Maybe it had been a good day. Maybe it had been a bad night. Angel shifted another pillow under his head and stared through the page of his book.
If he was being precise about it, in a running-tally on the whiteboard kind of way—which was not the way the business of saving souls should be run— it was an okay day of congealed pigs' blood followed by an excruciating evening of royally fucking up his scared Champion duty. His eyelids closed like lead shutters. Angel spent his last conscious thought on tossing l'Idiot, unread, onto his nightstand.
Sunnydale. The word floated up as though summoned. The Master's home, prison, and tomb. Seat of the Aurelian line. Gloried hall of Hell's gaping mouth. The city of vampires and their Slayer. With a pang of strange regret, a certain night at the Bronze clawed its way out of his brain. The night Buffy had first burned him, the intensity of her cross pressing against his flesh. His cross. The night after he'd staked Darla and hadn't even—how could have possibly failed to have—and not even one little—?
Guilt churned in his veins. Suddenly, he was a hundred back in a red Victorian boudoir in the heart of Romania andohDarla, her thick blond curls falling over bare shoulders. His fingers tangled in her curls as he kissed her neck, arms, face like they were still lovers and as though he hadn't turned her bones and skin to so many handfuls of ash. Unlamented ash.
He tumbled into the black.
After a length of time, he found himself in a tight doormen's suit. The brass appointments of the uniform glinted in the white streaming through the grand Venetian blinds. Seated in a bare wood chair at the edge of a finely appointed lobby with brass fixtures and marble-mahogany furniture, he waited to be bidden. The hotel reminded him nothing of the faceless hotels he'd passed through like a merry-go-round in his fifty years of mere drifting before the final resorting to transience. Pre-Sunnydale, he struggled to remember. Pre-Buffy.
A man stumbled in the door, a bottle of cheap whiskey in hand, tattered brown coat stained and stinking of the gutter and rat blood. Angel did not recognize this tramp, unconsciously straightening the lapels of his uniform. His days as a doorman were limited. One of these days he would be in wherever it was those shiningly clad folk went as they whirled up the stairs, laughing at jokes which must have been funnier than any of the ones that Gunn and Wes told him, in dresses prettier than the ones that Cordy smoothed over her slim hips, with arms and torsos as sleekly defined and dangerous as Faith. The rat-smelling wreck puked up blood in the potted ferns. The stinking companion was worse than loneliness, he raged.
He opened the door to a new guest. A woman in blonde curls and a red, slinky kimono slid through the entrance and up the lobby stairs, disappearing into the hall.
A memory sparked in her wake. This man who stunk of overripe fruit and dead flesh was blocking his prize. An older man wrapped his knuckles on the glass, his travel bags hunching his shoulders terribly. He didn't hear; the bliss of knowing had transmuted the world around him to ice. Red Kimono would give him his prize. All he had to do was snap the tramp's neck. The thick ridges of his demon-face slid down his brow. He broke the leg off his Spartan chair. Three-legged, it sagged to one side. Useless now, his station.
The tramp saw the doorman coming and did nothing.
Angel hauled the empty-eyed creature to its feet by the lapels of its rancid jacket. It moaned, struggling to hold its head up for inspection. Angel hefted the makeshift club and stabbed the splintered end into the tramp's heart. It writhed. The stake descended again and again. Each time, writhing, stillness, and the eventual jerking movement of the tramps head. Big soulful brown eyes, soulful but empty of desire. They didn't ask him to stop. The limbs stilled. The head lolled back. The head twitched. The body drew another shuddering breath. The stake came down again. With brutal fury he killed it. Killed it until it was dead. And killed it again.
He couldn't open enough doors to escort the unfortunate through the lobby. And he didn't really want to. He burned to hold the red kimono woman in the doorway, press their bodies together hungrily in the light or in the dark. He wanted to kill the dirty pretender pissing in the hotel planters. He wanted to press his whole body to ash. Which is what, a small but growing voice whispered in his belly, he had wanted from the very first sip from his powdered lady's breast.
He woke to a gentle tapping from the hallway.
"Sunnydale—" Wesley said, his face anxiously peering through the crack.
"Take a message," Angel said. The door clicked shut.