Blue Shift by Wisebloodredux
Summary: "Blue Shift" is the first of three 1st person POV explorations of the late S1 Angel/Cordy/Wesley dynamic. Told from Angel's perspective, it can be read as a stand-alone, but it shares elements of time, plot, setting and continuity with companion pieces "Red Shift" (Wesley) and the to-yet-completed "Violet Shift" (Cordelia).
Spoilers: Chronologically, "Blue Shift" is set after 'Blind Date' and 2-3 days before 'To Shanshu in LA'.
Notes: The music Angel listens to, Samuel Barber's aching 'Adagio for Strings', was a late-night discovery via moonlight ride with NPR accompaniment that seemed to capture the mood of the entire trilogy. Just so you know, there's a whiff of Angelus here. It gets pretty dark. Not much fun, being in Angel's head on a day like this...
Some days, life isn't
too bad. Cordelia has a Vision, and I can do the job I came here for. Lose
myself in the hunt-and-kill of some recently-arisen netherworld baddie while I
tell myself I'm doing good work. Maybe, if I'm lucky and focused enough, even
help someone.
But this isn't one of those days.
No new cases on the roster. No flashing migraine neon signs. The bills have all
been paid, the files are more or less in order, and Cordelia is very bored. Her
desktop is only slightly cluttered. The inbox is empty. The plants are watered
-- my usual task. Fresh, hot coffee in the pot, even; she's gotten better at it,
but I'm deep in mental hibernation mode and don't make any effort to touch the
stuff. I know she's noticed because she's drinking out of my mug instead of
hers. Cupping it with both hands and having silent conversations with herself,
probably imagining that because it's mine, she can gain some kind of insight
into my morbid funk just by holding it.
Not much evidence of my presence to tap into, though. Virtually undetectable
fingerprints, no breath, no body heat. A specter, to all intents. She has some
experience in that area, but Dennis is so much easier to deal with, I imagine,
because he doesn't also insist on taking up so much physical space in her world.
So, boredom reigns at Angel Investigations, and my noticeably worse-than-usual
lack of enthusiasm for existence becomes the preeminent subject of my staff's
scrutiny.
"Angel's bummer cloud," Cordelia once named it. Dense and foreboding,
hanging over me with a threat of perpetual downpour so at odds with this bright,
desert-locked metropolis I call my territory -- just tangible enough to leaden
the air, but not so much that there's any real possibility of release.
She's at least able to fob off her covert observation of me in a semi-believable
fashion, camouflaging her sneaking asides behind the slick mag pages she's so
avidly thumbing through. The newsstand owner down the street loves her, knows
exactly which ones to set aside; today, there's Italian Vogue, Cosmo, Elle and a
couple of edgier ones I've never seen before.
But Wesley ... well, let's just say if he was an actor, he wouldn't be getting
many callbacks. Huddled over 'The Scroll' and peering through his magnifying
glass at the tiny, crabbed scrawls, he buffers himself between the piles of
books to either side while studying me with what he thinks is surreptitious
inscrutability. It's so obvious, I have to tilt my chair away from the door. I
know it infuriates him when I get like this. When I close up, pull my arms and
legs in and seal the vents of my shell. It's my protection against becoming
emotional roadkill. I am what I am, and nobody ever said vampires don't have
their moods.
Unfortunately for Cordelia and Wesley, I'm a lot moodier than most.
They do their Kabuki pantomime, trying to discuss me without really talking.
It's almost amusing, but I find myself wanting to slam the glass door shut just
to hear it shatter and realize my momentary humor is just a thin façade over
the enraged knowledge that I can't escape from them. Even if I wanted to.
Finally, when I can't stand them watching me any more -- their whispers, the
concern -- I retreat to the basement. Behind my disappearing back, the relief is
almost palpable.
***
I'm stuck in a memory loop, thinking about one particular kill today. Back in
Prague, when Darla and I were together in those wild years before the Kalderash
laced my rapacious vampiric appetite with a poison pill, the Great Earthquake
leveled everything. Titled and peasant alike were rendered equals in the chaos,
and we two rode the maelstorm, devils on horseback in love with our own
insatiable evil as we drank the spectrum from human fonts that ran beggar-red to
noblest blue.
All equally rich in its wine-dark savor.
It was a feast of truly ungodly proportions, and we sickened ourselves on the
mad banquet of flesh that overspread the town with the hyperflorid abundance of
a Roman bacchanal. The one I can't stop thinking of ...this particular woman ...
