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samsomTitle: Loved You Anyway
Summary: Cordelia deals with Angel’s abandonment during his beige period. Not.
An alternate look at Reprise/Epiphany with a heavy c/a slant.
Pairing: C/A, C/OC
Rating: NC-17
Dedication:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damnskippytoo. If this fic works, it’s because Debs pushed me, kept at me, and didn’t let me settle when I just wanted it to be finished already. It would have been a jumble of non-associated stream of conscious mess if not for her. Debs rocketh muchly. Also thanks to lostakasha for the title, and more.
Notes: for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lynnevitational. This is my humble offering.
~~
“Give Wesley our best, will you dear?” The tiny voice filtered through the receiver and Cordelia could only stare in wonder as the connection went dead. Wes nearly died saving Gunn’s life and his parents barely roused themselves to a mild chagrin.
She slammed the receiver back on the cradle and glared at it, feeling a bubbling cauldron of badness well up inside of her, begging for release.
Then she rounded the corner of the nurse’s station, and the cauldron bubbled over.
Angel lurked a few feet from Wesley’s room.
Seeing him after all they’d gone through the past six hours, it was enough. Cordelia steeled herself with nerve and adrenaline.
When he turned to face her, she was ready.
“…do us a favor and stay away.”
That look on Angel’s face was better than anything she’d accomplished in a while.
She stepped past him and walked to Wesley’s room, holding onto her anger until he couldn’t see, and then the ache caught up and her eyes stung sharp and salty.
She wouldn’t cry, though, because tonight was a fresh start, a clean getaway from the express train to hell Angel chose to ride.
It didn’t seem to matter that he was taking a piece of her - of them - with him, that they’d be left behind to carry on like shell-shocked orphans of war.
Now they’d go on, and he’d sink back down into the dark abyss where he felt so at home.
She was fine with that.
But her hands shook and she couldn’t make the words to Wesley come out kind.
She needed to leave. Standing, she said goodbye to the boys and turned down Gunn’s offer of a ride.
In the hall, she took a lungful of stale antiseptic air. She didn’t want to go home, wasn’t ready to face the silence of another sleepless night wondering why she couldn’t reach him, of having nightmares of finding his ashes in a box with a Wolfram and Hart logo in the center – or worse, to dream that they’d unleashed Angelus.
~~
The pub was quiet except for the jukebox.
After going home and flipping on the television, only to find herself staring at an infomercial on exercise equipment, Cordelia decided she needed a little help quieting her nerves.
Wesley’s favorite pub seemed the best place to decompress so she got dressed, wore her hair down, her black pants and spaghetti-strapped blouse loose. Low heels clicked on the hardwood as she ambled her way to a stool.
She ordered vodka on the rocks.
The bartender didn’t ask for identification and she didn’t offer to show any.
Age was relative anyway. She was twenty and felt sixty. Wesley was just a few years older than her but looked a hundred in that hospital bed. Gunn had enough hardness in his chocolate brown eyes to fill up three lifetimes, and two hundred and forty-two-year-old vampires were really just eight, jumping up and down when their favorite toys got broken.
Prowling rooftops and alleys, staying away but never really going away.
The door opened, hushed greetings announcing another late night customer, and the air rushed in after him, chilled by nightfall.
She shivered, feeling the air down her spine like the sweep of a cold gaze, though she knew if she looked, he wouldn’t be there.
He never was.
~~
His name was Charlie, and he was a graduate student.
Nice eyes, green and warm.
Soft auburn hair.
She let him sit next to her at the bar as she nursed her vodka, and listened to him talk
about college, and Boston. He was twenty-four, and in his second year studying film-making.
He was nice, and he was interested in her, asking questions she easily dodged through practice.
When she was ready to leave, he called her a cab and waited with her while it came.
He asked for her number and she gave it to him, laughing as she gazed up into his face, the air cold on her nose and the vodka warm in her blood.
He looked down at her and she recognized the puppy dog look in his eyes as he blinked. She saw it a lot in high school, a lot less of it in LA.
When the cab came, she got in and he covered her hand with his where it rested on the door, rather than trying to kiss her. She smiled again, brightly, and let him shut it for her.
She kept her eyes off the rooftops, and away from the alleyways.
~~
Two nights later, Charlie picked her up for a drink and dinner at the Upper Crust Trattoria, where she had tiramisu and a small glass of Muskat for dessert.
The sweet wine stayed on her tongue as he drove her home, lingered by her doorstep before leaving. He drove away and she paused before turning into her building, sweeping the darkened street with a glance.
The wind ruffled the leaves from the trees, caused them to scatter along the concrete sidewalk.
~~
Cordelia stared down at the bills spread across her desk. Two of them were pink. She thought about the one Mrs. Sharp wouldn’t pay, and had the completely horrible idea that maybe they should put the Skilosh spawn in her head, just for a day, long enough for her to write a check, and then right back out again.
Wesley probably wouldn’t go for it, though she thought she could convince Gunn.
Angel would’ve –
No.
She wasn’t saying his name, she wasn’t thinking his name and she was going to go on pretending the still shadow across the street wasn’t him.
~~
Cordelia was buzzed on wine and Charlie’s good company. She didn’t once think about the Sharps or the pale look on Wesley’s face the last time she saw him.
For that, Charlie deserved a thank you.
And she deserved to be in the company of a man who wanted her.
Inviting him in, she warned Dennis to be nice and lowered the lights, bringing him a mug of tea and scooting close to him on the couch.
Her windows were open, bringing in the cold night air.
The moon was heavy in the sky, dappling her living room in shadows and pale light.
She let Charlie kiss her, closed her eyes and enjoyed the warm caress of his tongue, slipping her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in the hair at the base. She drifted pleasantly on his touch, felt for a few minutes how easy it used to be, how uncomplicated it was, even on the hellmouth, even starving in LA.
Before she let herself care.
Her eyes floated open when Charlie’s hands grew restless, and she froze.
Angel stood outside her window, framed by moonlight and the dark sky beyond, watching.
Something inside her twisted and turned, becoming as ugly as the way he looked at her. She deepened the kiss, allowed Charlie to push her gently back against the cushions, and his ardor became hotter until it burned the air. She watched Angel watching them as Charlie ran his palm up the flat of her belly, arching her neck for his mouth.
When Charlie’s palm touched the swell of her breast, Angel turned and dropped out of sight.
~~
“Don’t make me move you.”
She blinked and looked away, not moving.
She waited for his hands on her arms. She waited for the physical pain to catch up to the lacerations in her heart, but he was as frozen as his eyes, as she was.
Unwilling, it seemed, to follow through on anything.
She turned to glare up at him, disgusted.
“Well, what are you waiting for, Big Bad? Move me.” She reached up and poked him in the chest, not caring if she was provoking him further, wanting some kind of reaction from him.
Begging for attention like some pathetic dog tearing up the cushions.
He grabbed her finger, her whole hand, latched onto her elbow, snaked his hands up and gripped her shoulders, all while she blinked, and moved her.
He spun her around and forced her back over her desk, a parody of her position the night before.
“Angel!” Wesley’s voice was a paroxysm of panic. “Let her go!”
