Fic: Intervention with the Vampire (Angel the Series, gen)
Title: Intervention with the Vampire
Author: Littera Abactor
Fandom: Angel the Series
Rating: PG
Size: 7,000 words/~40kb
Author's Note: This takes place between the end of season two and the start of season three.
Thanks: To vamplover84 and fanofall for their kick-ass betas. (The errors that remain are my own stubborn fault.) Also, thanks to vamplover84 for the fabulous title. For the record? She claims she does not have title-fu, but she lies. She's like Jackie Chan with the titles.
Feedback: Oh, yes. Please. All types and kinds.
"We have to go, er..." Wesley looked at Gunn.
Gunn, eyes wide, said, "See, there's this demon. This huge, slimy, fangy demon, and we have to, um..."
"Go look at it," Wesley finished helpfully, and then winced.
"Right now," Gunn added.
Angel closed his book and looked around for his car keys; he even felt vaguely interested. What kind of demon could scare Wes and Gunn this much? "I can go with you. I can do this reading later."
"No!" Wesley and Gunn both shouted. They looked at each other. "Because," Gunn continued, "Cordelia needs you. Here. To, um -"
She came into the office behind them and shut the door. "Hello, Angel." Her smile was a little alarming.
Wesley and Gunn exchanged trapped-rat looks. Angel frowned at them. "Guys? Something up?"
Cordelia's smile became much bigger and much scarier. "We're just going to have a little meeting," she told him.
"Oh. You know, if it's about the staples, I was - using those. I just kept having stapler problems and getting more, and I didn't realize..."
"No, no." Cordelia gave him another toothy, fake smile, which reminded Angel of her earliest efforts at acting. She looked at Wesley and Gunn and made significant gestures with her eyebrows and hands and mouth and even ears, then said, "So if we'll all just sit down..."
They sat. Like condemned men. Angel wondered if he should worry about them. Maybe they were working too hard.
"Okay. We're here, we've all got time, the door is closed, and we agree to keep what's said here in here, right?" Cordelia was reading from a printed page in her hand.
"Yes." Wesley and Gunn sounded grim; they had clearly become condemned men who were resigned to their fate. Angel studied them for a second longer, then changed that to ‘condemned men who were probably kind of looking forward to the peaceful quiet of the grave.' In which case they were in for a nasty surprise, because the grave? Not quiet. Not peaceful. Not fun.
"Angel?" Cordelia, on the other hand, sounded like she was trying to herd sheep with her voice. Retarded sheep. Retarded, easily spooked sheep. "Angel?"
And, damn. He couldn't remember what they were talking about. "Yes?" he said, trying to remember if he was agreeing to something, and if so, what.
"Good. Okay, I'll start." She looked at the papers again. "Angel, we called this intervention because -"
"Wait. Intervention?" This was definitely the first time anyone had used that word.
Cordelia plowed on, ignoring him. "Because you've seemed a little, well, down lately."
"Buffy died. The world almost ended. The wheels came off my rolly chair. It's been a tough week."
"It's more than that, Angel. Ever since we came back from Pylea, you've been - well, depressed."
"I'm not depressed." He was pretty sure vampires couldn't be depressed.
"Wesley? Gunn?"
"Er, well, speaking only for myself, I have to say that, er, you have seemed a bit - well, yes, depressed. Glum. Melancholic. You did refuse to come out of your room for five days, Angel."
"I was - busy."
"Yeah, busy playing with knives," Gunn said, and Angel hadn't expected Gunn to rat him out like that. No fair.
"I was practicing!"
"Angel, we're not judging you. We're concerned about you. We want to help you." She smiled at him again, and, really, this was getting scary. Had she always had that many teeth? "We think you have Seasonal Affective Disorder. You were a lot better in Pylea, with the sun."
He looked around the room. Wesley was staring at his shoes. Gunn gave him a weak smile. Cordelia gave him a big one. "We want to help," she reminded him.
"That's very nice of you guys, but, you know, I really think I'm fine." He stood up. "So, I'm glad we could have this little, uh, intervention, and now I'll -"
Cordelia gave him a satisfied look. "And we all know what ‘fine' stands for, don't we?" She made the air quotes and everything.
Angel stared at her blankly and dropped back into his chair.
"Fucked up and in Need of an Ear," Cordelia said.
"Actually, Cordelia, that's what, er, FUAINOAE stands for," Wesley told her. "Perhaps you meant ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge'?"
"That's FUCK, and that's an urban legend," Gunn told him.
"Really?"
"Check Snopes, Renaissance man." Angel was beginning to suspect that Gunn's new nickname for Wesley wasn't precisely a compliment.
Cordelia was glaring at them all. "If we could just get back on track here? Guys?" Hell, now there were teeth in her voice. Angel wondered for a second if this was some kind of demon masquerading as Cordelia, but managed to shake it off.
Gunn and Wesley nodded. Wesley said, "But, er, it's an excellent point all the same. About being fine, and how you aren't."
"Yes," Cordelia said. "And the point is, you need an ear."
"I need an ear?" Angel said, trying to resist the temptation to check on both of his.
"Exactly! You need an ear. So I've got this list of therapists -"
"Cordelia, I can't see a therapist."
"Resistance is natural, Angel. It's your depression fighting your instinct to seek help. But as your friends, it's our job to make sure the depression doesn't win." She was reading from her paper again. Angel knew he could move fast enough to get it away from her and destroy it, but the odds of him surviving that maneuver were slim. And if he did survive it, well, that might be even worse.
He switched to defense. "I can't even go to one. It's not like there's late-night psychiatrists."
"Actually," and she whipped out another print-out, and he was really going to have to do something about her computer. Have it exorcised, maybe. "I have a list of therapists that make appointments in the evening. So you just pick one of them and you're good to go!" She held out the list and smiled brilliantly at him.
He took it and put it on his desk. Give him a few days, he'd lose it. Problem solved. "Okay. I'll make an appointment, um, tomorrow maybe."
"No. You pick one now and I'll make the appointment now." She sounded dangerous.
Angel, feeling cornered, said, "Cordelia, what am I supposed to tell a therapist?"
She smiled at him. "You'll think of something. And it doesn't really matter, anyway. No matter what you say, any decent shrink who gets one look at you is going to write you a prescription for Prozac, which is the goal here."
"Prozac? I'm a vampire. We don't - medicate."
"Well, under normal circumstances we'd just buy a whole bunch of full-spectrum light bulbs, but we're afraid you'll catch fire. And Prozac is, like, so Southern California."
"Exactly my point, Cordelia."
She just looked at him.
And looked at him.
And then she started to look mean.
"Fine! I'll go. I'll go to, um," he glanced at the list, "this one. This Amber person. Amber Alexander."
She went back to the big fake smile. "That's all we ask. Right, guys?"
They agreed with everything she said, but she made them do the group hug anyway.
~
Angel walked into the Hyperion, looked around warily, and then bolted the door.
Cordelia was waiting for him behind the reception desk. "I looked it up," she told him cheerfully. "It's actually Fucked up, Insecure, Needy, and Evasive. No ears."
"What?"
"Fine. It stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Needy, and Evasive."
"That's FUINAE," Wesley said automatically.
"I don't think that's going to help me much," Angel told them both. "Either way."
Cordelia didn't let him re-route the conversation for long. "Didn't you like her? Did you give her a chance? Did you tell her about Buffy and Darla and Pylea and everything?"
"There's only so much I can tell a therapist." Angel checked the coffeepot. "No coffee?"
"Coffee can make depression worse, and is often used to self-medicate. It's important to approach therapy openly, with a clear heart, and with your usual defenses down."
Angel stared at her. She didn't even have the papers anymore, and she was still talking like a self-help robot. Maybe she was the one who needed the exorcism. "My usual defenses down," he repeated. "That seems like a good way to get staked."
"Your mental defenses. So the therapist can get into your mindset."
"Well, not to worry. This one got into my mindset, all right. She got way, way too into it." He shuddered and started looking for wherever they'd hidden their supply of coffee, because no way could Cordelia be this attentive and alert without some.
Cordelia frowned. "Tell me what happened."
"I told her an old girlfriend I still loved had died, and also that my girlfriend from before that had come back to me and we'd restarted a relationship and then she left me for another woman," Angel said.
Catching their looks, he added, "What? I couldn't say she got brought back from the dead but she was human but then she was turned back into vampire by someone I sired." He couldn't find any hidden coffee. He frowned at the coffeepot again, sighed, and put his mug down. "Or I didn't think I should, anyway."
"And? Did you tell her about how Darla made you all evil?"
"Yes. Sort of. Pretty much."
"So?"
"She didn't listen at all. She said, ‘your secretary told me you had to have an appointment at eight because you have a medical condition that keeps you from going out in the daylight.'"
"Well, I had to say something. She asked."
