#ats doyle

you forget sometimes amidst the plots of the episodes, but internally he took doyle’s death HARD, and he felt responsible for it. but cordelia got the visions, and the important thing is that he has cordelia and wesley to ground him and keep him sane and give him a purpose.

so imagine a universe where there is no cordelia in his life. he leaves buffy, he’s distraught, and then he meets doyle. and they’re actually really similar! two lonely pathetic post-breakup irish part-demons who seek redemption. they fall in love over the few months they have together, they kiss, and doyle dies. and angel is completely alone with literally the weight of the world on his shoulders, or behind his eyes in this case. the visions and the grief and the loneliness and all his other angst and pain pile up until he’s nothing but a shivering wreck.

sure wesley and gunn are giving him a home and doing the dirty work for him, but in this universe they don’t have a connection - how can you have a relationship, a friendship, with a husk of a person?

they had all that space and they chose to awkwardly overlap the bubbles like that????????