fic: home (5/7) (buffy: the vampire slayer) (angel: the series)
Classifications and warnings available here.
Continued from Chapter 4.
* * * * *
Home by anr
* * * * *
5. THE PLYMOUTH
Roughly twenty miles out from the Sunnydale limits, Angel says, "what happened to your car?"
"Hmm?" They've been driving mostly in silence since they left LA, reversing the trip they made five years ago, and it takes a moment for the query to pierce the churning apprehension-excitement-fear vibe she's got going on.
"You had a BMW before," he clarifies. "When we left --"
"Oh! Yeah. Well," she shrugs, "that was my dad's. After the whole blackmailing-for-my-inheritance milestone, he sort of revoked my driving privileges." Adjusting the passenger side mirror, she watches a mile marker sign recede behind them. "I replaced it with this way shiny Porsche after my beachy Bahamas days, all black and beautiful and wicked slick."
"Where is it now?" When she looks across at him, he adds, "I haven't seen you drive recently."
She makes a face and turns back to the window. "Turns out playing crash test dummies with a vampire? Not exactly covered by insurance. She decapitated as she went through the windshield, I broke five ribs and turned my car into a very expensive paperweight."
On the old 'only five more minutes to Doublemeat Palace' billboard, someone has painted the words, here there be monsters, over the fast food joint's logo. Grimacing, she forces herself to focus on what she was saying.
"I thought about buying another one but the whole 'vampires don't need invitations into small, confined spaces moving at a hundred-fifty miles per hour' thing really gave me the wiggins after that." Plus the fact that Frank would've had kittens had she started shopping for vehicles like she does shoes. "So, now I'm all bus and heels girl like it's totally the it thing."
"That's very... green? Of you?"
"Uh huh," she says distractedly, "that's me -- saving the planet one pair of Manolo Blahniks at a time. Stop the car!"
Angel slams on the brakes, his beast of a car swerving slightly as it comes to a stop in the middle of the road. "What? What's wrong?"
Throwing open her door, she gets out of the car. She can hear Angel shouting her name, but she ignores him as she stands on the edge of the road. It's still cloudy and overcast up above, despite the rain that had been drenching LA having eased somewhere around Oxnard, and on the far distant horizon line she can see the faint smudges of a shiny sun, its weak light gilding her hometown with gold in the moments before twilight. Effectly, it's kind of beautiful.
"Welcome home," she whispers.
The sun sets.
*
"So," says Angel, pulling up at a lightless intersection. "Where's this party?"
Good question. "The Bronze, I guess."
Angel grimaces. "You don't know?"
She shrugs. "You heard Clem's message -- all he said was Sunnydale today."
"Right."
The car doesn't move.
Looking over, she takes note of the grim look on his face, the white-knuckled grip he has on the steering wheel. "Hey," she says, "you okay?"
He doesn't look at her. "No," he says shortly. But he puts the car back into gear, and sets them to driving again, anyway. "Let's just get this over with."
Frowning, she lets it go.
*
The Bronze is empty.
Empty and destructed, mores to the point. The alley facing wall has completely collapsed, rubble strewing outwards like a bomb's hit it bad. The roof and upper mezzanine is a dangling cobweb of broken beams and tangled cabling, gilded with moonlight and most all semblances of her previous haunt a shattered memory.
Standing at the edge of the debris, she picks up what looks like the end of a pool cue and absently twirls it baton-like. "Some party," she says softly.
Angel kicks at a chunk of brick, sending it skittering into the empty space where the stage used to sit. "I don't think this happened recently. The damage is too worn."
Like that makes it any better. She tries to remember how it used to look, back in the good old days of Sunnydale version one, but the images that come to mind are superimposed with how she saw it last -- cages and barbed wire and dead bodies, oh my.
"This is where we met," says Angel quietly, bringing her back, and she nods.
"Yeah." Twice, actually. Standing outside the restroom, and locked inside a cellar cage. The first time was safer, but the second changed her life. One day she should probably tell him by how much. "Do you wanna go down? Reminisce?" Please say no, she thinks. Just because you're all stoic undead most the time, doesn't mean there aren't some things nobody should have to relive.
Staring into the abyss, he shakes his head.
Thank god. Throwing the pool cue into the ruins, she dusts her hands and turns and walks back to the car.
After a moment, Angel follows.
*
It's a full moon night, thank god, which makes it easier to see which streets are navigatable, and which aren't. Main Street, from what they can see, is definitely in the latter category, so she doesn't say much when he steers the car away from the town center and into the residential streets. She's pretty sure she knows where they're going -- Revello Drive is this way -- and she's about to object to the Buffy nostalgia when he takes a left, heading in the opposite direction.
"Where're you going?"
He glances at her briefly. "Crawford Street," he says, "there's a mansion there that might be where your party is at."
She blinks in surprise. "You remember the Crawford mansion?" She didn't think he'd ever lived there this time around.
He shrugs. "Heard Drusilla mention it before she and Darla left town back in '98."
Ah, right. "With Spike?"
He does a double-take, mouth opening like he wants to ask her how she knows about Spike, then slowly shakes his head as he remembers. "No," he says shortly. "He wasn't here very long. Never had any respect for the Master."
She rolls her eyes. "Like you did," she scoffs. She watches house after house pass by her window, broken windows and shattered doors all. "Where'd he go? Spike, I mean."
His mouth tightens. "Don't know. Drusilla mentioned something once about him swimming in Cleveland, but that could have meant anything. She wasn't exactly lucid at the time."
When is Drusilla ever? she wonders.
Angel takes a right onto High Street.
*
Crawford Street, Greenridge Lane and Hillcrest Road are gone.
Stunned, she stands next to Angel on the crest overlooking the hillside of nothing that used to be --
"My home," she says. "Your mansion. Harmony and Aura's... they're all gone." She looks up at him disbelievingly. "Where'd they go?"
There's no debris, no rubble, no ruins. In the moonlight, the road they're on just crumbles away into dirt and rocks and trees and shrubby little bushes. The whole view looks eerily like the olden day photos in the Civic Center that show what Sunnydale used to be like, like, years before the mission people got all earthquaked out of the way for progress.
"Angel?"
He shrugs helplessly. "I don't know." He gestures at the nothing. "I just..."
She tries to work out what could do this -- what could turn back time on a patch of land that used to be the most exclusive in the area, mansions and ocean views and live-in help as far as the eye could see -- and just can't. Blowing up the Bronze? Totally imaginable. Reversing over a hundred years of property development? Inconceivable.
When she turns away, unable to stare at nothing any longer, something beyond the glare of the Plymouth's headlights catches her eye. Backtracking to the driver's side, she leans in and switches them off.
"Cordy?" Angel asks, turning around.
Her eyesight adjusting, she waves at the town lying below them. "Look."