She waited on an exhale, for what he’d do next, body braced.
He loomed over her, eyes freezing her, and then very deliberately rubbed his hipbone against her belly.
She sparked inside, like napalm through a jungle.
A smirk curled his lip, and if she had a stake in her hand right then, she would have driven it through his chest.
He removed himself from her, and took the book he wanted off the bookcase. She straightened up, glaring at his back.
“I don’t even know what you are anymore.” She spit out, hating him right then.
He swung back around, not looking at her, heading for the door.
“I’m a vampire. Look it up.”
She held herself perfectly still, like that moment before thunder sounds, steadying her breath. Wesley’s voice was so far away from her, and it wasn’t until the sharp copper smell hit her nose that she turned to look at him finally.
Poor Wesley.
Bleeding while she played out her sad little melodrama.
~~
Charlie was sweet and she needed sweet, something to offset the hardness of her nights, her life, her heart.
She let him touch her, strained for his kiss, allowing him to lead her to the couch where they kissed and caressed for long minutes, the music keeping time.
She could forget, for a bit, the pink-colored mail, the wounded co-workers, the faithless boss who pushed them aside and pretended the visions weren’t for him, that she hadn’t spent the last two years making herself available to pain and loss of muscle control so he had a better shot at some obscurely worded redemption promise.
Charlie’s hands and Charlie’s warm mouth were enough in the space of her apartment. Charlie’s weight on top of her body as they laid on the couch.
Her curtains were closed, her window latched.
Nothing with black eyes and a grey soul would interrupt her.
Not even -
She grunted as the pain coalesced in the back of her skull, burrowed into her brain and yanked –
he looms over her, hips pumping and hands grasping, his faith is broken and his hope lost
She came back like an addict coming down, shaking.
God, Angel.
Charlie’s voice was as distant as an echo of thunder while she tried to block out the images replaying like random bursts of lightning.
“Cordy, what-?”
Charlie’s voice broke off, choking on the last unuttered word, and panic hit her like a bullet from a gun, burning off the pain before it settled in her head. Opening her eyes, she saw him, the black winged monster of her dreams and nightmares, sitting on top of Charlie’s back, his head gripped in one fist by the hair.
His eyes were flat, dead.
no hope.
“Angel?” She breathed, fear making her voice uncertain.
He blinked at her.
“Why are you scared?” He asked, sounding mildly curious.
Her laugh had an edge of hysteria.
“Because there’s a vampire in my apartment, sitting on top of me and my date?”
Charlie made another inarticulate sound in his throat, the part of his brain that still feared fire and shadows on the cave wall waking up and telling him he was not in the company of men, but of demons.
And their concubines.
Poor Charlie, she thought.
“Why are you here?” She asked Angel as he stared down at her with his blank eyes, still as a gargoyle perched on top of Notre Dame.
His jaw worked, clenching, unclenching, and his whisper was like admitting a sin in confessional, eyes averted.
“I wanted to feel...something.” He blinked and looked down. "Anything.”
An ugly thought trawled through her mind.
“Oh God, this is about Darla - did you sleep with her?”
It couldn’t be about her, it never was.
She wasn’t helpless enough, blond enough.
Dying enough.
He blinked down at her, and she didn’t think he would tell her, and maybe she didn’t want to hear it, but his mouth opened and the words came out anyway.
“I wanted to.”
She flinched.
“I didn’t want to feel the cold anymore. Wanted to…” His voice drifted off and she finished for him.
“Wanted to lose your soul.”
The words were bitter on her tongue, leeching into her flesh as she began to understand what he had wanted to happen. What he had tried to make happen.
“But she’s cold too. Her skin, her eyes, they’re like ice.” He focused on her again. “I thought about the last time I felt warm.”
Then he yanked on Charlie’s head and she was stunned to realize she’d forgotten about her date, even with Angel pressing the man’s body down on top of hers.
“And here are you are.” He glared at the back of Charlie’s head. “Looking so cozy.”
Charlie’s head arched up, his cry choked off by the strain of Angel's hand gripped in his hair.
Fear crawled through her hurt as she realized how close to the edge Angel really was, what he’d do to push himself over. Maybe the lawyer buffet wasn’t enough to leech the poison in his veins.
“Angel, listen to me. He has nothing to do with you. He’s just my date.”
Arrogance flashed across his face.
“He has everything to do with me, Cordelia.”
She drew her lips together, heat burning her face as she realized how much Angel understood about her, and her feelings for him.
“But I interrupted something, didn’t I?” He adjusted his position, leaned down on top of Charlie more fully and sniffed his neck. Charlie’s eyes widened.
“Kiss her there,” he said, reaching out to trace his finger along her collarbone. “Right there.” When he failed to move, Angel grabbed the back of his neck.
Charlie froze, and Cordelia saw the whites of his eyes as he tried to look behind him.
“I said, kiss her.” He pressed Charlie’s mouth down on her shoulder, his lips dragging uselessly along her skin. “Cordelia likes good things in life, boy. Good wine, good clothes, the touch of a good man.” He grabbed Charlie’s hand, flattened it against her leg and dragged along her thigh. The collateral brush of his fingers alongside Charlie’s sent eruptions of feeling along her skin, and she shook with the way her body leapt, like Pavlov’s dog.
Charlie was shaking, and she knew he thought he was going to die tonight, that he’d stumbled into a room filled with monsters that looked like men.
Guilt settled over her other, wilder emotions as she realized she needed to get him away from Angel.
She reached up and put her hands on either side of Charlie’s head, her fingers cupping over the clench of Angel’s fist in his hair, and kissed Charlie’s mouth deeply while she held Angel’s gaze, running her eyes over his face, down over his neck. She let her need for him lay naked in her eyes, the way she always felt when he looked at her, touched her.
His gaze blackened, deep burning pits of despair twisting into something else, much darker.
“Want something?” She whispered up to him, breaking the kiss and burying Charlie’s face in her neck. He clung like a child holding onto the last normal thing he knew, but she barely paid attention. She saw something shift in Angel’s eyes, a need that was wholly human and heartbreakingly normal.
To be a part of something, instead of on the outside.
It called to something inside of her, the part that was willing to sacrifice so much to save him, her acting career, her health.
Her life even.
She reached out and covered his hand, pulling it off Charlie’s and spread her palm across the back, pushing it gently into the flesh of her thigh, calling all of Angel’s darker instincts to herself.
Mapping the way up her thigh, changing the angle, she let him feel the heat of her body, what he did to her without trying. She blocked it away most of the time, labeled under “Never Going to Happen” and forgot about it.
But now she let it pour over her eyes, flooding her senses.
“Come on Angel.” She coaxed him and he reacted, reaching down and trying to kiss her past Charlie’s body.
The light scraping of his mouth on hers made her shudder, made her reach for more. Angel made an impatient sound, shoved Charlie out of the way and fell down on top of her.
Charlie hit the floor between the couch and the coffee table with a muffled thud.
Opening his mouth over hers, he took, and she met the need with her own, letting her desire bleed over them both, shoving her fingers through his hair.
He was desperate and cold, frantically shoving his hand under the back of her neck and lifting her into his kiss, unable to get close enough.
