visiongirl: ([Angel] Wish I could stay)
Cordelia Chase ([personal profile] visiongirl) wrote2014-09-05 02:39 pm

If My Heart Was A House You'd Be Home | For [personal profile] chuisle| [community profile] all_inclusive

It's been a few months now since Cordelia first arrived here in the hotel. Things have eased up a little, after that rather public argument of theirs he did give her more space, which she's appreciated. It's given her time to adjust to life in the hotel, to occasionally branch out and talk to other people.

Not that she doesn't still spend a lot of time with him anyway, because she does. In all this time neither one of them have even suggested the idea of her getting her own room -- or at least her own bed. He still sleeps on the fold out sometimes but it's not that uncommon for them to end up asleep in the same bed.

Or he sleeps, anyway. Months later and Cordelia still has trouble sleeping. Maybe it's because after being in a coma so long, after dying in one there's an irrational fear that if she falls asleep she might not wake up.

Which is why she's lying here in the dark, staring at the ceiling and thinking about things a little too much. She's not the brooder of the two of them, preferring to live in the moment then the past but sometimes it's easier not to. It's easier to not think about how they shouldn't let whatever is going on here end up in their long list of missed opportunities. To just indulge the irrational fear that if actually talks to the man she loves about things she'd probably just end up disappearing again.

He had once suggested that maybe they were supposed to miss their moment -- but Cordelia rejects that idea. She has problems with the idea of thinking it was all up to fate or how things were "supposed" to be -- like their choices don't even matter. Because they do. Skip might of taken all the credit for how her life shaped out, how it was all supposedly manipulated so Jasmine could hijack her but she refuses to give them that much credit. To believe that their choices, what they want or feel don't matter. It does.

"Angel?" She calls out quietly, as if testing to see if he's fallen asleep yet. It's a little strange, sometimes, that they have the same sleep schedules now. Or at least they do in theory with him being human and all.
chuisle: (pic#7813630)

[personal profile] chuisle 2014-09-13 11:05 pm (UTC)(link)
He's not on the bed or the fold out this evening, but stretched out on the sofa with a good book that he's very nearly done with. Upon hearing his name, however, he sets the book aside and moves into the bedroom through the open door. Angel almost turns on the main light, but thinks better of it, turning on a lamp with a low, soft light near the doorway instead.

"Can't sleep?"

Asks the pot calling the kettle black. He can't sleep, either.
chuisle: (pic#7813531)

[personal profile] chuisle 2014-09-27 03:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Angel has indeed picked up on it, but it's something he's very reluctant to address. Her coma had been a series of frustrating months, where he argued, unseen by his friends and those who cared about him, with some of Wolfram & Hart's highest paid employees. He plowed through every single viable department, recalling wizards and warlocks from alternate dimensions to work their magic on Cordelia in attempt to bring her out of her slumber. Nothing they did — nothing he did — had worked, and all he'd succeeded in doing was costing the firm millions in useless research and resources, earning himself a very stern lecture from Eve on where he should and shouldn't be spending his company's money.

Talking about his time as Wolfram & Hart's CEO was another thing he didn't want to discuss. Technically, he still was the guy in charge of the Los Angeles branch. His contract was still active, and it was a little frightening to think that whatever (or whoever) controlled this world had the ability to keep them in it. Whatever that power was, it overrode the Senior Partners' ability to recall him using his contract.

"Very," he answers without hesitation. Others would get a shrug and a lie, but Cordelia gets the truth. "I haven't been human in centuries. I forgot how to do a lot of things that people who aren't dead have to do."

Like shave. Also use the bathroom... That had been a mortifying night for he and Wesley both. It wasn't his fault that indoor plumbing wasn't a thing in the 1750s!
chuisle: (pic#7813463)

[personal profile] chuisle 2014-10-05 07:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Telling Buffy that Cordelia and Wesley were dead had been hard enough, but telling Cordelia herself that such had happened to Fred, Wesley, and maybe even Gunn, too, was going to hurt a lot more. Unlike Buffy, Cordelia had been close to these people — they were family, comrades in arms through the good times and the bad. She deserved to know, but he didn't want to tell her. Not yet. Maybe that made him a coward, but a man who's been through as much as he has is entitled to a little selfishness now and then.

"Oh yeah," he says emphatically, recalling all the modern day mechanisms and habits he barely blinked at when he was dead that had confounded the crap out of him while he tried to navigate them as a living person who now relied on them. "There was a period of awkward adjustment. Really awkward. Made even awkward-er by the necessity to pretend I was still a vampire."

Angel grimaces, remembering all the times he was beaten and bloody, hot and sweaty and seven different kinds of uncomfortable beneath the layers of his long leather coat, doing his damnedest to walk upright and in a straight line. Not dying right then and there had hinged on his ability to tolerate the pain and make it back to the firm without giving himself away.