Cordelia: A Better Where to Find
Mar. 1st, 2004 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: A Better Where to Find
Author: Doyle
Rating: PG
Pairing: none
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anna_maria, who wanted Cordelia/Connor, shippy or not. Spoilerific for ‘You’re Welcome.’
Summary: Time for one last goodbye.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia…
Thou losest here, a better where to find.
- King Lear
Angel’s office swam and blurred before her eyes, like a chalk painting melting in the rain, and Cordelia blurted out, “Wait!”
The scene froze around her. She could make out that Angel was holding the phone, but not the expression on his face, so she couldn’t tell if he knew yet. That was good. She wanted her last memory of Angel to be that kiss, and not his face when he realized she’d been Sixth Sensing it all day.
She’d had a whole day to get ready to go. Angel would say her goodbyes for her. Wes and Fred and Gunn would know soon enough; somebody would think of calling Xander and the rest.
And that was really that. Cordelia Chase, that was your life.
Only she couldn’t help thinking of somebody who wouldn’t know she was gone, and she said out loud, “Oh, come on. I’ve had the visions and been in a mystical coma and given birth to an evil ex-Power, who incidentally you guys could have maybe been keeping an eye on, and I can’t get ten more minutes?” She would have said she felt like a kid again, begging to stay up past her bedtime, except her mom and dad had never been big on rules, or on making her do anything she didn’t feel like.
She got the feeling that the Powers That Be didn’t work that way. But she must have been owed one, because the office melted into a different place. The world sharpened and she took a minute to get her bearings – she was outside, somewhere colder than California, and the quickest glance around told her she was in a bus depot.
Sitting on a bench, not far from where she’d appeared, and reading a book by the stark overhead lights, was Connor.
**
He looked different. He was still too skinny, and not very tall, and his brand new life clearly didn’t include a butch-er haircut. His eyes were different, though, when she got close enough to see them. He looked up and gave her a polite, shy smile, and his eyes weren’t haunted any more.
“Hi,” she said, sitting down. The bench was cold and probably covered with the Ebola virus, but she technically had minus fourteen hours to live, so it didn’t matter much. “Are you getting the bus?”
“Um.” He flushed and stammered that yeah, he’d been visiting his girlfriend and now he was going back to college, and he was so nervous about talking to her that Cordelia realized he thought she was a hooker. That nearly made her laugh, till she remembered the night the world nearly ended. Giving him something real.
She wanted to touch him, stroke his face, tell him it wasn’t his fault and that girl, the sacrifice, she would have died whatever he’d done. Instead she cut him off with a breezy, “It’s okay. Really. I’m just waiting for somebody to pick me up – somebody I know, who is not going to take me to a motel room and give me money in the morning – and, anyway. You’re a wee bit chess club for my tastes,” she finished softly, and wasn’t sure if she’d really spoken those words a year ago, or if she’d just been the mouthpiece for them.
He grinned, relief all too clear. “Where are you going? Home?”
She looked down at her hands. “Not exactly.” At least four of her ten minutes were up. Like sands through an hourglass, these are the seconds of our afterlives… His backpack had a University of San Jose crest on the front. “Oh, you’re a student?”
“English,” he said, “minoring in drama. I think, anyway, I’m just a freshman.”
The Connor she’d known – God, was that even his name, still? Was he Steven again? Somebody totally new? - was literal, and confused by anyone who wasn’t. She couldn’t see him dressing up and treading the boards.
“I wanted to be an actress,” she said, smiling at the memory. She’d been so young, young as he was now. “I was so sure I was going to be a star.”
The tiny frown and the way he looked at her was so Connor that she bit her lip to keep from crying, or hugging him.
“You still could. You’re not even thirty,” he said, which should have offended her, what with only being twenty-two, but she took it in the spirit it was meant.
“Nah. I’m done with that. I think I’m ready to try something new.” She took a deep breath, looking to their left, where a patch of shadow shimmered and transformed into the shape of a man.
Connor, or whoever he was, was looking the other way, at the approaching headlights. “My bus is here.” He grabbed his bag and then looked back at her, torn. “Are you okay, here by yourself?”
“I’m fine,” she said, shooing him towards his ride. “Look, my friend’s here.”
“Sorry,” Doyle said, stepping out from the shadows, “didn’t want to interrupt. All ready to go?”
She’d never thought she’d be so glad to see that beat-up brown leather coat again. “Just saying goodbye.”
“Bye,” Connor said, his smile bemused, but genuine. “It was really good to meet you.”
