A Compendium of Lost Moments
By: dharmamonkey & Lesera128
Rated: T
Disclaimer: We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own.
A/N: We've given you a peek at Angel & Brennan during the 1920's. And we showed you a glimpse of what Angel was up to in the early 1950's. We've dialed the clock back a little, to the mid-1940's because—well, because the 40's are a really great time period to write about, and because it's a chance to delve into some more of Angel's background. This one is a bit longer than the other two "Compendium" pieces, but we think it's still worth your time. Because tall, dark, brooding vampires are always worth it, right? We certainly think so.
Chapter 3: "Eventually"
The Bowery, New York City ~ July 23rd, 1946
Angel picked up his partially crumpled and half-empty pack of cigarettes, plucking one out and rolling it between his fingers before he stuffed it between his lips. Reaching into the right pocket of his dark blue jeans, he pulled out his Zippo lighter and flipped it open, lit the cigarette he held between his teeth, puffing a couple of times before pulling the tip from the flame and snapping his lighter closed.
He set the pack and his lighter back on the bar and reached for the generously-poured double Bushmills the bartender had just slid over to him. Setting his cigarette down on the brim of a nearby crystal glass ashtray, he reached for the glass and raised it to his lips, deliberately hesitating for a moment as he inhaled a whiff of the whiskey's strong, spicy vapors before taking a much-needed sip. He held the liquor in his mouth for a moment, enjoying the burn before swallowing it. Setting his glass down, he reached again for his cigarette and held it between his lips as he opened the copy of the New York Post he'd picked up on the way into the bar.
The bar was one that Angel found himself in at least two or three nights a week. He'd found the place by accident a couple of years earlier during the small hours before morning twilight while prowling around the neighborhood—which ran along Third Avenue on the southern part of Manhattan—trying to find some amusement before he would have to wind his way back to the Delancey Street boarding house that he'd been living in after being evicted from his apartment a few weeks before.
At first, he thought it was one of the innumerable dingy bars that lined that part of Third Avenue in the seedy, run-down neighborhood that took its name from bouwerij, the Dutch word for 'farm.' The term made Angel laugh when he first heard it because the closest thing to a legitimate farm he knew of was on the other side of Long Island Sound up on the Island itself, or north of the city in Connecticut. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually seen anything green and alive (other than bread mold) growing in Manhattan outside of one of the borough's numerous public parks, the nearest of which was Castle Garden at Battery Park, home of the New York Aquarium.
Angel remembered how he was about to round the corner and head home when he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end in a way he'd only felt in two other specific circumstances: in the presence of other vampires, and when in the company of witches and warlocks, a couple of whom he'd met over the years of his long-term association with Temperance Brennan. He stopped walking and turned around, and, looking past a restaurant that had its menu painted in the window ("pig's feet with boiled cabbage" for ten cents,"oxtail stew" for fifteen cents, "three large pork chops" for thirty cents, all served with coffee, tea or buttermilk), saw a set of stairs leading down to a basement establishment with a hand-carved sign with fading yellow painted letters that read "The Devil's Own."
The sound of breaking glass and snarling behind him shook Angel from his memory as he turned around to see two gray-skinned, yellow-eyed demons grappling and exchanging punches in the corner. The bartender grunted in annoyance and gestured to the bar's security guard—a redhead from Belfast named Maguire, a six-foot tall pillar of solid muscle whose luminescent orange eyes were the only sign that he was anything out of the ordinary—who simply walked over and gruffly picked the two brawlers up by their shirts and hauled them with what looked like almost no effort exerted on his part as he tossed them out the front door.
Glancing back at the folded paper, Angel saw the daily headline in large-block type printed in bold, black letters across the front page of the tabloid-style paper: "Bomb Blows Up British HQ in Palestine" and below it was a photograph of Jerusalem's large, stately-looking King David Hotel, the right half of which had crumpled, surrounded by a swarm of British soldiers standing on the street staring impotently at the wreckage. The smaller headline below said, "91 killed, scores injured in attack by Jewish group."
"Terrible thing, that is," a woman's voice said to him casually, interrupting his much desired and much enjoyed solitude. "You know," the voice continued matter-of-factly, "after the war and all, I'd really hoped we'd seen the last of that sort of thing for a while. There's been far too much dying these last seven or eight years."
With a frown, Angel looked up from his paper and turned to see a blonde, green-eyed woman in her forties sitting on the barstool next to him. Her hair was a very light blonde, quite literally the color of flax, which reminded him of the Claude Debussy piano composition, "La fille aux cheveux de lin" ("the girl with the flaxen hair") that he'd heard performed at a recital in London in 1898, a few months before he left for that fateful trip to Romania that had changed his existence in so many ways, both expected and unexpected. The woman's eyes glittered back at him with a brightness and an intelligence that reminded him of one other pair of eyes he knew even better than his own: Brennan's. It wasn't the color—Brennan's eyes were paler and a bit bluer—but there was something else, something about the way they flickered with a penetrating energy behind their dark-rimmed surface that, after a moment, made him feel simultaneously uneasy and yet intensely curious about this woman.