The apartment is so quiet. I riffle through my record albums, seeking noise of
my own choosing to drown the clamor of my mind. My hands are shaking. As if I
can actually feel the cold ... the numbness of no gloves on a frigid,
crystalline Czech winter evening. I pull out all my favorites, but nothing's
exactly right. The Arvo Part is lovely, but right now I just don't have the
energy to mourn the dead of World War II when I've got my own pile of corpses to
contemplate ...
I finally settle on Barber's "Adagio for Strings" and let the needle
coast over the wavering black vinyl, its softly worn crackles strangely
reminiscent of fire ... I think of the fires in Prague from burst gas mains,
casting their fleeting shadow plays on crumbled masonry walls as the people ran,
stinking of blood and insanity, in the streets ...
I turn it up a little too loud.
I know they can hear it upstairs -- are wondering what cryptic message I'm
trying to send up through the floorboards. The rumble of the bass tickles
through my feet as I strip on the way to the shower.
Thank the Romans for the modern conveniences of plumbing and pressurized water.
They invented it and exported it to the rest of civilization, but the greatest
triumph in personal hygiene has come in the form of the shower, which reached
its pinnacle of development at the cusp of the 21st century. I've lived a long
time, and after you've been drenched by a few too many chamberpots of shit
raining down from a second-story balcony, you learn to appreciate the value of a
good rinsing-off. I can't imagine, now, living without one.
The drum of the water is such a comfort. I turn into it, deafening myself with
the cleansing roar while drops thump on my chest in the bitter-sweet mockery of
a heartbeat. Also, tears don't show. I've learned to sob quietly. Sometimes,
it's not so bad. If I'm strong enough, I can keep the faces, the vivid,
still-frame stutter of memories, at bay.
This is not one of those times.
I stand against the torrent until my body throbs with scouring heat and the
stream begins to run cool, until the edge of my fugue has been blunted and
spirals down the drain. An eldritch ocean of mist wraithes around me in vaporous
eddies as I step out. I scrape the towel roughly over my limbs, my genitals,
enjoying the almost-abrading tingle. It's some kind of sensation, at least. But
I don't let myself think about that too much.
The hair is easy: a dab of gel, skimmed across my palms and mussed through two
or three times. I've done it so often by feel that the idea of a mirror is
laughable, even if seeing myself was an option. Cordelia used to protest the
absence of such a fundamental grooming accessory, but she knows now how it
disturbs me not to feel myself present in my own home.
Lately, she's taken to using a little hand mirror. As a habit, it reeks of an
Old World narcissism which, I have to say, I actually find sort of charming. She
usually pulls it out to check her eyeliner and lipstick, or her teeth, but
occasionally I'll catch her just gazing into it. I envy her that-- the ability
to see into her own eyes. To feel herself as being real. I can only see myself
in the eyes of others, and, mostly, what's reflected there isn't what I'm
looking for.
On a day like this, when my plans don't include gutting something disgusting and
wearing it home as some kind of urbane guerilla fashion statement, dressing
should be an afterthought. If I really believed I'd be down here undisturbed all
day, I'd just throw on something slouchy, maybe even do some t'ai chi. But I
know how they are. In an hour or so, one or the other will come to ask a
question, or deliver some bit of unimportant news, conveyed in what they hope is
a suitably urgent tone that'll disguise the real reason they've intruded.
I lean into the armoire and pull out the midnight-blue matte-silk shirt Cordelia
surprised me with a few weeks back. I wonder if I might be able to fake myself
into a semblance of a better mindframe by wearing it -- but then, knowing
they'll see right through that crap attempt at psychology, I let myself go for
the soft, drapey black I'm really craving.
To assuage my guilt over not wearing it yet (because I was shocked she'd spent
so much on a spontaneous gift -- and because it's so exquisitely cut, with
hand-sewn French seams and turnback cuffs, that it really isn't appropriate for
everyday), although I promised her I would, I forego the usual battered demon
shit-kickers for that pair of black calf monkstrap oxfords she once mentioned
liking. The buckles are squarish and silver, vaguely Puritanical, which bothers
me -- until I reason it's just that they remind me of Penn, and he's gone, so
why obsess?
I feel sorry for them, for me being the mess that I am, and for the fact that
they, for whatever reasons, have become saddled with my interminable weight at
this juncture in their young lives. I worry they got off at the wrong station to
follow me; that dragging my baggage is slowing them down from catching the next
train. You know, the one they should be taking, where there's actual light at
the end of the tunnel.