“You too,” she said, and heard Doyle quietly echo her.
Then Connor climbed on the bus, and waved, and was gone.
“Good kid, Angel’s boy,” Doyle said. “Glad I got a chance to meet him.”
She had fallen asleep on top of Angel’s bed one night, Connor resting quietly between them. For weeks after Holtz took him she’d woken up smelling formula and baby powder. “So am I,” she said. “Guess that’s my ten minutes, huh?”
“With some to grow on,” he said. “Coming?”
It started to rain, the water pouring down as suddenly as if it had been tipped from buckets in the sky.
Three hundred miles away, Cordelia’s mother jolted awake, and couldn’t understand why she was crying, or why she couldn’t stop. She spent the rest of the night sitting up by the phone, smoking every cigarette from a pack her husband had left behind and listening to the rain drumming on the roof.
Cordelia’s mouth formed a quiet O of surprise. “Did I do that?” she asked. “Sorry!” she shouted at the sky. The torrents kept coming.
At a table in Wolfram & Hart’s company bar, Wesley suddenly knocked over his drink.
Doyle reached out. “Come on, princess.”
It was like looking down on a city, Willow said later, when she’d come out of the deep meditation and was back on her normal astral plane. Like seeing all these lights, and knowing that one had gone out, you know? Kennedy said that yeah, she knew what she meant, and resented that Tara wouldn’t have had to lie. And Willow said, Do you hear that? It’s raining, but Kennedy couldn’t hear a thing.
Cordelia looked at the rain, and the taillights of the bus, already receding into the distance.
There were people in other places – Africa, Mexico – men she might have loved, who might have loved her. Xander stared at the sky, at the clouds that had appeared from nowhere, as the neighbourhood children whooped and shrieked and splashed around his feet. The Groosalug finished off the beast he had been fighting and dropped to one knee on the wet ground. Honouring a princess, though he wasn’t sure why.
She took Doyle’s hand.
And in the back seat of the red-eye back to his college Connor thought, just for a second, about the strange, beautiful woman he’d spoken to at the bus depot. He twisted to look out the window, pressing his fingertips flat against the glass, but the rain was too heavy to see if she was still there; and the sodium glow of the streetlights made the raindrop tracks gleam like falling stars.
END
Author: Doyle
Rating: PG
Pairing: none
Notes: For
anna_maria, who wanted Cordelia/Connor, shippy or not. Spoilerific for ‘You’re Welcome.’ Summary: Time for one last goodbye.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia…
Thou losest here, a better where to find.
- King Lear
Angel’s office swam and blurred before her eyes, like a chalk painting melting in the rain, and Cordelia blurted out, “Wait!”
The scene froze around her. She could make out that Angel was holding the phone, but not the expression on his face, so she couldn’t tell if he knew yet. That was good. She wanted her last memory of Angel to be that kiss, and not his face when he realized she’d been Sixth Sensing it all day.
She’d had a whole day to get ready to go. Angel would say her goodbyes for her. Wes and Fred and Gunn would know soon enough; somebody would think of calling Xander and the rest.
And that was really that. Cordelia Chase, that was your life.
Only she couldn’t help thinking of somebody who wouldn’t know she was gone, and she said out loud, “Oh, come on. I’ve had the visions and been in a mystical coma and given birth to an evil ex-Power, who incidentally you guys could have maybe been keeping an eye on, and I can’t get ten more minutes?” She would have said she felt like a kid again, begging to stay up past her bedtime, except her mom and dad had never been big on rules, or on making her do anything she didn’t feel like.
She got the feeling that the Powers That Be didn’t work that way. But she must have been owed one, because the office melted into a different place. The world sharpened and she took a minute to get her bearings – she was outside, somewhere colder than California, and the quickest glance around told her she was in a bus depot.
Sitting on a bench, not far from where she’d appeared, and reading a book by the stark overhead lights, was Connor.
**
He looked different. He was still too skinny, and not very tall, and his brand new life clearly didn’t include a butch-er haircut. His eyes were different, though, when she got close enough to see them. He looked up and gave her a polite, shy smile, and his eyes weren’t haunted any more.
“Hi,” she said, sitting down. The bench was cold and probably covered with the Ebola virus, but she technically had minus fourteen hours to live, so it didn’t matter much. “Are you getting the bus?”
“Um.” He flushed and stammered that yeah, he’d been visiting his girlfriend and now he was going back to college, and he was so nervous about talking to her that Cordelia realized he thought she was a hooker. That nearly made her laugh, till she remembered the night the world nearly ended. Giving him something real.
