+++++++++++++++++++++++
Part II
+++++++++++++++++++++++
What if the cure is worse than the disease?
Dracula Moon - Joan Osborne
+++++++++++++++++++++++
He was Altas, chained to the world, Ixion with his eternal wheel.
"You don't have to work out. You're eternal."
"I may not always be . . ."
More often than not recently, he would catch the scent of her in the halls of the Hyperion, across the coruscating designs in the wallpaper, over tables and carpets, on chairs, against doors on coffee cups and paper. More often than not he would catch the scent of her before he heard her, before he saw her, before she had even arrived. Not difficult to sense the change in her when the visions ripped her a new line of consciousness; the rising of the heartbeat, the schizm of the nerves a-jangle just before the forecast of impending pain becomes its reality. The adrenalin rising from her in waves of fear, thundering. Only later did he learn to pick out the delicate difference between the girl she had been before becoming a pawn for the Powers and the woman was after. And then he would dream about her, solipsing her image - claiming a part of her.
There were nights, half-starved nights. Of lumina and lucifer. After the crash in her apartment of ghosts, she would move around absently if she could not sleep, often forgetting that being what he was he was bound to be awake at these hours. Awake and restless. There was nothing untoward about it. Just that her neck and legs were often bare. And he was often tired and lacking for constructive contemplation... and sometimes she would be there and so would he.
Late night movies, all noir and horror, and laughing at the hokey Dracula. Seeing her roll her eyes when he insists that the real Dracula looks nothing like that.
"Pfttt. Whatever. I'm going to bed. Be nice to Dennis."
Then she's gone - but not - still here under the cushions, in the kitchen, absently against the cloth of his shirt. The remote is floating before him. Not Dennis' thing.
"Sure, you can turn it over if you want."
He would sit in the kitchen and read anyway. Wonder if Cordelia had visions in her sleep, or cared what Wesley got up to at 3am in the morning. Wondered. Lean a little more to the left so that he could almost catch the dull timpani of her heart as it slowed to sleep. Hear the little leaps of agitation, that were probably due to tossing and turning, settle down slowly. And accidents do happen. The rarest of rare occasions would find arousal rising from her in waves of as she dreamt - a tantalising hint of musk and around her the temperature rising (warm blood making itself apparent and oh so available) and he would have to go stand near an open window - or just go for a walk. But everywhere he went the shadows reminded him of her. Her screaming alone on a hospital bed, then salved on medication, so out of it that she could not see him, sense his cool hand on her hot brow. Vision fear. If he was lucky, he found some puffed up demon or reckless vampire to vent on. "Whaling" as the children of Sunnydale liked to speak it.
Then he would return to find she had left him a tub of fresh blood on the table top with a note:
Heard you not sleeping. Probably moping around. Cocoa works for me but you might want this.
C
ps - I thought I'd skip the little marshmallows this time.
So close. So very close to her while squeezed into her apartment. She never really said if having the rooms dark and shutters down affected her. She took the place of the sun he never saw, her skin reflecting the mood of the season, the colour of clear honey the smell of warm flowers. Wes would be there but periodically he had a place of his own. So he failed to keep out of her way - giving her two phantoms to deal with. Gradually as her to do list grew shorter, so did her days. The nights, limited as they were, became alive and vivid to her, as to sleep in the day; or, when her visions came, to recover.
She *never* fell asleep on the couch - must have been a personal rule. He would hear her dreams anyway, the doors were nothing to him. And if he closed his eyes he would have his own.
To go back to what he could remember, what he could fondly recall (without feeling he had somehow molested her by memory): He lay in a coffin - he knew this because he dreamed in third person and could see himself lying there. Very pale and very dead he was too. This was nothing new to him, he had been death in a very real sense for centuries at a time. But the quality of this surcease was funereal, almost surreal. He tried to grasp the sensation but lost it. Then above him she appeared. Cordelia. Her hair still long then, looking down, small platinum crucifix dangling from her neck, she smiled at him as if she knew - he was not dead at all. Merely sleeping. Unconscious. She slipped the necklace over her head, held it in the hand that rested against his belly. Leaning over the edge of the coffin, as if she would fall into him, she descended leaving a kiss. Just a simple kiss, not much in it.