The town is lit haphazardly. Here and there she can see streetlights, but they're inconsistent, like most have been smashed dark. The houses which have lights on are few and far between, the illumination more of an echo than a bright beacon, and she assumes those are the places with people still living in them, their shutters drawn against the dangers of the night. She takes small comfort from the sight -- so the town's not completely dead then, after all.
The brightest, most visible glare, however, is coming from --
"Is that the --" starts Angel.
"The high school," she finishes, nodding. "Hellmouth central."
Anya.
*
Angel manages to pick a path through the streets of her childhood easily enough, but now that she's so close, now that she can see her future within finger's reach, her impatience is legendarily high. As soon as he pulls into the school parking lot, she has the passenger door open and she's out of the car almost before it's stopped moving. She runs.
"Cordelia!"
Ignoring him, she heads straight for the main buildings. The gym is a dark shell on her left -- no game or school formal tonight by the looks of it -- but this is a demon she's after. If there's gonna be a party anywhere on these school grounds, it'll be right over the --
She stops.
She's in the courtyard just off the school's front entrance but, unlike the Bronze, this place isn't destroyed and, unlike her home, it's not nothing.
Black and pink streamers hang from the edges of the surrounding buildings. Misshapen balloons cluster above the weed-infested garden beds, each one glowing like a mini-flood light. A large tent-like canvas sail stretches between the building sides, shadowing the entire courtyard, and off to the right, a long trestle table covered with mostly-bare silver trays paces the width of the enclosure. Plastic cups and empty bottles and cigarette butts litter the ground.
Someone moves into her peripheral vision, and she turns to see a vampire ambling along the side of the buffet, a paper plate filled with scraps of pink seaweedy spaghetti, or maybe faded red liquorice, in his hands.
He looks up. "Entrail?" he offers, holding up his plate. "There's not much left, unfortunately, but you might be able to find a couple heart-blood dumplings still down the end."
She stares, mute.
Unconcerned with her silence, he shakes his head, whistling low. "Man, hell of a party, am I right? The best of the season, for sure. I mean the band was pretty whack, but the food? Definitely worth the 'bring your own sacrifice' cover charge. You sure you don't want some of these intestines?"
From behind her, Angel asks, "it's over?"
The vampire nods. "Yeah. Most everyone teleported out when the kegs ran dry a few hours ago. That's the trouble with daytime gig's -- never enough to drain." He sniffs suddenly and steps closer to her, eyes gleaming golden. "Say, you smell awfully hum--"
Angel stakes him.
Numb, she steps through the spray of ash towards the spot where she and Anya had --
There's an orb there, hovering in mid-air. She reaches out.
"Don--"
The orb flares white as her fingertips graze its surface, a semi-transparent screen forming in the air above it. Stepping back, she watches as her own image appears on it, Anya by her side.
Bile churns into her stomach.
On the screen, Anya takes her pendant off. "Here," she says, "I think you need this more than I do right now."
She watches her screen-self -- and, oh god, was she ever that young? that naive looking? -- lift her hair away from her neck as Anya fastens the necklace around her neck.
"Yeah, I can use some luck," she says, her words echoing in the empty courtyard, "and a stick with pointy, sharp bits. If that Buffy wasn't... I swear. She's a pain."
Anya frowns. "But Xander -- he's an utter loser. Don't you wish..."
Don't wish, she thinks. Don't ever. Don't don't don't...
Her younger-self doesn't even blink. "I never would've looked twice at Xander if Buffy hadn't made him marginally cooler by hanging with him!"
"Really?" asks Anya, looking away off-screen.
"Yeah," she says, "I swear! I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale."
Anya turns back all wrinkly and raw-meat face, a smile on her lips. "Done!"
The scene fades to black.
Behind her, Angel whispers, "Cordelia?"
A new image flickers onto the screen, the Bronze as it was when she found Angel, all death and vampire lair. It soft-blurs into a shot of the trashed Main Street, as a voiceover kicks in, narrating the images, the events, the repercussions of her wish. A montage of the different cemeteries about town, full of freshly laid graves. Scared little humans cowering in their homes.
The scenes shift away from Sunnydale and to the world at large. A demon bikie gang tearing up Vegas, piked heads bleeding from mounted positions on their handlebars. Dozens upon dozens of plane and train crashes, boat sinkings and multicar pileups. Witches and warlocks and creepy crawly things best left under kid's beds. A battle between two demons, bolts of lightning decimating everything around them. Tsunami's and heat waves and tornados and earthquakes.
And mixed in with all the scenes of death and destruction, shots of evil things celebrating. A trio of vampires, arms around each other's shoulders, give wide grins and thumbs up to a camera as blood drips off their chins. A chaos demon does an Irish jig in front of a burning building. A bar full of every kind of beastie imaginable roars approval at a wall-sized TV screen showing a flood washing away people and buildings.
The last shot shows Anya, haggard and grinning in an office cubicle, the tagline, Winner of the Best New Reality, 11 December 1998, superimposed over the bottom of the screen. On her desk, a pewter trophy showing an earth cracked right through the middle.
Anya raises a coffee mug with the words, you wish, written in capital letters on the side. "You're welcome," she says simply.
The screen disappears.
Slowly, she bends down and picks up an empty wine bottle lying at her feet. Holding it like a bat, she takes one step, two steps, and swings wide and hard. The orb flies from its suspended position with a sharp crack, striking the ground at a angle and shattering.
Behind her, Angel is silent.
Dropping the bottle, she walks away.
*
Except for the jagged, rocky hole in the centre of the room, the Library doesn't look much different.
Okay, so the bookshelves are empty, and the table and chairs are all gone, the cage wall all bent out of shape, what looks like scorch marks on the main counter, and dust and dirt thick over every possible surface, but the layout? The overwhelming sense of familiarity? All right there.
"Cordy?"
"I never got to go to Prom," she says quietly, trailing her fingers along the edge of the countertop. "I had the perfect dress thought out -- it was going to be red and long and make these little whispery noises when it moved over my skin -- and I never got to go." She looks up at the domed ceiling, surprised to see it still intact when the Hellmouth below is gaping and raw. "I'm twenty-three years old, Angel, and five years ago today I broke the world. I never graduated from high school, I'll likely be bankrupt before I'm thirty, the best chance I had at fixing my wish was apparently last called hours ago, and despite all of that -- despite everything -- all I can think about is how I never got to dance at my formal."
To her horror, she starts to cry.
She hasn't cried in so long, forever maybe, and to do so now, standing in this Library, in the Scoobie Command Center, an epitome of what she destroyed...
It's another betrayal.
Angel steps closer and places his hand on her shoulder. It's a small touch, hardly even comparable to the amount of contact they've been indulging in of late, but it evaporates any shadow of her control in an instant. Turning, she clutches at his shirt, pressing her face to his chest and feels his arms come up and around her, holding her against him.
Holding her.
I'm sorry, she thinks. Oh, god, I'm so, so sorry.
