The clinking ended when Angel placed the last of the dishes into the sink and went to sit down in the living room, where he perched on the floor like a gargoyle. Wesley could see the dark man staring ahead at nothing in particular, the stone skull surrounding living eyes.
A lot had happened, he knew.
Before this, he'd had trouble imagining them together, sitting across the table from one another, finding things to say. But they'd had someone in between them, hadn't they? A buffer of sorts, understanding his age, and her youth.
Now the only thing between them was the pain of his absence. It filled the silence and allowed them to become bodies that picked forks up from dishes, put them in the sink and scrubbed at them like Cordelia was doing now, staring at the wall as she worked.
Her hand came up from the sink and passed the plate to Angel's hand. Again, Wesley watched as the towel went back and forth over the porcelain and the big hand that had shot out in violence for hundreds of years set the plate down gently with the others in the cabinet over the sink.
He couldn't remember accepting the tea particularly as he held the steaming cup to his lips. The liquid filled his insides and for a moment, he thought he felt the emptiness go away. "The rooves of mouths..."
He could not keep drinking tea forever.
There'd been plenty of tea back at home, and he remembered the same feeling from a few weeks ago when he'd visited his real home in the rain. He remembered her face beneath the glass, worn like some kind of weathered fabric, her subtle smile still sewn in lovingly.
It was such a simple thing, he thought abstractedly; the death of cells in the brain, the ceasing of life to function. Something that was more natural and more expected than birth. But he hadn't expected it.
It had never occurred to him that while he was off clowning around a million miles away, that life would go on without him. And so would death.
He'd wished he'd done more for her, naturally. Not dismissed her so often, or stand so rigidly when they spoke. He'd wished he hadn't wasted his life the way he had.
But what else was there to do with life but waste it, some way or the other?
Angel didn't know this. He would live on. Cordelia didn't know this, because she was still unaware of life's natural conclusion. She still believed Doyle's death unnatural.
We were made to die, Cordelia. Didn't you know?
And Wesley could now see himself on the other side of the glass, his wire frame glasses magnifying eyes that no longer needed to see. A pressed suit holding a dead bundle of cells. This was life too.
He wondered what would happen at the end of it all, when all that remained was dust, and Angel stood above it like a statue. All our dust, all our grief would fill his lungs and there wouldn't be enough air to breathe, but he wouldn't need to. He would eat the grief till there was no more pain, and then let the sun dissolve it.
And none of this emptiness would matter.