And the eyes of the corpse below them popped open, waking, drawing breath.
In his dreams it seemed the order of things. Though once awake they were food for thought. A hurricane rushing through the empty house of his body, where the demon squirmed, an dirty itch. He certainly did not mention the dreams, because then the rift between Cordelia and himself was a widening thing - something he had had to put back together. It in truth he *was* better at tearing things down then repairing them, but it had been worth it in the end.
In the end.
But the dreams had become over time - more. Nightly they came and went. Ironically, at the height of his dreams about Darla, his occasional dreams of Cordelia, though then rare, had been more extreme as if to balance their infrequency. Silently, he never denied they were there. But like filched morsels in a period of drought, plucked from the air and thanking your good fortune, they were not forgotten. As a matter of course he avoided giving them too much afterthought. Not when he had the reality to contend with...
***
Lorne always got that faraway look in his eyes when watching someone/something sing. But tonight, perhaps, his ruby reds were more than a little misty. Hard to tell. Angel rarely registered any residual emotionscents from him or his clan, their feelings were hard to compass unless...unless they came right out and told you. Not a problem for his brothers but The Host wasn't one for nostalgia in the conventional sense - or convention, actually; and he was customarily silent while appraising a subject. It just happened that this subject was Cordelia. *His* Cordy.
Angel did not know the name of the song - an educated guess said Time After Time but he did not, in fact, know it, and he did not have to sing.
"Oh thank God...For your sake, 'cause you don't like to do that."
He should not have done it. He should not have put her at risk like he had but in the early days - actually any day - she always seemed counter to what he had wanted her to be. Compliant had been the first thing. And that she had never been. That was what had worn on him, torn on him at first, and ultimately it had been the very thing he had come to treasure. Humans, he had decided, very early in his existence, would rarely tell you the truth. They would dress things up in words and persuasions, guilts and agonies, fears and failures. Very rarely the truth. Cordelia's subtlety reflex, so sacrosant in many, seemed to be entirely missing. Her tendency to narcissim was given full boone in a highschool of desperation. And while this space lifed her pedestal-like - it had always been a vacuum. She knew it. And eventually so did he.
"No think! Pay! That's an order!"
"Hey! How 'bout we pretend YOU work for ME."
"You are really unpleasant when you - "
"Well then how about we pretend you DON'T."
"You can't fire me. I'm vision-girl."
But he had.
Despite the fact that he shut everybody out he was easily antagonised. It was the beast within him. No. This had always been his. And she wooed that beast every chance she got. And even in the moments when she wasn't there both he and his beast - for they were one and the same - missed that. They relied on the memory, the echo of her, the colour, the shape when deprived of the substance. And the clothes in the corner had just reminded him of what he missed, so he had in time given them away. Thrown her away. Driven himself mad. And then, when he had figured it out she was suddenly there, but not there. He felt for her but touched nothing. Only a sense of something locked deep within that he grasped at with shadow hands. Warded off by the ferocious light of her disappointment. Kept at bay.
"Uh--"
"Don't."
"Don't--?"
"You're gonna start trying to make small talk. Get all stammery. Don't. You might strain something."
He had seen that light, and he had watched it fading right before his eyes. Funny, he had never been so involved in human affairs, so attendant on it that he had cared to watch it fade. But there she was, a sun setting before his eyes.
***
Johnny Mathis was singing, somewhere off in the distance. His mouth was moving and stammering threatened. There were great gaps in the conversation where he paused - and she seemed to be listening to something else, looking somewhere else, feeling anywhere but here. Calls her name and her glance snaps towards him with a certain impertinence.
"Are you even hearing- "
"What is this song they're playing?"