She's said it so many times, and in so many ways, to herself, to her memories, to her dreams and nightmares. Has tried to fix what she did with every book she's referenced, every spell she's memorised, every vampire she's staked and every demon she's learned how to avoid. Four years of her life, gone and devoted to finding a reset, a rewind, a way back to before she said those words.
I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale.
She should pull away from him. For what she did -- she needs to pull away. She doesn't deserve this -- not his comfort, not his compassion...
Not him.
But when she tries to let go, he holds her tighter, holds her closer, holds her and takes a small, slight step to the right, and then to the left, and then back again, again and again, until they're turning in slow, swaying half-circles and semi-circles, book dust shifting beneath their feet.
Dancing. He's dancing her beside the Hellmouth. All because she -- because he --
She can't fight that.
Closing her eyes, she holds on and lets him.
*
It takes some time, but eventually she manages to get herself back under control. As their steps fade, she unclenches her fingers and releases her grip on his shirt, wiping at her eyes and cheeks. Angel relaxes his hold on her as she moves back a step, and she takes his hand before he can completely stop touching her. He laces his fingers with hers.
"Okay?" he asks.
Honestly? "No," she says. Shifting to face the room, she sighs. "Seems larger than I remembered."
He accepts the change in topic without protest. "The books," he says. "They made the room feel... fuller."
"You've been here? Before, I mean?"
He nods. "Once. Before Darla and Willow and Xander caught me. I was looking for a book, and I had heard the librarian here had an extensive collection."
That's putting it mildly. "Yeah," she says, "Giles loved his dusty old tomes alright."
She looks around and pictures the Library as it used to be, the smell of paper heavy in the air, the dull yellow glow from the desk lamps, Xander's inappropriate humour and Willow's nerdy enthusiasm. Buffy's impatience, Oz's zen, Giles' distractedness and Angel's silence. Between them, they'd foiled every big bad who'd looked to destroy the town and world...
... until her.
Straightening her spine, she turns and looks up at Angel. He's staring at the hole in the floor like a part of him wants nothing more than to jump in and find out exactly what sort of beastie can make such a mess, and she tightens her grip on his hand.
"C'mon," she says. "Let's get out of here."
He nods.
*
As they walk back to the Plymouth, she says, "there's one more place I want to see." She glances a look at him. "Before we leave."
She's expecting him ask where, and what for, why, but he just nods again, all complaisant and compliant.
"Okay," he says.
*
His agreeableness ends as the gates begin.
"No."
Ignoring him, she twists so she can reach the backseat and rummage through her weapons bag. Pocketing a couple vials, she grabs a stake and makes a couple of quick stabby motions, testing its weight.
"Cordelia --"
"Cemetery at night bad; cemetery at night in Sunnydale even worse -- I get it, Angel." The stake feels wrong in her hand, and she swaps it for an alternate. Straightening back into her seat all proper-like, she opens her door and gets out.
In the car still, Angel makes no movements akin to that of following her lead.
Sighing, she leans back down and raises an eyebrow at him. "You coming?"
*
The cemetery's not as well maintained as she remembers.
Side-stepping a crumbled tombstone, she heads south through the Catholics and towards the Lutherans and Methodists. Angel paces her, a sword in hand and a dark look on his face.
She has a fair idea as to where she's buried -- for all the business the Sunnydale diggers do, their records are astonishingly up-to-date -- and after a few wrong turns, she finds the proper section soon enough. The graves in this area are more prevalent and closer together, the markers made less from stone and more from wooden crosses embossed with little metal plates, and she has to get uncomfortably near to some in order to read the names.
She recognises far too many of the latter before she finds the one she came for.
"Jane Smith," reads Angel. He looks at her. "You knew her?"
Her mouth twists as she stares at the uneven and weedy grassy grave. "We both did."
"I don't --" starts Angel, confused.
"She didn't have any identification on her. When they found her -- well. There wasn't a lot left, you know? Your Master hadn't much cared for the sacredity of her chosenness."
Slowly, Angel says, "the Slayer..."
"Yup. Buffy Anne Summers in the decay."
His hand touches the small of her back, light and soft. "You were friends. Before."
She shakes her head. "Not really."
"Then why --"
Because I always thought it was all about me until it was all about her and what she was doing to me and mine.
Because even if she did screw everything up, she didn't deserve this. None of us did.
Because I get it now. I understand. I know...
"No why," she says, cutting him off. "Just because." When she steps back from the grave, his hand slides to her hip and anchors there. "Let's get out of here, yeah?"
He nods. "Yeah."
*
They're almost back to the road that winds through the cemetery when she stops short and looks around, surprised. "Wait... I think I remem--"
"Well, well, well," says a voice off to the left. "What do we have here?"
Crap.
As she turns, Angel draws up his sword and angles his body between hers and the -- she counts quickly -- four? no, five vampires approaching.
Quintuple crap.
Gripping her stake, she tries to work out which one's the weakest. Angel'll go after the strongest, for sure, and --
"Cordy?" squeals one of the vampires.
-- no way! "Harmony?"
Harmony squeals again and claps her hands together, pushing through the group of demons so that she can see better. "Oh my god! Look at you! How are you? I haven't seen you in, like, forever!"
"I'm good, I'm good! And you? You're looking all..." Harmony grins, her fangs all bright in the moonlight. "... dead! Wow. When did --"
Harmony waves a hand. "Oh, graduation, you know."
"Wow. That's, um -- I'm sorry?"
Her former second-string Heather pffts. "Oh, don't be. Being all evil is, like, totally the coolest thing ever! I mean, eating Mom and Dad and the help was kind of a bummer and all, but the never having to worry about wrinkles thing? Completely awesome."
One of the vampires beside Harmony growls. "Hey! Can we move this along already?"
"Yeah," agrees another one, "I'm hungry!"
Harmony's glee turns all abashed. "Oh, right." To her, she says, "hey, after I kill you and all? We should totally do dinner, yeah?"
Uh, yeah, no. Before she can say as much, however, two of the vampires charge and that's red rover.
She sees Angel decapitate the first vampire into a waterfall of dust before the second charger comes at her, all determination and mindless hunger, and she has to turn her attention to her own survival.
She's expecting super martial arts and ass kicking, but this guy just runs straight at her, not even pausing or blinking or, more importantly, apparently seeing her stake as she plunges it in and out of his chest. He dusts.
Surprised at how easy a kill that was, she turns to see if she can't help Angel with his groupsome of violence when something grabs her hair and pulls. Shouting at the smarting pain, she stumbles back several steps, arms like pinwheels, before dropping onto her ass like it's cheerleading tryouts and Amy's supreme klutziness all over again.
The pressure on her scalp eases a split second before a burst of star-inducing pain explodes across her cheek, and she yelps the pain away, trying to focus before she gets herself all dead and injured. Throwing herself to the side, she tumbles away from the direction of the punch and pushes back up to her feet.
"Harmony?"
Harm gives a cheery little hand wave. "Just like old times, hey, C?"
