Part 2
Recollection

"What did you see?" Angel asked again as Lorne sat himself down on the couch, still in shock and Joy, under Gunn's watching gaze, made her way to him.

"It's okay," she said in a soft voice trying to shake him out of it.

"Don't tell me it's okay!" Lorne suddenly screamed at her.

"It...it will be," Joy assured him a little taken aback, she wasn't used to people screaming at her like that. Angel looked at Lorne then at Joy and back at the demon.

"What the hell did you do to him?" Gunn asked Joy in a harsh tone.

"Nothing, I just...showed him he shouldn't fear me. I'm just looking for help," Joy told him. She wasn't so sure she had done the right thing anymore. She hadn't showed him everything, actually he had seen too little to know anything of what was to come, but still, even if it was just a bit, she felt as if her mission was close to failure. She was in this time only for a few hours and already she had been forced to reveal a part of her secret.

"Was it real?" Lorne asked in a lower, softer tone.

"Yeah," Joy whispered, hoping at least he wouldn't tell the others.

"You have to go to Sunnydale," Lorne turned to Angel. "Don't ask me why, just go. And could anyone get a drink? Whatever you have in a double."

"I think Wesley used to hide this bottle of scotch..." Gunn looked under the front desk, after a few moments finding what he was looking for. "Here."

He handed it to Lorne. When Gunn offered to get him a glass too, the demon shook his head. He felt like drinking a tub of scotch not just a glass. The whole bottle was just a start.

"So I'm coming," Angel looked over at Joy. The last time he had seen Lorne in that state had been after he had read Cordelia. "No one's gonna try and make a hole in his skull for what you showed him, right?"

"I don't think so," Joy knew the things she had shown Lorne were of no importance. The front door suddenly opened and Cordelia and Connor entered.

"Hey, guys. I just wanted to pick up some things," Cordy told them, feeling as if she'd interrupted some sort of vital conversation.

"Cordelia..." Joy mumbled, excited of meeting her. Cordelia's stories were among her favorites. The half-demon ex-cheerleader that managed to be popular by day and a demon hunter by night. At some point her mother had even been jealous that she considered Cordelia her favorite hero. She was only sorry Cordelia Chase would end her life so soon.

"Am I suppose to know you?" Cordelia asked her confused. Joy didn't answer her. Thinking that maybe she had thought she was joking, Cordy asked again: "Really, do you I know you?"
"No, you don't," Angel quickly stepped up to her. "She's a client."

"Oh," Cordy passed by Angel, not addressing him another word. He looked after her as she climbed upstairs. Every time he saw her he expected the old Cordy with her cheery smile and each time he faced only disappointment.

"I didn't want her to go off by herself at night," Connor told Angel when his father looked questioningly at him.

"Does she..." Angel started.

"When can we leave?" Joy interrupted Angel's reply. The vampire looked towards her and Connor seemed to finally take interest in her too.

"Where are you going?" Connor asked Angel.

"Sunnydale," Angel said and he suddenly got an idea. "I can take Cordy with me."

"What?" Connor didn't like the sound of it.

"Maybe she'll remember something. She was born there, that's where her past is," Angel told his son. Connor didn't know about that. He realized there was a lot he didn't know about Cordelia, but he promised himself he would find out everything there was to know.

"I'll come too," Connor suddenly heard himself saying.

"Why?" Angel asked. He had enough of a hard time dealing with Cordy living with Connor, he didn't want to spend an entire trip worrying about what the two would be up to instead of focusing on the problem at hand.

"You'll be too busy with your, uhm, client" Connor pointed towards Joy. "You can't leave her alone," he was referring to Cordelia now. "I'm just going to be there to make sure nothing happens to her."

"He has a point," Gunn agreed with Connor. "She can't really take care of herself right now."

"Yeah," Angel was forced to accept. It did make sense, but he could've juggled finding some gholas with spending time with Cordelia. He would always be able to find time for her. He had hoped that some time alone with him would perhaps awaken the old feelings inside Cordelia and would make their present situation less tense, but now he severely doubted his son would give them any privacy what so ever. Connor seemed hell bent on preventing Cordelia from remembering anything about Angel even if his father didn't want to believe it.

"And someone has to take her out in daylight. That's where she probably has most of her memories from," Connor added not bothering to think how much that comment would sting his father.