"Temperance told me you were in town," she said to him, her words falling in loping rhythm from her lips almost as if she'd heard his thoughts. She had an odd accent, not quite English but yet most definitely not American—almost a mix of the two. "Since I had a spare bit of time, I thought I might take the time to finally come and see you."
"Huh?" he blurted out in surprise. For a second, he felt his chest tighten in the same fight-or-flight way it had the night that the government agents had barged into his apartment a couple of years earlier, in 1943, the night he was told he was being pressed into service for the benefit of the war effort. After a moment, the tension melted away a bit but he was left flummoxed by the sudden appearance of this woman who apparently knew quite well the one person who really knew him.
"What?" he asked the woman with a slightly suspicious look on his face. "I don't understand. Who are you, and what do you want with me?"
Even some twenty-odd years after returning to New York (where he'd originally entered the country via Ellis Island around the turn of the century), Angel had kept largely to himself, and even the people who knew him didn't know about his decades-long, long-distance affair with a four-hundred-year-old-plus-witch-turned-anthropolo gist who lived in Chicago when she wasn't traveling the world digging up skeletons or visiting him as she did a few odd times a year. At the current moment, Angel knew, Brennan was enjoying herself in the field again, this time at Tel abu Shahrain near Basra in southern Iraq, excavating the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu where the ruins dated back to 5,400 B.C.
The woman looked at him sitting next to her and couldn't help but stare for a moment at the young man. Though he was dressed very casually, in dark jeans and a somewhat rumpled cornflower-blue button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled up, his shoes—Weejun loafers—were shined and well-made, and he wore a Swiss-made Roamer watch on his left wrist. His hair was neatly trimmed to a fine buzz on the back, along the sides and over his ears, but was longer on top, combed and slicked back with a shiny pomade as was the fashion.
"You don't know who I am," the mysterious blonde said with a soft smile. "But I know who you are...Angel."
Clearing his throat, Angel took a long drag on his cigarette and stared at the woman, saying nothing as he reached once more for his whiskey. After a minute, he inclined his head and then opened his mouth to speak. "Yeah," he said simply as he took a sip of the Bushmills sixteen-year single malt, letting the spicy liquor pool on his tongue for a moment as he tried to read the puzzling expression in the woman's twinkling green eyes. "I kinda got that."
She laughed quietly at his gruff, almost monosyllabic responses, remembering a letter she'd received eight years earlier from her friend's daughter, postmarked in Lhasa, in which Brennan had wrote of her erstwhile companion and how much she'd missed his company. Brennan had told her how the ensouled vampire was prone to falling into extended spells of dark brooding. As she sat next to him at the bar, she could feel his depressed mood hanging in the air around him like a pall, and knew that once again, Brennan had been quite right.
He was, no doubt, an attractive and intriguing figure, she instantly knew, despite his glum mood. She smiled as she recalled how Brennan had described him to her with a crooked smile on her lips and a fondness in her husky voice as she spoke of him. As she looked at him, with his high cheekbones, olive skin, slender lips, strong, pockmarked jaw, and thick, muscular neck and shoulders, she could see the source of the attraction. Above all, she found her attention drawn to the smoldering expression in his dark brown eyes, which she remembered Brennan describing once as deep, watery wells that reflected back the full gamut of the man's feelings. A sadness dwelled in those brown eyes, presumably a touch glassier and more dull from the whiskey he'd been drinking, but something else welled in those eyes—a hope that persisted despite the heavy cloak of brooding that clung to him as he sat there, smoking and drinking in a bar full of demons, vampires and supernatural humans such as herself.
"My name's Stephanie," she said to him, touching his forearm with her hand. His skin was cool to the touch, and she felt the sinews shift slightly under his skin as he reacted to the contact but didn't move his arm away.
"Yeah," he grunted. He held his cigarette firmly between his forefingers as he felt a sudden swirling sensation in his gut that warned him he was not as in control of the situation that was unfolding before him. He looked up as leveled a hard glare at the disconcertingly forward woman next to him. "And who are you again, exactly?" he questioned her sharply. His brow then furrowed in annoyance as another thought occurred to him and ruffled his feathers. "Don't tell me—she sent you here to check on me or something? Make sure I'm being a good boy and not staying out past my curfew or whatever?"
Slowly shaking her head, the woman tried to mollify him. "No," she answered his question. "Not at all."