Kicking high and hard, she catches Harm under the chin with the toe of her shoe, forcing her back a step. "Oh, yeah, sure." Stake, stake, where's her -- oh, crap! Forcing herself to attack regardless, she goes offensive, following up with two right hooks and a left upper cut. "Like the time you stole my Barbie in fourth grade." Harmony's kick catches her thigh, almost dropping her balance. Staggering, she covers with a sweep at Harmony's shins. Harmony jumps. "And the time you kissed my boyfriend behind the bleachers in eighth." Spotting her stake, she cartwheels away from Harmony's lunge, righting herself just in time for Harmony to land another punch. Damnit. Blinking the pain away, she slam the side of her hand into Harmony's throat. "And, oh yeah, the time you tried to kill me right now."
Harmony kicks her dead center in her chest, pushing all the air and oxygen and other breathing necessities out of her body in one whooshing gasp. Before she can recover, Harmony has her clutched from behind.
"Well, it's not like it's personal or anything, you know? I mean, killing you is, like, super meaningful for me because it's you and all."
Amazing how not at all better that makes her feel. Rather much like the grip Harmony has on her body, one hand in her hair and pulling her head to the side. "Harm --" Twisting, she slams her elbow into the side of Harmony's breast, feeling the tug on her hair disappear as Harmony yelps. "You're an idiot."
Spinning on her heel, she punches Harmony as hard as she can, no finesse, no training, just her fist and Harmony's face, best friends forever. As Harmony stumbles back, she bends down and snatches up her stake, twirling it across her palm and slamming it into Harm's chest.
Oh.
For the first time maybe ever, she realises too late that she's going to almost regret killing a vampire, everything of the now evaporating as a rush of better memories suddenly floods to mind. This is Harmony. Harmony. Her best friend. Her --
"I'm sorry," she manages.
Harmony smiles, blonde and not comprehending to the end, and fades away.
*
Angel's still fighting one of the vampires. She can see him over by the cheruby Wilkins plot, trading throwy punches and random brawling moves, and she's about to heel it back over there when she looks up and --
She was right. She does remember this place.
The Alpert mausoleum has seen way better days, ivy smothering the left half and a section of the right wall crumbling in on itself. The area layout though, the positioning of the surrounding tombstones and gravestones? All totally memory truthsome.
Buffy, come on -- one night of rest is not gonna kill you.
The words -- Willow's? Xander's? -- echo and ripple as she turns in slow, small circles, trying to see, to remember -- what was it Buffy had said?
Oh. Yeah.
"No," she breathes out, "it'll kill someone else."
"Cordelia?"
She looks up.
He's still in his gamey-vamp face, sword gone and coat all dusty, as he weaves through the markers towards her.
She holds up her hand. "Stop!"
He freezes immediately, shoulders tensing, and she knows he's trying to sense where the attack he thinks she's just warned him about is going to come from, but.
"Wrong," she says, shaking her head. This looks all wrong. When it happened, he -- Turning, she says, "there."
"What?" She listens as he unfreezes, as he walks past her and towards where she's pointing at the section of road curb near a dead street light. Stopping of his own volition this time, he turns in a circle, looking down and around before back up at her, confused. "Wh--"
Her heart leaps and she feels faint, suddenly. Light-headed. Likely to cease consciousness.
"This --" Her voice catches, and she clears her throat, trying again. "This is where you could have stopped it."
His head tilts slightly to the right, mimicking that night so uncannily that she almost can't breathe. "Stopped it?"
"Me," she whispers.
"Huh?"
The stake in her hand is a mistake. She wasn't carrying one that night, never carried one those nights. Back then --
Dropping the stake, she fumbles in her pockets for a cross. The one she pulls out is way smaller than what she'd had that night -- the one she'd told Willow she had to have, thank you very much, because she was Cordelia and that alone determined that she have the bigger and better symbol -- but the allusion works nonetheless.
"We were here, patrolling. Xander and Willow and I." He flinches at those names. "Buffy was all sicky and flu-y, and they had the oh so brilliant idea that they could help in her place and --"
"Your dimension," he says slowly. "You --"
"It wasn't a dimension," she snaps. "God, Angel -- deficient much? If only it was a stupid dimension! Do you know how easy those are to cross? I'd've been home years ago if that were the case." She points the cross at him. "No. No. We were here, and then Buffy was here too, all, 'oh, Angelus, he's no match for a half-pint slayer as gross as I', and that's when you --"
Aww, c'mon. Just one more.
"Cordelia --"
"You should have done it! You should have killed me! You had me, get it? One moment all stepping-out-the-shadows guy and the next you and me on the ground, you all grr and me all defenceless and so easily dieable, and all you had to do was bite down and you didn't." Her shoulders slump. "You didn't."
"That wasn't me."
Pfft. Like that matters. "Yeah? Well, it was me, okay? It was me before I turned all big bad and you could have stopped it."
Stiffly, Angel says, "killed you, you mean." Slowly, he steps towards her. "Bitten you." Another step. "Drained you." And another and another until he's right up in her face, her cross hovering a shirt's breadth from his chest. "Turned you?"
She looks up at him. "You could have saved the world."
"No," he says, quietly, "I couldn't have."
Even now... even after everything he saw at the high school, the truth of her past on high-def orb-TV... "You still don't believe me," she says dully, looking away.
"Hey," he says, touching her chin so that she'll look at him again. "History's full of people who've changed the course of things to come, Cordelia. You're just one of them. No different, no worse."
"Not worse?" She scoffs bitterly. "I've murdered thousands -- tens of thousands -- of people. People who never did anything to me. Who probably never would have. This town alone used to have almost forty-thousand in it and how many are left now? One hundred? Two?"
He shrugs. "How many did Hitler kill? Genghis Khan? The Crusades? The Rwandan military? Your own American government? Who's to say that your reality wouldn't have ended with a higher count than yours some other way?"
He doesn't understand. "I say. What I did -- it wasn't some war or revolution or conquest. It was a wish. Unnatural and magical and --"
"And it's done. It's done and the world still turns, just as it always has, because the people in it? They don't care. They don't know how things came to be this way and they don't care. Nobody's going around thinking, 'oh, I wish Cordelia hadn't done what she did', just like they're not saying, 'wow, wouldn't it have been nice if the She'ju'lal demons hadn't created that plague back in the fifth century'. For them life is just life -- theirs to live as they choose."
"But they're choosing wrong!"
"You don't know that."
Leaning down, he kisses her, totally unmindful of the damage she could cause his heart in this very instant.
Pulling back, he lets his bumpies smooth out. "C'mon," he says, gently, "let's go home."
*
At the car, he hands her into the Plymouth all gentlemanly and sweet. Before he can pull back, she reaches out and touches the side of his face.
She has no idea what she wants to say.
"It'll be alright," he says. "I promise."
Dropping her hand, she lets him shut the door.
Yeah. That's what she used to think.
* * * * *
Continued in Chapter 6.
