Addiction
by Jana Kay

DISCLAIMER: All characters named here belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the WB and 20th Century Fox. No profit being made, I’m just playing.
RATING: PG-13
WARNING: There are some themes in here that might make you uncomfortable. Read if you think you can handle it.
SPOILERS: Vague references for ‘Sanctuary’ and ‘Blind Date.’ Major references for ‘Lover’s Walk’ and ‘Hero.’ Standard canon, though ‘To Shanshu ...’ hasn’t happened yet.

SUMMARY: Not everything is as it appears.
NOTES: //...// means thoughts

Quote : Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which they never show to anybody.
--Mark Twain

Cordelia waved as she walked out of the office door, a bright smile plastered on her face that bordered on real, but couldn’t quite make it up to par.

They didn’t notice though of course.

A great actress she may not be, but she knew how to read the lines when it came to her own life. She knew how to tilt her head and raise her brows, pursue her lips and deliver the zany one-liners.

She may have had only a few minutes to memorise and read the lines from that play //not thinking about it// the other day, but she had a lifetime’s experience on reading the cue cards when it came to her own twisted life.

She paused on the steps outside, the warmth of the oncoming summer blanketed for the moment in a chill fit for winter, and she shivered as goosebumps raced up the length of her arms, and the dull ache she’d reluctantly grown used to began dancing along the edges of her scar again, eating away at her from the inside out.

Rain was coming.

Maybe she should get a job as a weathergirl instead of an actress. She’d stopped counting how many times the news-crew reported a sunny and fine day, and then her scar had eaten away at her again, leaving her feeling hollow, and she knew instantly that they’d be wrong.

Never more would citizens throw shoes at television screens for lying to them and letting them get caught in the downpour, if they had Cordelia Chase on board.

But how many times had she felt an icy rush of hatred for the people who’d given that very scar to her. How many times had she wished she could wreak revenge on them and make them see just how much their foolish thoughtlessness had hurt her.

Her! Cordelia Chase. Cordelia FUCKING Chase. She was so much better than them, and what had they given her in return for her friendship? A handful of broken promises and twin holes in her side, marking the entrance and exit of them in her life.

But of course, wishing was no good, because she had made a wish after all, and the memory of that wish was always enough to make the hatred die a little. Douse the flames of her anger the tiniest bit, and make the snapshot in her head of the two traitorous friends kissing seem like afaraway nightmare from another life that wasn’t really hers.

A black and white photograph left out in the rain whose colours had bled together to form a lifeless gray, pushed far, far down beneath the muck and betrayal to be forgotten, so she could still pick up the phone and talk to Willow as if they were old friends, relay messages back and forth from her to Wesley and Angel, making her two best friends think that she actually was still chummy with her highschool classmates, when in reality, she never wished to have anything to do with them again.

Her new life was in LA, not Sunnydale. And it may not be perfect, no, but it was *hers*, and she’d be damned if little Miss Likes-To-Fight or any of the rest of them were going to take that away from her.

Angel was more hers now than he ever had been Buffy’s anyway. She didn’t love him like Buffy had loved him, no, but she was his friend dammit and she cared about him. She was the one that he’d turned to when Doyle had died, just like she’d turned to him, and she was the one that he whispered his problems and fears and hopes to in the dark of his office when he thought she wasn’t around, but still needed to tell somebody so badly because he could no longer keep it locked up inside of himself to burn away like an unchecked acid, forever cloaked in darkness and despair.

Not Willow. Not Xander.

And never. ever Buffy.

She was the one who accepted him for who he was, bringing him blood and patching him up, and complaining all the time, yes, but that’s who Angel signed up for, right? She wasn’t Florence Nightingale and he knew that ... but she was his friend, and Angel accepted her for who she was moreso than anybody else ever had in her life.

The ache of her scar grated on her taut nerves as she got in the waiting cab and told the driver her address. She sat quietly in the back, staring out of the grimy window as she watched the traffic and buildings fly by in a flood of neon and white and gray and orange, trying not to remember the days when she had her own beautiful car and was never. ever reduced to paying a lecherous cabby to take her back to her rent controlled apartment.

Halfway there, the rain started.

//Weathergirl strikes again//

She shook her dark head as she stared down at her feet, decorated in the latest, albeit cheapest fashion, refusing to look at the falling rain which mocked her and her ever-present scar as it fell from the sky and splattered on the roads and pavement below, hissing slightly as the moist drops made contact with the dry ground.

