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?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That shirt is dropped carelessly on the floor to mingle with the mess that he's made. For a vampire who was so OCD about keeping things clean and neat and even when he was 'okay,' a trashed room contrasted greatly against the norm, especially with how comfortable he felt among the rubble where it would have otherwise driven him insane. He sits down on the bed as instructed, wincing and making a distinctly vampire noise at the lights being turned on.

Angel blinks at her, squinting as his eyes adjust to the brightness now filling the room. "I'll make a note to get my ass kicked more often."

She rolls her eyes at him and crosses her arms. "Yeah. I'll tell River to always be on standby just in case I get another hankering." The pose only lasts a second or so, for now she's busy with taking what she needed from the kit: some cleaning solution, gauze, and tape.

With these in hand, Cordelia goes to sit beside him again. She frowns at the marks and wounds that River has left on him - and makes a mental note to never piss Ant Lady off. She gently traces the skin next to the worst ones before quietly starting the task of playing Nurse Cordy.

Angel doesn't wince or tense or show any signs of if what she's doing is hurting him. This is normal, after all. He gets hurt, she patches him up. He's missed this during his days at Wolfram & Hart before coming here-- hell, the days before her ascension before she came back possessed by Jasmine, even. In those days, he'd either patch himself up or Fred or Lorne would see to assisting him. What he would do to make everything in LA go back to the way it was, the way it was supposed to be...

"I'm sorry you didn't get your night," he says quietly after a few moments of silence.

Cordelia looks at him, hands stilling just as she was about to tape down the gauze on the right side of his chest. That night had been a night of extremes - from them professing their love for each other to Angelus coming out - that she can't think of one without immediately jumping to the other. It had hurt, so so much, that the aliens chose that night out of the many others to unleash hell on them all - with her being its first victim.

She can't offer that they do it again, not this soon. Instead, she reaches up to gently kiss him, then says, "It's okay. I have now with you - and that's much, much better in my book."

He hates that, too. Of all the moments the aliens could've chosen to turn him into Angelus, they'd chosen that night and then, when he had been about to test the waters when it came to working around the curse. How horribly ironic it was to be engaging in something in order to avoid letting Angelus out only to have the aliens do it anyway. And now, he knew what her blood tasted like and that bothered him more than he cared to admit, for the demon in him kept reminding him that he did and he knew that side wouldn't let him forget it any time soon.

One would think he'd be used to being screwed over by now. Nothing ever went his way. Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered, but it was like he'd told Spike once: What else was he going to do with his immortality?

Angel smiles weakly, but genuinely at her. "Just having you here means more to me than you'll ever know." He means that in both her sticking by him after this mess and her being in Taxon in general.

"I'm glad that you finally appreciate my presence," she teases him. In truth what he said to her just now meant a hell lot to her, too, considering just how worthless and useless she'd felt the entire time Angelus was running loose in Taxon.

She tapes gauze down, then says, "There. All done."

Even though he knows that she's just teasing, he draws a leg up on to the bed, bent at the knee so that he can turn and face her. He takes hold of one her hands and cups her cheek with his other. "I always appreciate your presence. Never think otherwise."

xiii [ location: hyperion hotel, basement ].

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]

[ location: hyperion hotel, angel's room ]