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"Uh, Nina?"

This wasn't right. He knew the hotel — his hotel — like the back of his hand. He could walk the corridors blindfolded, even those in parts of the building that they had barely inhabited before the great move to the Law Offices of Wolfram & Hart. And while the Hyperion had managed to avoid sustaining heavy damage or infestation like a majority of the buildings in Los Angeles, hell wasn't nearly this well-kempt. Especially not where his former mailing address was concerned. The carpets were vacuumed, the floors had carpets, mirrors and glass polished to a glare-free shine...

Not only did he appear to be in the wrong hotel, but the wrong dimension, and that was a problem. A big one.

This was the last thing he needed, whether it be an actual case of dimensional displacement or some trick the Senior Partners were pulling on him in retaliation for overthrowing the Lords. Not that they needed an excuse to meddle in his life. They were the masterminds behind his newfound liveliness in spite of what the heavy glamour that hid his humanity from everyone had to say about him. Angel was alive, but it was important that everyone still believed he was a vampire.

It's like he told Wes; there's only one way to get out of hell. Act like nothing's changed.

Which was why he stared at what he could see of the buffet table across the way, but made no move to approach it. Eating actual food in public? Dead giveaway. (No pun intended.)

He should probably find shoes. Somehow, walking out of his room in nothing but a t-shirt and sweatpants had topped his list of poorly thought out life choices this morning.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If talking didn't feel like a precursor to vomiting, he would've commented on how much vomit was a part of parenthood. Connor threw up on him daily, it felt like, in those early months before Holtz ripped him out of his life. Angel was used to waltzing around covered in demon good, other people's blood, and baby vomit. Cordelia even threw up on him a few times after an intense doozy of a vision ripped through her skull.

He's desensitized to a lot of things; vomit being one of them.

Angel lies still, waiting for her to finish. His grip on her arm remains firm, steadying for both of them.

It was probably best for both of them that he kept quiet. It let her focus anyway. She had been fortunate enough to skip all of that with Dawn. Sure, she had a few hazy memories of Dawn and sick days, but they lacked detail. Hospitals smelled like vomit underneath all the sanitizes and bleaches they used and she would never be comfortable in a hospital because of her experience there with her cousin when she was a little girl.

Buffy was careful tying off the fishing twine as tight as close as she could manage. She straightened up, twisting to grab a bandage with the hand that Angel didn't have a grip on, content to let him hang on because it was steadying for the both of them. It took a little bit of work and she did move the held arm a bit, holding it close with her fingertips while she taped the bandage down.

"Okay. I think you're good, but you need to be careful not to rip the stitches. Take it easy and I'll look at them...probably every day? The clinic might be able to give you some antibiotics, but they'll probably also pooh pooh you for not going to them to get stitched up in the first place. Do I need to get a trash can? Bolting up to the bathroom, probably not a good idea."

Every day? She made it sound like he was going to be here for a while and that was exactly the opposite of what Angel wanted. Still somewhat drunk, it made him even angrier to think of the possibility of being unable to get back to hell, to his son. He promised Connor they would talk and instead of heading downstairs to sit down with his kid and discuss the whole awkwardness of the Gwen situation, he wound up here.

"I'm not staying here," he declared stubbornly, letting go of her arm so he could plant both his hands on the mattress and push himself up into a sitting position. He waved off the offer of a trashcan. "I have to get back. I can't— I can't stay. I have things to do, a city to get out of hell. I don't deserve to not be there; to be here while they're still there."

Buffy put a hand on his chest, not literally holding him down but making the gesture of it. "First you rest, sober up and have something to eat then you can go running in the muck ~~amok~~ looking for a door back home. They're still going to be there, Angel. A few hours, some rest and some food will only make you more able to help them."

Look at that. Buffy knew how to be logical and use it to make a reasonable argument. It was kind of a new development.

To a sober mind, her words would've made sense. But to a drunk one, what Buffy's insisting is madness, something he cannot fall in line with.

"No."

Angel surges up anyway, moving a hand to swat hers away from him. If there was a door to get home, he was going to find it and he was going to find it now. He'd been through worse, lived through things no living or undead being ever should, and some hotel wasn't going to keep him away from LA or his son.

