taxonomites | xiii [ location: hyperion hotel, basement ].

[ ooc | backdated to after this thread, handwaving dawn's performance of the ritual. sarah, if you'd like faith in on this, jump right on in-- same for anyone else who feels their character would be present. :> also, we can treat this like a party post with jumping around/threadjacking, etc. whatever works best for y'all. ]

Everything's foggy at first and there's shapes that, while still somewhat caught in the tail-end of the ritual's affects on him, he mistakes for others, relying on what little of his sight is working and unable to access the other senses that would give him a surer sense of who's around him. He doesn't remember Taxon. Not yet. What he thinks is happening is an echo of the past for him, of another time when his soul was ripped from him the 'wrong way'-- but then it had been of his own consenting, where here it had been a game, something out of his hands and entirely in someone else's control. To the blurry figure in the cage with him (Godric) he ventures, "Connor?" Then, turning his head towards the equally blurry figure outside the bars (Cordelia), he commands in a tone that isn't as loud or commanding as he thinks it is, "Faith. Stop. He's just--"

But then his sense of smell flares back to life with an intensity that makes him shut his eyes, shallow hard and slam his head back against the stone he's chained to with a sickening crack that would've damaged him, had he been human. It won't even cause a bump; it'll just hurt for a while, but the pain is tangible. Pain is always tangible. He understands pain, especially the self-inflicted. Right now, it's all he understands.

The scents are wrong. It doesn't fit the picture of what's supposed to be happening in his head. Connor. Where is Connor? He wants to ask, but his lips won't move and instead, the unvoiced question receives an answer in the form of a memory of a woman he can barely stand; light brown hair, twinkling hazel eyes and a smirk he would have liked to-- quite literally-- rip right off her face.

"Hits you where you live, don't it?"

"..."

"Of course I know. You lost your son. Well, gave him up."

"To save him."

"Which you did. He's happy and well adjusted now that he has no memory of you-- and the rest of the world, including your best friends, never even heard of Connor."

But, he'd spoke of him. He remembers now. Sitting in his office at Wolfram & Hart, smirking and laughing as he told Buffy of the son whose existence he'd hidden from the world. ...yet, he doesn't know why he did it. What should be an obvious answer is just a big, gaping blank in his memory; the reasoning that it wasn't him, but Angelus, not within his grasp. He hadn't done that when he was Angelus last. He'd killed a bunch of people, terrorized Fred (Fred, he smells Fred in the room and his eyes snap open as he turns his head and looks at where she's sitting on the stairs, vision still not fully back yet), gave Wes a run for his money and bit Faith, but he hadn't spoke so...callously of his son. And Connor had still been his then and not the family the Senior Partners had reassigned him to. It didn't match up like trying to fit two pieces from different puzzles together to form a picture he didn't even have the box art to.

"I-- I don't--" He tries to stand, but finds he can't. Yes, he'd been shackled then, but he hadn't been bound to anything. "Why am I chained to the wall?"

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Angel stops just shy of the door, a shuddering, frustrating sigh escaping him. If anyone else had told him what she'd she said, he would've ignored them and kept on his merry (well, not-so-merry) way to that afore mentioned elsewhere to get back to work on skulking professionally, but this was Faith. She got it. The fact that she was even here, even if she hadn't been downstairs with Fred and Cordy, meant the world to him-- though at the moment, he didn't feel like he deserved it. A stake to the chest felt more deserving and part of him wanted to challenge her, knowing fully that he couldn't take her while still recovering from the ritual's affects, just to see if she'd do it. She wasn't the only one with suicidal tendencies.

Slowly, he turns around to face her. "What do you want me to say? I'm back? Monster's in the box again? That I wish I didn't remember how good it felt to snap her arm like a twig?"

She doesn't bother to look up from the worn spot on the leg of her jeans, quietly sipping at the beer in her hand while Angel hesitates by the door. Odds are good he'll make the right call here, and if he doesn't she can always outrun him and slap him down when that happens. Doesn't mean she's bringing out the weapons though, because the only death wish she respects in this fight club of two is her own. There's pretty much no situation Faith can think of where she could take Angel out. She's working on the hero gig, day by day, letting the good fight matter more than her own shit; but Angel's in a category all his own. Comes down to it, she might just let the world burn if things ever shook down that way.

