"Why does the mirror move like me?"
By Mackatlaw
Chapter One: The human thing to do
Angel followed the path of cobblestones up the steep driveway, where he'd just come out of the white house at the bottom of the steep curve. Mostly covered by trees, it was a modest little split-level building, almost cozy, and slightly hidden by the turn before one got out into the residential street. He didn't remember how he got here. Doyle had asked him to come help, was the last thing he could recall. There had been a demon. But then, there was always a demon.
He rubbed his clean-shaven face ruefully. He had never had much of a beard before he died, only a bit of shadow, but he shaved every night nonetheless. After all, it was the human thing to do. Angel prided himself on being human. He had a soul, that brightly glowing light that he had seen several times encased in an Orb of Thessala, but there was more to being human than having a soul. That's why he drank blood from a coffee mug, ate solid food when he could endure having bowel movements, and slept in a bed, not a coffin.
He looked around uncertainly. He was in a quiet suburb somewhere. Lawns were well-kept, with enough green trim to show that people cared, but not excessively. The mailboxes needed no concrete pillbox protection, but were carefully tended with jaunty red flags, no need for concrete protection. He saw a few cars parked in driveways, mainly middle-class Hondas and Chevrolets, with a shiny red TransAm hidden under one person's garage. Probably a teenager, or more likely from the newness, a doctor who'd finally been able to afford the car they wanted in high school. Nobody was out playing, though. Judging from the lack of activity and the angle of the sun, it was probably somewhere between three, when the schools let out, and five, when people drove home from
work. Sun? He blinked and checked again. Then he rubbed a face with suddenly aching eyeballs.
He stepped hastily under the shade of a tall spreading tree, prepared to dive for further sanctuary under a nearby car, when he caught himself. If that was really the sun and he was really on his own world, he'd be a pile of ash, gently drifting in the breeze. He didn't understand why he'd even stepped out of the house if the sun was out and not noticed until now. He'd ambled out like it was the easiest thing in the world, like he when he'd never taken a step outside during the day for over two hundred years without being afraid of going to hell or oblivion.
He felt his fangs, which had come out at danger. The neighborhood still looked peaceful, but something was very wrong, so wrong that it had lulled the survival instinct to sleep. Even now, he kept wanting to shrug it off, not worry about what was happening. He forced his fangs to retract, pushing down on them with one hand and the vampiric facial folds with the other until he knew he looked human again. His lack of control shamed him, but the rules were wrong now. Vampires, with or without a soul, should explode in daylight, not be worrying about their potential afterlife.
Wait. What had he been doing in the house? He tried to think but couldn't remember. He'd walked up the driveway. But he couldn't see back to what was in that house. He'd been putting one foot after the other on the cement. Before that, sometime in the distant past, he remembered Doyle coming to him with a problem. That much was still clear. Just nothing between that and now.
He'd been sitting in the hotel office early one evening, feet propped up on his desk, disconsolately leafing through one of Cordelia's women's magazines. He wasn't really paying much attention to the words, but more to the scent she'd left behind on it. Apple blossom conditioner, some facial powder and cosmetic, but mainly a woman smell that was all hers, musky, sensual, out-of-reach.He sighed and threw the magazine down. Cordelia and he were still an "item", he supposed, and sometimes trysted, as they called it back in Ireland. He'd usually called it wenching, since he was rarely in polite company. Second sons of rich parents could afford to go and be rakes. After all, there was always more money where that came from, and no consequences as long as you told the priest on Sunday.
He should know. He'd made enough of them give him their own last confession before he'd ripped out their tongues, and then their blood with the rest of the flesh. If he was feeling particularly artistic, he made Drusilla take them first. The vampire strength of the madwoman could hold them down easily, especially if she'd sampled the vintage a little ahead of time. 1805 English deacon was one of the best, he thought. Protestant, of course. Angelus didn't spare any Catholics out of memory for his Irish upbringing, though; he simply became more creative instead.
The cries of helpless pleasure as the sanctimonious bastards got to come and violate their chastity vows always brought Angelus to an erection. Once the priest finished panting under the cool pleasures (well, warm at this point, really; Dru always liked a little blood with her pain) of the undead monster on top of him, Drusilla would roll off and let Angelus have a turn. Sometimes this was pain and beatings and knives; sometimes it was sex. If the priest was young and good-looking, he offered a choice of sodomy or something excruciating with the crucifix. Most held out to the bitter meaning of what "martyrdom" really meant. The ones who resisted got taken anyway, only it was a lot more painful than otherwise. Everyone died in the end, of course. Anything Angelus ever promised was a lie and a cheat.