Time passed and they were at her house, her stepping out of the cab quickly after paying the driver, racing up the steps as quickly as she could so she wouldn’t end up looking like a drowned rat.

Didn’t work though of course.

Next thing she knew, she was shaking water off of her clothes as Dennis opened the front door for her, sensing her as she walked up the hall, and she greeted him as she always did before slipping quietly into her bedroom.

The alarm clock on her night-stand read 11:13, the moonlight slanting into the room making the red numbers glow almost silver.

Another late night thanks to painful vision number 43.

She’s been keeping count, even though she’s never said anything to the others. They’d probably think she was crazy or ungrateful or just incredibly nit-picky. Maybe all three and a few others as well. God forbid she should ever feel pissed off for having to put up with mind-numbing visions that never once helped *her* ... well except for that first one. But then again, she never would have needed it in the first place if she hadn’t gotten them.

But she admits to herself that it’s nice to have a small reminder of Doyle always with her. Carried around snug and safe, tucked away inside of her. And every vision she gets always leaves behind a ghostly aftertaste of Ireland and whiskey and male, and she’s never told that to the others either.

She wonders sometimes if, when her time comes and she dies thereby passing the visions on to someone else, leaving them bound to Angel in service of the Greater Good, whether they’ll be able to taste her too, mixed up with the flavour of Doyle and pain and heartbreak and more pain.

She thinks now that she loved Doyle in her own way even before he was gone, but now that he is gone, that love has long since been mixed up with pride and hate, because he believed in her enough to give the visions to her, entrusting her with something so much more important than any one person ... and because he *did* give them to her, thereby tying her to somebody else for the rest of her -- now undeniably shortened -- life.

It’s hard for her, always hating the men she loves.

Xander. Doyle. Wesley, for just being so *him* sometimes. Angel, for never once being able to let go of even the smallest memory of the past.

She wonders if he thinks he has to atone for even the smallest of indiscretions, like rapping some little girl’s knuckles at the neighbour’s house when he was only a little boy himself ...

Probably.

Cordelia feels tired all of a sudden. So many old, painful memories. She feels drained as she haphazardly drops her coat on the bed and wanders into the kitchen.

Her stomach is grumbling now, craving for food as it keeps perfect time with the throbbing of her scar. She absent-mindedly runs a finger over it, massaging and tracing the lines she memorised long ago as she opens the refrigerator door with her other hand.

A pitiful half lettuce sits on the uppermost shelf, three small tubs of yogurt on the shelf beneath it, a packet of cheese and four tomatoes on the one below that, and a 2 litre bottle of Evian is tucked into the side.

She thinks she’s run out of bread, so she can’t make herself a sandwich. Instead, she grabs all three tubs of yogurt and the Evian, lugging them over to the small kitchen table in the centre of the room, grabbing a little spoon on her way from the side drawer.

Normally, she would have eaten at Angel’s after the fight. Scrambled eggs and juice and toast, plus a piece of fruit he seems to always make magically appear just for her.

But not tonight.

Tonight, Angel got hurt.

She patched him up as she always did, hovering over him as she chewed on her bottom lip and heated up two packets of blood to make up for all that he’d lost, trying to clean out the gaping wound that was directly over his heart but thankfully, the cause of it not made by anything even remotely made of wood, worry eating away at her because there was just. so. much. Blood.

And usually, Angel was always able to make a slightly witty remark when he got hurt and she patched him up, showing her that he was going to be just fine ...

But this time, all he did was close his eyes and grit his teeth, silently gulp down the blood and wince as he did, his throat aching from the ring of bruises around it. And when she was done, all he did was catch her hand as she turned to leave, squeeze it lightly and nod his head in thanks, and she pretended that his actions appeased her, that she wasn’t worried anymore, turning to Wesley and joking around, getting a smidgen of a laugh out of her broody boss before she turned with a smile and a wave and left, her work for the evening done.

She tries not to think that it was *her* vision that got him hurt so badly, tries to squash the image of Doyle that rises in her mind instinctively when even the thought of a vision is broached.

Her face becomes a stone mask as she rips off the plastic covering of the first small tub and dips her spoon in.

For right now, she’s had enough of walking down memory lane. If she so much as thinks of Doyle again just once tonight, she’s going to either a) smash her apartment to pieces, b) tear out her eyeballs with her fingernails or c) start crying and be seriously afraid of never being able to stop.

She still thinks there were never enough tears shed for Doyle, even after nearly a year since his death.

She concentrates on the menial things.

Holding her small spoon tightly in her palm.