Then a shadow moved over the back of his head, and she tried to break away, but he wouldn’t let her go, hands like iron clamping her down.
Charlie swung the bat she kept in the corner of the living room, hitting Angel on the back.
He grunted into her mouth and flung himself off her, knocking the bat from Charlie’s hand and sending him careening into a corner, knocking over a side table, sending some of her framed pictures crashing and breaking onto the hardwood floors.
“Angel, no!” She jumped up and rushed over, grabbing his arm and holding on tight. “Let him go!” Angel looked down at the other man, and she barely recognized this Angel. The expression on his face was unreachable. He was like a newborn in the way he seemed to need a connection, desperately holding onto anything that touched him, but dangerous because this ‘newborn’ had the deeply predatory instincts of a demon, and one fragile human soul straining under the weight of all that rushing emptiness.
Charlie shook his head dazedly, trying to get up and she stepped between them, looking up at Angel.
“He doesn’t work for Wolfram and Hart, he didn’t turn Darla.” She breathed up into his face, willing him to listen to her. “He’s just someone who was nice to me, someone who wanted to spend time with me. Is that so hard for you to understand?”
She turned her back on Angel, a risky gamble in any circumstance lately, and kneeled down to help Charlie up. Glass crunched, another picture falling and breaking.
She tried to smile, and failed.
“I’m sorry, I really am.” She told him, voice shaking. “He’s – he’s got problems. A lot of them.”
He stared down at her, furious and afraid.
“He’s –what is he?” He whispered, voice broken. She cupped his upper arm, trying to push him towards her front door.
“He’s lost, that’s all. Go.”
He shook off her hold and grabbed her elbow, pulling her with him.
“I’m not leaving without you.”
She opened her mouth, digging her heels into the floor but before she could say anything, Angel pushed past her and knocked the hand off her arm. He shoved Charlie into the door, pressing his body up on his toes with his hand under his chin, choking him.
“Leave. Now.”
She pulled on his arm, like a mother trying for her child's attention, and surprisingly, he stepped back behind her, allowing her the control.
Charlie didn’t try to grab her again, and she was grateful.
Opening the door, she took Charlie’s arm and pushed him through, lifting her lips in a pathetic attempt at a smile.
“It’s okay.” She lied. “Just go.”
He turned, stumbling out.
She watched him walk away, until he was a shadow against the street, when a hand came up next to her head and, with one shove, shut the door, cutting off her surveillance.
His other hand drifted up the knots of her spine, coming to rest on the bone protruding at the top, cupping the back of her neck. The touch made her skin sing with awareness, goosebumps trailing like camp followers.
“Not losing your nerve, are you, Cor?”
She rested her forehead against the doorframe, shutting out his voice, his casual abbreviation of her given name.
Not the heart of anything, she thought. She was too tired to be. Fighting Angel, hating him, it was just so draining, and it didn’t even burn away her love for him. That was as real as ever, so deeply ingrained not even his rejection of her made it die.
He nuzzled her, burrowing his face in her hair, arm hooking around her waist when her knees gave. He pressed her against the door with his body, making her shiver, making her shake like a reed in a storm, needing and wanting and hating and resisting.
“I hate you.” She whispered softly, around the water closing over her head.
He paused, and then resumed, mouth open on the skin of her neck, laving, loving.
“Did Darla fail you too?” She turned, pressing her cheek to the door, so that they were face to face, so close she could have rubbed noses with him. Something so small, so mundane and she ached because she couldn’t do it, because it didn’t have a place among his grasping hands and devouring mouth. The lust that woke her own, so easily. She didn't know, before Angel, that someone could be so deeply engrained in the striations of her bones.
“Darla couldn’t fail me because I never had hope in her.”
She laughed, low in her throat.
“Yes, you did.” She twisted and his mouth fell on her neck like rain, hand so low on her belly it wouldn’t have been anything to reach down, direct that hand, move those fingers, around and around and around.
“You wanted to save her, because it meant you could be saved. That was your hope.”
He picked her up with his hands on her waist and hauled her over to the couch, setting her down in the same spot, still warm with her body heat.
No lovers’ embrace this time; Angel merely climbed on top of her and pushed the strap of her dress down, baring her breast. He latched on, sucking hard, drawing her blood to the surface. She felt his teeth and shivered, body flowering open already, the throbbing between her legs resuming its cadence.
Then he stopped and licked her nipple like a cat, eyes blinking slowly up at her, lazy in his regard.
A predator’s gaze.
“And it got trashed, right?” She persisted, trying to break through to the Angel she knew. “So you went after Wolfram and Hart because you couldn’t kill her or Dru, but you could let them kill the lawyers that fucked with you, right?”
“Yap, yap, yap. You talk too much. Have I ever mentioned that?” He bit the words out, and covered her mouth with his, tongue spearing deep for a taste of her soul.
She pulled back from the draw, trying to understand.
“Why are you doing this?” She asked, the taste of him on her tongue. “What am I to you?”
He stopped for a second, smoothing a hand over her cheek.
“I can’t feel anything real.” He said. “I need you.”
Their friendship, that wasn’t real enough for Angel. But her body was, the comfort of her mouth and skin, the space between her legs that burned for him even then.
Angel shrugged out of his coat, unaware that something was being lost, something she counted on as precious and sacred between them.
Their friendship.
He pulled her dress up, dragged her panties down and thrust his fingers inside her cunt, making her squirm, making her knees drop open. She got wetter, flooding his digits with warm honey, and he grunted in response, bending down to her breast, making her arch and cry out. Part heartbreak, part love, it was in her voice if only he’d listen. She loved him, loved his touch, loved his anger and his need for a forgiveness he didn’t think he deserved.
She pushed against his fingers, panted in his ear and held him closer, licking at his skin where she could reach, straining for the release he promised with his touch.
He worked her clit with his forefinger, slicking over the flesh with knowledge and skill, and even though she got wetter and wetter, until her body throbbed in time with her heart, she didn’t come.
He sucked on her nipple for a time, then reached down and opened his pants, shoving them down.
His hard bar of flesh was hot against her thigh, and he nudged her legs apart, sinking down between them. He pulled his fingers out and shifted his hips, pushing his cock inside her, and she grabbed fistfuls of his shirt, held on as he rocked into her.
Her hips moved, and he grunted like he was in pain as her body closed around him, sucking him deeper. He bent over her, eyes closed and kissed her deeply, opening her mouth for his tongue as he moved inside her, a rhythm like war drums, driving her body higher.
But the sadness, the heartache, it latched onto her and wouldn’t let her forget, even for a few minutes. Why he came, who he came from.
She couldn’t come, even though her body ached for the release.
The oblivion.
Maybe she wasn’t so different from Angel, after all.
He whispered her name against her mouth, reached down and cupped her ass as he shoved into her, taking what he wanted, playing her body and killing her heart.
She arched her face up into his, and slid her hands from his back to his neck, cupping his face.
He leveled up onto his elbows and peered down at her as his strokes shortened, signaling the beginning of his orgasm.
He met her eyes, and saw.