"Then what?" Angel pressed, trying to understand the woman and becoming increasingly frustrated the longer he was unable to do so. "Why would she even tell you about me? It's not like Bren has ever been much for being the bestest buddies type. Who are you anyway?"
Tilting her head, she answered, "Let's just say that Temperance and I go...way back." Seeing the skeptical narrowing of the vampire's eyes, she added, "I've known her since the day was born." After a second or two, she moved her hand and sat back on her bar stool, reaching into her pocketbook and pulling out a green lacquer cigarette case. Flipping it open, she pulled out one of them and placed it between her lips, then looked over to Angel with a smile.
He blinked a couple of times and imagined this woman standing in front of a cooking fire next to a pale-eyed, auburn-haired toddler in a woolen dress. A part of him always regretted that Brennan had been born before the advent of photography, because he'd always wanted to see how beautiful and adorable she'd looked as a little girl. The thought that this woman Stephanie knew her then, before she knew the pain that hardened her after her mother's passing, somehow thawed his reticence.
Sensing an opening, she turned to him and asked, "Could I trouble you for a light? Especially since. somewhat coincidentally if I believed in that sort of thing, we smoke the same brand and all."
Angel sighed, then grabbed his lighter from on top of his own pack of cigarettes. Flipping it open, he smiled faintly as Stephanie leaned forward and caught the tip of her cigarette in the flame, sucked a few quick puffs and sat back in her seat as he closed the Zippo with a sharp snap. He cocked his head to the side and watched her, his chocolate brown eyes a bit brighter after Stephanie's mention of his longtime lover, but he still didn't say anything.
"Did you start smoking these in the war?" she asked him, gesturing with her chin towards the crumpled red and white Lucky Strike packaging sitting next to his whiskey glass on the bar.
"No," he replied. He took a long drag of his own, sighed and said, "I mean, not this war."
"I didn't think the Tommies had Lucky Strikes in the trenches," she said with a knowing grin.
"Not usually," Angel answered, pursing his lips as he realized that, indeed, this interesting woman knew far more about him than he had ever told anyone—anyone, that is, other than Brennan herself.
"Not as standard-issue, that is," he explained with a grin. "We usually rolled our own. But there was a guy in my unit, the 252nd Tunneling Company, who did a bit of trading with another one of the tunneling companies a bit farther down the line, a Canadian unit, and he got American cigarettes from them in exchange for..." His eyes swiveled up to the ceiling for a moment before he blinked away the memory. "Anyway, I first smoked 'em then. But I didn't really start until..." His voice trailed off as he remembered the young ensign, Lawson, who he'd turned in the engine room of the captured German sub three years earlier. He shook his head as if he could shake away the memory, frowned and said simply, "It wasn't 'til a couple of years back I started...you know..." After a moment, he added, "Bren really hates it, though."
Stephanie smiled at hearing him call Brennan by her nickname—the one only he had ever used for her—then leaned forward in her seat, closing the distance between them as she asked quietly, "Do you miss her?"
Angel took one last drag on his cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray. He reached for his whiskey but didn't pick up the glass, but instead just rotated it back and forth on the bar in a lazy arc. "Every day," he said. "Every single damn day."
"She misses you more than you possibly know," she said as she acknowledged the bartender with a quick nod and pointed towards Angel's whiskey with a two-fingered gesture. "Probably more than she'd ever say, or ever admit to you directly. But, she tells me things she wouldn't necessarily tell other people. She says so in her letters. She's very much like her father in that way—"
Angel winced at the mention of Brennan's father. "Max doesn't like me much," he grumbled, glaring into his whiskey as he remembered the first time he encountered the old warlock in the lobby of a London hotel and how he was met with the same withering look when he ran into him again coming in one night from the movies while he was living with Brennan in Chicago. "Never has, really."
A smile tugging at the edge of her lips, Stephanie asked, "Oh?"
Nodding, Angel said, "Yeah."
Stephanie was quiet for a moment and then asked, "And, why do you think that?"
Angel chewed the bottom of his lip for a minute before he answered vaguely. "Let's just say I always got a little nervous watching him add logs to the fireplace," he said. "'Cause I always figured he was always on the lookout for a splinter big enough to do me in with."
Laughing, lightly at that, Stephanie chuckled. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about him too much if I was you," she said with a knowing smile and a wave of her hand. "He's full of bluster but fairly harmless. His bark is almost always worse than his bite...most of the time anyway." Angel shifted in his seat and muttered something inaudible under his breath. "He loves his daughter, though, and Tempe's kind of the exception to a lot of rules...not just for him as I'm sure you know yourself," she added. "He's being a normal dad...looking out for his little girl, you know. She's the only thing he's got—the only family he has in this world."
Angel shrugged, still unconvinced. A heavy silence hung over the pair before Angel muttered, "I know he doesn't like me. He never has, and I don't think he ever will."