"Wonderful, Wonderful by Johnny Mathis."
She did not smile. From then on his mouth tended to say things without his brain's actual permission. Not that it mattered - she never really listened, just agreed. And soon she was outside, sitting on the trunk of his car, haunched over, so caught up in thought it did not seem to matter where she sat or when, or with whom.
She said nothing in the car just stared out of the window. But he sensed the resistance in her dwindling. A certain release to let things happen. The scents were a blazing mess in her, though, and she must have phased through every radio frequency in the state and more before they got back.
The engine dies with a rumble. Her belt buckle darts away like a serpent's tongue as she turns to face him. Never seen that expression on her face before, like she was seeing him for the first time. For once he doesn't try speaking. Only lets her lean across and kiss him. It's warm and wonderful, and kind of censored. Leans back again, her eyes searching, searching for something. He touches her hand - she doesn't shrink back, the bubble bursts. The air around them stills, and in and around her he senses another change. The gravity in him shifts again.
They walk to the hotel together, hand in hand. She hesitates for a moment on the way there.
"Angel?"
Absently he's stroking her hair, she doesn't seem to mind.
"Hmm?"
"You think we're gonna look back on this and laugh?"
"You actually...want to...look back on it."
"And you don't?"
"Well I...laugh wouldn't be what...I'd be doing."
"Guess not. But if, by any means this thing goes wrong-"
"And it won't."
"But if it does...and I die..."
"Don't say that."
"I *will* come back and haunt your brooding ass!"
"And I will never let it come to that."
"You mean over your dead body, right?"
He let the flippancy of that lie. Until it occurred to him.
"Are you...scared?"
Quickly and quietly, somehow smaller than she should be: "You betcha." Her admission rustles the trees with the night breeze. They whisper her confession. She adds: "But maybe it's not the end of the world, you know. I'll be all right."
She flashed him *the* smile (my, my, her acting was getting better) slipped out of his arms and crossed to the Hyperion. He followed. Not the end of the world, but without her a world without purpose.
Part II
+++++++++++++++++++++++
What if the cure is worse than the disease?
Dracula Moon - Joan Osborne
+++++++++++++++++++++++
He was Altas, chained to the world, Ixion with his eternal wheel.
"You don't have to work out. You're eternal."
"I may not always be . . ."
More often than not recently, he would catch the scent of her in the halls of the Hyperion, across the coruscating designs in the wallpaper, over tables and carpets, on chairs, against doors on coffee cups and paper. More often than not he would catch the scent of her before he heard her, before he saw her, before she had even arrived. Not difficult to sense the change in her when the visions ripped her a new line of consciousness; the rising of the heartbeat, the schizm of the nerves a-jangle just before the forecast of impending pain becomes its reality. The adrenalin rising from her in waves of fear, thundering. Only later did he learn to pick out the delicate difference between the girl she had been before becoming a pawn for the Powers and the woman was after. And then he would dream about her, solipsing her image - claiming a part of her.
There were nights, half-starved nights. Of lumina and lucifer. After the crash in her apartment of ghosts, she would move around absently if she could not sleep, often forgetting that being what he was he was bound to be awake at these hours. Awake and restless. There was nothing untoward about it. Just that her neck and legs were often bare. And he was often tired and lacking for constructive contemplation... and sometimes she would be there and so would he.
Late night movies, all noir and horror, and laughing at the hokey Dracula. Seeing her roll her eyes when he insists that the real Dracula looks nothing like that.
"Pfttt. Whatever. I'm going to bed. Be nice to Dennis."
Then she's gone - but not - still here under the cushions, in the kitchen, absently against the cloth of his shirt. The remote is floating before him. Not Dennis' thing.
"Sure, you can turn it over if you want."