He looked stunned as he came, his hips shoving against her hips as he buried himself the deep, his pelvic bone hitting her clit in bursts that felt like little deaths, over and over.
When it was done, there was only her harsh breathing, and the feel of water on her face.
Lifting a hand, she touched her cheek, brought it away wet.
She had been crying.
Angel leveled his weight off to the side, and tried to wipe her face for her, making sounds in his throat that sounded like confusion and remorse, his cock still twitching inside her.
“Please go.” She croaked, hardening herself against the broken bent of his voice, knowing it wasn’t going to change anything.
He pulled back, off her and up on his heels, his cock softened and glistening with their juices, looking like heaven bent and touched him, revelation glowing on his face.
She didn’t want to hear it.
She closed her legs, ignored the ache in her clit, the way her body still wanted him, even now. But she couldn’t have one.
She wouldn’t be able to bear the emptiness afterwards.
Gathering her legs together, she lifted them from under his and shoved herself up toward the opposite end of the couch.
He reached for her.
“Cordy, God, I –“
She killed him with a look, freezing his reaching hands in mid-air.
“Don’t try, just go.”
He swallowed and glanced away.
She gathered her dress to her body and climbed carefully to her feet, untrained muscles twitching in her thighs, framing the ache in her clit, which throbbed and throbbed, her whole sex still swollen with unacknowledged need.
Angel’s come trickled out of her, and she needed a bath in the worst way as she stood there and tried to smooth out the wrinkles from her dress.
All the while he stared up at her with eyes that saw too much.
“Get out.” She said as she turned her back on him and walked to her bedroom.
When she shut the door, she let herself sink down to the floor.
Was this what The Powers intended when they sent her the vision, gambling on her need to save Angel from his darker impulses? Did they show her what would have happened regardless of her foreknowledge, or did they just make it easier for her to give in to her feelings for him?
She sank down until her forehead pressed against the carpet.
It was too hard to think about, her head ached, her thighs ached, and, not least of all, her heart ached.
She loved him, she hated him. The two feelings had existed in the same space for weeks, making her run in circles inside her own mind, and now it was worse.
So much worse.
How was she gonna let go now, when he left?
With the taste of him still in her mouth.
~~
After the Skilosh, Cordelia felt like a torn piece of paper that someone had taped back together, full of bruises and violations.
When Kate called, she was at the end of her emotional rope, and not in the mood to hear about Angel’s last minute heroics after leaving her apartment. But Kate’s inability to romanticize the vampire, coupled by the cop’s weary voice, so reminiscent of her own, compelled Cordelia to listen.
“Angel says you won’t talk to him, won’t answer his calls.”
She tapped her pencil against the blotter on her desk, glaring at the wall beyond. Wood paneling. Her old interior decorator would swoon from the affront.
“Since when did you turn into his PR agent, Kate? A week ago you were ready to flip the shades up on him yourself.”
A sigh, ragged and heartfelt, came from the other end of the phone line, across the miles and chasms that separated them.
“I got a second chance, in no small part thanks to Angel. He came through for me, Cordelia, when I’d written him off as lost, gone – whatever. I didn’t expect it and yet, there he was.” She paused. “It seemed to help him too.”
Well, that was great. Nothing like saving a blonde damsel to put Angel back at the top of his game.
“So you think he deserves a reward?” She asked, feeling bruised from the last time she tried to help Angel, and only ended up helping herself to more crap to deal with.
“No.” Kate replied. “I think he deserves a second chance. That’s all.”
She hung up softly, thinking of all the time she spent waiting for Angel to come to his senses and walk back in their door. All the times those doors didn’t open.
Then she thought about the shocked remorse in his eyes when he came inside her.
Hope could be ugly, rooting down deep, a hole that begged to be filled. She didn’t want to forgive him; she wanted to send him packing with his tale of woe and sorry tucked between his legs.
But more than anything, she wanted him back.
~~
When Angel slipped into their threadbare office, quietly contrite and cleaned up in his red shirt and hopeful expression, she felt herself giving way even more, like an iceberg drawn by tide and current.
When he offered to be their employee, she made her decision.
When she ended up in his hold rather than on the floor again, she let herself relax against him, let him keep on holding her, just for a second, just for her.
Then she shrugged herself free and turned to face him as Wesley and Gunn looked on, ready to back her.
“This is how it it'll be, Angel.” She told him with arms folded and face set in hard lines. “I’m the boss; you’re the employee. With the lowest seniority. You’re on probation for six months. Don’t mess up, and we’ll consider keeping you on.”
He nodded, allowing her the lead role, thinking it was all he had of her.
She looked into his eyes, and didn’t give an inch.
Through all that happened, all you put me through, I loved you anyway.
She blinked and turned away, sitting back down at her desk to write down the address from her vision.
It was time to get back to work.
~end~
Summary: Cordelia deals with Angel’s abandonment during his beige period. Not.
An alternate look at Reprise/Epiphany with a heavy c/a slant.
Pairing: C/A, C/OC
Rating: NC-17
Dedication:
damnskippytoo. If this fic works, it’s because Debs pushed me, kept at me, and didn’t let me settle when I just wanted it to be finished already. It would have been a jumble of non-associated stream of conscious mess if not for her. Debs rocketh muchly. Also thanks to lostakasha for the title, and more. Notes: for the
lynnevitational. This is my humble offering.~~
“Give Wesley our best, will you dear?” The tiny voice filtered through the receiver and Cordelia could only stare in wonder as the connection went dead. Wes nearly died saving Gunn’s life and his parents barely roused themselves to a mild chagrin.
She slammed the receiver back on the cradle and glared at it, feeling a bubbling cauldron of badness well up inside of her, begging for release.
Then she rounded the corner of the nurse’s station, and the cauldron bubbled over.
Angel lurked a few feet from Wesley’s room.
Seeing him after all they’d gone through the past six hours, it was enough. Cordelia steeled herself with nerve and adrenaline.
When he turned to face her, she was ready.
“…do us a favor and stay away.”
That look on Angel’s face was better than anything she’d accomplished in a while.
She stepped past him and walked to Wesley’s room, holding onto her anger until he couldn’t see, and then the ache caught up and her eyes stung sharp and salty.
She wouldn’t cry, though, because tonight was a fresh start, a clean getaway from the express train to hell Angel chose to ride.
It didn’t seem to matter that he was taking a piece of her - of them - with him, that they’d be left behind to carry on like shell-shocked orphans of war.
Now they’d go on, and he’d sink back down into the dark abyss where he felt so at home.
She was fine with that.
But her hands shook and she couldn’t make the words to Wesley come out kind.
She needed to leave. Standing, she said goodbye to the boys and turned down Gunn’s offer of a ride.
In the hall, she took a lungful of stale antiseptic air. She didn’t want to go home, wasn’t ready to face the silence of another sleepless night wondering why she couldn’t reach him, of having nightmares of finding his ashes in a box with a Wolfram and Hart logo in the center – or worse, to dream that they’d unleashed Angelus.
~~
The pub was quiet except for the jukebox.
After going home and flipping on the television, only to find herself staring at an infomercial on exercise equipment, Cordelia decided she needed a little help quieting her nerves.
