So. It hurts. It hurts in her stomach every time she sees Xander, or someone who knows both of them, or just one of them, or if she sees just a random person on the street or sometimes even just a particular street, house, tree, with the scalding humiliation that someone like him could do something like this to her. (Not someone like her. There is no-one like Cordelia Chase.) It hurts a little deeper when she realises that, really, the humiliation is the least of her worries.

She spends a week in Sunnydale Memorial Hospital. He doesn't appear after that first time – at least he's still obedient, just not when it counted and god, there's that pain again – but she already knows that the hospital will be one more place that reminds her of him. It's not just her room, where she lay for a week while her stitches healed, with slowly increasing awareness of all the pain that remained elsewhere. There's an office somewhere in this hospital where Cordelia flirted with a security guard while Xander got jealous. Okay, maybe she played it up a little just for that, but his face afterwards and the way he acted, then, the feeling of him staking his claim-

Was that all it ever was for him? Just a pretty girl to make out with in a car in the woods, a girl on his arm at the pier, on the beach, at the fair, what feels like every square metre of the school…

What she ends up wondering most of all is where she can go to no longer think about him. Even some burnt-out cabin in the woods is filled with him, that tearfully honest confession (To Buffy, of all people). Everywhere she'd campaigned for Homecoming Queen against opponents who were clearly evil, cheating forces of evil who cheated, evilly – Xander did those fliers, she went shopping for that dress with Xander to pick up his tux, that was only a couple of weeks before he had- had he already been-? And god, even going out at night, choosing the right cross to accessorize with, careful packing of precautions against creatures of the night – Xander's probably out patrolling, right now.

Next year will be better. She keeps telling herself that. A new life, with none of the old associations, or associates. She can forget Harmony, Aura, Buffy and her freaks. She wouldn't have minded staying in touch with Anya, but after just a couple of conversations where Cordelia had really thought they'd clicked, Anya seemed to just vanish off the radar. Still. Maybe away from Sunnydale, she'll even be free of the undead-reminders. Demonic activity is centred on the Hellmouth, right? She'll leave it behind, go someplace where she can walk home late without having to worry about having wood to hand or how to make a vial of holy water look like a convenient perfume-spritzer, and actually use her other necklaces. Like crosses have ever been a hot look.

Next year, with her father's money and her mother's support and her own hard-earned test scores – no surprise to her, just because she doesn't act like a nerd the whole time like some people who shall remain Willowless – next year, she'll find a new place. A college far, far away in a new city waiting for her to be its queen. NYU, Arizona, UCLA perhaps…

And so as Cordelia parks her car in front of the school for another day – one day less to go – this is what she focuses on instead of the hurting: a new place, begging for her to rule it. A new life. A better life, somewhere else.