"So I said, well, yeah. And she asked if I had ever tried the church as a solace, and I told her I wasn't big into churches these days. And then she said I looked awfully young for someone with such a wide range of experience. And then she asked me if I had a favorite food, and I said not exactly." Angel didn't want to think about the rest of it. Maybe if he looked depressed enough Cordelia would let him drop it.
She raised her eyebrows at him and made ‘go on, go on' gestures. "Well?"
"Then she ripped off her blouse and said, ‘Oh, Dark Master, take me. Make me one of your Immortal Children.'"
Dead silence.
"What?" Wesley sounded like he was choking on a lemon.
"You heard me."
"Whoa." Gunn was apparently imagining the scene. "Was she hot?"
Cordelia said, "Excuse me?"
"I'm just trying to get all the facts."
"What did you do?" Wesley said, bringing the conversation back on topic. "You didn't tell her, did you?"
"Of course not. I said, ‘What?'" He sighed. "And then she pointed behind me, where there was a mirror. And I wasn't in it."
"Oh." Wesley apparently didn't have anything to say to that.
"And then I ran."
"Leaving therapy early is a sign of unwillingness to explore your issues," Cordelia told him. He gave her a look. "But, okay, never mind. How about one of the others? This J. X. White guy has a lot of credentials and degrees and stuff."
Angel said, "Do I have to?"
"Do you want to try the UV lamps?"
"No."
"Do you want to have another intervention?"
"No."
"Well, then." She picked up the phone. "I'll try to get an appointment for Monday."
~
"Well?" Cordelia looked at him. He looked weirdly unfocused, actually, sort of vague even for him.
"It went really well," Angel told her. She was surprised. She was surprised that he wasn't surprised.
"So you're getting cured? And you're getting Prozac?"
"Well." He drifted around the room, looking dazed. "He said he wants to see me every day for a while. I'm going back at the same time tomorrow. But no Prozac; he says talking it out is the way to go." He wandered into his office.
Cordelia, for want of a better victim, gave Wesley a dirty look. This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
But that was how it did go, all week. On Tuesday, Angel came home, went upstairs, and slept until an hour before his next appointment, and they were all unpleasantly reminded of the beginnings of the Darla thing. On Wednesday, he did the same thing, except it took him an hour longer to get home. On Thursday, Gunn and Wesley went to pick him up. Wesley guided him upstairs - he wanted to fall asleep on the couch - while Gunn and Cordelia exchanged significant looks.
Wesley came back down a few minutes later and said, "We've got to do something. He tried to fall asleep on my shoulder in the elevator. And when I woke him up, he started crying."
"He was crying last night," Gunn said. "I stayed like you asked, and I heard him. And this hotel is creepy enough without a 24-hour crying vampire show."
Wesley nodded. "And he's sleeping all the time. This is ludicrous. He's actually worse than before."
"I didn't even think he could be." Cordelia sounded genuinely surprised.
Gunn said, "So what's the plan?"
They exchanged glances. "Tomorrow," Cordelia said, "we're going to sit down and have a talk about this."
"He won't even be awake."
"He will. Because we'll have the talk when he's supposed to be having his session."
Cordelia prepped by hiding everyone's car keys, all the telephones, and the keys to the locked hotel doors. Then she waited until Angel stumbled downstairs, blinking, and appeared in front of him with hot herbal tea - coffee was still banned - and a warm smile.
If he hadn't been, well, dead, she would have thought he was sick, because he totally fell for it. He took the tea, gave her a grateful look - Angel! Grateful! He was probably dying - and wandered off to sit down on one of the couches.
She followed and sat next to him and tried for sincere and unaffected. "So. How's the tea?" Nice. Open-ended. Gentle. Perfect tone. She was very proud of her therapeutic technique.
"Oh, it's...great," Angel said. Very, very slowly.
"And the therapy?"
"Oh, it's...great," he said in the exact same tone. He was even still looking at his mug when he said it.
"What do you talk about?"
"Everything. Last session it was Buffy."
Cordelia blinked at Wesley, who raised his eyebrows at her. "What did you tell him?"
"Cordy, you were there when it happened." It was the first time he'd said her name in four days, she realized.
"Yeah, but you can't tell him about how you met or why you broke up or what she did or how she died, so what did you talk about for a whole session?"
"Why can't I tell him?"
"Um. Angel. Vampire? Slayer? Died saving the world again?"
"Yeah, but he understands this stuff."
Cordelia looked at Wesley, who was looking at Gunn. Gunn, to complete the circuit, looked back at Cordelia, and his expression said "Holy shit" more clearly than any voice could have.
"Understands?"
"Yeah. He's a demon himself."
Cordelia turned back to Gunn and Wesley for another round of look-exchanging, then rose and said, maybe too brightly, "Well, I'll leave you to enjoy your tea!" The guys followed her into Angel's office - well, not like he was using it - and closed the door.
Gunn bonked his head gently against the closed door. "Demon. Why am I thinking this is a bad thing?"
"Because it is. This has to be related to his behavior in some way," Wesley said.
"You think?"
"Well, Gunn, I'd rather not jump to conclusions, mind you, but, yes, I do think so."
Great. They were going to start a bickering match. "Guys." They looked at her. "The question is, how are we going to kill him before he finishes doing whatever he's doing to Angel?"
Wesley checked his watch. "I suggest that we all accompany Angel to his appointment. If we leave now, he'll hardly even be late."
~
When they walked into the Hyperion two hours later, they were in bad shape. Also filthy. Cordelia and Gunn were covered in slime. Wesley was covered in blood and slime. Angel was clean but bereft-looking.
"I really thought he liked me. We had a therapeutic rapport."
"Angel, man, he did like you. He fed on misery; he must've thought you were the Holy Grail."
"He seemed like such a nice, normal guy," Angel said sadly. "I can't believe he had all those tentacles."
Wesley clapped Angel sympathetically on the shoulder. "Well, problem solved. May I borrow a towel, a shower, and approximately eight meters of gauze?"
"Sure." Angel didn't look up; he was staring at his hands. Cordelia kicked him. "Oh, and Wesley? Uh, thanks. Thanks for, you know, saving my life and keeping my therapist from sucking my brain and so on."
Wesley gave him a jaunty little wave with his good hand and headed for the elevators.
Gunn said, "I can't believe you told a dude with two heads all about Buffy. You won't even tell me about Buffy."
"You aren't missing anything," Cordelia said. "I told you, it's mostly just a lot of crying in the rain. Well, and the vicious killing people thing, but he doesn't go there anymore."
Angel sighed. Then he brightened. "But this means I'm all done with therapy, right?"
"Wrong. There's still lots of shrinks left in L.A."
"But, Cordelia -"
"You're going."
"But -"
"Angel."
"Fine," he muttered, and stomped off to his office and shut the door.
Gunn said, "It's sure nice to see things getting back to normal around here."
Cordelia, looking at her slightly battered list, said, "Joanne Alexievitch Guzman. That sounds like a responsible professional, right?"
"She probably collects vampire lungs."
"I'll make the appointment tomorrow."
~
Wesley flailed one hand out toward the phone. "'Lo?" He checked the clock. Four-thirty. In the morning. Half of him thought it had damn well better be an emergency, and the other half of him was sure it was. He tried to brace for all eventualities without entirely waking up.
It wasn't what he expected, precisely. "Angel didn't come back."
"Wha'? Whzzz?"
"Wesley, are you awake?" Cordelia sounded more worried than irritated. Not a good sign. Real emergency, then.
"Yes." He sat up and groped for his glasses.
"Angel didn't come back."
"From his therapy appointment? You're still there waiting for him?"
"Yes. And I kind of fell asleep, and I just woke up because Fred did that scuttling thing through here, and Angel is not back. You don't think he found another misery demon, do you?"
"I'm really starting to wonder about the psychiatrists in this town who are willing to make appointments after dark." Wesley hauled himself out of bed and started getting dressed. "You know, Cordelia, maybe Angel isn't cut out for therapy."
She made a frustrated noise. "He hasn't tried therapy! One vampire wannabe and one demon emotion-sucker-thing - those aren't therapists. Trust me. With real therapists, it takes years to figure out it isn't working."
Wesley sighed and pulled on yesterday's shirt. "He just seems to have bad luck with these things. Extraordinarily bad luck. One would even suspect -" Cordelia made an impatient noise, and he broke off. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes, all right?"
"Go through a drive-through and get me a grande soy milk no-whip mocha."
"Will do."
When he arrived, Cordelia was pacing in the lobby. "Where is he? He hasn't been back. And I've tried his cell a billion times and he hasn't answered."
"He probably just forgot to charge it. You know how he is with that thing." A lesser woman would've given up making him carry it after the explosions, but Cordelia was a true believer in telecommunications technology.
"Still."
She looked so seriously concerned that Wesley was touched. "You made the appointment, right?"
"It was for eight-thirty. It should've been over by nine-thirty at the latest. He's been gone for almost nine hours, Wesley."