Wesley’s favorite pub seemed the best place to decompress so she got dressed, wore her hair down, her black pants and spaghetti-strapped blouse loose. Low heels clicked on the hardwood as she ambled her way to a stool.
She ordered vodka on the rocks.
The bartender didn’t ask for identification and she didn’t offer to show any.
Age was relative anyway. She was twenty and felt sixty. Wesley was just a few years older than her but looked a hundred in that hospital bed. Gunn had enough hardness in his chocolate brown eyes to fill up three lifetimes, and two hundred and forty-two-year-old vampires were really just eight, jumping up and down when their favorite toys got broken.
Prowling rooftops and alleys, staying away but never really going away.
The door opened, hushed greetings announcing another late night customer, and the air rushed in after him, chilled by nightfall.
She shivered, feeling the air down her spine like the sweep of a cold gaze, though she knew if she looked, he wouldn’t be there.
He never was.
~~
His name was Charlie, and he was a graduate student.
Nice eyes, green and warm.
Soft auburn hair.
She let him sit next to her at the bar as she nursed her vodka, and listened to him talk
about college, and Boston. He was twenty-four, and in his second year studying film-making.
He was nice, and he was interested in her, asking questions she easily dodged through practice.
When she was ready to leave, he called her a cab and waited with her while it came.
He asked for her number and she gave it to him, laughing as she gazed up into his face, the air cold on her nose and the vodka warm in her blood.
He looked down at her and she recognized the puppy dog look in his eyes as he blinked. She saw it a lot in high school, a lot less of it in LA.
When the cab came, she got in and he covered her hand with his where it rested on the door, rather than trying to kiss her. She smiled again, brightly, and let him shut it for her.
She kept her eyes off the rooftops, and away from the alleyways.
~~
Two nights later, Charlie picked her up for a drink and dinner at the Upper Crust Trattoria, where she had tiramisu and a small glass of Muskat for dessert.
The sweet wine stayed on her tongue as he drove her home, lingered by her doorstep before leaving. He drove away and she paused before turning into her building, sweeping the darkened street with a glance.
The wind ruffled the leaves from the trees, caused them to scatter along the concrete sidewalk.
~~
Cordelia stared down at the bills spread across her desk. Two of them were pink. She thought about the one Mrs. Sharp wouldn’t pay, and had the completely horrible idea that maybe they should put the Skilosh spawn in her head, just for a day, long enough for her to write a check, and then right back out again.
Wesley probably wouldn’t go for it, though she thought she could convince Gunn.
Angel would’ve –
No.
She wasn’t saying his name, she wasn’t thinking his name and she was going to go on pretending the still shadow across the street wasn’t him.
~~
Cordelia was buzzed on wine and Charlie’s good company. She didn’t once think about the Sharps or the pale look on Wesley’s face the last time she saw him.
For that, Charlie deserved a thank you.
And she deserved to be in the company of a man who wanted her.
Inviting him in, she warned Dennis to be nice and lowered the lights, bringing him a mug of tea and scooting close to him on the couch.
Her windows were open, bringing in the cold night air.
The moon was heavy in the sky, dappling her living room in shadows and pale light.
She let Charlie kiss her, closed her eyes and enjoyed the warm caress of his tongue, slipping her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in the hair at the base. She drifted pleasantly on his touch, felt for a few minutes how easy it used to be, how uncomplicated it was, even on the hellmouth, even starving in LA.
Before she let herself care.
Her eyes floated open when Charlie’s hands grew restless, and she froze.
Angel stood outside her window, framed by moonlight and the dark sky beyond, watching.
Something inside her twisted and turned, becoming as ugly as the way he looked at her. She deepened the kiss, allowed Charlie to push her gently back against the cushions, and his ardor became hotter until it burned the air. She watched Angel watching them as Charlie ran his palm up the flat of her belly, arching her neck for his mouth.
When Charlie’s palm touched the swell of her breast, Angel turned and dropped out of sight.
~~
“Don’t make me move you.”
She blinked and looked away, not moving.
She waited for his hands on her arms. She waited for the physical pain to catch up to the lacerations in her heart, but he was as frozen as his eyes, as she was.
Unwilling, it seemed, to follow through on anything.
She turned to glare up at him, disgusted.
“Well, what are you waiting for, Big Bad? Move me.” She reached up and poked him in the chest, not caring if she was provoking him further, wanting some kind of reaction from him.
Begging for attention like some pathetic dog tearing up the cushions.
He grabbed her finger, her whole hand, latched onto her elbow, snaked his hands up and gripped her shoulders, all while she blinked, and moved her.
He spun her around and forced her back over her desk, a parody of her position the night before.
“Angel!” Wesley’s voice was a paroxysm of panic. “Let her go!”
She waited on an exhale, for what he’d do next, body braced.
He loomed over her, eyes freezing her, and then very deliberately rubbed his hipbone against her belly.
She sparked inside, like napalm through a jungle.
A smirk curled his lip, and if she had a stake in her hand right then, she would have driven it through his chest.
He removed himself from her, and took the book he wanted off the bookcase. She straightened up, glaring at his back.
“I don’t even know what you are anymore.” She spit out, hating him right then.
He swung back around, not looking at her, heading for the door.
“I’m a vampire. Look it up.”
She held herself perfectly still, like that moment before thunder sounds, steadying her breath. Wesley’s voice was so far away from her, and it wasn’t until the sharp copper smell hit her nose that she turned to look at him finally.
Poor Wesley.
Bleeding while she played out her sad little melodrama.
~~
Charlie was sweet and she needed sweet, something to offset the hardness of her nights, her life, her heart.
She let him touch her, strained for his kiss, allowing him to lead her to the couch where they kissed and caressed for long minutes, the music keeping time.
She could forget, for a bit, the pink-colored mail, the wounded co-workers, the faithless boss who pushed them aside and pretended the visions weren’t for him, that she hadn’t spent the last two years making herself available to pain and loss of muscle control so he had a better shot at some obscurely worded redemption promise.
Charlie’s hands and Charlie’s warm mouth were enough in the space of her apartment. Charlie’s weight on top of her body as they laid on the couch.
Her curtains were closed, her window latched.
Nothing with black eyes and a grey soul would interrupt her.
Not even -
She grunted as the pain coalesced in the back of her skull, burrowed into her brain and yanked –
he looms over her, hips pumping and hands grasping, his faith is broken and his hope lost
She came back like an addict coming down, shaking.
God, Angel.
Charlie’s voice was as distant as an echo of thunder while she tried to block out the images replaying like random bursts of lightning.
“Cordy, what-?”
Charlie’s voice broke off, choking on the last unuttered word, and panic hit her like a bullet from a gun, burning off the pain before it settled in her head. Opening her eyes, she saw him, the black winged monster of her dreams and nightmares, sitting on top of Charlie’s back, his head gripped in one fist by the hair.
His eyes were flat, dead.
no hope.
“Angel?” She breathed, fear making her voice uncertain.
He blinked at her.
“Why are you scared?” He asked, sounding mildly curious.
Her laugh had an edge of hysteria.