They handle me cautiously, like a precious but cracked vase. Admiring my artful
surface while they squint at the hairline fractures that mar my dualing psyche,
I am illuminated by their regard in all my imperfectly- mended glory. A
conservator's nightmare.
Hold me up to the light, metaphorically speaking, and it penetrates right
through me. I can't hold the things I used to, contain them with hermetic
sanctity. I'm stained by what I've done, broken to near-uselessness in so many
places, and nothing that touches me cleanses me; it just drains out of the
cracks, spilling like guts from an eviscerated belly.
That woman in Prague ... I remember her mouth, how beautiful it was. How it
shaped to fit my insolent member so perfectly, and how the choked vibration of
her scream was as pleasurable a sensation as I could then conceive of. I had
already drained her son -- a fair child of only ten or so --while she watched in
rapt horror, wiping his blood off my chin onto the hem of her wool dress as I
knelt to pull her down onto the crockery-littered floor.
She barely moved, but her mouth ... a moist, swollen cavern of enveloping
rapture that stayed hot until well after I'd fucked her a good hour or so. By
that time, she'd bled to death from the wounds Darla had inflicted while I'd had
my way with the boy, and her rapidly cooling body held no more interest for me.
We left the door open to let in the icy air, and Darla and I stood for a while
to appreciate the steam rising from the wreckage of their fragile human geometry
-- watched as the
lustrous, inflamed rose of the woman's lips was translated into muted indigo by
the language of death.
God forgive me --
It suddenly dawns on me why I possibly haven't yet worn Cordelia's gift. And
why, now, I probably never will.
I'll just have to explain it to her somehow.
The needle is scratching at the end of the album side. Finding myself on all
fours, I get up and replace the record in its fragile paper sleeve, carefully
shelving it. Cordelia leaves everything a wreck when she's down here prowling
around, but my records ... It's funny, she thinks they're so hopelessly
old-fashioned, but she handles them with such reverence. She even knows from
watching me how to hold them by the edges only, expertly flipping them with a
twitch of her palms.
I've never spoken a word to her about it, but she just knows. How it soothes me.
Or the beast in me, I suppose.
Only today, it isn't working its usual spell.
I don't know what to do with myself. I grab a book -- Morris Berman's 'Coming to
Our Senses. A Wesley suggestion. Reading gives my agitation a purpose, something
to push itself against, but I can't keep my eyes on the page, finding them
glancing up at the stairs, toward the elevator. Figures I can't relax when I
have the time to. It's so rare lately, I should appreciate these little pauses
in the hack-and-slash slipstream.
And Cordelia ... she deserves a day without eye-gouging headaches and horrific
images every once in a while. I catch myself cursing the Powers and stop, as if
I'm afraid They might overhear. But it's maddening. Out of so many ... how can
they do this to her? To someone who's never before experienced any kind of real
pain?
Of course, I understand that's the point, but it doesn't make me feel any
better.
Which is also the point.
***
After a sufficiently long while, when I think it's safe, I venture back
upstairs. The office is dark, the computers shut off. Wesley's books are neatly
stacked, and I can see more tabs marking the pages where he's found something to
investigate further. An excellent researcher, Wesley. I'm only just beginning to
realize how fortunate I am to have him. His copious notes, written in a
delicately precise script, are immaculate. Were he a Watcher, his journals would
be a joy compared to some I've had the displeasure of slogging through.
Cordelia has actually completely cleared off the piles of paperwork from her
desk, which puzzles me, as she normally has a few things there just to make
herself look busy. Then I notice how her magazines are stacked to the side, and
my confusion deepens. She always takes them home, the better to plan an
appropriate wardrobe for when she's achieved her inevitable superstardom.
Not sure why, I linger there, inhaling the faint perfume from the discarded
sample strips in the trashcan she's forgotten to empty, and the clean wood scent
of the pencils secreted in the back of the bottom drawer where she thinks I
don't know to look. I'd like to think it would take more than a twig-size No. 2
to do me in, even if my own hand was behind it. I feel the corner of my mouth
trying to hook upward as I head toward the door.
"Angel ..."