"Let's go check out the office." He began herding her out the door. "And don't worry. Perhaps Angel's simply - exploring his, er, difficulties. If he really started talking to her, they could go this late and still only have got back to 1997."
"The fifty-minute hour is a therapeutic tool; it allows sufficient time to explore a topic deeply and thoroughly without exhausting the patient or the therapist or increasing the chance of developing a dependent relationship," she said automatically. "But, fine, let's check it out."
When they got there, the psychiatrist's entire building was dark. Cordelia whipped out her cell phone. "That's it. I'm calling the shrink," she said.
"It's half-past five. She's probably not even awake yet."
"She's a professional. She can be paged."
And apparently she truly was a professional; she rang back within ten minutes. Cordelia said, "Hi. My name is Cordelia Chase. My husband -" Wesley felt his eyebrows shoot up "- had an appointment with you yesterday evening at eight-thirty, and he hasn't come back. This isn't like him, and I'm -" She broke off, apparently interrupted.
"Yes, I've got his medical power of attorney and everything. It seemed like a good idea, with his, you know, problems and all." Wesley wondered if she actually did have one; Angel might well have given her one. These days he seemed not to know or care what he was signing half the time.
He sighed. In a way, he hoped the therapy helped. Angel just hadn't been himself since - well, actually, he had been himself. Even more himself. That was the problem. Wesley truly wanted to believe eternity could be more fun than that.
"Oh," Cordelia said softly into the phone. "Oh." She sounded exactly like someone worried about a loved one, which was alarming, because her acting wasn't that good. "But - why?" She listened for a long moment, then said, "Where?" She made frantic writing gestures, and Wesley handed her his breast-pocket pen and notepad.
She wrote for a solid minute, then said, "Thank you, Dr. Guzman. I'm - yes. Yes. I will. Thank you." She flipped the phone shut and looked at him, eyes wide.
"Well?"
"He didn't report having any family, so she didn't notify anyone. But she said he was delusional and clearly disoriented, and became combative. She evaluated him as gravely disturbed and a danger to himself and others and had him placed as an inpatient in the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute as -" she looked at the pad " - a 5150, a 72-hour involuntary hold. She said there'd be a hearing tomorrow at which she'd be presenting preliminary evidence in favor of a 14-day confinement."
"Good lord."
"He's going to kill me, isn't he?" she said in a small voice.
Privately, he thought so. But all he said was, "I'm more concerned about what they'll do to him when they discover he doesn't have a pulse. Or, for that matter, if they try to make him go outside in daylight."
She winced. "We have to get him out."
"Well, if you have a medical power of attorney for him, can't we just go ask for him back?"
"Wesley. First, I do not have medical power of attorney. Who gets that for a vampire? He's not exactly going to be facing end-of-life issues. And second, he's been committed involuntarily. For 72 hours, no one gets him out." He raised his eyebrows inquiringly and she rolled her eyes. "Like Sunnydale wasn't full of prescription drug addicts? Like my mother didn't go down that road a bunch of times? Trust me, I know this stuff."
Wesley sighed. "I'll call Gunn."
By seven, they had take-out breakfast (including extra-large coffees for Wesley and Cordelia and an extra-large Coke for Gunn; Angel might be on a no-caffeine diet, but they needed the stimulants) and nothing even approaching a plan.
"I say we go simple. Get a gun, go in there, say we want our boss back."
"Yes. And then Cordelia and I will still have to get Angel out of the hospital, and we'll also have to get you out of prison."
Cordelia said, "They should allow visitors eventually. Maybe we could just go in and see him and then...well, I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to get him out."
"Lovely plan," Wesley told her. "The only thing it lacks is a plan."
"I don't see you doing any better," she said.
"At least I'm not -"
"See, but there's this thing that keeps bothering me," Gunn said, completely ignoring them both.
"Whether or not he really is crazy? That's been bothering me, too."
Gunn stared at her. "We know vampires are real, Cordelia."
"You don't think he could benefit from inpatient treatment?"
"Well, yeah. But who couldn't?" Gunn gestured around the table. "Our lives don't exactly contribute to stability and emotional health."
It was inarguable, really. Distressingly so. Wesley tried to re-focus them. "So what bothers you?"
"Why isn't he here already?"
Ah. "You mean, given his vampiric strength and speed, why hasn't he simply broken himself out of the hospital?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know. I suppose we'll just have to ask him."
Cordelia, with a certain amount of tension in her voice, said, "Which brings us back to the question of how we get in to see him and how we get out afterwards."
Wesley looked around the table, then took a deep breath. "Well, we could get in to see him by claiming he's escaped from..."
~
This time, when they arrived at the Hyperion, no one was slimy. On the other hand, everyone was at least a little bit bloody, so overall they probably weren't exactly coming out ahead. Gunn was leading the "most bloody" sweepstakes by a nose, although he might need to be disqualified, since most of the blood covering the uniform they'd stolen for him wasn't his own. Angel came next, definitely; he was wearing only an ill-fitting pair of blue drawstring pants, currently patterned with extensive bloodstains. Cordelia's jeans and t-shirt - she'd learned not to wear good clothes if Angel, Wesley, or Gunn was going to be in the same county as she was - were only marginally bloody, although she thought she deserved some kind of extra credit for the large patch of - "other fluid" was probably the best way to think of it - staining her top. Wesley, bringing up the rear in the blood collection contest, still had several patches of it, plus the best assembly of other fluids. Still, she deserved the most points for that; his biggest spot was just the remains of a saline drip.
"I still don't see why I had to be the nurse," Gunn said, flopping down exhausted on a couch that was never going to be the same after its close encounter with his clothes. He gave said clothing a vague, disgruntled look. "Especially a pediatrics nurse. I mean, are these ducks?" He plucked at his shirt.
"Dinosaurs," Angel said in a far-off, sing-song voice. "I think maybe dinosaurs is what they are, because they look like dinosaurs. To me they do. Dinosaurs."
"I'm just saying, ducklike dinosaurs are not a good look for me. Why did I have to wear them?"
"You were the only one who fit into the nurse's clothes," Cordelia reminded him.
"And you're saying that if you'd put them on, someone at that hospital would have noticed your uniform didn't fit? Come on. This is the place that hired a vampire as the assistant head of emergency medicine."
"I like the uniform, Gunn. It looks nice on you, and also, dinosaurs," Angel said earnestly.
Gunn gave him a long, worried look. "Dude. What did they give him?"
"I'm not entirely certain," Wesley said, removing his stolen and once-white lab coat, balling it up, and throwing it at the garbage can, "as I only had about two seconds with his chart before Nurse Ducky Dinosaur threw up."
"Look. Vampires I can handle. Demons I can handle. Emergency rooms? Burn victims? People puking? No. Just, no. But if you hadn't told Mr. ‘No Pulse Please, I'm a Dead Guy' to play dead, maybe we could've gone from the loony ward straight out the door, and then I wouldn't have had to throw up."
"I thought, given the way he was acting, that playing dead might be the only thing within the range of his abilities, and that once they discovered he didn't have a pulse they'd unlock those doors in a hurry. And furthermore, I was right," Wesley told him. "I don't see how I could have been expected to know that the UCLA ER is a haunt of evil undead physicians; no one would have suspected that."
"Yeah, no one, except for, oh, anyone who has ever been in an emergency room," Gunn said.
"I hate those places," Cordelia said. "The smell, and the crying. And no one looks good in emergency room lighting. No one." When she got the energy together, she was going to go up and shower until her entire body was pruned. Most of her worst memories had happened in hospitals.
"The psych ward was worse, though," Gunn said thoughtfully.
"True," Wesley said. "Several of those people were so clearly overmedicated that I briefly thought they were also undead. Lesser undead. Zombies, for example."
"The laughing one was worse than that," Gunn said. "She had the bad crazy." He sounded honestly horrified by the memory, but Cordelia thought they were both forgetting the worst of it.
"Please. The worst one was that woman with the hair and the voice and the pink shirt and those awful, awful fingernails." Cordelia shuddered.
"Are you referring to the ward nurse?"
"Actually, she's right. That woman was pure evil. Good thing we got him out of there," Gunn said, looking over at Angel. "Place was seriously fucked up."
"They were nice to me," Angel told them. "They didn't let me keep my shoes, though, or my shirt, or my knives, or my shoes, or my sunglasses, or my shoes. I miss my shoes. They were nice shoes. I liked them. Didn't you like them?" he asked Cordelia plaintively, then paused, looking distressed. "Wait, I don't remember what they looked like. My shoes, I forgot them, and now I -"
Cordelia interrupted, though it didn't stop Angel from talking. "Wesley. Can you figure out how long that -" she made a gesture at Angel, who was now sadly poking at his own toes "- is going to be going on? Because I am this close to taking him back to the hospital myself. Or staking him." She watched him for a minute; he was naming his toes now, and had gotten as far as calling his second left toe ‘Mr. Winkles.' "He'd probably want me to, actually."