SOUNDTRACK: Home
FEEDBACK: Always appreciated. *g*
Continued from Chapter 4.
* * * * *
Home by anr
* * * * *
5. THE PLYMOUTH
Roughly twenty miles out from the Sunnydale limits, Angel says, "what happened to your car?"
"Hmm?" They've been driving mostly in silence since they left LA, reversing the trip they made five years ago, and it takes a moment for the query to pierce the churning apprehension-excitement-fear vibe she's got going on.
"You had a BMW before," he clarifies. "When we left --"
"Oh! Yeah. Well," she shrugs, "that was my dad's. After the whole blackmailing-for-my-inheritance milestone, he sort of revoked my driving privileges." Adjusting the passenger side mirror, she watches a mile marker sign recede behind them. "I replaced it with this way shiny Porsche after my beachy Bahamas days, all black and beautiful and wicked slick."
"Where is it now?" When she looks across at him, he adds, "I haven't seen you drive recently."
She makes a face and turns back to the window. "Turns out playing crash test dummies with a vampire? Not exactly covered by insurance. She decapitated as she went through the windshield, I broke five ribs and turned my car into a very expensive paperweight."
On the old 'only five more minutes to Doublemeat Palace' billboard, someone has painted the words, here there be monsters, over the fast food joint's logo. Grimacing, she forces herself to focus on what she was saying.
"I thought about buying another one but the whole 'vampires don't need invitations into small, confined spaces moving at a hundred-fifty miles per hour' thing really gave me the wiggins after that." Plus the fact that Frank would've had kittens had she started shopping for vehicles like she does shoes. "So, now I'm all bus and heels girl like it's totally the it thing."
"That's very... green? Of you?"
"Uh huh," she says distractedly, "that's me -- saving the planet one pair of Manolo Blahniks at a time. Stop the car!"
Angel slams on the brakes, his beast of a car swerving slightly as it comes to a stop in the middle of the road. "What? What's wrong?"
Throwing open her door, she gets out of the car. She can hear Angel shouting her name, but she ignores him as she stands on the edge of the road. It's still cloudy and overcast up above, despite the rain that had been drenching LA having eased somewhere around Oxnard, and on the far distant horizon line she can see the faint smudges of a shiny sun, its weak light gilding her hometown with gold in the moments before twilight. Effectly, it's kind of beautiful.
"Welcome home," she whispers.
The sun sets.
*
"So," says Angel, pulling up at a lightless intersection. "Where's this party?"
Good question. "The Bronze, I guess."
Angel grimaces. "You don't know?"
She shrugs. "You heard Clem's message -- all he said was Sunnydale today."
"Right."
The car doesn't move.
Looking over, she takes note of the grim look on his face, the white-knuckled grip he has on the steering wheel. "Hey," she says, "you okay?"
He doesn't look at her. "No," he says shortly. But he puts the car back into gear, and sets them to driving again, anyway. "Let's just get this over with."
Frowning, she lets it go.
*
The Bronze is empty.
Empty and destructed, mores to the point. The alley facing wall has completely collapsed, rubble strewing outwards like a bomb's hit it bad. The roof and upper mezzanine is a dangling cobweb of broken beams and tangled cabling, gilded with moonlight and most all semblances of her previous haunt a shattered memory.
Standing at the edge of the debris, she picks up what looks like the end of a pool cue and absently twirls it baton-like. "Some party," she says softly.
Angel kicks at a chunk of brick, sending it skittering into the empty space where the stage used to sit. "I don't think this happened recently. The damage is too worn."
Like that makes it any better. She tries to remember how it used to look, back in the good old days of Sunnydale version one, but the images that come to mind are superimposed with how she saw it last -- cages and barbed wire and dead bodies, oh my.
"This is where we met," says Angel quietly, bringing her back, and she nods.
"Yeah." Twice, actually. Standing outside the restroom, and locked inside a cellar cage. The first time was safer, but the second changed her life. One day she should probably tell him by how much. "Do you wanna go down? Reminisce?" Please say no, she thinks. Just because you're all stoic undead most the time, doesn't mean there aren't some things nobody should have to relive.
Staring into the abyss, he shakes his head.
Thank god. Throwing the pool cue into the ruins, she dusts her hands and turns and walks back to the car.
After a moment, Angel follows.
*
It's a full moon night, thank god, which makes it easier to see which streets are navigatable, and which aren't. Main Street, from what they can see, is definitely in the latter category, so she doesn't say much when he steers the car away from the town center and into the residential streets. She's pretty sure she knows where they're going -- Revello Drive is this way -- and she's about to object to the Buffy nostalgia when he takes a left, heading in the opposite direction.
"Where're you going?"
He glances at her briefly. "Crawford Street," he says, "there's a mansion there that might be where your party is at."
She blinks in surprise. "You remember the Crawford mansion?" She didn't think he'd ever lived there this time around.
He shrugs. "Heard Drusilla mention it before she and Darla left town back in '98."
Ah, right. "With Spike?"
He does a double-take, mouth opening like he wants to ask her how she knows about Spike, then slowly shakes his head as he remembers. "No," he says shortly. "He wasn't here very long. Never had any respect for the Master."
She rolls her eyes. "Like you did," she scoffs. She watches house after house pass by her window, broken windows and shattered doors all. "Where'd he go? Spike, I mean."
His mouth tightens. "Don't know. Drusilla mentioned something once about him swimming in Cleveland, but that could have meant anything. She wasn't exactly lucid at the time."
When is Drusilla ever? she wonders.
Angel takes a right onto High Street.
*
Crawford Street, Greenridge Lane and Hillcrest Road are gone.
Stunned, she stands next to Angel on the crest overlooking the hillside of nothing that used to be --
"My home," she says. "Your mansion. Harmony and Aura's... they're all gone." She looks up at him disbelievingly. "Where'd they go?"
There's no debris, no rubble, no ruins. In the moonlight, the road they're on just crumbles away into dirt and rocks and trees and shrubby little bushes. The whole view looks eerily like the olden day photos in the Civic Center that show what Sunnydale used to be like, like, years before the mission people got all earthquaked out of the way for progress.
"Angel?"
He shrugs helplessly. "I don't know." He gestures at the nothing. "I just..."
She tries to work out what could do this -- what could turn back time on a patch of land that used to be the most exclusive in the area, mansions and ocean views and live-in help as far as the eye could see -- and just can't. Blowing up the Bronze? Totally imaginable. Reversing over a hundred years of property development? Inconceivable.
When she turns away, unable to stare at nothing any longer, something beyond the glare of the Plymouth's headlights catches her eye. Backtracking to the driver's side, she leans in and switches them off.
"Cordy?" Angel asks, turning around.
Her eyesight adjusting, she waves at the town lying below them. "Look."
The town is lit haphazardly. Here and there she can see streetlights, but they're inconsistent, like most have been smashed dark. The houses which have lights on are few and far between, the illumination more of an echo than a bright beacon, and she assumes those are the places with people still living in them, their shutters drawn against the dangers of the night. She takes small comfort from the sight -- so the town's not completely dead then, after all.