“Because there’s a vampire in my apartment, sitting on top of me and my date?”
Charlie made another inarticulate sound in his throat, the part of his brain that still feared fire and shadows on the cave wall waking up and telling him he was not in the company of men, but of demons.
And their concubines.
Poor Charlie, she thought.
“Why are you here?” She asked Angel as he stared down at her with his blank eyes, still as a gargoyle perched on top of Notre Dame.
His jaw worked, clenching, unclenching, and his whisper was like admitting a sin in confessional, eyes averted.
“I wanted to feel...something.” He blinked and looked down. "Anything.”
An ugly thought trawled through her mind.
“Oh God, this is about Darla - did you sleep with her?”
It couldn’t be about her, it never was.
She wasn’t helpless enough, blond enough.
Dying enough.
He blinked down at her, and she didn’t think he would tell her, and maybe she didn’t want to hear it, but his mouth opened and the words came out anyway.
“I wanted to.”
She flinched.
“I didn’t want to feel the cold anymore. Wanted to…” His voice drifted off and she finished for him.
“Wanted to lose your soul.”
The words were bitter on her tongue, leeching into her flesh as she began to understand what he had wanted to happen. What he had tried to make happen.
“But she’s cold too. Her skin, her eyes, they’re like ice.” He focused on her again. “I thought about the last time I felt warm.”
Then he yanked on Charlie’s head and she was stunned to realize she’d forgotten about her date, even with Angel pressing the man’s body down on top of hers.
“And here are you are.” He glared at the back of Charlie’s head. “Looking so cozy.”
Charlie’s head arched up, his cry choked off by the strain of Angel's hand gripped in his hair.
Fear crawled through her hurt as she realized how close to the edge Angel really was, what he’d do to push himself over. Maybe the lawyer buffet wasn’t enough to leech the poison in his veins.
“Angel, listen to me. He has nothing to do with you. He’s just my date.”
Arrogance flashed across his face.
“He has everything to do with me, Cordelia.”
She drew her lips together, heat burning her face as she realized how much Angel understood about her, and her feelings for him.
“But I interrupted something, didn’t I?” He adjusted his position, leaned down on top of Charlie more fully and sniffed his neck. Charlie’s eyes widened.
“Kiss her there,” he said, reaching out to trace his finger along her collarbone. “Right there.” When he failed to move, Angel grabbed the back of his neck.
Charlie froze, and Cordelia saw the whites of his eyes as he tried to look behind him.
“I said, kiss her.” He pressed Charlie’s mouth down on her shoulder, his lips dragging uselessly along her skin. “Cordelia likes good things in life, boy. Good wine, good clothes, the touch of a good man.” He grabbed Charlie’s hand, flattened it against her leg and dragged along her thigh. The collateral brush of his fingers alongside Charlie’s sent eruptions of feeling along her skin, and she shook with the way her body leapt, like Pavlov’s dog.
Charlie was shaking, and she knew he thought he was going to die tonight, that he’d stumbled into a room filled with monsters that looked like men.
Guilt settled over her other, wilder emotions as she realized she needed to get him away from Angel.
She reached up and put her hands on either side of Charlie’s head, her fingers cupping over the clench of Angel’s fist in his hair, and kissed Charlie’s mouth deeply while she held Angel’s gaze, running her eyes over his face, down over his neck. She let her need for him lay naked in her eyes, the way she always felt when he looked at her, touched her.
His gaze blackened, deep burning pits of despair twisting into something else, much darker.
“Want something?” She whispered up to him, breaking the kiss and burying Charlie’s face in her neck. He clung like a child holding onto the last normal thing he knew, but she barely paid attention. She saw something shift in Angel’s eyes, a need that was wholly human and heartbreakingly normal.
To be a part of something, instead of on the outside.
It called to something inside of her, the part that was willing to sacrifice so much to save him, her acting career, her health.
Her life even.
She reached out and covered his hand, pulling it off Charlie’s and spread her palm across the back, pushing it gently into the flesh of her thigh, calling all of Angel’s darker instincts to herself.
Mapping the way up her thigh, changing the angle, she let him feel the heat of her body, what he did to her without trying. She blocked it away most of the time, labeled under “Never Going to Happen” and forgot about it.
But now she let it pour over her eyes, flooding her senses.
“Come on Angel.” She coaxed him and he reacted, reaching down and trying to kiss her past Charlie’s body.
The light scraping of his mouth on hers made her shudder, made her reach for more. Angel made an impatient sound, shoved Charlie out of the way and fell down on top of her.
Charlie hit the floor between the couch and the coffee table with a muffled thud.
Opening his mouth over hers, he took, and she met the need with her own, letting her desire bleed over them both, shoving her fingers through his hair.
He was desperate and cold, frantically shoving his hand under the back of her neck and lifting her into his kiss, unable to get close enough.
Then a shadow moved over the back of his head, and she tried to break away, but he wouldn’t let her go, hands like iron clamping her down.
Charlie swung the bat she kept in the corner of the living room, hitting Angel on the back.
He grunted into her mouth and flung himself off her, knocking the bat from Charlie’s hand and sending him careening into a corner, knocking over a side table, sending some of her framed pictures crashing and breaking onto the hardwood floors.
“Angel, no!” She jumped up and rushed over, grabbing his arm and holding on tight. “Let him go!” Angel looked down at the other man, and she barely recognized this Angel. The expression on his face was unreachable. He was like a newborn in the way he seemed to need a connection, desperately holding onto anything that touched him, but dangerous because this ‘newborn’ had the deeply predatory instincts of a demon, and one fragile human soul straining under the weight of all that rushing emptiness.
Charlie shook his head dazedly, trying to get up and she stepped between them, looking up at Angel.
“He doesn’t work for Wolfram and Hart, he didn’t turn Darla.” She breathed up into his face, willing him to listen to her. “He’s just someone who was nice to me, someone who wanted to spend time with me. Is that so hard for you to understand?”
She turned her back on Angel, a risky gamble in any circumstance lately, and kneeled down to help Charlie up. Glass crunched, another picture falling and breaking.
She tried to smile, and failed.
“I’m sorry, I really am.” She told him, voice shaking. “He’s – he’s got problems. A lot of them.”
He stared down at her, furious and afraid.
“He’s –what is he?” He whispered, voice broken. She cupped his upper arm, trying to push him towards her front door.
“He’s lost, that’s all. Go.”
He shook off her hold and grabbed her elbow, pulling her with him.
“I’m not leaving without you.”
She opened her mouth, digging her heels into the floor but before she could say anything, Angel pushed past her and knocked the hand off her arm. He shoved Charlie into the door, pressing his body up on his toes with his hand under his chin, choking him.
“Leave. Now.”
She pulled on his arm, like a mother trying for her child's attention, and surprisingly, he stepped back behind her, allowing her the control.
Charlie didn’t try to grab her again, and she was grateful.
Opening the door, she took Charlie’s arm and pushed him through, lifting her lips in a pathetic attempt at a smile.
“It’s okay.” She lied. “Just go.”
He turned, stumbling out.
She watched him walk away, until he was a shadow against the street, when a hand came up next to her head and, with one shove, shut the door, cutting off her surveillance.
