killer!”

Giles doesn’t think ‘killer’ is the right word: Twilight has a power over it’s subjects. “There is no balance. Not anymore. When Buffy and Angel ascended, they were breached into a new reality. And there is no birth without blood.”

An uncomfortable silence fills the room for a moment.

So the demons pouring into the world is some sort of afterbirth? Xander is shuddering at the image in his head. Giles tells them that when born into the world, you vacate your old one. What you knew becomes expendable.

Dawn yells out, still monitoring the planet’s reaction to the Twilight. “We’ve got five different tears in reality.” The number rises before she even finishes her report. The demons are everywhere on Earth. Several are trying to get at the Scooby Gang now, Amy desperately using a magic force field to keep them back. She won’t be able to hold it for long. Xander shouts an order at Kennedy: Weapons!

In the corner of the base, Warren and Andrew are arguing over who came up with the idea for the Captain America shield. They both want it for the battle. Andrew refuses to pass the torch and, as a demon comes at him, Andrew gets in front of Warren, the shield barely holding the demon back as he crashes through it! Andrew is left, blood on his face, unconscious, having hit his head, hard.

Warren doesn’t leave his side. He uses the Iron Man repulsors to keep the demon at bay, protecting Andrew and calling Xander: “Andrew’s bleeding bad!”

Amy scoffs at her lover’s pleas and turns to the General, firing at demons with his revolver: “He does know we’re going to kill them after all this, right?” The General tells her to relax. They have their current problems, sure, but the boss and his girl are still AWOL and probably have no clue this is even happening!

On the beach, Buffy isn’t sure what’s happening. She asks Angel for clarification: first, she checks the sex happened. “Mother of mercy, we had the sex part,” is Angel’s swift reply. She says she was just checking – she wants to make sure this is real and not a dreamscape. Angel tells her that she’s always doubting everything. He doesn’t think they’re trapped anywhere. He thinks they’re finally free. Buffy snaps at him, calls him Twilight, guesses that even he doesn’t know what’s really happening.

Angel shows them the view, the gorgeous setting sun. “You know that’s not what I am. Think of how we got here. This place, it’s a place of pleasure. A place you’ve never been, and the only way to get here was each other.”

Buffy smiles, taking in what Angel is saying. She feels the breeze in the air, the setting sun on her face, hears the rhythm of the waves crashing…

She points at him. “One, that is the single Velveeta cheesiest come-on line I’ve ever heard. Two, if you say this is Heaven or something stupid like that, I will sock you.”

Angel sighs as she walks away from him, starting up the long beach. “I know why you make jokes Buffy, but it doesn’t change where we are. This place, you see it, don’t you?”

The scene around them shifts. It’s the Bronze. In Sunnydale. Empty, but still, the Bronze. Just as I remember it. “It reacts to us,” Angel says. Buffy says that it’s reacting with bad fashion, as she looks at her latest clothing change. Angel tells her it’s a robe from the sixteenth century, one worn by a Slayer that was killed. All the outfits she’s wearing, they belonged to former Slayers. “Think of this place as a higher plane,” he asks.

Buffy is insistent though: “It’s a trap!” she declares again, kicking a fire exit open – and stepping into a vast white void. “See? It’s not a ‘higher plane’! It’s a Daffy Duck cartoon!”

Angel tells her that the white void is the beauty of the whole thing: “It looks that way because you made it that way.” He understands now. We build ourselves paradise. The one thing the philosophers had right, he says. That’s why it looked like Eden. “Paradise is ours to write.”

Buffy scoffs. “Great speech.” But all she cares about is getting back to her friends. Angel tells her, slightly less charming than usual, that her friends can be wherever she wants them to be. Buffy looks at him. “Well then, I want them right here,” she says, gesticulating in mid air, emphasising the ‘here’. The void, inexplicably, rips open!

It’s a gap in reality. A gap they can look through. Twilight is giving Buffy what she wanted: a glimpse of her friends. Looking inside the tear, Buffy sees Faith, still injured, still attempting to hold the demons off. Buffy’s first question is whether they caused these events, but Angel tells her that he didn’t know it would be like that on Earth. He takes her by the hand.

“We can fix everything Buffy. After all these centuries, no more fighting, no more failing, no more dying. The universe we’re going to make. It’s not that we get to be together, Buffy. We finally get to be happy.”

He’s holding onto her hands, pressing them towards the place where his heart would be. Her eyes start to well up, thinking about what she could have, what they could have, that she could finally lay her arms down and rest, at last.

Faith picks Andrew up. He’s dying. She runs with him over her shoulder. She gets to Xander, who tells her she’s still bleeding. She tells him that these extra-dimensional demons are stronger than anything she has ever seen before. The girls are getting slaughtered, even with their powers back. Xander yells at Willow, who is up in mid-air, back-to-back with Amy, using magick to keep the demons at bay. And nothing they’re doing, even together, is working.

One of the demons slams Amy to the floor and she rolls across the cold surface, blood on her face. The demon stomps towards her, Willow racing to her side. “You smell of both good and evil,” he tells Willow, licking his lips. “Mind your manners,” she tells him, blasting him back, severing his arm.

In the white void of the Twilight reality, Buffy watches in stunned silence. She’s angry. She wants to protect her family and friends. Angel, covering the gap back up, like taping it shut, tells her that they’ve survived before without her: when she was dead. They always do.

Buffy tells him that he can’t possibly know what’s coming. He can live with them dying. She can’t. Angel tells her that none of it matters anymore: “The outcome is beyond us. The only absolute is that the Earth will end.”

Buffy looks at him with absurdity. “But today is different than later. My friends are different than… are you really not getting this?” She stares at him. She rips the gap open again and looks him straight in his eyes.

“That’s what I need to fight for. Not happiness. Not humanity. Them. Those people.” She points at the hole, but Angel seems to be able to answer everything. “You are fighting for them. That’s why you were sent here! This is the end of what’s down there and the beginning of us.” He pulls her close and tells her that she doesn’t have to choose anything. The universe already did that. All they have to do is leave the lower plane behind.

On Earth, Xander is cradling Andrew. It’s bad. He yells Buffy’s name. Warren tells him that she can’t hear him, but Xander insists on shouting. “She can hear me. She always can.”

In the void, Angel tells Buffy that this is what she was meant for. She looks at him with defiance in her eyes: “Don’t you know me by now, Angel?” she says, her voice growing louder.

“I never do what I’m meant for.”

She gets up. She rips more of the void away, exposing more and more of Earth. Angel insists that is they stay here, they will evolve. She tells him, in no uncertain terms, to screw evolution. He can’t believe what she’s saying: you’re just going to walk away and ignore what the universe has spent millions of years setting in motion?

“Yup,” is her one-word response.

He stands there, open-mouthed for a moment. She looks at him, sadly. He can’t bear to see her unhappy. He looks up, smile on his face. “Okay. Let’s go.” She smiles at him, tells him that she really did miss him and takes his hand. She’ll take the ones on the left and he gets the ones on the right? They jump into the gap, which seals up behind them.

On Earth, Giles, Dawn and Xander look up, as a blur rushes through the Twilight base. They can’t see what it is, it’s moving too fast, but it’s starting to slow. It’s Buffy and Angel, together, fighting the forces of darkness back. As one. The Champions. The Chosen Ones.

Willow is not keen on seeing Angel, calling him Twilight and saying she preferred Angelus. Angel reckons he had that coming, but Willow tells him she has worse for him to come. Buffy asks how many demons there are, while throwing two away, over her head.