The brightest, most visible glare, however, is coming from --
"Is that the --" starts Angel.
"The high school," she finishes, nodding. "Hellmouth central."
Anya.
*
Angel manages to pick a path through the streets of her childhood easily enough, but now that she's so close, now that she can see her future within finger's reach, her impatience is legendarily high. As soon as he pulls into the school parking lot, she has the passenger door open and she's out of the car almost before it's stopped moving. She runs.
"Cordelia!"
Ignoring him, she heads straight for the main buildings. The gym is a dark shell on her left -- no game or school formal tonight by the looks of it -- but this is a demon she's after. If there's gonna be a party anywhere on these school grounds, it'll be right over the --
She stops.
She's in the courtyard just off the school's front entrance but, unlike the Bronze, this place isn't destroyed and, unlike her home, it's not nothing.
Black and pink streamers hang from the edges of the surrounding buildings. Misshapen balloons cluster above the weed-infested garden beds, each one glowing like a mini-flood light. A large tent-like canvas sail stretches between the building sides, shadowing the entire courtyard, and off to the right, a long trestle table covered with mostly-bare silver trays paces the width of the enclosure. Plastic cups and empty bottles and cigarette butts litter the ground.
Someone moves into her peripheral vision, and she turns to see a vampire ambling along the side of the buffet, a paper plate filled with scraps of pink seaweedy spaghetti, or maybe faded red liquorice, in his hands.
He looks up. "Entrail?" he offers, holding up his plate. "There's not much left, unfortunately, but you might be able to find a couple heart-blood dumplings still down the end."
She stares, mute.
Unconcerned with her silence, he shakes his head, whistling low. "Man, hell of a party, am I right? The best of the season, for sure. I mean the band was pretty whack, but the food? Definitely worth the 'bring your own sacrifice' cover charge. You sure you don't want some of these intestines?"
From behind her, Angel asks, "it's over?"
The vampire nods. "Yeah. Most everyone teleported out when the kegs ran dry a few hours ago. That's the trouble with daytime gig's -- never enough to drain." He sniffs suddenly and steps closer to her, eyes gleaming golden. "Say, you smell awfully hum--"
Angel stakes him.
Numb, she steps through the spray of ash towards the spot where she and Anya had --
There's an orb there, hovering in mid-air. She reaches out.
"Don--"
The orb flares white as her fingertips graze its surface, a semi-transparent screen forming in the air above it. Stepping back, she watches as her own image appears on it, Anya by her side.
Bile churns into her stomach.
On the screen, Anya takes her pendant off. "Here," she says, "I think you need this more than I do right now."
She watches her screen-self -- and, oh god, was she ever that young? that naive looking? -- lift her hair away from her neck as Anya fastens the necklace around her neck.
"Yeah, I can use some luck," she says, her words echoing in the empty courtyard, "and a stick with pointy, sharp bits. If that Buffy wasn't... I swear. She's a pain."
Anya frowns. "But Xander -- he's an utter loser. Don't you wish..."
Don't wish, she thinks. Don't ever. Don't don't don't...
Her younger-self doesn't even blink. "I never would've looked twice at Xander if Buffy hadn't made him marginally cooler by hanging with him!"
"Really?" asks Anya, looking away off-screen.
"Yeah," she says, "I swear! I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale."
Anya turns back all wrinkly and raw-meat face, a smile on her lips. "Done!"
The scene fades to black.
Behind her, Angel whispers, "Cordelia?"
A new image flickers onto the screen, the Bronze as it was when she found Angel, all death and vampire lair. It soft-blurs into a shot of the trashed Main Street, as a voiceover kicks in, narrating the images, the events, the repercussions of her wish. A montage of the different cemeteries about town, full of freshly laid graves. Scared little humans cowering in their homes.
The scenes shift away from Sunnydale and to the world at large. A demon bikie gang tearing up Vegas, piked heads bleeding from mounted positions on their handlebars. Dozens upon dozens of plane and train crashes, boat sinkings and multicar pileups. Witches and warlocks and creepy crawly things best left under kid's beds. A battle between two demons, bolts of lightning decimating everything around them. Tsunami's and heat waves and tornados and earthquakes.
And mixed in with all the scenes of death and destruction, shots of evil things celebrating. A trio of vampires, arms around each other's shoulders, give wide grins and thumbs up to a camera as blood drips off their chins. A chaos demon does an Irish jig in front of a burning building. A bar full of every kind of beastie imaginable roars approval at a wall-sized TV screen showing a flood washing away people and buildings.
The last shot shows Anya, haggard and grinning in an office cubicle, the tagline, Winner of the Best New Reality, 11 December 1998, superimposed over the bottom of the screen. On her desk, a pewter trophy showing an earth cracked right through the middle.
Anya raises a coffee mug with the words, you wish, written in capital letters on the side. "You're welcome," she says simply.
The screen disappears.
Slowly, she bends down and picks up an empty wine bottle lying at her feet. Holding it like a bat, she takes one step, two steps, and swings wide and hard. The orb flies from its suspended position with a sharp crack, striking the ground at a angle and shattering.
Behind her, Angel is silent.
Dropping the bottle, she walks away.
*
Except for the jagged, rocky hole in the centre of the room, the Library doesn't look much different.
Okay, so the bookshelves are empty, and the table and chairs are all gone, the cage wall all bent out of shape, what looks like scorch marks on the main counter, and dust and dirt thick over every possible surface, but the layout? The overwhelming sense of familiarity? All right there.
"Cordy?"
"I never got to go to Prom," she says quietly, trailing her fingers along the edge of the countertop. "I had the perfect dress thought out -- it was going to be red and long and make these little whispery noises when it moved over my skin -- and I never got to go." She looks up at the domed ceiling, surprised to see it still intact when the Hellmouth below is gaping and raw. "I'm twenty-three years old, Angel, and five years ago today I broke the world. I never graduated from high school, I'll likely be bankrupt before I'm thirty, the best chance I had at fixing my wish was apparently last called hours ago, and despite all of that -- despite everything -- all I can think about is how I never got to dance at my formal."
To her horror, she starts to cry.
She hasn't cried in so long, forever maybe, and to do so now, standing in this Library, in the Scoobie Command Center, an epitome of what she destroyed...
It's another betrayal.
Angel steps closer and places his hand on her shoulder. It's a small touch, hardly even comparable to the amount of contact they've been indulging in of late, but it evaporates any shadow of her control in an instant. Turning, she clutches at his shirt, pressing her face to his chest and feels his arms come up and around her, holding her against him.
Holding her.
I'm sorry, she thinks. Oh, god, I'm so, so sorry.
She's said it so many times, and in so many ways, to herself, to her memories, to her dreams and nightmares. Has tried to fix what she did with every book she's referenced, every spell she's memorised, every vampire she's staked and every demon she's learned how to avoid. Four years of her life, gone and devoted to finding a reset, a rewind, a way back to before she said those words.
