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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.

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She doesn't move, but Faith does stand up a little straighter. She looks him over again, and if her eyebrows dip any lower she's going to transport back to the stone age and start grunting in communication.

Then she does move, to the side, and around Angel. Faith wants to get a good look at him -- what he's claiming is impossible, right? Was there anything impossible to them? Happiness, she thinks. Happiness is impossible and this is the closest thing she would think of for Angel's definition of happiness.

"Human." She clarifies, because she needs to hear the word aloud in order to actually process it. She laughs, then, because it's absurd and doesn't make sense and the only other option would be to attack him and feel out how he responds. And Faith's not quite there, yet. Not that it's out of the realm of possibility.

She's laughing, but he's not. There's nothing funny about the situation he's found himself in, about the how and the why of his being mortal.

Angel regards her grumpily, crossing his arms over his chest. "I'm not kidding. I'm human, Faith."

Well, clearly there's only one way to figure this out: Assume that this is not Angel and force the truth out of him.

So she moves forward, assuming that not only is he still a vampire but is potentially even more than that. Faith's fighting has always been more reliant on brute force than grace and tactic, so it's more of a bum-rush than a planned advance. She's not buying this bullshit and she's not about to get herself killed by being naive, but maybe she'll get herself killed in a fight she's letting her emotions get her into.

Bad move. Angel may be human and injured, but losing the demon within doesn't mean he's lost all those centuries of experience that he gained while he was still one. She rushes him and he moves to catch her off balance and counteract her would be assault, to use her momentum and lower center of gravity against her.

He's no longer faster, stronger, or swifter than a Slayer, but he's still a force to be reckoned with. Gunn and his crew alone had proved that a human could be a lethal weapon if wielded properly, and he's been doing just that since he was fit to hit the streets in hell. It's one of the many reasons why he's been able to keep this charade up for so long. He's just as dangerous alive as he is undead, thus making it harder for those around him to tell the difference.

That, and he's familiar with Faith's moves. That definitely comes in handy.

When Faith lands on the floor on her back, Angel's a lot closer than her instincts prefer and she jerks to move against him again until she registers what just happened. He'd known exactly how to counter, exactly what to expect, and he'd barely touched her. No swings, no jabs-- all maneuvering.

"So. Human."

"Human."

Good, she believes him. Hopefully. Faith's the first person he's willingly confided this in. The dragon knew, because he'd come across him before the glamour was applied and Wesley... Well, Wesley had ties Angel wished he didn't have. It was a constant internal conflict him; being grateful for the chance to see a fallen friend again and hating that the only reason he was around was to play liaison for the partners. Angel snipped at Wesley more than the ex-watcher deserved, but they were all under an extreme amount of stress and there was nothing about any of their situations that Angel was okay with. Wesley, unfortunately, being the man in the suit who delivered news from the big kitty upstairs, bared the brunt of that.

"Wolfram & Hart has an interesting sense of humor." Among other things.

"Right." She watches him for a moment, trying to figure out whether this is bad or really, really bad. And not just the human part but also the Wolfram & Hart thing. She should have had another drink, why hadn't she just grabbed a bottle? Then maybe the weird ache in her head could be justified with something more fun.

"Mind if I...?" She motions for up, because at least this will give her more time to process and figure out how to deal.

This— this is what he needed. The understanding, the ready acceptance, the absence of shock, hurt, and what had looked like a lingering desire to deck him for daring to hide it from her. Buffy, that is. And truth be told, if not for the circumstances that lead to her untimely discovery of his humanity, he would've kept hiding it from her. She didn't need to know. She wasn't a part of what he was involved in, wasn't a part of his life anymore.

Faith was and likely always would be.

He held out a hand to her to help her back to her feet. "Gotta work on those landings."

"Gotta work on a lot of things." She's up with only the grace allowed her profession, because she's still reeling from this bizarre revelation.

It's quicker than Faith thought that she comes down firmly on the side of really, really bad considering their whole situation. And she even seems to be on track with his line of thought as her mind turns to Buffy almost immediately.

"Buffy's here."

He frowns, the corners of his mouth turning downwards almost immediately at the mention of the other Slayer's name.

"I know."

It's a grimace; he knows, and he isn't all that thrilled about it.

