Chapter 11

Angel was in the med-lab. He had been subtly trying to enquire as to the health of hybrids, the name the scientists had given Will and him. He was quickly coming to understand that they didn't know very much.

His headaches had been becoming more and more frequent; they were coming on quicker and with more intensity than they had before. Besides the headaches was the fact that he just didn't feel well. He couldn't really describe his symptoms. Sometimes he was lightheaded, sometimes his legs felt like lead. Angel told himself that if the bozo in front of him couldn't tell him the first thing about his physiology, then he certainly was not going to ask the doctor to examine him. That would lead to poking and prodding, tests, scans, and a lot of hassle over what was probably, Angel believed, to be the result of quitting drinking.

He had almost convinced himself that he was going through some kind of withdrawal. He had some symptoms. His hands shook a little sometimes and he was a little feverish. Other than that, none of the symptoms matched up, but that was because no one knew how withdrawal would affect a hybrid, he told himself. Angel was sure his problems would go away if just held out a little longer. He refused to admit to himself that even before he stopped drinking he hadn't been feeling right. In fact, it had been almost two weeks of the same symptoms. He had decided that the incident after he tossed a client around the conference room a few days ago had been the worst of the symptoms. He hadn't blacked out before then.

Walking back to his office, he shivered a little. It wasn't cold in the hallways, so he blamed it on the memories of that incident. He would have slept longer on the couch in his office if the nightmares hadn't woken him up so suddenly. The dreams had been getting worse for months, and lately, he had been trying to avoid sleeping altogether. They were vivid and horrendous. Memories of his past life, of what he had done as the demon, plagued his unconscious hours.

He had tried talking to Wes about the health concerns of hybrids last week. Wes seemed to know more than that idiot doctor, Angel thought, but that still wasn't much. He and Will healed quickly; about at the same rate they did when they were vampires. Wes had tried to explain his mix up when translating the Shanshu. As Angel understood it, it boiled down to the fact that the word Wesley thought meant human actually literally translated as day-walker. At the time, Wes had concluded that meant human. They knew better now.

The fact that he still had most of his vampire abilities had turned out to be a double edged sword. They both had their senses, agility, stamina, speed, strength and healing. No one knew, though, if poisons effective against only vampires could affect them, or if poisons used on humans would affect them the same way it would a human. Wesley was basing most of his assumptions off of the physiology of the slayer.

Angel knew this, but he chose not to acknowledge it out loud. Wesley had explained that even though he could heal quickly and wasn't affected to the extent humans were by simple bacteria and viruses, that didn't mean he was invincible. If he pushed his body far enough, destroyed his immune system enough, Angel could get sick, Wesley had explained. It would take a lot to compromise his natural defenses, but it wasn't impossible, or even improbable. Angel really didn't want to think that he was sick. He hadn't been sick since the last time he was poisoned, and he knew of no poison that would do to him what was happening to his body now.

He couldn't remember the last time he had slept for more than an hour at a time, and that was a lot for him these days. His appetite hadn't really come back, yet, either. Most of the time, he felt a little lightheaded, and he didn't think his stomach would really take well to food. During the past week, nausea had started to accompany the lightheadedness. That was further incentive to skip meals. He figured, even if he was sick with some disease, his body would heal like it did from any other wound: quickly and with little effort on his part. There were times when he could feel his pulse racing, but he could normally get it to slow with deep breathing exercises.

Pushing any concerns about his health out of his mind, he got down to business. There were papers to be looked at and signed, a brief Will wrote that he had to be approved, a stack of minutes from board meetings that needed his approval. The stack on his desk didn't seem to grow any smaller, even as he signed and read and signed and read until his eyes blurred. When he finally looked at a clock, he had to blink a few times to make sure his vision wasn't failing either. It was almost midnight. His driver had probably left, not that he couldn't drive himself now that he was sober.

He hadn't needed the release the razor afforded him in a few days. He counted that as a good sign, a sign that maybe he was starting to get it together a little more. Maybe he wasn't such a complete screw up, he thought. After contemplating that, he decided, that no, he really was a total screw up and probably shouldn't try to convince himself otherwise.