He would sit in the kitchen and read anyway. Wonder if Cordelia had visions in her sleep, or cared what Wesley got up to at 3am in the morning. Wondered. Lean a little more to the left so that he could almost catch the dull timpani of her heart as it slowed to sleep. Hear the little leaps of agitation, that were probably due to tossing and turning, settle down slowly. And accidents do happen. The rarest of rare occasions would find arousal rising from her in waves of as she dreamt - a tantalising hint of musk and around her the temperature rising (warm blood making itself apparent and oh so available) and he would have to go stand near an open window - or just go for a walk. But everywhere he went the shadows reminded him of her. Her screaming alone on a hospital bed, then salved on medication, so out of it that she could not see him, sense his cool hand on her hot brow. Vision fear. If he was lucky, he found some puffed up demon or reckless vampire to vent on. "Whaling" as the children of Sunnydale liked to speak it.
Then he would return to find she had left him a tub of fresh blood on the table top with a note:
Heard you not sleeping. Probably moping around. Cocoa works for me but you might want this.
C
ps - I thought I'd skip the little marshmallows this time.
So close. So very close to her while squeezed into her apartment. She never really said if having the rooms dark and shutters down affected her. She took the place of the sun he never saw, her skin reflecting the mood of the season, the colour of clear honey the smell of warm flowers. Wes would be there but periodically he had a place of his own. So he failed to keep out of her way - giving her two phantoms to deal with. Gradually as her to do list grew shorter, so did her days. The nights, limited as they were, became alive and vivid to her, as to sleep in the day; or, when her visions came, to recover.
She *never* fell asleep on the couch - must have been a personal rule. He would hear her dreams anyway, the doors were nothing to him. And if he closed his eyes he would have his own.
To go back to what he could remember, what he could fondly recall (without feeling he had somehow molested her by memory): He lay in a coffin - he knew this because he dreamed in third person and could see himself lying there. Very pale and very dead he was too. This was nothing new to him, he had been death in a very real sense for centuries at a time. But the quality of this surcease was funereal, almost surreal. He tried to grasp the sensation but lost it. Then above him she appeared. Cordelia. Her hair still long then, looking down, small platinum crucifix dangling from her neck, she smiled at him as if she knew - he was not dead at all. Merely sleeping. Unconscious. She slipped the necklace over her head, held it in the hand that rested against his belly. Leaning over the edge of the coffin, as if she would fall into him, she descended leaving a kiss. Just a simple kiss, not much in it.
And the eyes of the corpse below them popped open, waking, drawing breath.
In his dreams it seemed the order of things. Though once awake they were food for thought. A hurricane rushing through the empty house of his body, where the demon squirmed, an dirty itch. He certainly did not mention the dreams, because then the rift between Cordelia and himself was a widening thing - something he had had to put back together. It in truth he *was* better at tearing things down then repairing them, but it had been worth it in the end.
In the end.
But the dreams had become over time - more. Nightly they came and went. Ironically, at the height of his dreams about Darla, his occasional dreams of Cordelia, though then rare, had been more extreme as if to balance their infrequency. Silently, he never denied they were there. But like filched morsels in a period of drought, plucked from the air and thanking your good fortune, they were not forgotten. As a matter of course he avoided giving them too much afterthought. Not when he had the reality to contend with...
***
Lorne always got that faraway look in his eyes when watching someone/something sing. But tonight, perhaps, his ruby reds were more than a little misty. Hard to tell. Angel rarely registered any residual emotionscents from him or his clan, their feelings were hard to compass unless...unless they came right out and told you. Not a problem for his brothers but The Host wasn't one for nostalgia in the conventional sense - or convention, actually; and he was customarily silent while appraising a subject. It just happened that this subject was Cordelia. *His* Cordy.
Angel did not know the name of the song - an educated guess said Time After Time but he did not, in fact, know it, and he did not have to sing.
"Oh thank God...For your sake, 'cause you don't like to do that."