Wesley heaved himself out of the chair and went to his desk, presumably to look for references on psychoactive medications in vampires.
She had to distract Angel from his toes, because remembering this wasn't going to make it any easier to take his broodier moments seriously. It took her a while to think of a conversation she was willing to have with him in this state, but she finally settled on, "Why didn't you run when I said run?"
"I was going to run," he said with dignity. "I was ready to run, I was going to run, but then I remembered that Jerry said not to run, so I was going to ask you if I should run, but then you weren't there anymore, and so I didn't run."
"Well, I'm sorry I wasn't paying perfect attention to you, but I was being attacked by a vampire with a medical degree," Cordelia reminded him. "It was distracting. I'm not used to fangs and syringes on the same person."
"There's no such thing as vampires," Angel told her.
There was a lengthy pause. Gunn finally said, "What?"
"There's no such thing as vampires," he repeated happily. "I learned that today."
Cordelia and Gunn exchanged long, significant looks. "Angel, man, you are a vampire."
"Nope. I thought so, but nope, turns out I'm not. Which is good, because I don't think I liked being a vampire back when I was a vampire, only I wasn't, but I thought I was. Jerry told me about there not being vampires. Could I have some clothes? Some other clothes? Some cleaner ones? Maybe like his, with dinosaurs?"
Cordelia said, "Angel. You. Are. A. Vampire."
"Nu-uh," he said, smiling happily. "I'm a real live boy, a dirty, dirty boy. Need a shower and a bath and a shower." He got up and wandered over to the elevators, singing about rubber duckies.
"You'd better go with him," Cordelia said to Gunn, watching Angel rebound off the furniture.
"What, like in case he slips in the shower and hits his head? He's a vampire. He's not going to drown. I'm taking my own damn shower, thanks." Gunn headed off in the same direction. "I don't shower with dead people!" he yelled back to her, steering Angel away from walls he seemed determined to walk into.
"I'm not dead, so we could shower if we wanted," Angel told him. "Together. Did you want to shower together? Because I'm not dead." Gunn caught Cordelia's eye and made significant gestures and facial expressions, clearly indicating that he didn't want to be alone with Angel. She had no pity, though, and nodded firmly at him. His gestures became more significant and slightly desperate. Angel hugged him, clumsily, like a bear embracing a tree. Gunn's face took on a distinctly panicked cast. She tried not to laugh, but, yeah, like that was ever going to be worth the effort.
The elevator arrived and Angel towed Gunn into it. "Well, have a good shower!" Cordelia told him heartlessly.
"I will get you for this if I have to sell my soul to do it," Gunn told her in a flat, level voice.
The last thing she heard before the doors closed was Angel's voice. "We're going to get her a present? Let's get her a dinosaur. Like on your shirt, because dinosaurs are nice. I like..." He faded out.
It was turning out to be a pretty good day after all. She was still smiling when Wesley came in a few minutes later. "Well?" she asked.
"Actually not that bad," he told her, sounding almost pleased. "The problem is that vampires have typical absorption but lack biological filtration systems, so whatever drugs they take continue to circulate until they feed again; medications don't have a half-life in vampires. On the other hand, they aren't as susceptible to drugs as a whole, which is why we're not seeing the more serious consequences of an overdose in Angel, just the atypical reactions that are apparently fairly common for vampires."
Cordelia nodded, feeling her eyes glazing over; she couldn't handle Wesley at his most Watcher-y on top of a hospital breakout and a night spent at her desk. She brought it back to specifics. "So we need to?"
"Get him to eat. Six pints or so and he'll be fine. I'll just heat up a blood pack, shall I?" He turned toward the kitchen, humming to himself.
"Wesley? Tiny problem." He turned back to her, eyebrows raised. "I don't think he's going to want to drink blood." She took a deep breath. "He, um, doesn't believe he's a vampire."
Wesley groaned.
~
Four days after the hospital breakout, Gunn walked in late and smacked a bottle down on Cordelia's desk. "Don't say I never did anything for you. And don't think you're forgiven for the shower thing, ‘cause this is just self-defense."
She ignored the last part - he'd get over it, eventually - and picked up the bottle. "Prozac!" she said. "For Angel - wait, Angel Gutierrez? That's not his last name."
"Do you even know what his is?" She shook her head. "Well, then. Plus, look. No one's going to ask questions about an Angel Gutierrez. Everyone's going to ask questions about an Angel Smith or whatever, because white men aren't named Angel, and I had to put that he was a guy on the form."
"I'm male, and I'm named Angel," Angel said, sounding insulted. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by eleven of the stuffed dinosaurs they'd given him at various points in the week; he'd concealed somewhere the blow-up dinosaur, the poster, and the Barney boxer shorts. Gunn had to give him credit; he was taking it really well, all things considered. Better than Gunn himself was taking Cordelia's annoyingly persistent shower jokes.
"Yeah, but you're pretty much alone on that one, Angel. Well, you and a thousand transvestite showgirls in Las Vegas." Gunn wasn't in a hurry to forgive Angel for the whole situation, either; he never wanted to spoon-feed blood to anyone ever again.
Cordelia was fondling the bottle happily. Almost obscenely, in fact. "But where did you get it?"
"I just figured, bag this shit. His shrinks are either psychotic or they think he is. And I'm not breaking him out of UCLA again. That was fucking depressing, and then - No." He shook off the memory. "So. You wanted Prozac for him? Well, girl, here's your Prozac."
"How?"
"Internet pharmacy. I said my name was Angel Gutierrez, I was a thirty-year-old male, I cried all the time and had no energy and thought about death a lot. And I gave them my credit card and asked for overnight shipping. Thirty seconds later they e-mailed me a shipping notice and a special offer for Viagra and that was that." He turned to Angel. "I'm putting it on my expenses, though, because that shit is expensive. And I didn't go for the Viagra, but I printed out the coupon, just in case."
"You said I cried all the time?" Angel seemed to have missed most of what Gunn had said.
"Does it matter?" Cordelia bounced up and handed him the bottle. "You have Prozac! You're going to be happy and full of life - energy, anyway - and medicated, just like everyone else in this town!"
Angel brooded at the bottle. "I don't cry," he said to it, but he seemed to be talking to Gunn.
"Angel, man, you've got to describe the right symptoms to get the right drugs. It isn't personal or anything. It's just how you get prescriptions over the internet."
"I'm somewhat disturbed that you know this," Wesley told him.
"Everyone knows this," Gunn told him, then made a big show of looking him over. "Everyone living in this century, anyway."
Cordelia was standing in front of Angel, the irresistible force meeting the moody object. "So, are you going to take the medicine?"
The broody look intensified. "Do I have a choice?"
"We can always try another therapist," she told him.
He sighed. "Does this mean I get coffee again?"
Obviously, she knew when to compromise. "Yes."
He reached for the bottle. "Fine. I'll take them. With coffee." He moved his gaze over to Gunn. "But I don't cry."
~
Angel swallowed the first pill with the first coffee he'd had in almost a month, and he was surprised at how good it tasted; maybe it was his expression of ecstasy that caused Cordelia to draw the wrong conclusions. "Helping?" she asked, five minutes later, and the sad part was that he could tell she waited as long as she could.
"I don't think it works on vampires," he told her.
"It takes a while. Two weeks before you feel the full effect," Gunn said. Catching Wesley's look, he added, "What? Everyone takes Prozac sooner or later."
That didn't stop her from asking the next day.
"Seriously, Cordy. Vampires and Prozac don't mix. We're supposed to be like this."
"Angel, no one is supposed to be that depressed. The Powers That Be wouldn't put us through that." Given what the Powers were willing to put them through, Angel had to wonder exactly how bad he seemed to his team.
And she kept right on asking.
"I don't think it's going to work. Why don't we try absinthe? As I recall, that seemed to help."
"It did?" Cordelia sounded interested.
It sort of had. "Well, it made Baudelaire a lot more tormented and depressed, and it gave him all these hallucinations about hell and the sun and evil and blood. It was hysterical. Completely brought back my interest in un-life." He caught the expression on her face. "Look, I was Angelus then."
She frowned at him. "Do you ever remember being not-depressed after the soul?" Angel, considering, didn't answer.
Fourteen days and fourteen questions later: "Well?"
"I don't think it's helping, Cordelia. Seriously. I'm not even sure I have - what was it called?"
"Serotonin," Wesley told him.
"Right. That. Anymore."
"Not helping at all?" She studied him closely.
"No, honestly. I mean, I appreciate the effort, I do, but it's just not - it's really not - I mean, I don't think I am depressed, but if I am, well, I don't feel any different since the Prozac."
Cordelia sighed. "Okay," she said, and turned to her computer. She clicked, and pointed, and clicked again, and when she turned back to him, she was perky again. "So we move on to Plan B. Religion."