In the present, he shifted uncomfortably in his padded swivel chair, and crossed his legs. He didn't want to be thinking about what aroused Angelus, but his mind wandered there anyway. It had been so long since Cordelia let him in her bed, and aside from her, he didn't have many other sexual experiences this century to draw on. He thought about Buffy briefly and winced, picking up his coffee mug for a quick sip of pig's blood to distract him. Of course, that got him thinking about richer human blood and the "good old days". That hadn't been him, that had been somebody else, somebody soulless, but he still had the memories, enjoyable and painful at the same time.
Angel had swiven scores of women in his wenching days, back before Darla and his second life. Had shown him the error of his ways. She'd been a traditionalist, even buried him in a coffin because her children always took a few days to rise. She wanted him to have a proper funeral so he could terrorize his family when she rose. He never understood why she chose him, though he'd asked her a hundred times. She would always shrug, and say in her femme fatale, bitch manner, "Looked like fun." Angelus understood, though. That was all the reason he ever needed. Darla was worse than a demon from hell. Given the choice between your average demon, here on earth anyway, and Darla, he'd take the demon any time. The demon breed might run out of ideas, but Darla never would.
He'd surprised her, though, because nothing could have prepared her for the smiling demon, charming with a grin and a thirst for cruelty like all the devils in hell, who rose from the churchyard in three days. When he woke up, he decided to become worse than any mortal man, and few would disagree. Murders, rapes, brutalities, broken homes, mental anguish, outright torture, he'd done most of the sins he could think of, though he had his favorites. Sex and violence went so well together.
He rarely kept the priests, though sometimes he'd take an altar boy as a catamite, but more often he'd choose a pretty little nun and take her with his troupe of vampires, monsters all. He, Spike, Dru and Darla would teach the nun everything they could think of until they'd broken her. When they were done, usually they'd kill her and dump her by the roadside, though sometimes they gave her to a local brothel if she was still pretty. It gave pocket money, after all, and added extra spice.
Leafing through the magazine, one particular blonde beauty made him think of a girl he'd known a long time ago. Her hair was up in a bun, with a few artfully arranged curls trailing out like they wanted to be free. One year, in the eighteenth century, he'd made a bet with William the Bloody, better known as Spike for his habit of nailing people up by railroad spikes. They'd been intrigued by a French nun they'd picked up after ravaging a convent. The picture looked too much like her, who in turn looked too much like his old love Buffy, for his peace of mind.
But then the door opened, and he lost his train of thought. Probably for the best. He hadn't really liked where that train was going. He looked across the room at his best friend, irritated despite himself. Half-Irish, half-demon, Doyle had proven to be a good man with a true heart. No matter how Angel felt, his guide and ally could cheer him up.
"Yes, Doyle? What's on your mind?"
"Uh, sorry to bother you, boss, but I came across something interesting, and unless you've got something better going on, you might want to listen. I know you need your quiet time and all that, " he cocked his head and quirked his mouth, looking at the Mademoiselle magazine, "but we've got real people, not ink and paper, who could use some help."
"Ah... I was just doing some research."
"Of course you were. Now, as I was sayin'..."
Angel grinned and grabbed his coat. Doyle was always good for a laugh, unless he was in his cups and wallowing in his darker moods, and right now almost anything sounded like an improvement over personal time with the demons kept buried in his particular basement. Besides, he'd already read the magazine twice.
He grabbed his gentleman's great coat, more stylish than practical if he was forced to admit, but it reminded him of the styles he'd grown up with. He'd never admit it, too, but he loved to put his hands in the pockets of the duster, hunch slightly, and talk the tough guy talk, be the knight in faded armor. "Down these mean streets a man must walk..." Chandler's Philip Marlowe was a personal hero of his. Misunderstood, unappreciated, but he did the job and he did what he thought was right. Tarnished but still out there walking.
Angel had seen every detective movie Hollywood ever made in black and white, and most of the ones in color. God, he loved Hollywood, magic better than the real thing. His friends wouldn't let him use the movie buff deck in Trivial Pursuit anymore because it would come down to a race between him and Lorne. No one else was even close. He'd always been a light sleeper, either as himself or as the demon possessing his body. When he'd gotten his soul back and was tormenting himself on a regular basis, he spent a lot of time in movie theaters in the fifties. He was a light sleeper, soul or not. Angelus could sleep the sleep of the cheerily damned, because there was a hell and he was already a demon in it. Buffy should have sent Angelus to hell, not him. That'd been the plan. If Willow had just let his soul be wherever it was, everything would have been right, he knew it. Angelus would have been just one more monster, and he, Angel, would be wherever he was meant to be.
But was that right? He stopped, consumed with doubt again. He deserved hell, he knew he had, because Angelus had just been Angel without restraint. The soul didn't have a personality; it was just the immortal part, the chain of conscience weighing down the rest. The "I" that thought was there all along, in every memory, making him responsible for Angelus's crimes. But wouldn't that mean Angel and Angelus were the same being, only with a soul and without?