Standing, he stretched his sore muscles, muscles that had been sitting for far too long. As he started doing a few simple tai chi moves to wake his body up, he felt stinging bile rise in his throat. He almost didn't make it in time to his private bathroom before he started retching.

There wasn't much in his system to purge. Somehow, though, his body found matter to expel. He sat on the cold tile floor, his head against the wall, knowing he was feverish and should probably go down to the med-lab. He wasn't going to, though. He was going to rinse his mouth out and wash his face and go home and try to get some sleep.

The people in the med-lab would tell him to take it easy, get some rest, relax. As if he could really do any of those things. It seemed that every time he turned his back just for a moment the world went to hell in a hand basket. No, he thought, he needed to keep going, wait it out. This will pass, he told himself.

He finished some paperwork, and approved the rather beautifully written proposal Will had composed, and then packed his brief case. It was nearly two in the morning, and he was meeting the guys at six to run on the beach. They had been meeting four or five days a week for about a year. They rarely met on the weekends, and all of them enjoyed the quiet time in the morning, when few others were on the beach. They all had headphones glued to their ears during the run, it was too much effort to talk most of the time, but the comradely feelings were there none the less.

His driver wasn't there, but another was in his place. Of course, Dan wouldn't leave him stranded. Not that he was technically stranded, but he glad all the same, he was a little too tired to drive. He managed to shower and slip into bed without further problems, but only managed an hour or so of sleep before he bolted upright in bed, drenched in a cold sweat.

It was almost time to get up anyway, he reasoned. He needed to shower and try to eat a piece of toast before he met the others at the beach. The shower he accomplished, but some part of him rebelled at the thought of food the minute the toast was done. When he joined the others on the beach, they had started stretching and warming up already. No one needed to say anything, words were unnecessary between them during these times. Angel quickly joined the warm up; turned on his MP3 player and slipped it into the arm band he wore to carry it.

They started out slow, giving themselves a chance to get acclimated. Will and Angel also wanted to give Gunn and Wes a fighting chance of keeping up. By seven, they were all out of breath and almost complete with their warm down. Angel had started out with a sweat shirt and long sleeve tee shirt, but the sweat shirt was now tied around his waist. Gunn had followed suit.

Leaning against the car, Angel closed his eyes and steadied himself. He had been running on fumes for so long he wasn't sure he could remember a time when jogging wouldn't have exhausted him so much. He felt like he could sleep for a week. His head swam and his legs felt like jelly, but he forced himself to stay on his feet.

"You alright, man?" Gunn lightly clapped him on the shoulder.

"Getting old." He managed a slight smile and got into his car. He needed to shower and change so he could be in the office by nine.

A strange feeling was tugging at him. The nudging had been becoming more insistent over the past couple of days. It had been strongest yesterday, but was growing even now. It was a feeling that was almost commanding him to start towards downtown, as if some higher being was sending him hunches instead of visions. He tried to shrug it off. He told himself that if the Powers wanted him to go somewhere, they would send him a seer to tell him so.

His heart almost jumped out of his chest when a young man with shaggy dark hair crossed the street right next to where his car was parked at a red light. It wasn't Connor. Angel could sense that right away, but the feelings the almost sighting caused Angel could not be denied. A longing spread throughout him, but he violently stuffed it back into whatever corner it came from. It would swallow him whole and he would never come up out of the sea of despair that would claim him if he allowed those regrets to surface. He would be trapped at the bottom of the ocean forever, he told himself.

His fists clenched at the unbidden memory. His mind was a rotten thing, he thought. It tortured him any chance it got. Sighing, he closed his eyes for the rest of the trip home.

Showering and changing didn't take long and the car was pulling into the lot of the law firm before Angel could remember getting into the vehicle. Time was escaping him lately; he would start reading briefs and realize four hours had passed without his noticing. He would be in the shower one minute and walking towards his office the next. He would have been alarmed if he had the energy to feel such an emotion.

Disassociation. It was called disassociation, he remembered. He had read that online when he googled time loss. Pop psychiatrists said it indicated trauma. That was laughable. Angel's life was the definition of trauma. He blamed himself for the vast majority of it. He sat down at his desk, a cup of coffee waiting for him already and got started on the new day.