taxonomites | [ location: castle summers ] [ accidental visual ]

Mirrors haven't been high on Dawn's list of priorities since they brought her back from Wolfram and Hart. Her arm is in a cast courtesy of Dr. McCoy, and every single part of her aches. It's pretty obvious whatever stares back from the mirror is going to be a refugee from the latest Lifetime movie, not the face she's used to seeing. There's no point, right?

...But that's not it, either. She's scared, doesn't want to see. So in the five seconds of alone time she's given today (and she feels a little bad about snapping at everyone about wanting three stupid seconds to herself, but this isn't a group activity) Dawn heads to the bathroom and flips on all the lights, takes a deep breath.

And looks.

It's not as bad as it could be, she thinks critically, setting her tablet behind her on the shelf thing Xander built (she's aware that she hated the tablets like three weeks ago, and clutching the stupid thing like security blanket isn't making her look any less unaffected, but if she had it more available when Angelus... anyway. Maybe this wouldn't have happened at all.) and turning back to the mirror. She's kind of pale, but that's not that much worse than normal. The bruise on her cheek is going down, and the black eye fading to a sickly yellow green.

But it's not the face that was the worst, so after a deep breath and some frustrated muttering-- taking clothes off while in a cast kind of sucks forever, thanks for asking-- she surveys the damage that way. The bruises on her abdomen still look gross, and the imprint of Angelus' hand is still on her forearm. (And her shoulders and turning around, wrapping around her waist and lower back from where he picked her up and squeezed, like a really sick parody of a father lifting up his daughter and twirling her around. Angelus is big on irony.) There are scrapes all along her back and shoulders, from trying to get away. If she lifted the leg of her sweatpants, she already knows all she'll see is the same red, painful abrasions that circle her wrists.

Standing at the mirror for a moment, Dawn just tries to breathe. She's alive, she's fine, she's as home as anyone can get while simultaneously being kidnapped by aliens/robots/hamsters. She's okay. Everything's okay, everything's okay, everything's not okay.

"Crap." The word is more of a sob, and anyone watching their tablets will catch it; along with a bruised and scraped bare lower back, and the owner of the back hunched forward, breathing deeply.

[ ooc: rumi here you go. now come with me to hell. we will go to hell, go straight to hell. we will not pass go or collect two hundred dollars.

ON ANOTHER NOTE lj is sucking, so if i owe you a tag and seem to be lagging i would be SO GRATEFUL if you could pm/im/email me because i probably have no idea that tag is even there. B| ]

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The two greatest consequences of his actions contrast greatly against one another. (Yes, his actions, for while Angel may normally stress the differences between himself and Angelus, it's a difficult thing to do right after the fact and he's barely into moving past and dealing with these latest events; without those hundred years learning to live with infinite remorse.) First, there's Dawn, who suffered the worst at his hand in an attempt to hurt not only the girl herself, but her sister, Harris, and everyone who had even the slightest of connections to her. And then there was Drusilla, whose wailing over the tablet had driven him to put a hole through the wall out of anger with himself. Drusilla was everything she was now because of him-- a vampire, a madwoman, a broken person in all the ways someone could be broken, and now, a woman without a home. Angelus had lured her out of the castle and she couldn't go back, Angel knew that. And Dawn... Oh, Dawn. He'd hurt her; bad. So very bad. Because he could.

He wants to say something-- Apologize? Invite her to stake him? He doesn't know. --but the moment he opens his mouth, his stomach churns and he finds himself switching off the tablet so that the only sounds that are heard are the dull thunk of it hitting the floor and the sound (accompanied by an odd-angled visual) of the fleeting footsteps of a vampire who's about to lose his lunch before the thing clicks off all the way.

Dawn is pretty sure she knows who that visual belongs to. For a second she stiffens, pulse pounding abnormally fast in her throat. ("Come on, Dawnie! This is fun, right sweetheart?") Then she speaks up, her voice pitched louder than usual.

"You did it, the least you can do is look." Heartless, but it's the nicest thing she can say at the moment.

Angel's sitting back on his heels in a corner as if he's trying to fit as much of himself into that small space as possible, somewhere away from (and thankfully, out of sight of) the tablet's camera by the time Dawn's voice comes filtering through. At first, he thinks it's his own mind mocking him like it so often did, so when he speaks, it's in something he only uses when alone and out of earshot of others. "Uimh Ní féidir liom. Ní dóigh liom go mbeidh an ceart breathn--" But then he stops, eyes catching sight of the red recording button on the tablet. "I-- This-- You-- ...sorry."

There's something to be said about reliving a remake of your past horrors that does an Etch A Sketch number to a hundred plus years of development and dropping you right back at square one.

Quickly switching the feed to locked, Dawn moves so she can see the tablet. "I don't speak whatever that was. Irish?" She'll just be ignoring that apology for now, her anger and fear and hurt finally given outlet. "And you saw what he did. You really think sorry is what I want right now?"

She needs to not feel sorry for Angel. Maybe it wasn't him pulling the trigger, so to speak, but he held the metaphorical gun.

Edited 2010-04-07 23:31 (UTC)

Angel knows that he should get up and walk away or get up and turn the tablet off or just sit there and not respond, but the masochist in him needs someone to be angry at him. It's a twisted acknowledgment of mutual gratification; she gets someone to yell at and he gets someone to yell at him.

"...no. It's not." His pause hangs heavy in the air before he speaks again. "What do you want?"

There are so many ways to answer that. 'You to hurt.' 'To set your head on fire.' 'To never see you ever again.' 'For none of this to have ever happened.' They're all honest in their own ways.

What Dawn settles on, though, is more caustic. "I'd settle for you not making this about your emo."

"Fine," he says from where he's sitting, still out of sight of the tablet's recording. Yeah, he's a bit of a coward He's allowed to be right now. "It's not about my 'emo.' It's about... I don't know what it's about."

[ location: castle summers ] [ accidental visual ] | o i'm going to be wounded

[ visual ] at least we'll have eachother in hell?

[ visual ] i'll bring the chips, you bring the dip

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[ visual | locked ] sob i fail at tagging back.