I wish Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale.
She should pull away from him. For what she did -- she needs to pull away. She doesn't deserve this -- not his comfort, not his compassion...
Not him.
But when she tries to let go, he holds her tighter, holds her closer, holds her and takes a small, slight step to the right, and then to the left, and then back again, again and again, until they're turning in slow, swaying half-circles and semi-circles, book dust shifting beneath their feet.
Dancing. He's dancing her beside the Hellmouth. All because she -- because he --
She can't fight that.
Closing her eyes, she holds on and lets him.
*
It takes some time, but eventually she manages to get herself back under control. As their steps fade, she unclenches her fingers and releases her grip on his shirt, wiping at her eyes and cheeks. Angel relaxes his hold on her as she moves back a step, and she takes his hand before he can completely stop touching her. He laces his fingers with hers.
"Okay?" he asks.
Honestly? "No," she says. Shifting to face the room, she sighs. "Seems larger than I remembered."
He accepts the change in topic without protest. "The books," he says. "They made the room feel... fuller."
"You've been here? Before, I mean?"
He nods. "Once. Before Darla and Willow and Xander caught me. I was looking for a book, and I had heard the librarian here had an extensive collection."
That's putting it mildly. "Yeah," she says, "Giles loved his dusty old tomes alright."
She looks around and pictures the Library as it used to be, the smell of paper heavy in the air, the dull yellow glow from the desk lamps, Xander's inappropriate humour and Willow's nerdy enthusiasm. Buffy's impatience, Oz's zen, Giles' distractedness and Angel's silence. Between them, they'd foiled every big bad who'd looked to destroy the town and world...
... until her.
Straightening her spine, she turns and looks up at Angel. He's staring at the hole in the floor like a part of him wants nothing more than to jump in and find out exactly what sort of beastie can make such a mess, and she tightens her grip on his hand.
"C'mon," she says. "Let's get out of here."
He nods.
*
As they walk back to the Plymouth, she says, "there's one more place I want to see." She glances a look at him. "Before we leave."
She's expecting him ask where, and what for, why, but he just nods again, all complaisant and compliant.
"Okay," he says.
*
His agreeableness ends as the gates begin.
"No."
Ignoring him, she twists so she can reach the backseat and rummage through her weapons bag. Pocketing a couple vials, she grabs a stake and makes a couple of quick stabby motions, testing its weight.
"Cordelia --"
"Cemetery at night bad; cemetery at night in Sunnydale even worse -- I get it, Angel." The stake feels wrong in her hand, and she swaps it for an alternate. Straightening back into her seat all proper-like, she opens her door and gets out.
In the car still, Angel makes no movements akin to that of following her lead.
Sighing, she leans back down and raises an eyebrow at him. "You coming?"
*
The cemetery's not as well maintained as she remembers.
Side-stepping a crumbled tombstone, she heads south through the Catholics and towards the Lutherans and Methodists. Angel paces her, a sword in hand and a dark look on his face.
She has a fair idea as to where she's buried -- for all the business the Sunnydale diggers do, their records are astonishingly up-to-date -- and after a few wrong turns, she finds the proper section soon enough. The graves in this area are more prevalent and closer together, the markers made less from stone and more from wooden crosses embossed with little metal plates, and she has to get uncomfortably near to some in order to read the names.
She recognises far too many of the latter before she finds the one she came for.
"Jane Smith," reads Angel. He looks at her. "You knew her?"
Her mouth twists as she stares at the uneven and weedy grassy grave. "We both did."
"I don't --" starts Angel, confused.
"She didn't have any identification on her. When they found her -- well. There wasn't a lot left, you know? Your Master hadn't much cared for the sacredity of her chosenness."
Slowly, Angel says, "the Slayer..."
"Yup. Buffy Anne Summers in the decay."
His hand touches the small of her back, light and soft. "You were friends. Before."
She shakes her head. "Not really."
"Then why --"
Because I always thought it was all about me until it was all about her and what she was doing to me and mine.
Because even if she did screw everything up, she didn't deserve this. None of us did.
Because I get it now. I understand. I know...
"No why," she says, cutting him off. "Just because." When she steps back from the grave, his hand slides to her hip and anchors there. "Let's get out of here, yeah?"
He nods. "Yeah."
*
They're almost back to the road that winds through the cemetery when she stops short and looks around, surprised. "Wait... I think I remem--"
"Well, well, well," says a voice off to the left. "What do we have here?"
Crap.
As she turns, Angel draws up his sword and angles his body between hers and the -- she counts quickly -- four? no, five vampires approaching.
Quintuple crap.
Gripping her stake, she tries to work out which one's the weakest. Angel'll go after the strongest, for sure, and --
"Cordy?" squeals one of the vampires.
-- no way! "Harmony?"
Harmony squeals again and claps her hands together, pushing through the group of demons so that she can see better. "Oh my god! Look at you! How are you? I haven't seen you in, like, forever!"
"I'm good, I'm good! And you? You're looking all..." Harmony grins, her fangs all bright in the moonlight. "... dead! Wow. When did --"
Harmony waves a hand. "Oh, graduation, you know."
"Wow. That's, um -- I'm sorry?"
Her former second-string Heather pffts. "Oh, don't be. Being all evil is, like, totally the coolest thing ever! I mean, eating Mom and Dad and the help was kind of a bummer and all, but the never having to worry about wrinkles thing? Completely awesome."
One of the vampires beside Harmony growls. "Hey! Can we move this along already?"
"Yeah," agrees another one, "I'm hungry!"
Harmony's glee turns all abashed. "Oh, right." To her, she says, "hey, after I kill you and all? We should totally do dinner, yeah?"
Uh, yeah, no. Before she can say as much, however, two of the vampires charge and that's red rover.
She sees Angel decapitate the first vampire into a waterfall of dust before the second charger comes at her, all determination and mindless hunger, and she has to turn her attention to her own survival.
She's expecting super martial arts and ass kicking, but this guy just runs straight at her, not even pausing or blinking or, more importantly, apparently seeing her stake as she plunges it in and out of his chest. He dusts.
Surprised at how easy a kill that was, she turns to see if she can't help Angel with his groupsome of violence when something grabs her hair and pulls. Shouting at the smarting pain, she stumbles back several steps, arms like pinwheels, before dropping onto her ass like it's cheerleading tryouts and Amy's supreme klutziness all over again.
The pressure on her scalp eases a split second before a burst of star-inducing pain explodes across her cheek, and she yelps the pain away, trying to focus before she gets herself all dead and injured. Throwing herself to the side, she tumbles away from the direction of the punch and pushes back up to her feet.
"Harmony?"
Harm gives a cheery little hand wave. "Just like old times, hey, C?"