His other hand drifted up the knots of her spine, coming to rest on the bone protruding at the top, cupping the back of her neck. The touch made her skin sing with awareness, goosebumps trailing like camp followers.
“Not losing your nerve, are you, Cor?”
She rested her forehead against the doorframe, shutting out his voice, his casual abbreviation of her given name.
Not the heart of anything, she thought. She was too tired to be. Fighting Angel, hating him, it was just so draining, and it didn’t even burn away her love for him. That was as real as ever, so deeply ingrained not even his rejection of her made it die.
He nuzzled her, burrowing his face in her hair, arm hooking around her waist when her knees gave. He pressed her against the door with his body, making her shiver, making her shake like a reed in a storm, needing and wanting and hating and resisting.
“I hate you.” She whispered softly, around the water closing over her head.
He paused, and then resumed, mouth open on the skin of her neck, laving, loving.
“Did Darla fail you too?” She turned, pressing her cheek to the door, so that they were face to face, so close she could have rubbed noses with him. Something so small, so mundane and she ached because she couldn’t do it, because it didn’t have a place among his grasping hands and devouring mouth. The lust that woke her own, so easily. She didn't know, before Angel, that someone could be so deeply engrained in the striations of her bones.
“Darla couldn’t fail me because I never had hope in her.”
She laughed, low in her throat.
“Yes, you did.” She twisted and his mouth fell on her neck like rain, hand so low on her belly it wouldn’t have been anything to reach down, direct that hand, move those fingers, around and around and around.
“You wanted to save her, because it meant you could be saved. That was your hope.”
He picked her up with his hands on her waist and hauled her over to the couch, setting her down in the same spot, still warm with her body heat.
No lovers’ embrace this time; Angel merely climbed on top of her and pushed the strap of her dress down, baring her breast. He latched on, sucking hard, drawing her blood to the surface. She felt his teeth and shivered, body flowering open already, the throbbing between her legs resuming its cadence.
Then he stopped and licked her nipple like a cat, eyes blinking slowly up at her, lazy in his regard.
A predator’s gaze.
“And it got trashed, right?” She persisted, trying to break through to the Angel she knew. “So you went after Wolfram and Hart because you couldn’t kill her or Dru, but you could let them kill the lawyers that fucked with you, right?”
“Yap, yap, yap. You talk too much. Have I ever mentioned that?” He bit the words out, and covered her mouth with his, tongue spearing deep for a taste of her soul.
She pulled back from the draw, trying to understand.
“Why are you doing this?” She asked, the taste of him on her tongue. “What am I to you?”
He stopped for a second, smoothing a hand over her cheek.
“I can’t feel anything real.” He said. “I need you.”
Their friendship, that wasn’t real enough for Angel. But her body was, the comfort of her mouth and skin, the space between her legs that burned for him even then.
Angel shrugged out of his coat, unaware that something was being lost, something she counted on as precious and sacred between them.
Their friendship.
He pulled her dress up, dragged her panties down and thrust his fingers inside her cunt, making her squirm, making her knees drop open. She got wetter, flooding his digits with warm honey, and he grunted in response, bending down to her breast, making her arch and cry out. Part heartbreak, part love, it was in her voice if only he’d listen. She loved him, loved his touch, loved his anger and his need for a forgiveness he didn’t think he deserved.
She pushed against his fingers, panted in his ear and held him closer, licking at his skin where she could reach, straining for the release he promised with his touch.
He worked her clit with his forefinger, slicking over the flesh with knowledge and skill, and even though she got wetter and wetter, until her body throbbed in time with her heart, she didn’t come.
He sucked on her nipple for a time, then reached down and opened his pants, shoving them down.
His hard bar of flesh was hot against her thigh, and he nudged her legs apart, sinking down between them. He pulled his fingers out and shifted his hips, pushing his cock inside her, and she grabbed fistfuls of his shirt, held on as he rocked into her.
Her hips moved, and he grunted like he was in pain as her body closed around him, sucking him deeper. He bent over her, eyes closed and kissed her deeply, opening her mouth for his tongue as he moved inside her, a rhythm like war drums, driving her body higher.
But the sadness, the heartache, it latched onto her and wouldn’t let her forget, even for a few minutes. Why he came, who he came from.
She couldn’t come, even though her body ached for the release.
The oblivion.
Maybe she wasn’t so different from Angel, after all.
He whispered her name against her mouth, reached down and cupped her ass as he shoved into her, taking what he wanted, playing her body and killing her heart.
She arched her face up into his, and slid her hands from his back to his neck, cupping his face.
He leveled up onto his elbows and peered down at her as his strokes shortened, signaling the beginning of his orgasm.
He met her eyes, and saw.
He looked stunned as he came, his hips shoving against her hips as he buried himself the deep, his pelvic bone hitting her clit in bursts that felt like little deaths, over and over.
When it was done, there was only her harsh breathing, and the feel of water on her face.
Lifting a hand, she touched her cheek, brought it away wet.
She had been crying.
Angel leveled his weight off to the side, and tried to wipe her face for her, making sounds in his throat that sounded like confusion and remorse, his cock still twitching inside her.
“Please go.” She croaked, hardening herself against the broken bent of his voice, knowing it wasn’t going to change anything.
He pulled back, off her and up on his heels, his cock softened and glistening with their juices, looking like heaven bent and touched him, revelation glowing on his face.
She didn’t want to hear it.
She closed her legs, ignored the ache in her clit, the way her body still wanted him, even now. But she couldn’t have one.
She wouldn’t be able to bear the emptiness afterwards.
Gathering her legs together, she lifted them from under his and shoved herself up toward the opposite end of the couch.
He reached for her.
“Cordy, God, I –“
She killed him with a look, freezing his reaching hands in mid-air.
“Don’t try, just go.”
He swallowed and glanced away.
She gathered her dress to her body and climbed carefully to her feet, untrained muscles twitching in her thighs, framing the ache in her clit, which throbbed and throbbed, her whole sex still swollen with unacknowledged need.
Angel’s come trickled out of her, and she needed a bath in the worst way as she stood there and tried to smooth out the wrinkles from her dress.
All the while he stared up at her with eyes that saw too much.
“Get out.” She said as she turned her back on him and walked to her bedroom.
When she shut the door, she let herself sink down to the floor.
Was this what The Powers intended when they sent her the vision, gambling on her need to save Angel from his darker impulses? Did they show her what would have happened regardless of her foreknowledge, or did they just make it easier for her to give in to her feelings for him?
She sank down until her forehead pressed against the carpet.
It was too hard to think about, her head ached, her thighs ached, and, not least of all, her heart ached.
She loved him, she hated him. The two feelings had existed in the same space for weeks, making her run in circles inside her own mind, and now it was worse.
So much worse.
How was she gonna let go now, when he left?
With the taste of him still in her mouth.
~~
After the Skilosh, Cordelia felt like a torn piece of paper that someone had taped back together, full of bruises and violations.
When Kate called, she was at the end of her emotional rope, and not in the mood to hear about Angel’s last minute heroics after leaving her apartment. But Kate’s inability to romanticize the vampire, coupled by the cop’s weary voice, so reminiscent of her own, compelled Cordelia to listen.