He should not have done it. He should not have put her at risk like he had but in the early days - actually any day - she always seemed counter to what he had wanted her to be. Compliant had been the first thing. And that she had never been. That was what had worn on him, torn on him at first, and ultimately it had been the very thing he had come to treasure. Humans, he had decided, very early in his existence, would rarely tell you the truth. They would dress things up in words and persuasions, guilts and agonies, fears and failures. Very rarely the truth. Cordelia's subtlety reflex, so sacrosant in many, seemed to be entirely missing. Her tendency to narcissim was given full boone in a highschool of desperation. And while this space lifed her pedestal-like - it had always been a vacuum. She knew it. And eventually so did he.
"No think! Pay! That's an order!"
"Hey! How 'bout we pretend YOU work for ME."
"You are really unpleasant when you - "
"Well then how about we pretend you DON'T."
"You can't fire me. I'm vision-girl."
But he had.
Despite the fact that he shut everybody out he was easily antagonised. It was the beast within him. No. This had always been his. And she wooed that beast every chance she got. And even in the moments when she wasn't there both he and his beast - for they were one and the same - missed that. They relied on the memory, the echo of her, the colour, the shape when deprived of the substance. And the clothes in the corner had just reminded him of what he missed, so he had in time given them away. Thrown her away. Driven himself mad. And then, when he had figured it out she was suddenly there, but not there. He felt for her but touched nothing. Only a sense of something locked deep within that he grasped at with shadow hands. Warded off by the ferocious light of her disappointment. Kept at bay.
"Uh--"
"Don't."
"Don't--?"
"You're gonna start trying to make small talk. Get all stammery. Don't. You might strain something."
He had seen that light, and he had watched it fading right before his eyes. Funny, he had never been so involved in human affairs, so attendant on it that he had cared to watch it fade. But there she was, a sun setting before his eyes.
***
Johnny Mathis was singing, somewhere off in the distance. His mouth was moving and stammering threatened. There were great gaps in the conversation where he paused - and she seemed to be listening to something else, looking somewhere else, feeling anywhere but here. Calls her name and her glance snaps towards him with a certain impertinence.
"Are you even hearing- "
"What is this song they're playing?"
"Wonderful, Wonderful by Johnny Mathis."
She did not smile. From then on his mouth tended to say things without his brain's actual permission. Not that it mattered - she never really listened, just agreed. And soon she was outside, sitting on the trunk of his car, haunched over, so caught up in thought it did not seem to matter where she sat or when, or with whom.
She said nothing in the car just stared out of the window. But he sensed the resistance in her dwindling. A certain release to let things happen. The scents were a blazing mess in her, though, and she must have phased through every radio frequency in the state and more before they got back.
The engine dies with a rumble. Her belt buckle darts away like a serpent's tongue as she turns to face him. Never seen that expression on her face before, like she was seeing him for the first time. For once he doesn't try speaking. Only lets her lean across and kiss him. It's warm and wonderful, and kind of censored. Leans back again, her eyes searching, searching for something. He touches her hand - she doesn't shrink back, the bubble bursts. The air around them stills, and in and around her he senses another change. The gravity in him shifts again.
They walk to the hotel together, hand in hand. She hesitates for a moment on the way there.
"Angel?"
Absently he's stroking her hair, she doesn't seem to mind.
"Hmm?"
"You think we're gonna look back on this and laugh?"
"You actually...want to...look back on it."
"And you don't?"
"Well I...laugh wouldn't be what...I'd be doing."
"Guess not. But if, by any means this thing goes wrong-"
"And it won't."
"But if it does...and I die..."
"Don't say that."
"I *will* come back and haunt your brooding ass!"
"And I will never let it come to that."
"You mean over your dead body, right?"
He let the flippancy of that lie. Until it occurred to him.
"Are you...scared?"
Quickly and quietly, somehow smaller than she should be: "You betcha." Her admission rustles the trees with the night breeze. They whisper her confession. She adds: "But maybe it's not the end of the world, you know. I'll be all right."
She flashed him *the* smile (my, my, her acting was getting better) slipped out of his arms and crossed to the Hyperion. He followed. Not the end of the world, but without her a world without purpose.