Kicking high and hard, she catches Harm under the chin with the toe of her shoe, forcing her back a step. "Oh, yeah, sure." Stake, stake, where's her -- oh, crap! Forcing herself to attack regardless, she goes offensive, following up with two right hooks and a left upper cut. "Like the time you stole my Barbie in fourth grade." Harmony's kick catches her thigh, almost dropping her balance. Staggering, she covers with a sweep at Harmony's shins. Harmony jumps. "And the time you kissed my boyfriend behind the bleachers in eighth." Spotting her stake, she cartwheels away from Harmony's lunge, righting herself just in time for Harmony to land another punch. Damnit. Blinking the pain away, she slam the side of her hand into Harmony's throat. "And, oh yeah, the time you tried to kill me right now."
Harmony kicks her dead center in her chest, pushing all the air and oxygen and other breathing necessities out of her body in one whooshing gasp. Before she can recover, Harmony has her clutched from behind.
"Well, it's not like it's personal or anything, you know? I mean, killing you is, like, super meaningful for me because it's you and all."
Amazing how not at all better that makes her feel. Rather much like the grip Harmony has on her body, one hand in her hair and pulling her head to the side. "Harm --" Twisting, she slams her elbow into the side of Harmony's breast, feeling the tug on her hair disappear as Harmony yelps. "You're an idiot."
Spinning on her heel, she punches Harmony as hard as she can, no finesse, no training, just her fist and Harmony's face, best friends forever. As Harmony stumbles back, she bends down and snatches up her stake, twirling it across her palm and slamming it into Harm's chest.
Oh.
For the first time maybe ever, she realises too late that she's going to almost regret killing a vampire, everything of the now evaporating as a rush of better memories suddenly floods to mind. This is Harmony. Harmony. Her best friend. Her --
"I'm sorry," she manages.
Harmony smiles, blonde and not comprehending to the end, and fades away.
*
Angel's still fighting one of the vampires. She can see him over by the cheruby Wilkins plot, trading throwy punches and random brawling moves, and she's about to heel it back over there when she looks up and --
She was right. She does remember this place.
The Alpert mausoleum has seen way better days, ivy smothering the left half and a section of the right wall crumbling in on itself. The area layout though, the positioning of the surrounding tombstones and gravestones? All totally memory truthsome.
Buffy, come on -- one night of rest is not gonna kill you.
The words -- Willow's? Xander's? -- echo and ripple as she turns in slow, small circles, trying to see, to remember -- what was it Buffy had said?
Oh. Yeah.
"No," she breathes out, "it'll kill someone else."
"Cordelia?"
She looks up.
He's still in his gamey-vamp face, sword gone and coat all dusty, as he weaves through the markers towards her.
She holds up her hand. "Stop!"
He freezes immediately, shoulders tensing, and she knows he's trying to sense where the attack he thinks she's just warned him about is going to come from, but.
"Wrong," she says, shaking her head. This looks all wrong. When it happened, he -- Turning, she says, "there."
"What?" She listens as he unfreezes, as he walks past her and towards where she's pointing at the section of road curb near a dead street light. Stopping of his own volition this time, he turns in a circle, looking down and around before back up at her, confused. "Wh--"
Her heart leaps and she feels faint, suddenly. Light-headed. Likely to cease consciousness.
"This --" Her voice catches, and she clears her throat, trying again. "This is where you could have stopped it."
His head tilts slightly to the right, mimicking that night so uncannily that she almost can't breathe. "Stopped it?"
"Me," she whispers.
"Huh?"
The stake in her hand is a mistake. She wasn't carrying one that night, never carried one those nights. Back then --
Dropping the stake, she fumbles in her pockets for a cross. The one she pulls out is way smaller than what she'd had that night -- the one she'd told Willow she had to have, thank you very much, because she was Cordelia and that alone determined that she have the bigger and better symbol -- but the allusion works nonetheless.
"We were here, patrolling. Xander and Willow and I." He flinches at those names. "Buffy was all sicky and flu-y, and they had the oh so brilliant idea that they could help in her place and --"
"Your dimension," he says slowly. "You --"
"It wasn't a dimension," she snaps. "God, Angel -- deficient much? If only it was a stupid dimension! Do you know how easy those are to cross? I'd've been home years ago if that were the case." She points the cross at him. "No. No. We were here, and then Buffy was here too, all, 'oh, Angelus, he's no match for a half-pint slayer as gross as I', and that's when you --"
Aww, c'mon. Just one more.
"Cordelia --"
"You should have done it! You should have killed me! You had me, get it? One moment all stepping-out-the-shadows guy and the next you and me on the ground, you all grr and me all defenceless and so easily dieable, and all you had to do was bite down and you didn't." Her shoulders slump. "You didn't."
"That wasn't me."
Pfft. Like that matters. "Yeah? Well, it was me, okay? It was me before I turned all big bad and you could have stopped it."
Stiffly, Angel says, "killed you, you mean." Slowly, he steps towards her. "Bitten you." Another step. "Drained you." And another and another until he's right up in her face, her cross hovering a shirt's breadth from his chest. "Turned you?"
She looks up at him. "You could have saved the world."
"No," he says, quietly, "I couldn't have."
Even now... even after everything he saw at the high school, the truth of her past on high-def orb-TV... "You still don't believe me," she says dully, looking away.
"Hey," he says, touching her chin so that she'll look at him again. "History's full of people who've changed the course of things to come, Cordelia. You're just one of them. No different, no worse."
"Not worse?" She scoffs bitterly. "I've murdered thousands -- tens of thousands -- of people. People who never did anything to me. Who probably never would have. This town alone used to have almost forty-thousand in it and how many are left now? One hundred? Two?"
He shrugs. "How many did Hitler kill? Genghis Khan? The Crusades? The Rwandan military? Your own American government? Who's to say that your reality wouldn't have ended with a higher count than yours some other way?"
He doesn't understand. "I say. What I did -- it wasn't some war or revolution or conquest. It was a wish. Unnatural and magical and --"
"And it's done. It's done and the world still turns, just as it always has, because the people in it? They don't care. They don't know how things came to be this way and they don't care. Nobody's going around thinking, 'oh, I wish Cordelia hadn't done what she did', just like they're not saying, 'wow, wouldn't it have been nice if the She'ju'lal demons hadn't created that plague back in the fifth century'. For them life is just life -- theirs to live as they choose."
"But they're choosing wrong!"
"You don't know that."
Leaning down, he kisses her, totally unmindful of the damage she could cause his heart in this very instant.
Pulling back, he lets his bumpies smooth out. "C'mon," he says, gently, "let's go home."
*
At the car, he hands her into the Plymouth all gentlemanly and sweet. Before he can pull back, she reaches out and touches the side of his face.
She has no idea what she wants to say.
"It'll be alright," he says. "I promise."
Dropping her hand, she lets him shut the door.
Yeah. That's what she used to think.
* * * * *
Continued in Chapter 6.
SOUNDTRACK: Home
FEEDBACK: Always appreciated. *g*