She wanted to touch him, stroke his face, tell him it wasn’t his fault and that girl, the sacrifice, she would have died whatever he’d done. Instead she cut him off with a breezy, “It’s okay. Really. I’m just waiting for somebody to pick me up – somebody I know, who is not going to take me to a motel room and give me money in the morning – and, anyway. You’re a wee bit chess club for my tastes,” she finished softly, and wasn’t sure if she’d really spoken those words a year ago, or if she’d just been the mouthpiece for them.
He grinned, relief all too clear. “Where are you going? Home?”
She looked down at her hands. “Not exactly.” At least four of her ten minutes were up. Like sands through an hourglass, these are the seconds of our afterlives… His backpack had a University of San Jose crest on the front. “Oh, you’re a student?”
“English,” he said, “minoring in drama. I think, anyway, I’m just a freshman.”
The Connor she’d known – God, was that even his name, still? Was he Steven again? Somebody totally new? - was literal, and confused by anyone who wasn’t. She couldn’t see him dressing up and treading the boards.
“I wanted to be an actress,” she said, smiling at the memory. She’d been so young, young as he was now. “I was so sure I was going to be a star.”
The tiny frown and the way he looked at her was so Connor that she bit her lip to keep from crying, or hugging him.
“You still could. You’re not even thirty,” he said, which should have offended her, what with only being twenty-two, but she took it in the spirit it was meant.
“Nah. I’m done with that. I think I’m ready to try something new.” She took a deep breath, looking to their left, where a patch of shadow shimmered and transformed into the shape of a man.
Connor, or whoever he was, was looking the other way, at the approaching headlights. “My bus is here.” He grabbed his bag and then looked back at her, torn. “Are you okay, here by yourself?”
“I’m fine,” she said, shooing him towards his ride. “Look, my friend’s here.”
“Sorry,” Doyle said, stepping out from the shadows, “didn’t want to interrupt. All ready to go?”
She’d never thought she’d be so glad to see that beat-up brown leather coat again. “Just saying goodbye.”
“Bye,” Connor said, his smile bemused, but genuine. “It was really good to meet you.”
“You too,” she said, and heard Doyle quietly echo her.
Then Connor climbed on the bus, and waved, and was gone.
“Good kid, Angel’s boy,” Doyle said. “Glad I got a chance to meet him.”
She had fallen asleep on top of Angel’s bed one night, Connor resting quietly between them. For weeks after Holtz took him she’d woken up smelling formula and baby powder. “So am I,” she said. “Guess that’s my ten minutes, huh?”
“With some to grow on,” he said. “Coming?”
It started to rain, the water pouring down as suddenly as if it had been tipped from buckets in the sky.
Three hundred miles away, Cordelia’s mother jolted awake, and couldn’t understand why she was crying, or why she couldn’t stop. She spent the rest of the night sitting up by the phone, smoking every cigarette from a pack her husband had left behind and listening to the rain drumming on the roof.
Cordelia’s mouth formed a quiet O of surprise. “Did I do that?” she asked. “Sorry!” she shouted at the sky. The torrents kept coming.
At a table in Wolfram & Hart’s company bar, Wesley suddenly knocked over his drink.
Doyle reached out. “Come on, princess.”
It was like looking down on a city, Willow said later, when she’d come out of the deep meditation and was back on her normal astral plane. Like seeing all these lights, and knowing that one had gone out, you know? Kennedy said that yeah, she knew what she meant, and resented that Tara wouldn’t have had to lie. And Willow said, Do you hear that? It’s raining, but Kennedy couldn’t hear a thing.
Cordelia looked at the rain, and the taillights of the bus, already receding into the distance.
There were people in other places – Africa, Mexico – men she might have loved, who might have loved her. Xander stared at the sky, at the clouds that had appeared from nowhere, as the neighbourhood children whooped and shrieked and splashed around his feet. The Groosalug finished off the beast he had been fighting and dropped to one knee on the wet ground. Honouring a princess, though he wasn’t sure why.
She took Doyle’s hand.
And in the back seat of the red-eye back to his college Connor thought, just for a second, about the strange, beautiful woman he’d spoken to at the bus depot. He twisted to look out the window, pressing his fingertips flat against the glass, but the rain was too heavy to see if she was still there; and the sodium glow of the streetlights made the raindrop tracks gleam like falling stars.
END
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no subject
on 2007-03-30 06:58 pm (UTC)This was certainly one of those, and well worth rediscovering.