Joy suddenly realized the present situation. It wasn't just Connor who was in love with Cordelia, it was Angel too...This piece of news confused her, Connor and Cordelia were written history, but Angel and Cordelia? Since when? Why had this detail been left out of the stories she had heard? It also made her mission harder. She didn't only have to separate Buffy from Spike, now she had to also find a way to break Angel away from Cordelia. This was the time of Cordelia's great amnesia - she remembered the stories - but this period ended with Celeste's conception... Luckily Connor would be there too and maybe the spark between them would light without her intervention and history would just take its course. She was broken out of her thoughts by the sound of two women talking while coming downstairs.

She looked up to see Cordelia and another woman coming into the lobby. She immediately recognized her. Lorne briefly startled in his seat at the sight of Fred, the image of her glorious grave flashing before his eyes. Joy's face tightened. Sure, her hair was much longer, but it was still Winifred Burkle under that naïve appearance. She was one of the few people Joy had grown up hating. The savior of humanity, the ultimate genius, the physician of a new era, the conceiver of the pawn theory - the murderer of millions. Fred was the one person whose grave she would spit on gladly. She was glorified for what she had done, but Joy knew the truth, she had just killed to be recognized by the world for her genius. She had been a stupid shallow woman in her eyes.

"What is she staring at?" Fred asked as she noticed Joy's disgusted gaze.

"Someone she might think is dead," Lorne muttered before taking another mouth full of scotch.
"What?" Fred looked at him confused.

"We can go now," Cordy said showing Connor the blue sweater she had come for. She had seen it laying around when they had showed her the place where all her things were stored. She remembered she had liked it because it was so soft.

"We're going somewhere else," Connor told her. "To..." he turned towards his father, not remembering the name of the city.

"Sunnydale. It's the city you were born in," Angel let her know. "I have to go there anyway so I thought it would do you good to be there too."

"Is Connor coming too?" Cordy immediately asked. Joy smiled, Connor and Cordelia's love story was legendary. When the bad times would come and strike LA with all their might they would stick together like...an apocalyptic version of Romeo and Juliet. She thought those words to be appropriate, because their end would be as tragic as those of Shakespeare's heroes. By the time the great tragedy of Los Angeles would take place, Joy would be far away in New Orleans with her mother and father, the hellmouth would be gone forever under the rubble of Sunnydale, Jacques would learn his first real spell and Celeste would kiss the world goodbye and become ashes forever.
"Yeah," Connor assured her.

"It would be a good idea to leave tonight," Joy spoke up.

"Great, we'll just pack a coupla' weapons," Gunn said smiling.

"Hold on, someone has to stay and watch over the agency," Angel reminded him an Gunn's smile faded. He had been looking forward to leaving town, especially for some good demon ass kicking. "You and Fred stay here. If you need help, call Wesley."

"No way I'm..." Gunn started arguing.

"Swallow your pride, Gunn. It's better than you and Fred winding up dead," Angel cut him short. Gunn shrugged, there was always that 'if'. He was sure he wasn't going to need any help from Wesley. The name of the ex-watcher caught Joy's attention. She wished so much that she could meet him in this time. Poor Wesley. Another sad destiny...if she thought of it now, it felt as if the detective agency had been cursed with the most tragic fates she had come to know in her life. And she had known so many.

"So now we can go?" Joy's eyes lit up with hope. In some ways she was looking forward to seeing Sunnydale. The place where legends were born and died. But in some ways it frightened her. She remembered when she had visited it along with her mother. It hadn't really been Sunnydale, but the ghost town that followed its demise. Unlike LA, no one bothered to rebuilt this place of horrors, so it remained the same - rubble - identical to the one her mother had left behind years ago. The only difference was that on the time of their visit the candles had burnt out and the glowing acres of soothing fire lit in the memory of those who died in the battle between human and demon were gone. She remembered the smell of dead, the disturbing chill that ran up her spine when she stared at the ruins, the voices of thousands of spirits lost between this world and the next whispering in her ears 'tell her I miss her...' 'where are you?'...'Janie... is that you...' 'the fire, the fire'... "Don't listen to them," her mother had told her. And she was right, she couldn't have done anything. Their deaths couldn't be avenged because the evil that killed them was closed beneath their feet, in the ever moving hellmouth. Her mother had taken her hand, even if she had been 15 at the time, shaking her out of the tempest of grief that Sunnydale had become.