Angelus had told Buffy that more than once. But then, what about Heaven? Angel, once Liam, didn't really believe that anymore. He thought that the soul might be immortal, but the self wasn't. The soul was God's, or whoever's, way of keeping people under control. So the soul might go back to heaven when you died, but the "you" that thought didn't.
Break. Interruption. His mind skipped back to the present, wherever that was.
He walked up the street in the daylit suburb, confused, but enjoying the sensation of not bursting into fire. Not really a sensation, he supposed, more the absense of one, but the feeling of sunlight's heat on his skin, pleasantly warming, was like he remembered from his breathing days. He knew something was wrong, knew he couldn't be both vampire and human, couldn't have fangs and walk around in sunlight, but if this was a hallucination or a dream, he wanted to enjoy while it lasted. In the distance he could hear kids playing, but he couldn't see them. He heard the sounds of people moving around in their houses. Any moment now, the rest of the family would be pulling their cars in the driveway from work.
But he kept not waking up. First rule of supernatural investigation, then: if it seems real, treat it as such until you found out otherwise. The bruises were less that way. He needed to know where he was as much as he could. If he walked up to the end of the street, he'd hopefully see a sign and know a street name. Then he could go find a phone and call somebody to come get him. He wondered who, though. Cordelia? Wesley? Gunn? Cordelia would assume he was delusional and tell him to not go out into the sun until she got there. Gunn would require too many questions first that he couldn't answer, and he still didn't know the man very well. Wesley was probably the first choice, since he'd come out anyway and figure out a theory before he got halfway there. He'd rather see Cordelia, though. But that was for more reasons than the practical. He missed her touch, her kiss, even her scoldings. He didn't know if it was the shrew or the ditz he loved, or maybe the way she balanced both. Why did he love her? He didn't know. A stray thought said, "Not for her mind, that's for sure." Those weren't his thoughts anymore, weren't the kind of man he was now, so he pushed it out of his awareness into elsewhere.
But the street kept winding into other streets, turning into a much larger subdivision than he'd realized, and try as he might, he couldn't find a street sign. He could always knock on a door and ask to use their phone, ask where he was and say he'd gotten turned around. Only, oddly shy, he didn't want to disturb anyone's privacy. So he wandered, peaceful, but not getting anywhere. This could have gone on for a few minutes, it could have been an hour. He'd lost track of time. But the sun hadn't gone down yet, so he knew it couldn't have been too long.
Then there was another break in his thoughts, and he realized he was walking beside Cordelia, only it wasn't Cordy. She looked like her but wasn't, and that was significant, only he didn't know why. They walked for a few minutes and talked about nothing in particular, nothing he remembered later, except for the last part of the conversation.
"I'm attracted to you," he admitted, stealing a quick glance at her, then looking away. He knew it wasn't appropriate, but he wanted to be honest around her. Looking down at his face, she smiled. "Don't worry about it. Really, don't let it trouble your mind. You have other things to worry about. Why don't you let me give you a ride to where you need to go?"
Break. The movie projector skipped, his mind blanked. They were riding in her car, navigating effortlessly through the streets, but he could never tell where they were or how to find his way back. But she knew the way, and he trusted her. They were almost to her place, which was the place he needed to go, and then she stopped the sedan. "I've taken you as far as I can go. You'll need to catch up and meet me there." She looked sympathetic.
He got out and watched the sedan drive away. It went up a hill and turned right into another street, and he knew that's where he needed to be, she would be there if he could just catch up. He started walking, trying to keep her in his sights, but she was gone. He knew the way now, though.
Then he got to the top of the hill. Disconnect. Break. Interrupt. The film jumped again, a splice. Doyle was saying something in a hallway. The electric lights splashed off his pallor. The rich red carpet was soft under his feet. They were looking for someone who would help them find the demon. All they had to do was open the door and ask them. Doyle said something that made him laugh. Made Liam laugh. No. He was Angel. He was Angel. He didn't deserve to be Angelus.
Doyle said he should open the door first just to be safe. "After all, I'm only part demon, you know?" Doyle was trying harder than usual to be funny, he noticed. But Angel put it down to nerves. Doyle was his best friend, after all. He didn't mean anything by it. He knew how much Angel struggled to keep his demon in check, but the demon Angelus had been forced on him. Doyle had grown up with his heritage, had a long time to be used to it. Doyle was good. He had a soul.
Angel opened the door.
Light. Light so bright it washed everything away, took it all away, made his mind go away. A mocking grin, as Angel saw his friend's true face, the grin that was laughing at the world because it found the world amusing, not because it liked it. And last words from Doyle, the last thing he remembered: "Place not your trust in demons, old friend. You really should have remembered."
Next: the Chapel Perilous