theres an au somewhere in which the romani spellcaster that curses angelus doesnt just curse angelus, but rather curses every vampire of the aurelian line in a, say, twelve mile radius to get their soul back.
it's rough, especially for the first few years. spike's the weepiest, but angel takes it the hardest, oddly enough. dru's absolutely nutty over it, but she's always nuts, and anyway, having the three of them to wrangle gives darla something to focus on other than the weight of her sins. they manage.
(one thing she does is research what, exactly, has been done to them. when she finds out about the loophole - even a moment's happiness - there is a gut-lurching second where darla thinks to herself, i can end our agony. and then she thinks of her last kill, a young couple and their toddler. the father had begged darla to spare the little child's life, to take him instead. the mother had clawed at darla, covering her child with her body, screaming as she died.
rather than find that moment's happiness, darla begins new research, looking into ways to secure an immortal soul to a vampire's body permanently. closing the loop, as it were.)
spike eventually gets it into his head that he wants to do the slayer thing - not kill them, like he'd planned, but to help the poor girls. dru gives him the idea. angel leaves them, at that point, in the dead of night, without telling them where he's going. darla lets him go.
there's a girl in peking - xin, her name is, and she's understandably skeptical, but she accepts their help. they fight with her until she dies, a few months later, at the hands of an apocalypse. it breaks spike and dru quite badly - cuts spike's face up, too. darla gets them out, gets them back to europe. leaves them in italy. looks for angel.
she finds him eating rats in new york city, of all places. she shakes some sense into him and gets him some clean clothes, some blood, a place to sleep out of the sun. he's wallowing, which is to be expected, but how does he figure he's going to atone for his sins if he's rotting in the gutter like so much trash?
she's too practical, he tells her. he's too fucking dramatic, she tells him, and makes him eat some more pig's blood, cold.
darla tells him about spike and dru, what they've been up to these past few decades. he shudders when she tells him about xin, her throat ripped out by enemy fangs. angel's intrigued by the concept of helping slayers, but he confesses quietly to darla that he's not ready for that yet.
so they part ways again, with the understanding that they'll stay in touch. darla bounces around the americas, running into spike and dru - sometimes just dru, as spike is off chasing rumors of slayers - until the late 1990s, when she gets a call from angel.
angel's found a girl, and he wants to get the gang back together.
