Title: Caged Hearts
Author: MexicanAlibi
Posted: 01/04
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Rating: R
Category:
Content: C/A
Summary: What if Buffy and Angel’s Great Love Affair was just another cruel curse bestowed upon Angel by Gypsies? Never one to miss an opportunity, Lilah lifts Angel’s various curses and sets about screwing with his life. Fun!
Spoilers: Season 3, post Connor.
Disclaimer: The characters in the Angelverse were created by Joss Whedon & David Greenwalt. No infringement is intended, no profit is made.
Distribution: just ask
Notes: I watched ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ the other day, and decided the only way Buffy and Angel could be so obsessed with each other was if they had a love whammy bestowed upon them. Or, if they were both really really stupid. It’s open to debate.
Thanks/Dedication:
Feedback: Yes please.
Prologue
Lilah Morgan was known throughout Wolfram and Hart as being a shrewd business woman. Of course, everyone knew that ‘shrewd business woman’ was just a euphemism for ‘complete bitch’. It was funny how lawyers had polite technical terms for everything nowadays.
She sat in her office, leaning back in her leather chair and rubbed her temples. Another day, another decimation. How remarkably boring the apocalypse industry was when your arch-nemesis was distracted by baby formula. Ever since the unexpected arrival of Angel’s newborn son, Lilah had been given her orders to keep her distance from the vampire and to busy herself with other projects.
But being evil was ninety percent paperwork, and as much as she hated to admit it, without Angel running amuck throughout her offices there really wasn’t much that interested Lilah anymore. Even virgin sacrifices seemed oddly tame compared to Angel’s little antics.
Stifling a yawn, Lilah leaned forward in her chair and batted at her computer keyboard, wiping the Wolfram and Hart screensaver off the monitor with a well-manicured hand. A familiar flashing message in the corner of the screen reminded her that she had approximately 43 unread email messages that were, undoubtedly, nothing she would be interested in anyway.
Out of sheer boredom she clicked on her inbox icon and figured now was as good a time as any to catch up on her correspondence. Hell, if things got really boring, she might even read her faxes. It was just that kind of day.
Something in her inbox caught her eye. Instinctively Lilah straightened her back and took a breath of stale office air. It was an email from one of the departments downstairs – one of those insignificant little corners of the law firm where people were required to obey her every command, on pain of death. Quite literally.
That, in itself, didn’t shock her. It was the subject line that had caught her interest.
‘Re: Gypsy curses. New developments.’
“Interesting.” Lilah conceded, clicking on the ‘read’ link. Her eyes graced the body of the text, growing wider and wider with each word. Only her foolish sense of pride was what was stopping her from mashing the keyboard with her palm and screaming in excitement.
Finally, something to do around here!
Lilah picked up her phone and pressed Line 1, impatiently waiting for her secretary to pick up.
“Susan? Did you get the office memo?…. good. Get the Peloponnesian Shamans on the line as soon as possible, I want an estimate for how much it’ll cost us to lift that curse, and I want that estimate before tonight.”
As Lilah grabbed a pen and started scribbling notes on her office pad, her secretary whispered something down the phone line that she almost didn’t catch.
“What? – What do you mean ‘which curse’?…” She waited impatiently for the girl to try and justify her question, before cutting her off mid-sentence, “… No, I don’t mean the soul curse, you moron. I’m talking about the love curse that’d had him bound to the slayer all this time. Did you even bother reading the memo?”
Wow, vampire in love with a slayer? Gypsies certainly weren’t without a sense of irony. Lilah smirked to herself as she continued to scribble, her mind racing at a mile a minute.
“And call an emergency office meeting for two o’clock this afternoon. If we can rid him of this stupid slayer obsession, it’ll change everything.”
Lilah slammed down the phone, hoping her incompetent assistant had gotten all the details right. She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms leisurely above her head, smiling to herself.
Giving Angel full control of his own emotions back? Well, that certainly would change everything. And to think, Lilah sighed, that she thought today was going to be dull.