She was mostly quiet on the long flight to LA.
This suited Cordelia down to the ground ‘cause it was getting harder and harder to focus. She’d closed her eyes and dozed for a while; pretty weird when you considered her actual self was doing enough sleep for the both of them while resting in coma-land.
Buffy’s voice broke her out of her non-dream and she glanced up. “What?”
“What happens when we get there?” She asked again, half turning towards Cordelia in her seat. They’d picked a random-ass flight at a random-ass time, hoping they’d hit lucky and it wouldn’t be full.
Buffy was seated in the back, cheapo flights a blessing really because there was hardly any people back there and she could talk freely.
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Cordelia admitted. She hadn’t. She hadn’t really considered the possibility that astral projecting herself to wherever Buffy happened to be would work, if she was honest, and everything had pretty much snowballed from that moment on.
She’d thought, at best, that she was only on the official wavelength of the people in the hospital. She’d disproved that theory when she’d shunted herself outside and felt the warmth of the sun on her face for the first time in what felt like months.
Then, of course, came the inevitable guilt.
Because for the brief three seconds she realised she was in control of a body that wasn’t hers? She realised that she was doing to somebody the very same thing that’d been done to her last year…
And she’d thrown herself right back out.
“This is all kinda surreal,” said Buffy after a beat.
Cordelia made a point of tapping non-existent fingernails against the armrest. “You think this is surreal? I’m minus a body and my best friend is heading up the law firm we’ve been fighting against for four years. That’s surreal.”
She tried to think about that for a moment but every time she did she got the feeling she was gonna lose it. Big time. So much for spanking your inner moppet, she chastized, trying to ignore the tight feeling in her chest.
“What if you just talk to him?”
Buffy snorted, “Talk to him? And say what? Hi, Angel, how’s things? I have Cordelia here and she’s mighty pissed at you for heading up the sucky, evil law firm?”
Cordelia brightened somewhat, “That could work! Although…” Her mood plummeted again.
Buffy looked at her. “What?”
“What if Wolfram and Hart are doing something to him? What if they’re keeping me in my coma? They’re not gonna relish you turning up and trying to break them out of whatever spell they’re under.”
The alternative, which she’d considered and banished on the slightest offchance that it was true, was that her friends didn’t want her back after everything that’d happened last year.
Which was clearly crazy ‘cause–Well, why visit?
“You think they’d do that?”
“It’s not like they haven’t tried it before.” She thought back to Vocah and how much simpler her first coma was… Then marvelled at the turns her life had taken when she was considering her first coma simple. God. “One time? They sent me killer visions. And they were behind the whole Darla-and-Angel fun-fest of doom during which boss-man went kinda beige, slept with the skank and gave away all my clothes.”
Buffy’s eyes fairly popped out at that one. “Darla? Angel’s-Sire-who-I-staked-Darla?”
Cordelia resisted the urge to ask how many Darla’s she knew, ‘cause–Well, Buffy had been dead that summer, hence a whole lot more important things to not worry about. “Oh, there is so much you don’t know…”
***