Oh. Really? They were going to do this? Buffy reached out, snagging his wrist with her hand, fingers curled around his wrist. She held on tight, but not tight enough to hurt him.

"Angel, I promised not to let you do anything stupid. This qualifies as stupid. I will tie you up and sit on you if I have to."

She'd let him find out whether there was an escape or not later when he was sober, but right now, she wants him to rest and eat and get sober. She's not sending him into hell with fresh stitches.

Sober Angel would've conceded her point and backed down. But that's the man when he's sober and capable of thinking rationally, and that man, this man was not. And the mind of this man dropped right down into the gutter, a smirk accompanying the descent.

"Kinky."

Edited 2014-03-13 04:06 (UTC)

Buffy rolls her eyes. Sixteen year old her would blush and get flustered. Twenty four year old her has been there and done that.

"Whatever. You were talking about throwing up on me ten minutes ago. Not so kinky. Lay down. Eat your sandwich."

Fine, fine. He does as he's told, wrenching his wrist out of her grip, Angel set himself back on his feet and padded around the perimeter of the bed to the other side. He sat down on the edge, retrieving the sandwich from the nightstand. Yep, he still liked peanut butter and very nearly almost commented on that— but thankfully, parts of his rational mind were beginning to bleed back in through the haze of whiskey and pain, reminding him that doing so would utterly destroy whatever new foundation he and Buffy were now standing on.

Telling your ex you were human for a day, but you took it back from her — from everyone but himself? Not among the best of ideas.

"Vampires don't do hungover like humans do. Less messy, what with the whole speedy healing deal. As a human... I remember that. Being hungover. It was the not fun part of spending your nights in the local tavern until the keep kicked you out. I'd like to avoid reliving my not-so-glory days."

Translation: water. Could've just asked for water, but rambling seemed like a better course of action at the time.

She stands in front of the door a moment longer, arms crossed over her chest, watching him and making certain he's not going to make a run for it. Finally she sits down on the opposite bed.

Definitely not the best of ideas.

She blinks at him, as if she'd have experience with a human hangover. Her healing might be quite so advanced as a vampires, but it's close and it takes an awesome amount of alcohol for her to get drunk. Honestly, it's him eating the sandwich that makes her think of water.

"Oh. Hold on."

She goes to the small kitchette and gets a bottle of water of out the fridge then takes it to him. "Something to drink."

He gulps it down and there's a part of him, the part of him that was a demon longer than he got the chance to be human, that's disappointed it isn't blood. His tongue yearns for the smooth, copper taste of blood and all other liquids, no matter how pleasing they are to his mortal palate, will always pale in comparison. He imagines he'll get over that. Eventually. Hopefully.

It was different than that day he took back. On that day, he'd wanted it. He'd wanted to be human and in those short twenty-four hours, he embraced every single facet of it. Now? It was a burden, it slowed him down. He didn't ask for it, never planned on obtaining it once he signed away his right to the shanshu. It makes all the difference between what he's used to as a vampire and hasn't done for centuries as a human startlingly apparent.

"Thanks. For everything." He holds the empty bottle out to her, unsure of what to do with it. The only trash can he saw was in the bathroom and standing is an effort he doesn't want to make at the moment.

It's probably only one piece of adjustment he's had to make or that he will have to make.

In some ways, Buffy could probably understand that difference. Maybe, if she chose normality, she'd deal with it better than she had on her eighteenth birthday when it'd been foisted upon her.

"You're welcome," Buffy says quietly, taking the water and throwing it in a trash can near the little living room suite area of the room. She gets another bottle of water and hands it over to him. "Drink that too."

Angel reaches out, but his hand lands on her wrist, not the bottle. He meets her gaze.

"You can't tell anyone. About me, about... this. What I am now. I've gone through a lot of trouble to perfect the glamour that has everything from Slayers to demon sludge believing I'm still a vampire. It needs to stay that way. Nothing's changed. Nothing can change."

Buffy goes very still when he grabs her wrist, watching him. After a moment, she nods.

"I won't."

She may not exactly understand what he's doing or why, but she understands the concept. She understands the reasons behind it.

"I"m better at keeping secrets than I was when I was sixteen."