Author: Littera Abactor
Fandom: Angel the Series
Rating: PG
Size: 7,000 words/~40kb
Author's Note: This takes place between the end of season two and the start of season three.
Thanks: To vamplover84 and fanofall for their kick-ass betas. (The errors that remain are my own stubborn fault.) Also, thanks to vamplover84 for the fabulous title. For the record? She claims she does not have title-fu, but she lies. She's like Jackie Chan with the titles.
Feedback: Oh, yes. Please. All types and kinds.
"We have to go, er..." Wesley looked at Gunn.
Gunn, eyes wide, said, "See, there's this demon. This huge, slimy, fangy demon, and we have to, um..."
"Go look at it," Wesley finished helpfully, and then winced.
"Right now," Gunn added.
Angel closed his book and looked around for his car keys; he even felt vaguely interested. What kind of demon could scare Wes and Gunn this much? "I can go with you. I can do this reading later."
"No!" Wesley and Gunn both shouted. They looked at each other. "Because," Gunn continued, "Cordelia needs you. Here. To, um -"
She came into the office behind them and shut the door. "Hello, Angel." Her smile was a little alarming.
Wesley and Gunn exchanged trapped-rat looks. Angel frowned at them. "Guys? Something up?"
Cordelia's smile became much bigger and much scarier. "We're just going to have a little meeting," she told him.
"Oh. You know, if it's about the staples, I was - using those. I just kept having stapler problems and getting more, and I didn't realize..."
"No, no." Cordelia gave him another toothy, fake smile, which reminded Angel of her earliest efforts at acting. She looked at Wesley and Gunn and made significant gestures with her eyebrows and hands and mouth and even ears, then said, "So if we'll all just sit down..."
They sat. Like condemned men. Angel wondered if he should worry about them. Maybe they were working too hard.
"Okay. We're here, we've all got time, the door is closed, and we agree to keep what's said here in here, right?" Cordelia was reading from a printed page in her hand.
"Yes." Wesley and Gunn sounded grim; they had clearly become condemned men who were resigned to their fate. Angel studied them for a second longer, then changed that to ‘condemned men who were probably kind of looking forward to the peaceful quiet of the grave.' In which case they were in for a nasty surprise, because the grave? Not quiet. Not peaceful. Not fun.
"Angel?" Cordelia, on the other hand, sounded like she was trying to herd sheep with her voice. Retarded sheep. Retarded, easily spooked sheep. "Angel?"
And, damn. He couldn't remember what they were talking about. "Yes?" he said, trying to remember if he was agreeing to something, and if so, what.
"Good. Okay, I'll start." She looked at the papers again. "Angel, we called this intervention because -"
"Wait. Intervention?" This was definitely the first time anyone had used that word.
Cordelia plowed on, ignoring him. "Because you've seemed a little, well, down lately."
"Buffy died. The world almost ended. The wheels came off my rolly chair. It's been a tough week."
"It's more than that, Angel. Ever since we came back from Pylea, you've been - well, depressed."
"I'm not depressed." He was pretty sure vampires couldn't be depressed.
"Wesley? Gunn?"
"Er, well, speaking only for myself, I have to say that, er, you have seemed a bit - well, yes, depressed. Glum. Melancholic. You did refuse to come out of your room for five days, Angel."
"I was - busy."
"Yeah, busy playing with knives," Gunn said, and Angel hadn't expected Gunn to rat him out like that. No fair.
"I was practicing!"
"Angel, we're not judging you. We're concerned about you. We want to help you." She smiled at him again, and, really, this was getting scary. Had she always had that many teeth? "We think you have Seasonal Affective Disorder. You were a lot better in Pylea, with the sun."
He looked around the room. Wesley was staring at his shoes. Gunn gave him a weak smile. Cordelia gave him a big one. "We want to help," she reminded him.
"That's very nice of you guys, but, you know, I really think I'm fine." He stood up. "So, I'm glad we could have this little, uh, intervention, and now I'll -"
Cordelia gave him a satisfied look. "And we all know what ‘fine' stands for, don't we?" She made the air quotes and everything.
Angel stared at her blankly and dropped back into his chair.
"Fucked up and in Need of an Ear," Cordelia said.
"Actually, Cordelia, that's what, er, FUAINOAE stands for," Wesley told her. "Perhaps you meant ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge'?"
"That's FUCK, and that's an urban legend," Gunn told him.
"Really?"
"Check Snopes, Renaissance man." Angel was beginning to suspect that Gunn's new nickname for Wesley wasn't precisely a compliment.
Cordelia was glaring at them all. "If we could just get back on track here? Guys?" Hell, now there were teeth in her voice. Angel wondered for a second if this was some kind of demon masquerading as Cordelia, but managed to shake it off.
Gunn and Wesley nodded. Wesley said, "But, er, it's an excellent point all the same. About being fine, and how you aren't."
"Yes," Cordelia said. "And the point is, you need an ear."
"I need an ear?" Angel said, trying to resist the temptation to check on both of his.
"Exactly! You need an ear. So I've got this list of therapists -"
"Cordelia, I can't see a therapist."
"Resistance is natural, Angel. It's your depression fighting your instinct to seek help. But as your friends, it's our job to make sure the depression doesn't win." She was reading from her paper again. Angel knew he could move fast enough to get it away from her and destroy it, but the odds of him surviving that maneuver were slim. And if he did survive it, well, that might be even worse.
He switched to defense. "I can't even go to one. It's not like there's late-night psychiatrists."
"Actually," and she whipped out another print-out, and he was really going to have to do something about her computer. Have it exorcised, maybe. "I have a list of therapists that make appointments in the evening. So you just pick one of them and you're good to go!" She held out the list and smiled brilliantly at him.
He took it and put it on his desk. Give him a few days, he'd lose it. Problem solved. "Okay. I'll make an appointment, um, tomorrow maybe."
"No. You pick one now and I'll make the appointment now." She sounded dangerous.
Angel, feeling cornered, said, "Cordelia, what am I supposed to tell a therapist?"
She smiled at him. "You'll think of something. And it doesn't really matter, anyway. No matter what you say, any decent shrink who gets one look at you is going to write you a prescription for Prozac, which is the goal here."
"Prozac? I'm a vampire. We don't - medicate."
"Well, under normal circumstances we'd just buy a whole bunch of full-spectrum light bulbs, but we're afraid you'll catch fire. And Prozac is, like, so Southern California."
"Exactly my point, Cordelia."
She just looked at him.
And looked at him.
And then she started to look mean.
"Fine! I'll go. I'll go to, um," he glanced at the list, "this one. This Amber person. Amber Alexander."
She went back to the big fake smile. "That's all we ask. Right, guys?"
They agreed with everything she said, but she made them do the group hug anyway.
~
Angel walked into the Hyperion, looked around warily, and then bolted the door.
Cordelia was waiting for him behind the reception desk. "I looked it up," she told him cheerfully. "It's actually Fucked up, Insecure, Needy, and Evasive. No ears."
"What?"
"Fine. It stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Needy, and Evasive."
"That's FUINAE," Wesley said automatically.
"I don't think that's going to help me much," Angel told them both. "Either way."
Cordelia didn't let him re-route the conversation for long. "Didn't you like her? Did you give her a chance? Did you tell her about Buffy and Darla and Pylea and everything?"
"There's only so much I can tell a therapist." Angel checked the coffeepot. "No coffee?"
"Coffee can make depression worse, and is often used to self-medicate. It's important to approach therapy openly, with a clear heart, and with your usual defenses down."
Angel stared at her. She didn't even have the papers anymore, and she was still talking like a self-help robot. Maybe she was the one who needed the exorcism. "My usual defenses down," he repeated. "That seems like a good way to get staked."
"Your mental defenses. So the therapist can get into your mindset."
"Well, not to worry. This one got into my mindset, all right. She got way, way too into it." He shuddered and started looking for wherever they'd hidden their supply of coffee, because no way could Cordelia be this attentive and alert without some.
Cordelia frowned. "Tell me what happened."
"I told her an old girlfriend I still loved had died, and also that my girlfriend from before that had come back to me and we'd restarted a relationship and then she left me for another woman," Angel said.
Catching their looks, he added, "What? I couldn't say she got brought back from the dead but she was human but then she was turned back into vampire by someone I sired." He couldn't find any hidden coffee. He frowned at the coffeepot again, sighed, and put his mug down. "Or I didn't think I should, anyway."
"And? Did you tell her about how Darla made you all evil?"
"Yes. Sort of. Pretty much."
"So?"
"She didn't listen at all. She said, ‘your secretary told me you had to have an appointment at eight because you have a medical condition that keeps you from going out in the daylight.'"
"Well, I had to say something. She asked."