"Gonna be a problem?" On lots more levels than he's probably thinking. Faith's really not sure she's got the sway to deal with all of this right now; she's gotta get some kind of bearing and fast. That means cutting through the bullshit right quick.

He shakes his head. "Not anymore than it usually is. Or was. I'm not too sure about the should be. Time's doing a... time thing."

Really, he ought to be more bothered by the prospect of being out of sync with them than he is, but at this point in his life, finding himself a few years behind his Sunnydale associations is pretty much par for the course. Must be Tuesday, take a number, etc. Karma kicking in for all those times he knowingly and deliberately tampered with the normal flow of time.

Faith's quiet for a little bit, giving herself another moment to adjust with new information. Time things, well, she's not all that familiar with. But there had been other weird crap happening that she wasn't sure of, too.

"Yeah." She's not sure she wants to sound like the crazy one this time, but Faith needs those bearings. And it's Angel. Maybe they had hit a couple trust speed bumps at home, yeah. This was more important. "Buffy act weird at you at all? Like-- more than usual."

"I don't think I'm the right person to be the judge of Buffy weirdness. There's been a constant weirdness between us since Sunnydale."

Maybe if he hadn't been treating her as some grand Wolfram & Hart illusion specifically designed to fuck with his head, he would've picked up on something a little more weird than their standard brand of weird, but he hadn't. To be honest, Buffy was too busy focusing on how weird he was acting to act too weird around him herself.

"Why, did she try to start something with you?"

The shrug that comes out of Faith is one she hasn't displayed in a little while -- a classic sign of Faith's own uncertainty about a situation.

"She was talking about some sister -- and she didn't mean one of the newbie slayers." It had left Faith questioning Buffy at first, and then herself. Recent events were only adding to the confusion: before Faith arrived here, Buffy had called her from the states talking about a sister, too.

A shrug of uncertainty is better than a shrug indicating her own certainty in her inevitable death in the wake of feeding herself too him after shooting up with orpheus. He's done a lot of hard drugs in his time, but nothing's quite affected him like that did. It gave new meaning to 'split personality complex,' giving body and voice to two sides of the same coin while he was still blitzed out on the stuff.

Ironically enough, the desire for disassociation had come from the souless side of himself, not the other way around. It was himself without a soul that had been unable to deal with the ties that bound him to the things he did while capable of goodness. He remembers how much that had sickened him. And for him, that wasn't all that long ago.

"Huh," is his only comment to that, but he doesn't think too much of it.

In his rational mind, Faith not being able to remember Dawn is likely a glitch that comes with doing the dimensional shift. Magic from one reality didn't always carry over to another or was represented differently than it was in the realm in which it was cast. Memories of Dawn were an illusion on the grandest of scales — perhaps imprints of her were, too.

In time, maybe this place would make him forget her, as well. Just like hell had made people remember Connor, and cause his son to remember everything Angel had joined up with Wolfram & Hart to ensure he forgot.

"She say anything else to you?"

Edited 2014-04-08 01:37 (UTC)

Faith shakes her head, recalling Buffy's immediate picking of a fight as soon as they came face to face. It was a little jolting, if she were to be honest, but not something she couldn't deal with. Walking away had seemed the best choice, but Buffy following along was pretty new, too. Being an adult about things is hard, and now Faith's got all this confusion, too.

"No, but I think I met the girl and made her cry." Which was also awkward.

Other people would likely seize this golden opportunity to tell Faith she's awful, that she ought to feel bad for reducing an innocent girl to tears. But, if Faith can't remember Dawn— Something else is going on here, something that isn't Faith's fault. Angel's not going to hold whatever the setting may be doing to a person's perception of someone else against them, and he knows Faith wouldn't lie to him about this.

Maybe to someone else, but not to him.

"Ever heard of multiverse theory?"

Normally, Faith would affect a blank look and mention offhand that no, she doesn't eat that kind of cereal. But it's Angel, and this is kind of serious so she's more willing to actually look like she wants info.

"Not really, no." But she figures it is what it sounds like. "What, like, they're from a different dimension, or whatever?"