Obviously, she's been watching me the whole time. More unnerved that she escaped
immediate detection than I want to admit, I actually startle but manage, I think
pretty smoothly, to segue it into my swing around. She's in my office, sitting
back in my leather chair with her knees drawn up under her jaw. Her hair
curtains around her in jet waves, surrounding the luminous disk of her face the
way space shapes itself to fit around the moon. She's staring at me with intense
concentration, trying for stern but coming off more worried than she thinks I
can see in this faint light.
"Where're you going?"
I know she hears me swallow, it's that loud. I hood my eyes downward, and the
chair creaks as she rises, her light footfalls tapping to a stop in front of me.
"Nowhere." We both know I'm lying. It's true, I was thinking of
leaving--
but maybe it's only half a lie, because I had no idea where I was going to go.
"It's late," I say, which is a guess since I don't have any idea what
time it is, and it all feels the same to me, anyway, when the sun's not around
as a marker. Sleep, feed, meet, kill, brood, sleep ... But I know it must be
late if she's still here, in the dark, waiting. I see a cunning frown gather as
she works out where to best insert the verbal chisel.
One that'll accommodate the coming blow to wedge me open.
"We actually got a lot done today," she says, too quietly. I think I
blink.
Not the tangent I was expecting. Cordelia being subtle by feigning casual
normalcy. Weird. I'm tensing, suddenly off-balance.
"Wesley went home a couple hours ago." Her hazel eyes puncture me
unwaveringly, and I edge uneasily back until I'm against the wall.
"I think he was kind of upset you never came back upstairs. He wanted to
talk to you about something. He's been working really hard on that Scroll of
Aubergine, you know."
"I had things to do," I answer, my voice as carefully neutral as a
demilitarized zone.
She strides up within an inch of me, poking a finger at my face. "Angel,
you are *so* full of shit --" she indicates a benchmark just above my eye
height "-- up to here. I can tell `cause you're on a full tank."
That's two jabs so far, and joking ones at that. Usually she can coax a smile
out of me, but such is my gloom-cloud that I can't even summon the pretense of
one. Her face falls like a confection jostled too quickly out of the oven; she
leans back to take me in, and effortlessly, stunningly, changes tack.
"But, I gotta say, you're lookin' fab." She sweeps me with an almost
wistfully appreciate look, and I'm secretly glad I took the effort to dress.
"Oooh."
Stooping quickly, she purrs with approval. "The shoes are tre yummy."
"Thanks," I mutter, just to have something to say, although, for once,
I know she really means it.
Her mouth bends like a rubber band, snapping into a slow crescent. "So. We
kickin' it curbside or driving?"
I suddenly understand where this is going, and anxiety cramps me. I was going
out ... to be alone.
Like I've been alone all day. Like I've been for --
"I can give you a ride home," I feint, misunderstanding her on
purpose.
She rocks back and forth, her teeth seizing her lip as she contemplates her next
response. Finally, she twists her head, calculating. "I waited for, like, a
million hours for you. Aaaa-looooooone." Her lashes do that flutter thing.
Knockout. I'm going down, I know, but not with a jab of my own. "Who said
you had to wait, Cordelia?" I try to make my growl light, hiding my
irritation. "Wesley would have been glad to give you a ride." I shrug
off her glare.
"Angel -- you know that's not what I mean," she huffs, tired of
sparring. "Never mind. I'm outta here." She snatches her jean jacket
off the coatrack and shoulders it on like she means it. A ribbon of panic twines
my insides, tightening.
Her lip droops as she turns away. "What if you're not the only one around
here who needs something out of this gig. Didja ever think of that?"
Ouch.
"No, I'll drive you." Realizing I've left the Plymouth keys
downstairs, I go to her desk, where I know she keeps the extra set. So taut, I'm
almost vibrating. She watches me fumble in the drawer, her expression
unreadable.
I walk back to the door she's propping open for me with a nonchalant sandal.
Just that quickly, she's opening, pouring on her Cordy-charisma like
night-blooming jasmine, drawing me in. I know she wants to touch me, even if
it's just to stroke the fabric of my shirt, but instead she only hands me my
leather coat, fondling the lapel with her thumb as I take it from her.
I try giving her the magazines, and for that I get a light smack on the arm and
a look of bemused scorn. "Leave `em. I read almost all of them already, but
what else am I going to do tomorrow? Jeez. You have any idea how boorrrrring
Wesley is with the scroll-jabber? After about two seconds, I start going all
glazy-–"
"Cordelia," I warn her, but my fangs are firmly retracted. She smirks
as I toss the glossy mags on the couch, laughing slyly at my barely restrained
impulse to straighten them.