"So I said, well, yeah. And she asked if I had ever tried the church as a solace, and I told her I wasn't big into churches these days. And then she said I looked awfully young for someone with such a wide range of experience. And then she asked me if I had a favorite food, and I said not exactly." Angel didn't want to think about the rest of it. Maybe if he looked depressed enough Cordelia would let him drop it.
She raised her eyebrows at him and made ‘go on, go on' gestures. "Well?"
"Then she ripped off her blouse and said, ‘Oh, Dark Master, take me. Make me one of your Immortal Children.'"
Dead silence.
"What?" Wesley sounded like he was choking on a lemon.
"You heard me."
"Whoa." Gunn was apparently imagining the scene. "Was she hot?"
Cordelia said, "Excuse me?"
"I'm just trying to get all the facts."
"What did you do?" Wesley said, bringing the conversation back on topic. "You didn't tell her, did you?"
"Of course not. I said, ‘What?'" He sighed. "And then she pointed behind me, where there was a mirror. And I wasn't in it."
"Oh." Wesley apparently didn't have anything to say to that.
"And then I ran."
"Leaving therapy early is a sign of unwillingness to explore your issues," Cordelia told him. He gave her a look. "But, okay, never mind. How about one of the others? This J. X. White guy has a lot of credentials and degrees and stuff."
Angel said, "Do I have to?"
"Do you want to try the UV lamps?"
"No."
"Do you want to have another intervention?"
"No."
"Well, then." She picked up the phone. "I'll try to get an appointment for Monday."
~
"Well?" Cordelia looked at him. He looked weirdly unfocused, actually, sort of vague even for him.
"It went really well," Angel told her. She was surprised. She was surprised that he wasn't surprised.
"So you're getting cured? And you're getting Prozac?"
"Well." He drifted around the room, looking dazed. "He said he wants to see me every day for a while. I'm going back at the same time tomorrow. But no Prozac; he says talking it out is the way to go." He wandered into his office.
Cordelia, for want of a better victim, gave Wesley a dirty look. This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
But that was how it did go, all week. On Tuesday, Angel came home, went upstairs, and slept until an hour before his next appointment, and they were all unpleasantly reminded of the beginnings of the Darla thing. On Wednesday, he did the same thing, except it took him an hour longer to get home. On Thursday, Gunn and Wesley went to pick him up. Wesley guided him upstairs - he wanted to fall asleep on the couch - while Gunn and Cordelia exchanged significant looks.
Wesley came back down a few minutes later and said, "We've got to do something. He tried to fall asleep on my shoulder in the elevator. And when I woke him up, he started crying."
"He was crying last night," Gunn said. "I stayed like you asked, and I heard him. And this hotel is creepy enough without a 24-hour crying vampire show."
Wesley nodded. "And he's sleeping all the time. This is ludicrous. He's actually worse than before."
"I didn't even think he could be." Cordelia sounded genuinely surprised.
Gunn said, "So what's the plan?"
They exchanged glances. "Tomorrow," Cordelia said, "we're going to sit down and have a talk about this."
"He won't even be awake."
"He will. Because we'll have the talk when he's supposed to be having his session."
Cordelia prepped by hiding everyone's car keys, all the telephones, and the keys to the locked hotel doors. Then she waited until Angel stumbled downstairs, blinking, and appeared in front of him with hot herbal tea - coffee was still banned - and a warm smile.
If he hadn't been, well, dead, she would have thought he was sick, because he totally fell for it. He took the tea, gave her a grateful look - Angel! Grateful! He was probably dying - and wandered off to sit down on one of the couches.
She followed and sat next to him and tried for sincere and unaffected. "So. How's the tea?" Nice. Open-ended. Gentle. Perfect tone. She was very proud of her therapeutic technique.
"Oh, it's...great," Angel said. Very, very slowly.
"And the therapy?"
"Oh, it's...great," he said in the exact same tone. He was even still looking at his mug when he said it.
"What do you talk about?"
"Everything. Last session it was Buffy."
Cordelia blinked at Wesley, who raised his eyebrows at her. "What did you tell him?"
"Cordy, you were there when it happened." It was the first time he'd said her name in four days, she realized.
"Yeah, but you can't tell him about how you met or why you broke up or what she did or how she died, so what did you talk about for a whole session?"
"Why can't I tell him?"
"Um. Angel. Vampire? Slayer? Died saving the world again?"
"Yeah, but he understands this stuff."
Cordelia looked at Wesley, who was looking at Gunn. Gunn, to complete the circuit, looked back at Cordelia, and his expression said "Holy shit" more clearly than any voice could have.
"Understands?"
"Yeah. He's a demon himself."
Cordelia turned back to Gunn and Wesley for another round of look-exchanging, then rose and said, maybe too brightly, "Well, I'll leave you to enjoy your tea!" The guys followed her into Angel's office - well, not like he was using it - and closed the door.
Gunn bonked his head gently against the closed door. "Demon. Why am I thinking this is a bad thing?"
"Because it is. This has to be related to his behavior in some way," Wesley said.
"You think?"
"Well, Gunn, I'd rather not jump to conclusions, mind you, but, yes, I do think so."
Great. They were going to start a bickering match. "Guys." They looked at her. "The question is, how are we going to kill him before he finishes doing whatever he's doing to Angel?"
Wesley checked his watch. "I suggest that we all accompany Angel to his appointment. If we leave now, he'll hardly even be late."
~
When they walked into the Hyperion two hours later, they were in bad shape. Also filthy. Cordelia and Gunn were covered in slime. Wesley was covered in blood and slime. Angel was clean but bereft-looking.
"I really thought he liked me. We had a therapeutic rapport."
"Angel, man, he did like you. He fed on misery; he must've thought you were the Holy Grail."
"He seemed like such a nice, normal guy," Angel said sadly. "I can't believe he had all those tentacles."
Wesley clapped Angel sympathetically on the shoulder. "Well, problem solved. May I borrow a towel, a shower, and approximately eight meters of gauze?"
"Sure." Angel didn't look up; he was staring at his hands. Cordelia kicked him. "Oh, and Wesley? Uh, thanks. Thanks for, you know, saving my life and keeping my therapist from sucking my brain and so on."
Wesley gave him a jaunty little wave with his good hand and headed for the elevators.
Gunn said, "I can't believe you told a dude with two heads all about Buffy. You won't even tell me about Buffy."
"You aren't missing anything," Cordelia said. "I told you, it's mostly just a lot of crying in the rain. Well, and the vicious killing people thing, but he doesn't go there anymore."
Angel sighed. Then he brightened. "But this means I'm all done with therapy, right?"
"Wrong. There's still lots of shrinks left in L.A."
"But, Cordelia -"
"You're going."
"But -"
"Angel."
"Fine," he muttered, and stomped off to his office and shut the door.
Gunn said, "It's sure nice to see things getting back to normal around here."
Cordelia, looking at her slightly battered list, said, "Joanne Alexievitch Guzman. That sounds like a responsible professional, right?"
"She probably collects vampire lungs."
"I'll make the appointment tomorrow."
~
Wesley flailed one hand out toward the phone. "'Lo?" He checked the clock. Four-thirty. In the morning. Half of him thought it had damn well better be an emergency, and the other half of him was sure it was. He tried to brace for all eventualities without entirely waking up.
It wasn't what he expected, precisely. "Angel didn't come back."
"Wha'? Whzzz?"
"Wesley, are you awake?" Cordelia sounded more worried than irritated. Not a good sign. Real emergency, then.
"Yes." He sat up and groped for his glasses.
"Angel didn't come back."
"From his therapy appointment? You're still there waiting for him?"
"Yes. And I kind of fell asleep, and I just woke up because Fred did that scuttling thing through here, and Angel is not back. You don't think he found another misery demon, do you?"
"I'm really starting to wonder about the psychiatrists in this town who are willing to make appointments after dark." Wesley hauled himself out of bed and started getting dressed. "You know, Cordelia, maybe Angel isn't cut out for therapy."
She made a frustrated noise. "He hasn't tried therapy! One vampire wannabe and one demon emotion-sucker-thing - those aren't therapists. Trust me. With real therapists, it takes years to figure out it isn't working."
Wesley sighed and pulled on yesterday's shirt. "He just seems to have bad luck with these things. Extraordinarily bad luck. One would even suspect -" Cordelia made an impatient noise, and he broke off. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes, all right?"
"Go through a drive-through and get me a grande soy milk no-whip mocha."
"Will do."
When he arrived, Cordelia was pacing in the lobby. "Where is he? He hasn't been back. And I've tried his cell a billion times and he hasn't answered."
"He probably just forgot to charge it. You know how he is with that thing." A lesser woman would've given up making him carry it after the explosions, but Cordelia was a true believer in telecommunications technology.
"Still."
She looked so seriously concerned that Wesley was touched. "You made the appointment, right?"
"It was for eight-thirty. It should've been over by nine-thirty at the latest. He's been gone for almost nine hours, Wesley."