Tilting her head at him, Stephanie asked, "Oh? How come?"
"Because," Angel sighed. "When I was back in Chicago, you know, living with her..." His voice warmed at the reference to that five-year span as a wistful sigh punctuated his words. "Well, for starters, the looks he'd give me would peel the paint off walls."
Stephanie chuckled, having seen her old friend and erstwhile lover give such stares with those steely blue eyes of his. "He was testing you," she explained with a slight shrug of her shoulder. "And, just so you know, you passed the test."
Angel's eyebrow arched, and he snorted in disbelief, "Really?"
"Absolutely," she said. "He told me so, when he was here in New York just a couple of months ago." Stephanie flashed her carefully-waxed eyebrow. "Like Temperance, her father wears his manner like an armor, but underneath, he's as loving and tender as she is. While he didn't care for you at first—I can't lie to you about that because, in fact, saying that he didn't care for you is probably a gross understatement, because he really hated your guts—but, he knows that you make her happy, and in the end, his daughter's happiness is all he really wants. He's not going to gush about it, but he's accepted that you bring Temperance that happiness that he's always wanted for her."
Considering her words, Angel nodded and stroked his finger on the smooth surface of the bar. Several long moments of silence hung between them before he looked up again and spoke.
"Yeah, well, Bren...I know she's in Iraq now," he said absently, steering the conversation back to a subject he felt more comfortable talking about. "Digging up some ancient city—one that's supposedly old enough to go back to the time of Noah and the big flood." Having finished his first cigarette, he reached for another one and lit it up, adding in between puffs, "But Bren doesn't believe in all of that Biblical stuff. She says it's just superstitious legend made for ignorant, weak-minded people to believe in because they're not willing to put the effort into thinking scientifically about...I dunno, something or other."
Stephanie laughed. "Temperance is a woman of strong opinions," she said. "You love that about her, don't you?"
Angel ran his hand through his hair, slicked back with a generous dab of Brylcreem, nodded and gave her a slight, fleeting smile. "Yeah. She's constantly blowing my mind with her facts and theories." He stared for a moment at the finger of whiskey in his glass. "Sometimes I think I'm way outta my league with her, you know?" He stopped and then for the first time, smiled a legitimate smile as he tilted his head and confessed to the other woman with a light chuckle, "Actually, I think that most of the time."
"Hmmm," she murmured thoughtfully. "Granted, I don't know you well, but I wouldn't sell yourself too short. I don't know, but I have a hunch that you bring your own gifts to the table, Angel."
Angel gave her another appraising look. It was clear to him that she knew Brennan very well, and had since she was a girl, and that she kept in continued contact with her. Although he wasn't sure, she seemed also to have an intimate relationship of some kind with Brennan's father, though exactly what kind, he couldn't be certain. But, above all and most importantly, she seemed quite honest, refreshingly open, and very friendly. The quiet murmur inside of Angel, the one that had resided in his mind for twenty-three years since the night his lover found him and took him in, became to hum louder inside of him. He felt a warmth in his chest and the thrumming of Brennan's soul inside of him led him to think that, despite his natural inclination to the contrary—especially when it came to witches and other users of magic—he could trust this woman.
"I can cook," he said with a snicker, then added a bit more edgily, "even though I don't eat—how's that for irony?"
"I think you have other gifts," Stephanie said, her last word fractured by a laugh. "And I don't mean..." Her eyes met Angel's and she watched a genuine smile crack his stubbornly serious face.
"Well," he chuckled with a waggle of his eyebrows. "I don't want to brag, but..."
Stephanie laughed again, squeezing her eyes shut as she threw her hands up in mock embarrassment. "Please, no," she said. "No need to give me any details." Her cheeks flushed a little as she remembered Max telling her how he came out of the bathroom the first night he met Angel at Brennan's apartment and how he'd found them kissing, the vampire having pinned her against the living room wall with his hip flush against hers as she palmed his backside with her hands. "Tempe and Matthew have told me all I need to know...and then some, truth to be told, since I think you're starting to get that I'm all about honesty."
She acknowledged the bartender who brought two glasses of the same single-malt Bushmills that Angel had been drinking and placed a fifty-cent piece on the bar to cover the latest round and the one he'd been drinking before. The bartender, a corpulent man with a faint blue sheen to his waxy skin who must have stood six foot five as he towered over the bar, swiped his giant hand across the bar and collected her money. As he walked away, she turned to Angel with an amused look.
"Besides," she said, "Temperance is very...discriminating...in the relationships she keeps. I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have kept you around as long as she has if there wasn't something fairly compelling about you that held her interest."
Angel swallowed and shrugged. "I guess..."
