Author: RavenWolf
Pairing: Cordelia/Doyle
Rating: PG
Summary: Cordelia includes something odd in her daily health regimen.
Life's too short. Cordelia's life is going to be even shorter than most people's. She doesn't want to estimate how much of her time is spent viewing brutal slayings while rolling around on some floor or another. Way too much of it, probably.
Add to that the fact that, except for a suicide bomber, she probably has the most dangerous occupation that there is, and she doesn't expect to live much longer than a year or two, if that.
But she tries not to be pessimistic. Miracles and magic do happen, and she's been taking a daily multi-vitamin, just in case. She exercises regularly and keeps up with her yoga. She drinks eight glasses of water a day, and she eats healthy. And somewhere in between the killing and the healthy regimen, she finds time to think of him.
She read in a book somewhere that health of the mind is just as important as health of the body, if you want to live a long, healthy life. It was a long time ago, because she's been thinking of him every day since he died, which was at least two years ago. Sometimes she thinks that without that little tiny thing, she'd go insane. Humans weren't meant to bear the things that she sees on a daily basis. She's not a slayer. She's not a vampire. She was Sunnydale's almost-homecoming queen. She was the head cheerleader. When she was little she played with Barbies, and when she was older, she played with daddy's credit card.
This means that she was totally unprepared for what lay ahead of her. Some days she wakes up and wants to scream because how can it not be a nightmare? How can she still be awake and walking around when demons are being raised in ways she doesn't understand to do things she can't fathom? She wasn't meant for this. Of the entire Angel Investigations team, she is the least likely. Least likely to survive very long, as well.
So she thinks back, every day, to when things were new and bright and she thought she could make a difference. When it was exciting to go out on a mission, and she didn't come back worrying about the next one. When her medicine cabinet also had beauty supplies in it, not just various types of high potency pain-killers. She thinks about Doyle, the man who gave his life for hers.
Some life it's turned out to be. She can't quite resent him, though. How do you resent someone for something like that? She misses him, sure, and she admits that that's partially why she thinks about him so often. She was never very good at mourning, or knowing genuine emotions, and so she did it with difficulty when he died. She's still doing it.
He made her feel special. He made her feel like, for once, something had gone right in the world. That there was rhyme or reason to what they did. She lost that feeling long ago, but, like Doyle, when she remembers him, a ghost of innocence comes up from the depths to touch her, as well.
Things are getting complicated now. She's been possessed by so many entities she hardly remembers who she is anymore. Perhaps the scared little girl, screaming inside her head, maybe that's her.
So, on a good day, after a mission that went in the win column, she goes to visit his grave.
Memorial is more like it; his body was so charred and burned that they could only collect his ashes to bury. It's a small little affair, in one of the cemeteries at the edge of town. It's not a very pretty graveyard, but still, she feels a weight lift when she enters. No one talks among the dead.
It's quiet, so quiet that her mental voice dares to emerge, inquisitively testing the waters, and waiting fearfully for another vision to come roaring in and drive it away.
But it's still quiet, and she leaves a bouquet of daylilies on the soft carpet of grass.
"Hi, Doyle," she says, noting the dead flowers lining the stone from visits past. "Long time no see." For a moment, she imagines separating from her body, becoming clean and new in a waterless baptism on a grave.
She kneels, not caring about her skirt. She can buy a new one if it stains; she can afford these things now. She strokes the grass and finds it strange that he offers her more peace now than he ever did when he was alive.
She looks up and wonders if he thinks of her as often as she thinks of him.
She stands. Probably not, she thinks.
After all, he already found his peace.