"Parallel worlds. There's an infinite number of them, all created by the varying choices we make in our lives and others. The deviation could be a simple as ordering orange juice instead of coffee for breakfast, or as dramatic as Buffy's mother settling down somewhere not Sunnydale after the divorce. If this hotel is a sort of holding dimension, a pocket middle ground for all those crossing wires, then it's possible variations of would arrive here, too — follow?"

That's not quite multiverse theory, but Fred was the physics guru, not him. He was far from stupid, but there were a lot of ideas and concepts that Angel understood perfectly from a magical/mystical standpoint, but was completely lost on when it came to the scientific.

Not to mention Faith doesn't care much beyond the general idea of things -- physics details aren't ever gonna have her munching popcorn and begging for more.

"I might be a different me than she knows. Vice versa -- fun. Extra Slayer drama garbage." But it could be worse, of course. Maybe there's a world where Faith didn't go darkside. Maybe there's one where she didn't come back from it at all. Faith shakes her head lightly, waves of hair shuddering over her shoulders as she tries to refocus her thoughts on what matters and what she can affect.

"All right, so Dawn's this Buffy's sister. That mean you're the not you I know, too?"

"Maybe, maybe not. Would it matter if I wasn't?"

He's human. He's been living in hell for the past year or so, give or take a few months. It's very possible that the Angel who got swept up into that mess with Twilight is one who lived in a world where Los Angeles never fell to hell in the aftermath of the battle with the Circle, that time was somehow shifted and forked off, leading to the one that was dragged down leading a completely different, Twilight-free life.

Another shrug. Faith's head's not sure about the answer to that, but her instincts tell her that it wouldn't. His name is Angel? She'll follow him over cliffs.

"Maybe not," she replies. What she doesn't say is that another version of her could be much less cuddly than she is these days. That maybe Buffy would have a pretty valid reason to have started the slayer grudgematch up again. Not that she can worry about it now. Not with heart-beating Angel standing right here in front of her.

"So. Gonna have to figure out some things." Why they'd never heard of Random Hotel Dimension. How to get back to their own. How to deal with the fact that even as a human, Angel got the drop on her. Buffy has a sister. Buffy's here.

How to deal.

"Yeah, I'm doing a bit of that myself."

Angel's still reeling from hell, if he's being honest with himself. There's a tightness in his chest that's coiled up in fear for the son that's handled himself just fine out there without him, who is all buddy-buddy with Spike of all people instead of the father who's done more to fuck up his life than fix it. There's also the guilt for wanting to get back because Connor's there above righting the wrong he caused when he took down the Circle and pissed the Senior Partners off. He damned a whole city to hell, and he's supposed to just live it up in a hotel that exists in a world where day and night don't happen at once?

That's not acceptable, but like always, Angel's going to make the best of this situation. Going back is the ultimate goal (until it isn't, until Dawn and the lack of magic in the future she's from become more important than going back), but that doesn't mean he can't multitask along the way. He's good at that.

"Buffy knows — about me. That I'm... y'know." Alive. Human. "She sort of stumbled upon it. I might've thought she was something else pretending to be her in order to screw with my head at first. Nobody else does. I intend to keep it that way."

What goes unsaid is that if not for the fact that he was convinced he was hallucinating some sort of mindfuck, he wouldn't have clued Buffy in at all.

Faith nods, adding it to the pile of information she's currently compartmentalizing away. Multiverse theory, or whatever, means she's not looking to flap her butterfly wings and mess a lot of things up.

Which means she's probably going to have to go talk to Buffy, and given what they'll be talking about Faith doesn't expect it to go very well.

"Don't gotta tell me once," she says. As complicated and jacked up as Faith always thought her life was? Angel's got her beat by a million. She's not about to add to the pile if she can help it. And given her track record lately, she's par for the course on loyal to a fault. It means she might not be as chatty as she normally would, in fear that she'll let something slip in a moment of easy friendship that she shouldn't. She's lucky she only commented on his toes, and not something more serious.

"Work the problem. Where do we start? Plenty of vets already been here awhile, and here we are without any info. No train tracks, no mustache-twirler gloating." She bites at her lip, looking around the room as if it will reveal some grand design to her. "Gotta figure it's just a freak of nature, to start. A crack in reality, or something."

It's easier with Angel. Not having to pretend to be an idiot.