Angel can't say when he fell asleep, just that he eventually did, the pull of alcohol and exhaustion weighing down heavily on his system. He's been through a lot in the past year, skirting by with the bare minimum sleep requirement if he allowed himself to sleep at all, and being able to just doze uninterrupted and without worry is freeing. It's a freedom he shouldn't be allotted, but Buffy had been right.

He was of no use to his son, to his friends, to the people of Los Angeles if his entrails were falling out. If time stood still on the other side of the door he'd gone through like she said, then Hell on Earth would still be there waiting for him when he found it again. Hopefully by then, his side will have either healed some or been done back up by magic.

Did this place even have a library with those kind of reference books in it? Questions he asked himself upon stirring, though out loud it was—

"How long was I out?"

Angel may not be certain when he fell asleep, but Buffy had watched it happen by degrees. She lay on the opposite bed, tangled up in her own thoughts, her hand beneath her cheek as she watched Angel fall asleep then proceeded to watch him sleep.

It was fascinating, watching him sleep as a human. She'd fallen asleep beside him when he was a vampire countless times, but he'd always been so still, so quiet in sleep. He tossed and turned now. He snored lightly. He was alive and Buffy wasn't sure how to cope with that. She wasn't sure how to cope with knowing what Angel would do or had done in her world. She wasn't even sure if they'd happened to him yet or if they ever would and did any of it matter now that he was human? Shouldn't becoming human be some sort of fresh start?

She was lost in those thoughts when he woke up and asked his question. She glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand.

"A couple of hours. Not too long. How do you feel?"

"Like I was hit by a bus. Or kicked by a dinosaur. Feels about the same."

Funny thing about having actually been hit by a bus before: you're able to legitimately compare that to being kicked by some demonsarus rex. It sure didn't feel funny, though, and that chuckle that ripped through him didn't do him any favors. He was sore — rested for once, but sore. At least he was no longer bleeding through his bandages. Buffy's stitching up did the trick.

He sits on the edge of the bed, runs a hand through mussed, ungelled hair. Might as well address the elephant in the room.

"It's a punishment. Not a gift, not something I rightfully won or earned, but a demotion. I riled up some of the biggest bads out there by taking out their apocalypse task force." Angel sighed, looked down at his feet. "I joined Wolfram & Hart for reasons... It's a powerful weapon, I intended to not only redirect their resources for good, but also to take the damn thing down from the inside-out." He looked back up at her then, something hot and intense in his gaze. "I did it. I pulled the rug out from under the feet of the Senior Partners, but I lost people along the way. Fred, Wes, and Gunn. Doyle."

His gaze dropped again, mouth slanted into a thin, unhappy line. "Cordy."

A breath— "After I did it, they retaliated almost immediately by dropping all of Los Angeles into hell. You can't see it." Or couldn't. Wouldn't? He's sketchy on how time is supposed to play into this, being well acquainted with how that tends to work in these situations. "To the outside world, LA looks like its carrying on as usual. Inside? There's nothing. A void where a city used to be. They're in hell. All of them. The Partners made me human to make it harder for me to fight back and they damned all of them along with me. And you know what the bitch is?"

He laughed again, his side protesting. "I'd do it all over again."

"Good information to know." She hasn't actually been hit by a bus or kicked by a dinosaur, but she's pretty sure there are some comparables there. However, she's got the slayer constitution and healing working for her so...maybe not.

She listens to him, nodding when necessary, but not injecting anything. Sometimes there aren't any words that can make anything better or add anything to the telling. She'd hoped that his new job had been something good, something that wasn't him going evil. Corporate hadn't ever really been Angelus' style, at least not as far as Buffy is aware. It's far too impersonal for him.

She wants to tell him that wars have casualties whether they like it or not. Good deeds don't go unpunished and sacrifices have to be made to make things matter, but he's not one of the potentials; he doesn't need a pep talk and he knows all of the things she could tell him. Instead, she keeps her silence, body tense as she listens.

"Which is why we didn't know," she says quietly. It makes sense; however, she's not certain they wold have been able to help out even if they'd known. She's been busy with her own problems, an influx of zompires is taking over San Francisco and the police are after Buffy. Again.

She looks up at his laugh and his words. "It was Connor, wasn't it? You saved him."

