Title: If Only You Knew
Author: Sidewalk Doctor
Posted: Jan 8 2006
Email
Rating: NC-17 overall
Category: Adventure/Romance and all that fun stuff
Content: C/A baybee
Summary: Based on a challenge issued by Scorch. Buffy and the gang arrive in L.A. Mayhem and awkwardness ensues…And Buffy finds out about C/A. Fun to be had by all
Spoilers: Erm… I guess late S1ish for Angel and late S4ish for Buffy.
Disclaimer: The characters in the Angelverse were created by Joss Whedon & David Greenwalt. No infringement is intended, no profit is made.
Distribution: Sure, go ahead! Just let me know first, K?
Notes:
Thanks/Dedication:Thanks to Cali for being a kick-ass beta and coming up with this title
Feedback:Is better than wet Angel…. OK, maybe not that good but I like it a lot!
Chapter One
It was as if they were meant to be together, as if their bodies were made just for the other. Time and space seemed to fall away, consumed in the flurry of kisses, caresses, ragged breaths and racing heartbeats. She had woven a spell around him, a dark and exquisite magic that pulled him deeper and deeper with every silken thrust and every soft cry that spilled from her lips.
In and out, up and down… their bodies rose and fell like waves on the sea, intoxicating, irresistible, every moment punctuated by the crack of thunder or the flash of lightning outside the bedroom window. Rain came down in sheets, soaking the glass, but inside the room the forces of nature worked with equal passion and violence. She arched languidly beneath him, his name issuing from her lips in a whispered plea or prayer. Her fingernails raked deep scratches in his back as his fingers tangled in her silky dark hair, her head thrown back to expose the smooth, fair expanse of her neck. So soft, so tempting… so his.
He wanted to taste her, consume her, devour her. He wanted all of his senses filled with her. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough. Heaven help him, but if he ever believed in anything resembling religion, she would be it. He worshipped every inch of her silken skin, her strong, lithe body, her passionate and beautiful soul. She was so small, so fragile compared to him, yet she could break him with as much as one glance. She looked at him and he shattered like glass before her, arrested by those rich hazel eyes that could so easily strip away his pride, his defenses, his fears… his soul.
Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God. A clap of thunder rang out with exceptional violence, the subsequent flash of lightning illuminating the room with a ghastly, pallid glow. He lurched up in bed, some unseen force tearing him apart inside, simultaneously pulling and tugging until he feared he might fly to pieces. He could feel it inside of him, pushing, struggling, slowly gaining dominance as the last of his humanity slipped away. No! He had to stop it, had to stop it… it wouldn’t happen again. He wouldn’t let it. Not this time. Not again. Not with her…
“No!” Angel sat bolt-upright in bed, sheets soaked with sweat, the room impossibly hot and stuffy. It took a moment for him to get his bearings. That he was alone, still in his room below the office, still with his soul intact.
And someone was banging on the door.
“Angel! The one time I show up on time, and you’re the one sleeping in. Payback’s a bitch, buster!”
Angel groaned and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, nearly tripping over the sheet that had wrapped around him from all the tossing and turning. Impatiently he swatted it away, figuring he’d bother with the bed later. Meanwhile, the incessant pounding on his door was doing little to soothe what remained of his nightmare-induced headache.
He managed to tug on a pair of pants before staggering out to the door, blinking sleep from his eyes. He had no sooner opened it that Cordelia swept inside, hazel eyes flashing and a scowl across her face.
“Took you long enough! I was wondering if you were in a coma or something.”
Groggily Angel faced the angry brunette, who stood before him with her arms folded over her ample chest and her chin jutted out at a defiant angle. She was clad in a tight little sports bra top and warm-up pants that hugged her rounded bottom a little too tightly for his comfort. In fact, given the dream he’d just had, a burlap sack would probably be too tight for his comfort. “Cordelia… what are you doing here so early?”
She heaved a huge sigh, rolling her eyes. “Hello, training! You said to be here at eight, sleeping beauty. Jeez, did you get hit on the head during that last fight or something? Maybe it knocked something loose.”
His only response was his special “Cordelia” glare, the one that mixed equal parts exasperation, amusement, and endearment.
Cordy was less than impressed. With an indignant hmph she crossed the room toward the supply of weapons he kept downstairs. “Well, hurry up and get dressed. I want to learn more swordfighting. You said we would learn more today.”
“You mean fencing.”
“Whatever, you know what I mean.” She withdrew a particularly long and dangerous-looking weapon from his stash, eyes sparkling with excitement. “This is so cool. Now if a bad guy shows up, I can justshoomp shoomp shoomp !” She punctuated each shoomp with a sweep of her sword, narrowly missing Angel’s ear in the process.