Stephanie tilted her head to one side and rolled her eyes. "She's entrusted herself to you," she said, the gentle cadence of her speech rounding the edge off the gravity of her statement. "She gave herself to you, Angel, in more ways than one, not the least important of which was giving her very soul into your keeping. She would've sooner taken her chances with losing that soul to the powers of darkness if she had any doubt that you were worthy of her trust."
His mouth fell open at her words. She knows, he thought. She knows about us...about our arrangement...our agreement.
In that moment, most of the tension he'd been holding in his chest and shoulders seemed to relax away. "I'm afraid sometimes," he confessed, his low voice nearly a whisper. "I'm afraid I'm not strong enough to be what she needs me to be." He sighed and added, "I know it sounds stupid, but—"
"You're strong enough," she assured him confidently. "You know that Temperance doesn't abide weakness, and she doesn't trust easily. That she trusted you with her soul is irrefutable proof of the strength she sees in you." She paused for a moment, smiling faintly as she watched his face, then said, "Trust her trust in you, Angel."
He scratched the back of his head and nodded. "Okay."
"Your two lives are intertwined, woven and bound into a single destiny. I can feel it in my heart," she said. She rolled her lips together in a firm line, then said, "Why don't you let me read your cards?"
"What?" he coughed with a grimace. "Cards?"
"Yes," Stephanie said as she reached into her handbag. "Tarot cards. You've heard of them, I'm sure?"
Angel shook his head repeatedly. "Wait, oh no," he said, his low voice cracking as he held up his hand. "Please don't tell me you're some kind of Gypsy fortuneteller or anything like that. I don't like Gypsies, okay? I mean, I really don't like Gypsies." He continued to shake his head emphatically as he added, "Nuh-uh, no siree, alright?"
She placed her hand on his shoulder, frowning a little as he flinched at her touch. "Angel," she said, her voice smooth and steady as she tried to comfort him. "Listen, relax. I'm not a Gypsy, and tarot is not inherently Gypsy magic. This has nothing to do with Romanii magics in any way, I swear. Most historians and practitioners believe tarot emerged in Italy, actually, not Romania."
She patted his shoulder reassuringly and then reached back into her handbag. She felt his gaze follow her every move as she set the box of cards on the bar and opened the lid.
"No, wait—what are you doing?" His brow furrowed deeply as he watched her pull the cards from the box and spread them in a fanlike arc across the dark, varnished walnut of the bar.
"Pick four cards," she said, tapping her index finger on the bar. "Come on, Angel. Go ahead. They won't bite."
He looked at the cards, then up at her, and then back down to the cards for a moment. Mysticism had always bothered him, perhaps even more so than magic, even though his own run-ins with magic over the years, at least before the Halloween night almost twenty-three years earlier Brennan found him—starving, freezing and despondent—on the streets of Chicago, were usually less than positive. But something about this woman made him want to trust her. For a moment, he looked at her, hesitant for reasons he did not completely understand, but as he felt the anxiety flutter in his belly, he sighed and reached for another cigarette, his crutch of choice, and lit it in a sequence of movements so swift and smooth, it left no doubt in his companion's mind that he'd been chain-smoking for quite some time.
"Alright," he muttered, draining the last of his first glass of whiskey before sliding it across the bar and surveying the arch of cards spread before him. "Four?" he asked. Stephanie nodded. He placed his finger on a card and slid it out of the spread, but didn't turn it over. He glanced up at the flaxen-haired witch and grinned sheepishly, then picked another three cards and likewise pulled them out of the array, but left them face down.
"The first card represents something in your past," she said. "People like you and I—we have very long pasts, so it's not that the card will necessarily represent your entire past, but rather, something that's happened in your past that informs your future. Does that make sense?"
"Umm, yeah," he said. "So, not what happened back in the old country, mmm? Maybe just what happened these last few years?" He closed his eyes and shook his head as he tried to suppress all of the memories of what he had done to earn him the name Angelus, the Scourge of Europe, pushing them as far back in his mind as he could. Looking back up at her, Angel asked, "Will that do?"
Nodding slowly, Stephanie said, "Yes. I think that will do."
Angel took a long, hard draw on his cigarette and stared for a second at the faintly glowing orange tip, holding the smoke in his mouth and throat before letting it stream in languid tendrils from his nostrils. He always liked watching the smoke pour from his nose. It almost made him feel human...feel normal. For a moment, he wondered if that's why he really took to smoking in the first place—just to feel normal. He was shaken from his thoughts by a question.
"Are you ready?" she asked him with an arched eyebrow as she stroked her finger over the glossy back of the first card.
Angel shrugged. "Sure," he said, holding his glass in front of his mouth as he watched her slowly turn over the first card. The card, 'The Hanged Man,' depicted a man hanging upside down from a T-shaped cross or gallows by one foot, with the other foot tucked behind his knee and his hands crossed behind his back. "Uhh, that doesn't look good," he groaned.