She remembered her mother's steady hands guiding her through the ruins and she recalled how awkward it had seemed to her that she knew - even if the town was now a havoc - where all the streets and all the buildings were. They had gone straight to a gigantic crater. There, her mother's hands began to shake. This was where the battle had been fought. The place that still haunted her mother's nightmares. She knew that in some nights, she found herself there again, each time fighting differently, saving others, leaving those once saved to perish. Had it been different if they had been saved? She recalled the odd feeling of her mother's hand slipping out of hers, as if she was drifting away in some unknown world, and she wanted nothing more than to grab hold of her and get her out of harms way, but she did nothing - she knew she didn't belong in that world and didn't understand it. She just watched as her mother walked away from her and fell crying on her knees a few feet away, seeming to want to pull at the earth, demanding that it give her back the friends it stole. At that moment Joy had cursed her father for refusing to come. He had told her that Sunnydale was a place that belonged to the past and the real dead and he was neither. Joy knew that his father held even uglier memories of that place than her mother had. And her mother, even if she seemed so weak and fragile in front of the past, was stronger than him.

She didn't remember the exact moment when her mother had risen to her feet, but she recalled the wind suddenly blowing harder and her mother being up. She desperately tried to light the candles she had brought, but the wind didn't want to let her. It seemed to mock her efforts and want to drive her way. It seemed to yell to her that she didn't belong there anymore, to leave and never look back. This was a place of the real dead, this was their wasteland and they had nothing to look for there. Humanity had abandoned it and so should have they. Fate was so cruel, she had thought then and was thinking now.

"Joy, let's go," Angel moved his hand in front of her eyes. "I thought we lost you for a moment there."

"Aren't you gonna pack?" she asked feeling as if she had traveled to another reality and her skin was turned inside out because she had been pulled back into this one. Jacques had warned her about the side affects of the time spell. If she would let herself be pulled in the whirlwind of her memories she could get lost forever in them. That was one of the reasons Jacques appeared from time to time, to check up on her, make sure she was okay and if needed pull her back with or without her mission accomplished.

"Already done. While you were...uhm..." Angel couldn't find the right words.

"Blacked out?" Cordelia suggested as she came downstairs carrying a small bag.

"I blacked out?" Joy looked at Angel for an answer.

"Not really. Your eyes were kinda blank. All you said was that there are
ghosts around here," Angel told her, but Joy had obviously no recollection of saying it now, but she knew one time she had said it - she had told that to her mother when they had first entered Sunnydale.

"Oh, sorry. The bad energy of this place it's-it's...overwhelming," she lied not daring to look Angel in the face, knowing her fib was totally out of place.

"O-kay," Cordy said not knowing if such a comment was made on a regular basis. "You really think I'll get some kind of memories of this place?"

"I don't know. Maybe. A lot happened when you were there. Something could trigger your memory," Angel told her, adding after pondering his words: "I figured that...I don't know, maybe you never had a normal moment here, anything you'd want to remember, but at some point you were happy there."

"So I wasn't happy here?" Cordelia asked and Joy wondered what was in Angel's head. Cordelia had been the happiest in Los Angeles. That's what the stories told her. When she was in Sunnydale all she had been was a scared little girl and an insecure teenager.

"I don't know. You had your fun moments, but there were...a lot of bad ones. You had a normal life there. For a while anyway," Angel replied. "Sometimes all you want is to be normal."

"It's strange, but I think I know the feeling," Cordelia told him as Connor entered the hotel again, not liking the closeness between his father and Cordelia. At least they weren't alone, he thought as he gave Joy a look. He had gone to his place to pick up some things. "You're back," Cordelia noticed with a smile. "We can go now," she turned towards Angel.

"I guess we should," Joy said, an odd feeling overcoming her. This would be the first time she'd ride an old fashion machine. New Orleans wasn't futuristic, but it wasn't set this far in the past either. Los Angeles was one of the first great steel metropolis to be built, then all the world seemed to rose up to the skies or fall down. New Orleans was one of the very few that survived the post-digital era and kept its old charm without falling into a third world country abyss. Jacques owned something he called his prized jewel, a beat up old truck that needed fuel and ran on wheels. Joy had never trusted it enough to climb aboard. It was messy, dirty and against the ecological laws imposed in her time. Jacques occasionally drove it around the bayu, but he'd never go into town with it. The police wasn't fond of Jacques and they were just looking for a reason to arrest him.

When she climbed in the car, she found the smell of fuel to be intoxicating. Angel, Cordelia and Connor didn't seem to notice her distress or the horrible smell. Luckily for her she could go hours without breathing. A special gift she had inherited from her father. Unfortunately not all his gifts were this useful, she thought as she suddenly stopped her heart from beating. Angel looked at her through the front mirror. He didn't have a reflection, but Joy knew that look very well, even if it was invisible. It was the same look her father had often given her when she used to go out and fight demons on her own. It was a look of worry. She shrugged to herself, Angel had nothing to worry about. She did. Her lifeline was slipping away with every minute that passed and it wasn't a disease that was doing it, it was she.

End Part 2