"Let's go check out the office." He began herding her out the door. "And don't worry. Perhaps Angel's simply - exploring his, er, difficulties. If he really started talking to her, they could go this late and still only have got back to 1997."
"The fifty-minute hour is a therapeutic tool; it allows sufficient time to explore a topic deeply and thoroughly without exhausting the patient or the therapist or increasing the chance of developing a dependent relationship," she said automatically. "But, fine, let's check it out."
When they got there, the psychiatrist's entire building was dark. Cordelia whipped out her cell phone. "That's it. I'm calling the shrink," she said.
"It's half-past five. She's probably not even awake yet."
"She's a professional. She can be paged."
And apparently she truly was a professional; she rang back within ten minutes. Cordelia said, "Hi. My name is Cordelia Chase. My husband -" Wesley felt his eyebrows shoot up "- had an appointment with you yesterday evening at eight-thirty, and he hasn't come back. This isn't like him, and I'm -" She broke off, apparently interrupted.
"Yes, I've got his medical power of attorney and everything. It seemed like a good idea, with his, you know, problems and all." Wesley wondered if she actually did have one; Angel might well have given her one. These days he seemed not to know or care what he was signing half the time.
He sighed. In a way, he hoped the therapy helped. Angel just hadn't been himself since - well, actually, he had been himself. Even more himself. That was the problem. Wesley truly wanted to believe eternity could be more fun than that.
"Oh," Cordelia said softly into the phone. "Oh." She sounded exactly like someone worried about a loved one, which was alarming, because her acting wasn't that good. "But - why?" She listened for a long moment, then said, "Where?" She made frantic writing gestures, and Wesley handed her his breast-pocket pen and notepad.
She wrote for a solid minute, then said, "Thank you, Dr. Guzman. I'm - yes. Yes. I will. Thank you." She flipped the phone shut and looked at him, eyes wide.
"Well?"
"He didn't report having any family, so she didn't notify anyone. But she said he was delusional and clearly disoriented, and became combative. She evaluated him as gravely disturbed and a danger to himself and others and had him placed as an inpatient in the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute as -" she looked at the pad " - a 5150, a 72-hour involuntary hold. She said there'd be a hearing tomorrow at which she'd be presenting preliminary evidence in favor of a 14-day confinement."
"Good lord."
"He's going to kill me, isn't he?" she said in a small voice.
Privately, he thought so. But all he said was, "I'm more concerned about what they'll do to him when they discover he doesn't have a pulse. Or, for that matter, if they try to make him go outside in daylight."
She winced. "We have to get him out."
"Well, if you have a medical power of attorney for him, can't we just go ask for him back?"
"Wesley. First, I do not have medical power of attorney. Who gets that for a vampire? He's not exactly going to be facing end-of-life issues. And second, he's been committed involuntarily. For 72 hours, no one gets him out." He raised his eyebrows inquiringly and she rolled her eyes. "Like Sunnydale wasn't full of prescription drug addicts? Like my mother didn't go down that road a bunch of times? Trust me, I know this stuff."
Wesley sighed. "I'll call Gunn."
By seven, they had take-out breakfast (including extra-large coffees for Wesley and Cordelia and an extra-large Coke for Gunn; Angel might be on a no-caffeine diet, but they needed the stimulants) and nothing even approaching a plan.
"I say we go simple. Get a gun, go in there, say we want our boss back."
"Yes. And then Cordelia and I will still have to get Angel out of the hospital, and we'll also have to get you out of prison."
Cordelia said, "They should allow visitors eventually. Maybe we could just go in and see him and then...well, I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to get him out."
"Lovely plan," Wesley told her. "The only thing it lacks is a plan."
"I don't see you doing any better," she said.
"At least I'm not -"
"See, but there's this thing that keeps bothering me," Gunn said, completely ignoring them both.
"Whether or not he really is crazy? That's been bothering me, too."
Gunn stared at her. "We know vampires are real, Cordelia."
"You don't think he could benefit from inpatient treatment?"
"Well, yeah. But who couldn't?" Gunn gestured around the table. "Our lives don't exactly contribute to stability and emotional health."
It was inarguable, really. Distressingly so. Wesley tried to re-focus them. "So what bothers you?"
"Why isn't he here already?"
Ah. "You mean, given his vampiric strength and speed, why hasn't he simply broken himself out of the hospital?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know. I suppose we'll just have to ask him."
Cordelia, with a certain amount of tension in her voice, said, "Which brings us back to the question of how we get in to see him and how we get out afterwards."
Wesley looked around the table, then took a deep breath. "Well, we could get in to see him by claiming he's escaped from..."
~
This time, when they arrived at the Hyperion, no one was slimy. On the other hand, everyone was at least a little bit bloody, so overall they probably weren't exactly coming out ahead. Gunn was leading the "most bloody" sweepstakes by a nose, although he might need to be disqualified, since most of the blood covering the uniform they'd stolen for him wasn't his own. Angel came next, definitely; he was wearing only an ill-fitting pair of blue drawstring pants, currently patterned with extensive bloodstains. Cordelia's jeans and t-shirt - she'd learned not to wear good clothes if Angel, Wesley, or Gunn was going to be in the same county as she was - were only marginally bloody, although she thought she deserved some kind of extra credit for the large patch of - "other fluid" was probably the best way to think of it - staining her top. Wesley, bringing up the rear in the blood collection contest, still had several patches of it, plus the best assembly of other fluids. Still, she deserved the most points for that; his biggest spot was just the remains of a saline drip.
"I still don't see why I had to be the nurse," Gunn said, flopping down exhausted on a couch that was never going to be the same after its close encounter with his clothes. He gave said clothing a vague, disgruntled look. "Especially a pediatrics nurse. I mean, are these ducks?" He plucked at his shirt.
"Dinosaurs," Angel said in a far-off, sing-song voice. "I think maybe dinosaurs is what they are, because they look like dinosaurs. To me they do. Dinosaurs."
"I'm just saying, ducklike dinosaurs are not a good look for me. Why did I have to wear them?"
"You were the only one who fit into the nurse's clothes," Cordelia reminded him.
"And you're saying that if you'd put them on, someone at that hospital would have noticed your uniform didn't fit? Come on. This is the place that hired a vampire as the assistant head of emergency medicine."
"I like the uniform, Gunn. It looks nice on you, and also, dinosaurs," Angel said earnestly.
Gunn gave him a long, worried look. "Dude. What did they give him?"
"I'm not entirely certain," Wesley said, removing his stolen and once-white lab coat, balling it up, and throwing it at the garbage can, "as I only had about two seconds with his chart before Nurse Ducky Dinosaur threw up."
"Look. Vampires I can handle. Demons I can handle. Emergency rooms? Burn victims? People puking? No. Just, no. But if you hadn't told Mr. ‘No Pulse Please, I'm a Dead Guy' to play dead, maybe we could've gone from the loony ward straight out the door, and then I wouldn't have had to throw up."
"I thought, given the way he was acting, that playing dead might be the only thing within the range of his abilities, and that once they discovered he didn't have a pulse they'd unlock those doors in a hurry. And furthermore, I was right," Wesley told him. "I don't see how I could have been expected to know that the UCLA ER is a haunt of evil undead physicians; no one would have suspected that."
"Yeah, no one, except for, oh, anyone who has ever been in an emergency room," Gunn said.
"I hate those places," Cordelia said. "The smell, and the crying. And no one looks good in emergency room lighting. No one." When she got the energy together, she was going to go up and shower until her entire body was pruned. Most of her worst memories had happened in hospitals.
"The psych ward was worse, though," Gunn said thoughtfully.
"True," Wesley said. "Several of those people were so clearly overmedicated that I briefly thought they were also undead. Lesser undead. Zombies, for example."
"The laughing one was worse than that," Gunn said. "She had the bad crazy." He sounded honestly horrified by the memory, but Cordelia thought they were both forgetting the worst of it.
"Please. The worst one was that woman with the hair and the voice and the pink shirt and those awful, awful fingernails." Cordelia shuddered.
"Are you referring to the ward nurse?"
"Actually, she's right. That woman was pure evil. Good thing we got him out of there," Gunn said, looking over at Angel. "Place was seriously fucked up."
"They were nice to me," Angel told them. "They didn't let me keep my shoes, though, or my shirt, or my knives, or my shoes, or my sunglasses, or my shoes. I miss my shoes. They were nice shoes. I liked them. Didn't you like them?" he asked Cordelia plaintively, then paused, looking distressed. "Wait, I don't remember what they looked like. My shoes, I forgot them, and now I -"
Cordelia interrupted, though it didn't stop Angel from talking. "Wesley. Can you figure out how long that -" she made a gesture at Angel, who was now sadly poking at his own toes "- is going to be going on? Because I am this close to taking him back to the hospital myself. Or staking him." She watched him for a minute; he was naming his toes now, and had gotten as far as calling his second left toe ‘Mr. Winkles.' "He'd probably want me to, actually."