I knew this was a mistake, he thought. You'd think I'd learn by now...me and witches. Never a good thing. Well, except for Bren.
"Ohhh," she crooned, the syllable ringing nasally as she watched Angel react to the card, as most querants did, negatively.
"What's that mean?" he said, his voice wavering a bit.
"Oh, it's not necessarily a bad thing, despite the image on the card," Stephanie said with a comforting smile, reaching over and placing her hand on his forearm, giving him a light squeeze. "The Hanged Man represents the idea of surrendering the past and stepping forward into the unknown. You see, the Hanged Man willingly allows himself to be suspended and dangle head-first. It's about letting go of the things that hold you back and taking chances so you can realize a previously unimaginable future."
Angel thought about her words for a moment.
"I let go of her," he said quietly, flicking his ash into the tray as he stared at the wall on the far side of the bar. "I mean, not that she was holding me back. It was the other way around. I was holding her back. I let her go so that she could have the future she deserved." He stroked his thumb over the side of the cigarette mindlessly before bringing it to this mouth again, pulling a stiff drag on it and quickly snorting out the smoke before he turned back to the old witch. "I know she didn't want to go," he said. "She thought she wanted that life we had in Chicago, which I admit was wonderful—the best years of my life, really—but if I had stayed there, with her, just because that's what I wanted, it wouldn't have been the right thing. I had to be the one to go, to force her hand, I guess. It was the right thing to do for her..." He leaned his head back and sighed. "Right?" he asked. "I mean, I did the right thing, didn't I? Hardest thing I ever did, but..." He looked at her, his warm brown eyes pleading as they glistened in the dim light of the bar. "Please tell me I did the right thing."
Stephanie took a deep breath and tilted her head to the side as she watched his face.
"You love her," she said, her eyes surveying the hard, tense lines of his face. "You love her so much you were willing to give her up," she added, her words a statement of fact and not a question.
"Yes," he whispered. "It killed me to do it. And it kills me a little every time I watch her leave, you know, when she comes to see me, but...for now, I guess, it's the right thing."
Several long moments of silence hung between them before Stephanie patted him on the arm and asked, "Are you ready for the next one?"
"I don't know," he said grimly, then seeing the flicker of disappointment in her eyes, forced a smile and nodded. "Okay."
"This one represents your present," she said as she turned the card over to reveal a black-cloaked figure against a gray background surrounded by five gold cups, three of which were overturned, spilling their contents on the ground. Two upright cups stood on the ground behind him. The figure's face was obscured but his head seemed to hang dejectedly from his hunched shoulders.
"The Five of Cups—what's that mean?" Angel asked, nibbling the inside of his lip, his troubled brow quivering as it knit over his deep-set eyes. The image on the card looked grave to him and he felt a nervous clenching in his belly as he stared at the card.
"You've done something you regret," she said, her eyes narrowing as she gazed deep into his. "Something you feel bad having done. It weighs heavy on your heart." She pursed her lips as she saw him wince at the reference to his heart, which lay cold and unbeating in his chest. "You know what I mean," she added quietly.
Angel's jaw quickly hardened and a low growl sounded from the back of his throat as he reached for his fresh whiskey. He brought the glass to his mouth and drained half of it in a single swallow.
"I have done more things that I regret than you can possibly imagine," he said through gritted teeth. His voice dropped to a lower, darker pitch as he set his glass down with an audible clank, and he said, "I am the worst mass murderer in history." He blinked a couple of times as he shifted his jaw from one side to the other. "Even the bastards they they've got on trial at Nuremberg now—granted, they turned their country into a machine that killed millions, but..." He sighed. "None of them took as many lives by their own hands as I have." His eyes fell to a headline on the bottom front page of the New York Post which still sat on on the bar in front of him. Attorneys for the defendants at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg were still making their closing statements, one by one, as they had since the 4th of July. "My hands are covered with blood that nothing, nothing will ever wash away."
Stephanie snuffed out her cigarette and turned to him. "I know," she said. "But that's not what's eating at you, is it? You've carried that burden for almost fifty years, since the night you got your soul back. Something else is weighing on you, Angel. Something that's happened far more recently."
He threaded his hand through his hair and grabbed a fistful towards the back of his scalp, shaking his head as he took one last hard suck on his Lucky Strike before crushing the butt in the ashtray. He remembered the night he came to Brennan's home in Chicago, straight from Union Station, and how he'd broken down and confessed to her what he had done on that German submarine. Ravaged by guilt over having condemned another man to an eternity of misery—doomed to spend the rest of his potentially endless existence trolling the earth, quenching his anger and slaking his thirst with the blood of the living—he'd come to her broken, and she made him whole again by offering herself to him in a way she never had before. Feeding on her that night helped him put what he'd done in perspective, but as he rode the train back east to New York a few weeks later, he wondered if he had finally done what he left Chicago fifteen years earlier to prevent—becoming a burden on her, unable to manage on his own the gravity of his own anguish—and in so doing, put not only her physical body and very life at risk in feeding on her, encumbering her mind and thoughts with worries that would prevent her from being able to fulfill her own destiny. It was that, even more than the guilt over what he had actually done to Lawson, that troubled his thoughts each night and fractured his sleep with worry each day.