The face she gives him in response is two parts bitch please, one part nonchalant, with a little bit of sympathy hidden in the cracks between. "Yeah, that bullshit? Not gonna work on me, babe." Another long swallow of beer, then deliberately callous (because he needs this, somebody to shake him out of the funk he'll wallow in if they let him; and because Faith is so fucking not the grownup here, and she's only pretending to be one until he takes the mantle back) she shrugs, stretches lazily. "So freaking what, your switch flips for the kinky shit? Pretty sure I wrote the book on that one. So if you're looking for somebody to judge you, B's got this big freaking castle down the way, can't miss it."

Edited 2010-04-08 10:09 (UTC)

Any other day, she would've gotten an equally 'bitch please' response to that accompanied with a question asking if she thought he was stupid enough to go to the castle right now. But this isn't any other day, this is the day after-- the minutes after he's been walking around for the past two months as the Scourge of Taxon and showing the people here just why Angelus is the worst vampire ever recorded. He's ashamed, he's hurt, he wants it all over, so very selfishly so. The mission, the shanshu... None of it is worth putting people through that kind of torment when these alien hosts can simply flip a switch and make him go Alfred Hitchcock on the whole lot of them. He was in control before and only he, whether it be by a moment of perfect happiness or the dark magic of a shaman, had the power to let Angelus out. Wasn't the same here and that, beyond anything else, terrified him.

He'd be lying if he said that he wasn't half-expecting that switch to be thrown again any moment now.

"Then tell me what bullshit is going to work, Faith. I'm not exactly in the talking mood at the moment."

Not to get bitchy about it, but yeah. Faith does think he's stupid enough, today. She knows this one, what it's like to be so broken up inside that you go looking for someone to make the outside match. And like hell is she letting him turn to anybody else on this one, because she gets it. He wants a beating, she can give him that first, but he's going to deal with this shit if it kills them both.

"Should've thought of that one before dragging my ass back into the land of the living. Twice." She tosses it out offhandedly, but it's a reminder, even if Angel might be too in his own head to see it. He saved her, pulled her back from the brink when everybody else wrote her off as better off finishing the job. Now it's her turn. "And fine, whatever. I can beat your ass first, if that's what you're looking for. I owe you one anyway."

That reminder is caught and is the only thing stopping him from going up those stairs or out that door. Instead, he caves (for the moment at least) and moves to sit down on the steps-- but pauses. Cordelia and Fred are still down there and bound to follow him up any moment now. While he certainly appreciates the girls' attempts at comforting him, he doesn't want it right now and doesn't want them to be on the receiving end of his frustrations while he tries in vain to sort through them and sift through the muddle that is his mind and push past the urge to stake him himself and get it all over and done with.

He turns towards the stairs. "Not here. They'll be up. They don't..." Doesn't need to finish that, does he?

If Faith was a different person (if she wasn't offering to the point of begging) she might be insulted that his sidekicks need to be spared Angel's bitchfit while she gets the brunt. But she's not a different person, and she'll take whatever he dishes out and come back for more and be glad about it.

"Yeah, fine." She stands without any obvious effort, just smooth motion and ease. "Come on, let's go. You pick the place, babe. Not like it matters." She doesn't brush against him on the way to the door, keeps her distance for now. There's an order to this that has to be respected.

Angel leads the way up the stairs and while he's tempted to turn down a corridor that doesn't lead to his room, he keeps on that path he could walk blindfolded to his own. If they came looking, they'd find him, but he would send them away. As much as they-- or rather, she, in Cordelia's case-- need him right now, he can't be there for them while he's in this state; can't be happy and relieved like they want him to be. They don't get it, they couldn't possibly get it. And the kicker is that Cordelia, if she were from a point from before her death but during that faux coma awakening, would be able to, to some degree, but he doesn't even want to think about Jasmine right now. He feels lower than Jasmine and that's saying a lot, considering he held himself in higher regards over the fallen higher being because he had free will and used it. What free will did he have here? None. He wasn't in control.

When it came down to it, Angel was more upset over that lack of control than he was about hurting Cordelia, Dawn, Buffy, Petrana or anyone else.

The room is covered in a layer of dust when they enter, clear signs of his habitation elsewhere and the moment that door shuts behind them, his walls crumble and he collapses into the nearest chair to stop himself from falling to the floor. And then, just as suddenly, he's rising from that seat and snatching a priceless vase he brought back with him from Sri Lanka that's centuries older than he is off the nearest shelf and hurling it at the wall with a vicious snarl.

Edited 2010-04-08 23:30 (UTC)

xiii [ location: hyperion hotel, basement ].

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]

[ location: hyperion, upstairs ]