“Angel says you won’t talk to him, won’t answer his calls.”
She tapped her pencil against the blotter on her desk, glaring at the wall beyond. Wood paneling. Her old interior decorator would swoon from the affront.
“Since when did you turn into his PR agent, Kate? A week ago you were ready to flip the shades up on him yourself.”
A sigh, ragged and heartfelt, came from the other end of the phone line, across the miles and chasms that separated them.
“I got a second chance, in no small part thanks to Angel. He came through for me, Cordelia, when I’d written him off as lost, gone – whatever. I didn’t expect it and yet, there he was.” She paused. “It seemed to help him too.”
Well, that was great. Nothing like saving a blonde damsel to put Angel back at the top of his game.
“So you think he deserves a reward?” She asked, feeling bruised from the last time she tried to help Angel, and only ended up helping herself to more crap to deal with.
“No.” Kate replied. “I think he deserves a second chance. That’s all.”
She hung up softly, thinking of all the time she spent waiting for Angel to come to his senses and walk back in their door. All the times those doors didn’t open.
Then she thought about the shocked remorse in his eyes when he came inside her.
Hope could be ugly, rooting down deep, a hole that begged to be filled. She didn’t want to forgive him; she wanted to send him packing with his tale of woe and sorry tucked between his legs.
But more than anything, she wanted him back.
~~
When Angel slipped into their threadbare office, quietly contrite and cleaned up in his red shirt and hopeful expression, she felt herself giving way even more, like an iceberg drawn by tide and current.
When he offered to be their employee, she made her decision.
When she ended up in his hold rather than on the floor again, she let herself relax against him, let him keep on holding her, just for a second, just for her.
Then she shrugged herself free and turned to face him as Wesley and Gunn looked on, ready to back her.
“This is how it it'll be, Angel.” She told him with arms folded and face set in hard lines. “I’m the boss; you’re the employee. With the lowest seniority. You’re on probation for six months. Don’t mess up, and we’ll consider keeping you on.”
He nodded, allowing her the lead role, thinking it was all he had of her.
She looked into his eyes, and didn’t give an inch.
Through all that happened, all you put me through, I loved you anyway.
She blinked and turned away, sitting back down at her desk to write down the address from her vision.
It was time to get back to work.
~end~
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 12:49 pm (UTC)Not an easy task, actually- because I think it would be a fine line for Cordy to walk- to be so hurt by him, so disappointed in him and still have the ability to move past it, to understand they still had work to do.
Nice work.
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Date: 2007-07-26 01:25 am (UTC)Thank you. Because you know, this is the fic that would not speak to me.
So. So. Glad it's over and done and finished.
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Date: 2007-07-24 02:25 pm (UTC)...this ‘newborn’ had the deeply predatory instincts of a demon, and one fragile human soul straining under the weight of all that rushing emptiness...
Love that, the idea of 'rushing emptiness' -- and the schizophrenia that he fights so unsuccessfully just bleeds from the page.
As I was reading this, I thought of the link between Angel and Cordy and Lindsey. It hit me out of the blue, although I'm probably the last to notice it. The pull of hate and love, the desire for something Angel can't successfully be for either of them, and that constant, predictable pull back to him. Funny how they both paid the price for that pull with their lives. Hmm.
Lovely fic, and you've left me with lots of thinky thoughts. And I'm really glad my icon inspired the title! Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2007-07-26 01:27 am (UTC)Thank you. This was hard, Angel's mindset was hard, and I'm glad I got something across.
*VBG*
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Date: 2007-07-24 02:43 pm (UTC)You're wonderful at writing both their inner turmoil, the pain tearing them apart from the inside that one can see, but the other. Angel really had reached bottom here and still Cordy was there, no matter what. That just shows that she was, after all, the real hero.
Fantastic piece!!
no subject
Date: 2007-07-26 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-26 01:32 am (UTC)I'm glad I got some of that across. It was one of the biggest honors I've had since writing c/a to be asked to be a part of your ficathon. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 07:21 pm (UTC)so few words saying so much, and really hot sex,
thank you
no subject
Date: 2007-07-26 01:34 am (UTC)Feedback like this is why I write. Or a part of it anyway.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-25 11:22 pm (UTC)It couldn’t be about her, it never was.
She wasn’t helpless enough, blond enough.
Dying enough.
Hard to pick a favorite moment, but this sums up Angel and Cordy at that time perfectly. And it's so heartbreaking knowing that she was dying and helpless then and if he had known it, would that have been enough to stop him? Hmmm, maybe you should give that scenario a try. ;)
I know this one sucked the life out of you to finish, but I'm very proud of you for succeeding. *You* rock!
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Date: 2007-07-26 01:36 am (UTC)It was the incubus of fics, sucking the energy out of me until I couldn't even code properly.
*YOU* rock.
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Date: 2007-07-27 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 04:31 am (UTC)I'm so, so glad this worked for you, because I was fairly convinced it was crap, despite Deb's best efforts. Let's hope the next one is going to be easier to write.
*hugs*
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Date: 2007-07-27 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 04:44 am (UTC)And I'm truly elated that I got Cordy's POV across as well. She's a complicated woman, and she hides *a lot* behind that bright smile.
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Date: 2007-07-28 01:23 pm (UTC)The language was beautiful - the black nightmare, the gargoyle, the line about Cordy not dying enough for him.
Structurally, playing Angel's darkness off of Charlie's lightness showed, unapologetically, what a monster Angel really is. But what really made it work was Cordelia. The realization that she was his concubine harkened back to that early S1 ep, where she was pissed at Angel and Wes for spoiling her for other guys. She meant then that she needed a hero, but in this story, what she really needed was Angel, black soul and all.
I'm glad you stuck it out and finished this. For me, writing stories like this is hard b/c it requires me to look at parts of myself I don't much like. To embody Angel I have to look into the abyss. It's hard to deal when the abyss looks back.
:loves you:
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Date: 2007-07-29 01:25 am (UTC)Also, well into my fifth rewrite, it suddenly occured to me that I'd missed a boat in regards to the other man in Cordelia's life at that moment.
It should have been Linsday.
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Date: 2007-07-28 01:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-29 01:40 am (UTC)Aww. I wish I could have breakfast with ya'll.
Hope it was delicious.
And if I ever write a sequel, then Charlie will probably reappear. He didn't seem to give up too easily.
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Date: 2007-07-29 01:34 am (UTC)Poor Charlie. He met the perfect woman in LA, gorgeous and smart and hang-up free. Except that she comes with this vampire that perches in her life like a gargoyle.
Maybe I'll bring him back. Girl needs a little normalcy, some TLC from the black hole of need that is Angel. Only, for me, she's always gonna end up with Angel, because she needs him just as much. And because I ship them. *g*
Thank you for such wonderful feedback. It's really feeding the writer in me right now.
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Date: 2007-08-01 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-02 01:42 am (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2007-08-13 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 07:45 pm (UTC)When I read it over after posting, all I could think was "man, it's either going to go across really creepy.....or really, really absurd."
Imagine my relief. *g*