"You don't have to tell me," Stephanie said quietly. "I know, Angel. Feels like you're drowning in guilt, doesn't it?"
Angel grunted and reached for his glass. "Is that what the cards say?"
"I can see it in your eyes," she said, her voice low and even. "The cards merely point to a struggle. That struggle is written all over your face, Angel." He closed his eyes and frowned. "Listen, Angel—the Five of Cups says that the only way to stop drowning in the anguish of the loss of the spilled cups is to have the strength to look away from what is lost..." She pointed to the spilled cups on the card. "And to focus on what is left. There can be no redemption if you're too lost in woe to look for it. Focus on what you still have, not on what you've lost. In every loss, in every sacrifice, there is something gained. You simply have to open your eyes to the truth of what was gained, and set aside thoughts of what was lost or taken away."
"Accentuate the positive?" he grumbled. "Chin up and all that?"
"More or less, yes," she said with a gentle shrug. She reached for his hand, curling her fingers around his wide palm. "You're a good man, Angel," she said. "The soul you have inside of you is good. The choices you've made you made with the best of intentions. Sometimes we can't save everyone."
He turned and looked away.
Stephanie took a small sip of her whiskey, wincing a little as the vapors hit her nose as she swallowed, then set her glass down. "The next card signifies your future or the path forward," she said as she turned over the third card he'd picked.
"Hmmm," she murmured as she revealed the image of a winged, haloed figure of uncertain gender standing with one foot in stream and one on the bank while holding two goblets and pouring the contents of one into the other.
Angel turned and looked at the card. "Temperance?" he said incredulously. "You're kidding, right?" He scratched his jaw and realized he hadn't shaved before he went out that night. "I know that Bren's...I mean, she's...what we have between us is..." He struggled for words. "I know she's my future," he said. "And I'm hers."
"I know," she said with a grin. "But there's more," she continued with a tap of her index finger on the card. When he still had a confused look on his face, Stephanie said with a slight nod, "Let me explain. I know the coincidence of the card's name alone may seem hard to look past, but there's a deeper meaning."
Angel licked his lips self-consciously, then lit another cigarette before nodding for her to continue.
"Temperance is about balance," Stephanie said. "Blending opposites, synthesizing two discrete entities into a single whole. Back in the days before science, when I was a girl, they called it 'alchemy.' Look at the card..." She pointed to the image again. "Diluting wine. Not throwing it out, but rather putting water and wine together into a mixture that's fortifying but not too intoxicating. You don't have to give something up completely, but rather, find a balance, a state of equilibrium where the two disparate substances can work together. But like alchemy, it's not an instant fix, right? Trial and error. It's incremental. You might make mistakes along the way, but if you keep trying, seeking that balance, you'll get there. You'll find that point of equilibrium. You just have to be patient."
Angel sat there in silence for a minute, smoking and sipping his whiskey, occasionally glancing over to his companion. She watched him with interest, but spoke not a murmur as she gathered up all of the cards, except for the last one, and straightened out the deck.
"You think we can do it?" he asked her vaguely, his mouth hanging open as his hand toyed with his lighter. "Bren and I? I mean, to make a life, her and I, together?" He raised his eyebrows expectantly, his soft brown eyes glimmering in the light of the lamp that hung over the corner of the bar where the two sat. His forehead creased and uncreased as his eyes awaited her answer. "Do you?"
Reaching once more for his hand, Stephanie clasped it and stroked her thumb over the web of veins on the top, squeezing it gently in hers in a gesture that was intimate and comforting.
"I know you will," she said. "I don't know when, or how, but I know in my heart that you will...eventually."
A smile curved the edges of Angel's lips as he reached over and patted her hand, sandwiching her hand between his. "You're a woman of wisdom," he said, noting how his hands dwarfed hers. "If you think we can—well, then I guess we can."
Stephanie nodded and smiled fondly, then winked as she placed her fingers on the fourth card. "The last card is like a summary or an overview of the entire reading. It speaks to the overall message of the spread—the cards we've seen tonight." She noted an optimistic curiosity in his warm brown eyes as he watched her finger tap on the card. "Ready?"
He met her eyes with a sheepish grin and nodded.