How did she-- Of course. Cordy had calmed down considerably after he told her he did it for Connor. It was the only thing that made sense, the only reason he would sign his name to that dotted line. His son was losing it, clinically. There was nothing he could do for him, nothing that could be doen to stop him. Getting a half-vampire the psychological treatment he so desperately needed would've resulted in a bunch of dead psychiatrists, leaving him with only one option he didn't want to take: eliminate his own child in order to keep the world safe from him.

Connor had been beyond saving, was putting other people's lives in danger besides his own. He would've either killed himself and hundreds of innocence (including Cordy) or been taken down by his father's own hand. Wolfram & Hart gave him an Option C that fixed a seemingly unfixable problem. A new, normal life had given Connor the stability he needed, something to fall back on once the reality of his life set back in.

Angel needed to get back to him.

"Yes," he admitted quietly, feeling tears sting his eyes, unbidden. He blinked them back, pressing his fingers against his eyelids. "He was-- Things got bad, things you don't know about. There was nothing-- Nothing I could, and Wolfram & Hart offered me a chance to do what I couldn't do, to give him something I wasn't capable of providing for him."

He was talking to a girl who dived off a tower for her sister, a girl who had told Giles that if Dawn died, she quit and meant it. She might not understand exactly how Angel felt, but Dawn was a part of her and she wanted all good things for Dawn, all wonderful, normal, happy things. She felt as if that qualified her to understand the whys of what Angel had done and would do.

In his place, Buffy would have done the same thing for Dawn. There was no point in saving a world when she didn't see anything worth saving in it.

"And he's okay now?"

Except Angel didn't have the luxury of quitting. He'd done that once, after he lost Darla to Wolfram & Hart's determination to turn her back into a vampire after she'd finally come around and accepted her mortal fate for what it was. It hadn't worked out too well, and he didn't plan on throwing in the towel ever again. If he'd been forced to take out his kid, he would've kept going, because he had to. Because someone had to. He made the tough choices, the rough calls.

He did it so nobody else had to, never completely thinking of himself. It was always for the greater good, no matter the price.

Funny how a couple centuries ago, he'd been a selfish drunkard going nowhere in life and now he was a selfless Champion of the Powers That Be.

"More or less. Considerably more than less. It's complicated. I don't want to get into the details right now."

At that point, Buffy didn't really have the luxury of quitting, but she had every intention of taking it if Dawn had died. Buffy hadn't chosen to be a hero. It had been pushed upon her. However, she'd accepted it and was willing to dedicate her life to it; she simply had a few conditions; one of them being that Dawn lives.

She nods, happy not to push the issue. "Okay." She sits back down on the opposite bed. "I'll tell you what I now about the doors so far. It's not much. I haven't found one back to Sunnydale, Scotland, San Francisco or anything that resembles our world. That doesn't mean it's not there. From what I understand, different doors react to different people. You might be able to find and open one to Sunnydale circa high school while I can't. Or anywhere else. Generally they seem to be reliable? Once they're there, they stick so in theory you could go back and forth between here and home if you find a door, but as far as I can tell, you can't bring anyone else over."

"Scotland?"

His head snaps up, eyebrows knitted together in confusion. Why was she looking for a door back to Scotland or San Francisco for that matter? Last he heard, she was based out of Italy. Thoughts of The Immortal threaten to sour his mood further, but he resists.

"Yeah...Scotland." All of the dubious looks ever. Surely he remembers Scotland. It's kind of where they'd been when the whole disaster that was their sex life had resurfaced.

"Castle. Potentials. Dawn was a centaur, or maybe a doll. I can't remember which at the time you were there."

Dawn was a centaur. Her sister was a centaur (and a doll?) at some point, and she was near castles in Scotland surrounded by ex-potential Slayers, not on a dance floor in Italy at The Immortal's side. It didn't add up, which meant–

Angel sighed, dropped his head into his hands for a second. He ran his fingers over his face as he lifted his chin back up, his gaze landing back on her.

"Year. What year is it supposed to be for you? Because last I checked, it was circa 2005."

Or it ought to be. He wasn't too clear on how time worked in hell. Last time he was in hell, a century equated to a few months on Earth's dimensional plane.