Spoilers: All of Season 3 so far and some speculation for future episodes. This is set two years in the future.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Cordelia must make a choice...
Disclaimer: Not mine, Joss, David and all evil entities own...
Feedback: If y'don't mind, I'd love to read some...
Author's Note: Tomorrow, I'm lookin' to bring all my fics up to date. Hopefully, this will include Unexpected Surprises, The Luck O' The Irish, Wild Thing, Back Where She Belongs and anything else I have left to do... (That Dating Thing and We Demons Stick Together, I think) but this was just something bouncing round in my head that I had to write.
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She never really had been normal. In fact, coming from Sunnydale qualified to make you so far from normal that you were almost off the cosmological map. What else wasn't normal about the brunette standing at the edge of the pier was that she had survived Sunnydale. She'd got out in one piece, which a lot of people hadn't managed. Buffy had died twice there. Angel had gone to hell... Ms. Calendar had died, Kendra... The list was endless, all good people stuck in a One-Starbucks town where nothing was as it seemed.
She'd got out.
Okay, so her plans had changed a little. Instead of the inevitable stardom she'd expected, she'd gotten... A vampire and an irish half-demon, thus furthering her not-normal stakes. Strike two for Cordelia Chase. (Three, if you considered her dating Xander Harris.) Then, things were thrown into orbit. She'd gotten vision brain, her best friend had left her in pursuit of an evil bitch he then slept with, she'd been sucked into another dimension, forced to slavery, made Princess, fallen in love with a champion, watched as his child was stolen and then returned, had said vision brain almost kill her, be turned into a demon and now... She was faced with this. Easily the hardest choice in her life.
In her hands, she held happiness for so many people. Buffy, Angel, Connor... But oddly enough, not herself. She'd always known she was selfish, but here, in her hands, she held everything Angel had worked for in the past seven years and she hadn't gone straight to him with it. She'd come here, somewhere she could think. Oh, she knew it was wrong. This wasn't about her, this was about the man she called her best friend, about his happiness. But...
See? There was always that but. That one that taunted her, right in the back of her mind. It had done since Angel had turned human for that one day. When he turns human he goes straight to her. She wasn't bitter, not then at least, not even now, not really. If Buffy was what made him happy then, so be it. But they'd been playing this game for so long now. She'd nursed his son, when he was small and then, Angel had told her he loved her. She hadn't taken him seriously, how could she? Sure, he was pretty cuddly, as vampires went but... This was Angel, dork Angel who was just... A dork! And then later, when Connor had been returned, she'd helped get him into his first school. 15 years old, Angel had wanted Wesley to teach him lessons at the Hyperion. It was the first build up of trust between two friends, something that was still going on - regaining trust, Angel asking Wesley to tutor his son. Connor didn't talk about the place he'd been, didn't mention Holtz or anything, only said that the only good thing Holtz instilled into him was that hatred could destroy, take a life and break it until it was indistinguishable. Said that sometimes, when we thought we were making the right choice, it often turned out to be the wrong one. The betrayal that had ripped apart a friendship had been resealed by the return of Angel's son. Angel's son who, when you looked into his eyes, was wiser than his fifteen years. Angel's soon who took after his father in so many ways, despite not being round him much.
The lessons had gone well at first, but Connor, grew quickly tired. He knew he wasn't normal, just like his Aunt Cordy, he knew that his father stayed the same, never changed, drank blood from a container in the fridge. He knew the ways of the world as taught to him by a man consumed with hatred for a demon - knew of the Slayer and her fight against evil, knew everything about the demon world there was in Holtz's knowledge to give him but he wanted something... More.
He wanted normality. He wanted to look to the ideals that other people pertained to, see why they aspired to make themselves better and look at whether he wanted to do the same. He wanted a life. Cordelia had argued until she was almost blue in the face with Angel...
"Angel, he's 15 years old... He wants to be normal, a normal kid in a normal school."
"But he's not normal."
"I know that!"
"Cordelia, if..."
"You can't be round to protect him all the time, Angel. You're going to smother him and this time, instead of being taken away, Connor's going to run..." She said softly.
Angel had frowned, "But what if..."
"No but's Angel. He needs some normality in his life."
"But he's not normal! What's he going to say to the other kids when they ask him where he went on holiday this year or... How long he's lived in LA or... Why does his Dad never age? His Aunty Cordelia float? The questions are the most difficult thing he'll have to deal with..."
"No, they're not." She said softly, "What he'll have to deal with his seeing how apart from this world he really is, Angel. Maybe it will do him some harm, but there's always the chance it'll do him some good too."
Angel sighed, "But..."
"Angel... Please? Just let him do this."
"Okay, okay. He can go to school," Said Angel, shaking his head, unsure of whether this was a mistake or not...
Not long after school had started, Cordelia helped him get dressed on his first date, because of course, with education came dates... And with dates came Angel checking the credentials of every girl who showed an interest in him which, come on, he was Angel's son - he was a hottie, that much was guaranteed.