She pursed her lips and slowly turned over the last card. The card diplayed a lone man, an elderly figure with a gnarled wooden staff in one hand and a lantern in the other, clad in a gray cloak, his bearded face mostly concealed behind a hood, and below his feet read "The Hermit." Angel's round, muscular shoulders slumped and he pouted, looking up at her with a crestfallen expression in his eyes.
"What's it with all the gloomy cards?" he asked petulantly.
Stephanie shook her head. "Just as you can't judge a book by its cover," she said. "You can't judge a card solely by the pretty picture painted on its front, hmmm?"
Angel stared at her for a moment, and then looked back at the card, and then hesitated before he arched an eyebrow back at Stephanie. "So, is this a...good card?" he asked hopefully, his eyebrows raised and his broad forehead deeply creased as he waited for her answer. "Or at least not too bad?"
Stephanie gave him a soft smile and then a shrug. "The cards themselves aren't good or bad, Angel," she said. "They just...are. And, in this case, the Hermit is about introspection and self-reflection...about taking a step back from the hustle and bustle, you know...taking time to be alone and take stock of things so you can move forward with a clear understanding of how all the pieces fit together."
Furrowing his brow, Angel looked down at his hand as he fumbled with his lighter.
"I've been trying to make sense of it all for a long time now," he said. "In part, that's why I came to New York. I was hoping I'd find the answers here."
Stephanie leaned back in her seat, uncrossing and recrossing her legs as she cocked her head and gave him a narrow-eyed look.
"The answers are all there—inside of you," she said vaguely. "And...inside of her."
His brows knit low over his eyes as he grunted softly in acknowledgment. "Is she a hermit, too?" he asked her, somewhat surprised at his own question.
Stephanie smiled, reaching up to tuck a loose strand of her blond hair behind her ear. "You're not the only one wandering the world, looking for answers," she said. "And, while I can't tell you what the answers are, I'm pretty sure that the farther you two wander, the clearer those answers will become. And when you're both done wandering, you'll find out how to achieve that wholeness that you're each looking for."
"Eventually," he said, his Adam's apple dipping low in his throat as he swallowed hard. "Right?"
She didn't answer him, but merely shrugged with a demure flutter of her long eyelashes. Angel brought his cigarette back to his lips and drew a deep puff, then leaned his head back and blew the smoke out in two hard, straight streams, watching it dissipate in the air over the bar.
He thought of Brennan and when they'd last been together, four months earlier when she'd passed through New York en route to Iraq, and how he'd had lain in bed after they'd made love for the last time that night, watching her as she slept, her auburn hair fanned over the pillow as she dozed. The image, and the memory of how soft her skin had felt beneath his fingertips as he'd stroked her upper arm, enjoying the murmurs she made in her sleep at feeling his touch, made him smile in anticipation of seeing her again in a few months to celebrate the Samhain holiday at the end of October.
Eventually, he told himself. We'll find a way somehow to make a life big enough for both of us—a single life shared.
After a moment, his expression grew serious once more, eyes narrowing again as they flickered back to meet her green ones.
"Why did you seek me out this night?" he asked, his smile returning to his face as soon as the words left his lips.
She cocked her head to the side and gave Angel an appraising look, then shrugged. "Because I love her, too."
A/N2: So there you are. With the way "Eventually" started out, we bet you thought this little ditty was gonna be a gloomy one, huh? Bet we had you going for a minute there, didn't we? We're so sneaky... *snicker*
So, anyone recognize Stephanie? She's definitely an interesting figure, and she'll be back. We mentioned her in Max's oneshot, but wanted to give you a closer look.
Did you like the little bits of historical texture we threw in there for you? July 1946 was a pretty eventful time, with the world picking up the pieces after World War II. For those keeping score at home, you'll note that this chapter took place in a part of New York City—the Lower East Side—which was a pretty interesting place to be back then. A young writer named Jack Kerouac and a few of his friends, attracted by the low rents in that part of Manhattan, started hanging out there after the war. Those other dingy bars on Third Avenue were full of disaffected young men who would later be called Beatniks. How 'bout that? Angel wasn't the only brooding young man slumming in the Bowery in the summer of 1946. In fact, we imagine he fit in pretty well there... :-)
We're still trying to get that next "Echoes" chapter ready for you. It's proving to be more complex to edit and longer than we expected—not that that's any surprise with us, but we extend our apologies nonetheless. The good news is final edits are proceeding, and although we know we've said it before, we are close to finishing. In the meantime, we have a couple more of these random oneshots in the hopper. One is set during the weeks that Angel spent with Brennan in Mérida, Mexico in 1929. The other—well, we'll keep that one a surprise, but it may include a glimpse at Brennan's relationships with some of the other women who knew Angelus in the years before his ensoulment in 1898.
As for this one, let us know what you think. Please leave us a review. Pretty please? :-)
Thanks in advance! We love you guys and, as always, appreciate your readership more than you will ever know.
