Just a little season one Christmas fic set after Hero... I'm very proud of this one, however short it might be.I'm supposed to be working on a request, and I promise that I am working on it, but I was inspired to write this today. To any interested: coming soon, how Lorne arrived and decided to start Caritas.
Angel stared at his office in disbelief. Cordelia could tell that he was horrified in that quiet way of his, but she smiled anyways, trying to win a war that was already lost. "What, you don't like it?"
"It's very-" He seemed lost for an adjective. "Um, Cordelia, we're a detective agency, and our clients expect us to be..."
"Festive? Exactly what I thought," she agreed, breezily ignoring him. "Wesley helped me with this all."
Angel glanced around the dark room at the tinsel draped everywhere, at the stick of a tree decorated with cheap-looking ornaments, at the mistletoe hung over the doorway he was nearly standing under. He took a step back before finishing his thought. "I was going to say professional."
Cordelia frowned at him in false confusion from behind the paper snowflake she was trying to hang by standing on her desk. He was too easy to play with like this. "You don't think tinsel is professional? Tinsel screams professional! We're so professional, we can afford to put tinsel everywhere, that's what this says. Hello, we live in tinseltown. This is the most appropriate decoration ever, which you'd know if you weren't hiding in that office all the time."
"You don't think it's a little... gaudy, maybe?"
He looked awkward, and slightly scared. Oh, she had trained him well. She gave him her classic you idiot look. "I know gaudy, okay? One string more would be gaudy. One string less would be sad. This is perfect."
Angel decided not to press it, but his eyes still wandered around his now-sparkly office in an overwhelmed kind of way. "Right. Um, you're right. I apologise. The tinsel is, uh, perfect."
"And you'd better believe it," she replied, gazing proudly at the paper snowflake she had just finished hanging. She jumped back onto the floor. "Don't let my Christmas spirit interrupt your brooding."
He hesitated. "Cordelia, don't you have, um, somewhere to be? Some Christmas dinner or something?"
"Wesley's coming over to my place and Dennis is cooking us dinner as I speak. You should come, it's going to be pretty quiet anyways," Cordelia offered, sitting in her chair again.
"Why aren't you with your family or other friends?" Angel had been a detective too long. He was treating this as an interrogation and not a conversation between friends.
Cordelia almost lied, but the odd concern in his tone made her tell the truth. "I would, if my mom were in the country and if my dad wasn't in jail and if I actually had any friends except you and Wesley. There's nothing that could make me go back to Sunnydale, and the person I meant to spend Christmas with is dead. Do you know how hard it is to go back to my apartment tonight and talk to my ghost when all I can think about is how different it could have been this year?"
He looked straight in her eyes, which made her glance away. "Cordelia-"
"Anyways," she continued in an overly bright voice, shocked at how open that had been. Apparently, so was Angel. "This office is going to be damn festive this year, and there's nothing you can say that will make me take these down."
There was a small silence in which the tinsel blurred into fuzzy, sparkly lines until she blinked a few times. "I don't mind the tinsel," Angel said quietly. "I'm just not used to it, that's all."
"Liar," she accused, trying to pretend that there weren't tears in her eyes, because honestly, how pathetic would that be? She smiled a sincere smile at him, and he actually returned it before he retreated back into his dark office.