"It's a nice night, huh?" She's playful now that she has me.
"Let's walk around to the car." With nimble practice, she spins her
hair into a top-down- ready knot. I can't help but stare at her long throat,
rising as it does from a woven necklace of sparkling cobalt beads.
I make myself look away as she turns back; her eyes are coolly knowing.
"Maybe we should hit a drive-through blood bank on the way out, huh? Snacky
Angel. Come on, Yo Badness. Cruise us someplace cool."
***
The sky is full of glitter, spun out across the ocean haze in a dusting of
silver tinsel. A low moon, nibbled to fingernail-thinness, skates above. We park
and walk to the pier, where we're pretty much alone. One couple huddles
intimately to the side on a bench, immersed in intense conversation. Their
attention doesn't even waver when we pass.
I remember the feeling of being so absorbed by someone else like that. Two
poles, the axes of their respective worlds, shifting to circle one another.
Locked in cosmic tandem ... but ultimately, still isolated.
Or maybe that's just one pole I'm thinking of. Whichever's the most bitter cold.
"Whatcha thinkin', Angel?" She dares to touch me this time, only her
face is so sad I can only think she's read my ill-concealed misery and is a
string plucked in sympathy with it. Her coal-hot forefinger feathers the top of
my fist. I look across the dark, moon-flecked water, its undulant surge and
swell seeming to draw an answering moisture into the corners of my eyes by sheer
force of attraction.
"Angel ..." She lightly brushes my face, lips bent with strange
tension as she inspects the wet. Her arm snugs around me, and just for a second
I allow myself to lean into it. Let myself smell her opulence, feel her soft,
pliant warmth and the faint down that furs the nectarine blush of her cheek.
Her voice hums into my ear, so low it's like wind across the rim of a conch:
"You hurt so much."
I don't know what to say to that, not trusting my voice to be any steadier than
my hands, which have somehow become clamped around the pier railing as if to
keep me from hurling myself over. Finally, I manage, "We -- we should
--"
"Go? Yeah, you wanna run. I know." She takes her arm away, hugging
herself against the stiff breeze. Her hair springs loose a curl or two, one
riding along the arch of her temple like a corkscrewing thought making its way
outside her skull.
I shake my head, hunching my shoulders against the wind as I take the
opportunity to shove my hands -- traitors -- into my pockets. "Not run ...
just hide."
Her eyes follow the line of the horizon where it curves away into fresh, open
sea. "Don't hide from me, Angel. I know ... listen, you're going through so
much crazy stuff, it's like you're living on your own personal fault line.
Everything's getting all shook around. But you're solid." She gently
strokes my back, and her hand burns, branding me with the ghost of her human
fire. "No matter how intense everything gets, you always roll with
it."
"I came here, and I was alone," she murmurs. "No friends ...
nothing. But everything's so much better now than I could have believed. My job,
my apartment. For the first time in a long while, the ground feels real under my
feet, and so much of that's because-- because you're ..." She sniffs. I
watch her from the side, entranced by the blazing liquid glimmer of her eye.
If I'd had breath, I'd be holding it. I bend my head and wait.
"... My stability." She finishes with a little cackle, and I feel
something indescribable -- a cracking open inside me, spilling hope and wonder
like brilliant, golden yolk from its trembling center.
Today was rank. This moment, by contrast, is so the opposite, it's almost worse
as I mull over what to say -- how to gather my scrambled thoughts and speak as
if I haven't just lost the shit she insists I've got so much of.
"Cordelia ... I know I haven't --"
"You don't have to explain anything to me," she demurs. "I know
what you were doing today. Thinking, feeling, remembering. Listening to your sad
music. Wesley knew what it was. It's totally okay. You do what you gotta to
deal."
She elbows the railing, tipping her chin. I'm watching intently for tears, but
all I see is a wide smile, pent up and now released -- one I know she's saved
all day for me.
"Only, you wouldn't let me in earlier. But stuff happened. You worked
something out. And now, you are."
The waves chop at the pilings. Cordelia smushes her nose against my jacket,
squeaking the leather, and giggles at the noise. I close my eyes and feel the
cloud lift just enough to let a smile of my own break through.
Some days, life isn't so good to begin with. Then, inexplicably, poles shift.
The stars come out, and the weight ... well, it gets, if not exactly lighter,
then a little easier to carry.
This day was definitely one of those.
End.
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