“All right, enough swordplay for you.” He grabbed her wrist to take the sword from her, and nearly jumped at the jolt of electricity that shot through him. You have got to get that dream out of your head , he ordered himself, hastily pulling his hand away. Cordelia looked shocked and offended.
“God! What is your problem? I knew exactly what I was doing!”
“Yes, that is why you almost shoomp shoomped my ear off.”
“I was just testing your reflexes,” she said with a haughty lift of her chin. “You know, seeing if you were awake.”
He responded by tossing her another glare. She regarded him balefully, lower lip thrust outward in that oh-so-delectable pout of hers. The one that made him want to draw that lower lip between his teeth and nibble…
Maybe he should start the training ASAP. He was more than willing to brave the risk Cordelia and swords posed to his ears, if it meant working off some of that leftover lunacy—er, tension—from that blasted dream.
Unfortunately, that decision ended up having the opposite effect. Teaching Cordelia swordplay involved far too much physical contact for his comfort. As he stood beside her, his hand over hers as he showed her how to hold the sword, all he could think of was how perfectly her lush curves molded to his muscular frame and how warm her skin must be under those tight clothes and how unnervingly close that perfect butt was to… certain parts of his anatomy.
It also didn’t help that she wiggled that perfect butt quite often while adjusting her stance. Which of course caused him to squirm uncomfortably lest the contact cause an unexpected and incredibly humiliating physical reaction on his part.
God, he could just picture her face. “Dammit, Angel! What the hell is wrong with you! Can’t you just watch porn like other guys and get it out of your system?”
On the bright side, at least she’d know he wasn’t a eunuch.
Cordelia’s eager voice brought him back to the present, and not a moment too soon. “OK, like this?” she asked. Swish!
He leapt aside just in time. “Cordelia, if we make it through this lesson with all my body parts still attached, I will consider it a success.”
He fully expected Cordelia to fire back with one of the snappy retorts that seemed perpetually on the tip of her tongue, but she had gone eerily still, the sword hanging limply at her side while her forehead crinkled in a pained expression. Quick as a flash he was at her side, catching her just as the sword clattered to the floor beside her.
The images sliced through her head like a knife, white-hot and blinding, leaving their imprints burned on her brain like flashes on the retina after looking directly into the sun. But the fear, the despair—she felt it, tasted it, was engulfed by it so thoroughly and fiercely that she was unsure if the pain that seized her body was only physical. She heard the victim’s heartbeat thundering, felt the blood roaring in her ears as panic bled into the terrifying, icy sensation upon realizing that she was indeed going to die. No, please, not yet… not like this…
“Cordelia…” Angel’s voice sounded muted and far away. But she felt his strong hands holding her, supporting her as he gently lowered her into a chair. “What do you see?”
And then it was over, the horrific images faded away, and she was left only with the acute throbbing headache that always followed these visions. “A girl… an alley… oh God, Angel, she was so scared. So scared…”
“Shhh, it’s OK… we’re going to help her.” The vampire drew her close to comfort her, pleased that she couldn’t see the anguish that her pain brought him.
“It was… it looked familiar. By that park on Sunset, I think… with the basketball courts… you know the one…”
“Yes, I know where that is.” Cordelia was referring to a location she undoubtedly passed every day while driving to the office from her Silver Lake apartment.
Angel grabbed a notepad and pen and jotted down the details of Cordelia’s vision. Meanwhile, she was still curled up in the chair, her appearance very small and vulnerable compared to her display of ferocity just a few moments ago. “Hang on, I’ll get you some aspirin and water,” he said, and quickly grabbed a glass from the kitchen.
When he got back, Cordelia accepted the pills and water gratefully and took a long sip. Angel could tell she was still rattled, and noted grimly that the effects of her visions appeared to be getting even worse. As much as he hated to speak ill of the dead, he almost cursed Doyle for unwittingly passing them on to her.
The half-demon could handle them. He was tough. But Cordelia… she was just a girl. A girl who hadn’t been chosen for anything other than a “normal” teenage life, who just happened to be drawn into this insanity by having the unfortunate luck of befriending a slayer…
“Is that all you saw?” Angel asked, and hated himself for being unable to say anything other than that, anything more comforting or caring or something to help ease her pain.
Cordelia shook her eyes, hazel eyes round and suspiciously bright. “This girl… she’s different. Not like anyone we’ve helped before.”
Angel’s disquietude grew. “How so?”