Wesley heaved himself out of the chair and went to his desk, presumably to look for references on psychoactive medications in vampires.
She had to distract Angel from his toes, because remembering this wasn't going to make it any easier to take his broodier moments seriously. It took her a while to think of a conversation she was willing to have with him in this state, but she finally settled on, "Why didn't you run when I said run?"
"I was going to run," he said with dignity. "I was ready to run, I was going to run, but then I remembered that Jerry said not to run, so I was going to ask you if I should run, but then you weren't there anymore, and so I didn't run."
"Well, I'm sorry I wasn't paying perfect attention to you, but I was being attacked by a vampire with a medical degree," Cordelia reminded him. "It was distracting. I'm not used to fangs and syringes on the same person."
"There's no such thing as vampires," Angel told her.
There was a lengthy pause. Gunn finally said, "What?"
"There's no such thing as vampires," he repeated happily. "I learned that today."
Cordelia and Gunn exchanged long, significant looks. "Angel, man, you are a vampire."
"Nope. I thought so, but nope, turns out I'm not. Which is good, because I don't think I liked being a vampire back when I was a vampire, only I wasn't, but I thought I was. Jerry told me about there not being vampires. Could I have some clothes? Some other clothes? Some cleaner ones? Maybe like his, with dinosaurs?"
Cordelia said, "Angel. You. Are. A. Vampire."
"Nu-uh," he said, smiling happily. "I'm a real live boy, a dirty, dirty boy. Need a shower and a bath and a shower." He got up and wandered over to the elevators, singing about rubber duckies.
"You'd better go with him," Cordelia said to Gunn, watching Angel rebound off the furniture.
"What, like in case he slips in the shower and hits his head? He's a vampire. He's not going to drown. I'm taking my own damn shower, thanks." Gunn headed off in the same direction. "I don't shower with dead people!" he yelled back to her, steering Angel away from walls he seemed determined to walk into.
"I'm not dead, so we could shower if we wanted," Angel told him. "Together. Did you want to shower together? Because I'm not dead." Gunn caught Cordelia's eye and made significant gestures and facial expressions, clearly indicating that he didn't want to be alone with Angel. She had no pity, though, and nodded firmly at him. His gestures became more significant and slightly desperate. Angel hugged him, clumsily, like a bear embracing a tree. Gunn's face took on a distinctly panicked cast. She tried not to laugh, but, yeah, like that was ever going to be worth the effort.
The elevator arrived and Angel towed Gunn into it. "Well, have a good shower!" Cordelia told him heartlessly.
"I will get you for this if I have to sell my soul to do it," Gunn told her in a flat, level voice.
The last thing she heard before the doors closed was Angel's voice. "We're going to get her a present? Let's get her a dinosaur. Like on your shirt, because dinosaurs are nice. I like..." He faded out.
It was turning out to be a pretty good day after all. She was still smiling when Wesley came in a few minutes later. "Well?" she asked.
"Actually not that bad," he told her, sounding almost pleased. "The problem is that vampires have typical absorption but lack biological filtration systems, so whatever drugs they take continue to circulate until they feed again; medications don't have a half-life in vampires. On the other hand, they aren't as susceptible to drugs as a whole, which is why we're not seeing the more serious consequences of an overdose in Angel, just the atypical reactions that are apparently fairly common for vampires."
Cordelia nodded, feeling her eyes glazing over; she couldn't handle Wesley at his most Watcher-y on top of a hospital breakout and a night spent at her desk. She brought it back to specifics. "So we need to?"
"Get him to eat. Six pints or so and he'll be fine. I'll just heat up a blood pack, shall I?" He turned toward the kitchen, humming to himself.
"Wesley? Tiny problem." He turned back to her, eyebrows raised. "I don't think he's going to want to drink blood." She took a deep breath. "He, um, doesn't believe he's a vampire."
Wesley groaned.
~
Four days after the hospital breakout, Gunn walked in late and smacked a bottle down on Cordelia's desk. "Don't say I never did anything for you. And don't think you're forgiven for the shower thing, ‘cause this is just self-defense."
She ignored the last part - he'd get over it, eventually - and picked up the bottle. "Prozac!" she said. "For Angel - wait, Angel Gutierrez? That's not his last name."
"Do you even know what his is?" She shook her head. "Well, then. Plus, look. No one's going to ask questions about an Angel Gutierrez. Everyone's going to ask questions about an Angel Smith or whatever, because white men aren't named Angel, and I had to put that he was a guy on the form."
"I'm male, and I'm named Angel," Angel said, sounding insulted. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by eleven of the stuffed dinosaurs they'd given him at various points in the week; he'd concealed somewhere the blow-up dinosaur, the poster, and the Barney boxer shorts. Gunn had to give him credit; he was taking it really well, all things considered. Better than Gunn himself was taking Cordelia's annoyingly persistent shower jokes.
"Yeah, but you're pretty much alone on that one, Angel. Well, you and a thousand transvestite showgirls in Las Vegas." Gunn wasn't in a hurry to forgive Angel for the whole situation, either; he never wanted to spoon-feed blood to anyone ever again.
Cordelia was fondling the bottle happily. Almost obscenely, in fact. "But where did you get it?"
"I just figured, bag this shit. His shrinks are either psychotic or they think he is. And I'm not breaking him out of UCLA again. That was fucking depressing, and then - No." He shook off the memory. "So. You wanted Prozac for him? Well, girl, here's your Prozac."
"How?"
"Internet pharmacy. I said my name was Angel Gutierrez, I was a thirty-year-old male, I cried all the time and had no energy and thought about death a lot. And I gave them my credit card and asked for overnight shipping. Thirty seconds later they e-mailed me a shipping notice and a special offer for Viagra and that was that." He turned to Angel. "I'm putting it on my expenses, though, because that shit is expensive. And I didn't go for the Viagra, but I printed out the coupon, just in case."
"You said I cried all the time?" Angel seemed to have missed most of what Gunn had said.
"Does it matter?" Cordelia bounced up and handed him the bottle. "You have Prozac! You're going to be happy and full of life - energy, anyway - and medicated, just like everyone else in this town!"
Angel brooded at the bottle. "I don't cry," he said to it, but he seemed to be talking to Gunn.
"Angel, man, you've got to describe the right symptoms to get the right drugs. It isn't personal or anything. It's just how you get prescriptions over the internet."
"I'm somewhat disturbed that you know this," Wesley told him.
"Everyone knows this," Gunn told him, then made a big show of looking him over. "Everyone living in this century, anyway."
Cordelia was standing in front of Angel, the irresistible force meeting the moody object. "So, are you going to take the medicine?"
The broody look intensified. "Do I have a choice?"
"We can always try another therapist," she told him.
He sighed. "Does this mean I get coffee again?"
Obviously, she knew when to compromise. "Yes."
He reached for the bottle. "Fine. I'll take them. With coffee." He moved his gaze over to Gunn. "But I don't cry."
~
Angel swallowed the first pill with the first coffee he'd had in almost a month, and he was surprised at how good it tasted; maybe it was his expression of ecstasy that caused Cordelia to draw the wrong conclusions. "Helping?" she asked, five minutes later, and the sad part was that he could tell she waited as long as she could.
"I don't think it works on vampires," he told her.
"It takes a while. Two weeks before you feel the full effect," Gunn said. Catching Wesley's look, he added, "What? Everyone takes Prozac sooner or later."
That didn't stop her from asking the next day.
"Seriously, Cordy. Vampires and Prozac don't mix. We're supposed to be like this."
"Angel, no one is supposed to be that depressed. The Powers That Be wouldn't put us through that." Given what the Powers were willing to put them through, Angel had to wonder exactly how bad he seemed to his team.
And she kept right on asking.
"I don't think it's going to work. Why don't we try absinthe? As I recall, that seemed to help."
"It did?" Cordelia sounded interested.
It sort of had. "Well, it made Baudelaire a lot more tormented and depressed, and it gave him all these hallucinations about hell and the sun and evil and blood. It was hysterical. Completely brought back my interest in un-life." He caught the expression on her face. "Look, I was Angelus then."
She frowned at him. "Do you ever remember being not-depressed after the soul?" Angel, considering, didn't answer.
Fourteen days and fourteen questions later: "Well?"
"I don't think it's helping, Cordelia. Seriously. I'm not even sure I have - what was it called?"
"Serotonin," Wesley told him.
"Right. That. Anymore."
"Not helping at all?" She studied him closely.
"No, honestly. I mean, I appreciate the effort, I do, but it's just not - it's really not - I mean, I don't think I am depressed, but if I am, well, I don't feel any different since the Prozac."
Cordelia sighed. "Okay," she said, and turned to her computer. She clicked, and pointed, and clicked again, and when she turned back to him, she was perky again. "So we move on to Plan B. Religion."