The questions of why Angel could never leave the hotel during the day had never come, Connor knew why. But a few weeks ago, he'd had a baseball game - his first at LaFayette High and Angel had been unable to attend. The gang had been there, cheering him on - but they all knew that both Connor and Angel would have rather had the vampire at his side when his son hit his first home run... Getting back to the hotel, Angel had smiled, said that the wonders of technology meant he could be there with his son sometimes when his real self couldn't and watching his face as on the TV screen, Angel saw Connor in his first achievement outside of demon fighting and in something normal, Cordelia knew. She knew she loved him. He'd looked so happy and yet so sad all at the same time...
Would he look like that now? She wondered as she looked down at the bottle. The end of an era, she supposed. The end of all things she, Cordelia Chase found comforting. It was funny to think of Angel's life as beginning now, for he had been alive for almost 250 years and shortly... That was what it would be, new beginnings. Everthing would change.
She sighed and closed her eyes, frowning at the betrayal of her own mind. She could see his face, had seen it every night for the past two and a half years. That slight smile that adorned his lips when he was happy... The full on one when he was in total dork mode...
"It's - it's saying - that you get to live until you die. It's saying - it's saying you become human.
Sighing, Cordelia pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear. She knew
now, what she had to do. Slowly, the brunette placed the vile of green
liquid on the pier floor and crushed it with her heel, sending bits of
the glass down into the sea below... She'd made his decision for him...
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The first thing he noticed about her, was the way her shoulders slumped as she came down into the hotel, "Cordelia?"
She never answered him. Quickly, Angel ran round the other side of the counter and grabbed her by both shoulders, "Cordelia? Please... What's wrong?" He asked, panicked. She was his lifeline, his sunshine... His everything, if she hurt, he hurt.
"I made your decision." Said the brunette, pulling herself up straight, "I knew that if I let you see... You'd ask me."
"What?" Puzzled, Angel stepped back a little, "Cordelia, what's going on? Will you... Look at me?"
"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you for the past two and a half years. Ever since Connor... But I was too afraid," She said softly. "You told me that you'd finished believing... You'd finished believing you could ever be happy... You told me you'd stopped loving, stopping caring when Holtz jumped in that portal and I just couldn't... I couldn't get hurt all over again. I wouldn't let myself and I won't now. I won't let myself have false hope that some day maybe you're not going to leave me or..."
Angel was getting more and more worried with each passing second, "Cordy, I'm not going to leave you. Why would I leave you?"
"I knew that if you saw that bottle in my hand, you'd ask me first. What you should do... I knew if you saw me cry, you'd do what I wanted and not what you needed. I smashed it, Angel." She said, meeting his eyes. "I gave you what you deserved."
It was then that Angel noticed it. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath, his heart struggling to beat in a chest that had lay dormant for years. Puzzled, Angel looked up at her as she stood, tears streaming freely down her cheeks and he got up, stepped a bit closer. "Cordy..." He began, "What the... How... What happened?"
"You're human." She replied, her eyes distant, "I killed you so that you could be happy... I couldn't keep pretending forever, Angel. That you might..."
"That I might what?"
"Choose me."
"Choose you?" Angel looked at her, "Cordelia, you're telling me that you gave me... This... My shanshu because you... Why?"
"Because it was the right time, we faced the Apocalypse, you stopped it. They sent me a vision of you, human. A demon. I asked Wesley for his help, he agreed. We killed the demon and now you're human." She said softly.
"And the real reason?"
"That was the real reason. You've worked so hard for this, I couldn't take it away from you, Angel."
"How would you be taking it away from me?"
"By asking you to choose!"
"What?"
"By asking you to choose me!" Said Cordelia, swiping furiously at her tears, "You just don't get it, do you?"
"Do you?"
"What?"
"Do you?" Asked Angel, "Get it? Do you get it?"
"Get what?"
"I can't choose you, Cordelia because you guys, you already are my Shanshu. You're what makes it important, without you, it would just be... Nothing. It would mean nothing..." He said softly. "Where did you think I would go, anyway? Back to Sunnydale?"
Cordelia stood there, staring at him, "But... You mean you're not?"
"How many times am I supposed to tell you that I love you before it sinks in?" Asked Angel, shaking his head incredulously. "I've wasted two years on what if's and maybe's, now my life is really short, you think we can not waste time on the rest of the how's and the why's?"
"But... But..." She sputtered, "Uhm, sure... What do you want to do?"
Angel smiled, "I want to take a walk, with you, in the sunshine and then..."
"What?" Said Cordelia, "Then what?"
Angel let something akin to a leer slide across his face, "You." He said softly, "I want you, Cordelia Chase."
And for the first time since she'd stood on that pier, early this morning, Cordelia smiled, "Well can I just say duh." Because in her hand, she clutched his. It felt warm. Safe...
End