“Because she’s like me. Like Doyle.”
“She’s part demon?”
“ I’m not part demon, genius. Angel, she sees. ”
—
“So she saw her own death… and you saw her foreseeing it,” Angel summed up, not really caring about how awkward the sentence sounded given the bizarre nature of Cordelia’s vision.
The brunette nodded , her fine features still twisted into a grimace as she held the glass to her forehead. “I… I’m not sure. But I suspect I might have. Either way, I just knew that she could. And her fear wasn’t just because she was going to die. It was deeper than that. there was confusion, despair, a feeling of being so overwhelmed… I haven’t gotten anything like that from another vision.”
Angel simply nodded, once again reminded of what an inadequate, trite gesture it was to describe his turbulent feelings.
“We have to save her. Not just because it’s what we do but because…”
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. He understood. Because I’m not alone.
His mouth stretched in a taut, thin line, and he stood up straight. “I’ll get Wes. You wait here, and rest.”
He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but somehow he was when Cordelia set the glass down and rose to her feet, making a valiant and near successful effort to hide the shakiness in her legs. “No way, no how. I’m going with you.”
“Cordelia…”
But the brunette wasn’t hearing any of it. Despite her fragile state, she placed her hands defiantly on her hips, adopting a poker face to hide the aftershocks of vision pain. “In the past four years I’ve been stalked by a psycho invisible girl, used as a human sacrifice by evil frat boys, lived in fear for months that I would get attacked in my car by… well, you… knocked up by a demon spawn surrogate and beaten up by a rogue slayer. And all of those times, I’ve done nothing. I’ve had enough of being on the sidelines. It’s time I actually got to help .”
“Cordelia, you’ve been helping,” Angel tried to explain, but was interrupted by a perfectly manicured finger being jabbed at his chest.
“Answering phones, researching demons, and organizing your files is not helping. Being the carrier of mind-numbing skull-crushing visions… well, that’s a help, I guess, but in the end I’m still sitting here while you, Wesley and Gunn go off being macho men.”
“But that’s enough,” Angel tried to explain. “You have your part, and we have ours.”
“Yes, but how has the sitting in the office helped keep me out of danger? No matter what you do to ‘protect’ me danger always finds me.”
“Yes, all the more reason you shouldn’t go looking for it,” Angel retorted sharply. But he could tell from the look on Cordelia’s face that his arguments might as well be aimed at a brick wall. Once she made up her mind to do something, there was no stopping her.
Frankly, if he were smart he’d just throw her over his shoulder and lock her in his bedroom till he got back. But despite the ways she frustrated him, he knew he’d never get physical with her—especially since the thought of carrying her into his bedroom might lead to other ways of getting physical, which was not good for anyone involved.
Meanwhile, Cordelia had already dismissed his protests and was going for the long sword that had almost severed his ear that morning. As she turned and walked back to him, Angel didn’t miss the ever so slight wince she gave when another post-vision headache flared up.
He frantically seized this slip in a last-ditch effort to keep her from coming. “You just had a vision. If you’re still in pain, you’re at a disadvantage. I can’t afford to take that chance.”
Her only response was a withering glare. “Angel, after months of carrying these visions, I think I know when I can handle it and when I can’t. Trust me, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.”
Oh, but he did. First of all, he was well aware that if nothing else—well, except perhaps talking too much and being a general pain in the ass at times—Cordelia was brave. Not to mention stubborn as an ox. And in this case, he feared that bravery was clouding her common sense.
He tried a different tack. “I don’t need you distracting me,” he said gruffly. “You’ll be a liability.”
For an instant he swore he saw something—hurt? Disappointment?—flash across Cordelia’s face. But the expression faded as quickly as it had appeared, and her stubborn scowl had returned.
Damn it, that woman drove him crazy sometimes. Truth was, it wasn’t her stubbornness that discombobulated him so much as that fierce sense of protectiveness he felt for her. The idea of her in danger filled him with a gut-wrenching anxiety that he hadn’t felt—hadn’t allowed himself to feel—since… someone else.
Angel forced away the painful and all-too fresh memories, choosing instead to focus on the willful young woman before him. Clearly she hadn’t been listening to a word he’d been saying, or if she had, she didn’t care. She merely shook her head and said, “You’re not going to talk me out of this. You know that, right?”
He sighed, raking a hand through his heavily gelled hair. “Fine. Stay behind me. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to,” he growled, turning and grabbing his coat before striding up the stairs.
He could practically hear Cordelia rolling her eyes as her light footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him. He couldn’t decide who was in more trouble here—her or him.
TBC…