Dipping it into the yogurt.

Making sure the spoon is full before lifting it out, being careful not to let anything drip.

Put it in her mouth and lick it off the spoon, savouring the taste of vanilla and strawberries.

She thinks that if someone were to see her now, they’d see nothing but a cold shell of her, left behind as her empty chrysalis, while her inner self has moved on to better pastures.

But there are no better pastures to move on to.

Just her and her visions and her motley group of friends, whom she clings to like a drowning woman clutching a lifeline or a woman possessed. She can never decide which one is the more flattering of the two.

If only the casting directors could see her now.

//Meryl Streep, eat your heart out. The angst queen has a new name//

Without even realising it, she’s eaten all three tubs of yogurt and has chugged more than half of the Evian.

The scar still scratches at her, the ache lessening now that the rain is coming down less heavily, but now she feels bloated, like a whale about to burst at the seams. And she has a headache as well. First she got the vision, and then she knocked her head. Not bad enough for a concussion though, says Wesley’s thorough inspection, so she duly took care of Angel and then went home to ‘sleep it off.’

But she knows it won’t sleep off.

Working with Angel, she’s had her fair share of headaches. And she’s become so used to them by now, especially in recent months, that she’s come to understand what types of headaches there are.

And this is one of those headaches that she knows won’t just disappear with a good nights sleep and a cup or two of chamomile tea a la Wesley.

This is one of those headaches that’s always waiting back there in the wings, lurking somewhere in the back of your skull and behind your eyes, beating an ever so faint drummer boy rhythm at the temples that you can’t always catch, but leaves you with a bad case of lethargy and a tapping of your foot nonetheless. And it’s always waiting for just the right moment to make it’s appearance, because this is the type of headache that always picks the wrong time. It’s what it’s known for.

The knock to her skull merely precipitated this, it didn’t bring it on. Now that it’s here, Cordelia can sense that it was building up for weeks.

It’ll be a good few days before she’s really herself again, and she can only pray to whatever sends the preternatural sight to her in the first place, that they forego any outward messages for at least a weeks time.

As she covers her bloated stomach with her hands and tries to block the gnawing of her scar until it fades to a faint nibbling and the pounding of her skull until it’s reduced to a gentle tapping, she feels that this is the perfect opportunity to act out of character for once.

After all, for a week she truly won’t be herself, it’s the perfect chance to do something outrageous that none of the others would ever expect of her.

And the fact that they’d never know would only make it all the better.

She groans as she stands up, taking the three empty tubs and throwing them in the trash can below the sink, then returning to the table to grab the Evian bottle and put it back in the refrigerator.

Turning resolutely and resisting the urge to cover her scar, she walks to the bathroom and carefully locks the door behind her.

Part of her knows that this is wrong, has scorned people who did this sort of thing herself time and time again ... but she still can’t stop. She’s been fighting the urge to do this for so long now, it seems like forever.

Probably since only three or four months after she got to the city though.

If she was in her right mind at the moment, she knows that undoubtedly, she’d never be doing this. After all, she’s Perfect Cordelia Chase. Beautiful Cordelia Chase. Queen Cordelia Chase.

But even being all those things, she still can’t measure up. Oh she knows she does in Angel and Wesley’s eyes, but in the giant scheme of things, she’s nothing more than a tiny bug on the radar, not even worthy of a blip.

In a few days time when she’s herself again, she’ll try and forget she ever did this. It’ll be pushed to the back of her mind like certain acts performed in Sunnydale and certain half-demons whom she still wakes up in a frigid sweat about most nights.

Part of her knows that what she’s about to do will not help anything, and perhaps it’ll only aggravate matters more, but she’s sick and tired of fighting.

And after every knock back, after every refusal ...

//Too tall ... too squeaky ... too dramatic ... too dark ... too innocent ... too bad//

The list goes on of course, but the one that gets her the most, the one that really kills her because it’s something she’s always prided herself on, the corner-stone of her entire image in highschool, going hand in hand with her knowledge of fashion and her money, is when they turn toeach other and say, just purposely loud enough for her to hear ...

//Too Fat//

If she was thinking properly right now, she’d know she wasn’t fat, just like she’d know the difference between a Gucci bag and a Prada one. She’d ignore the voice whispering in her mind that if she only did this, they’d notice her. If she only lost a pound or two, she’d get that next commercial for peanuts, or that other one for soap.

Maybe, if, what harm could it do? Just the one time, to see if there was any difference afterwards.

If she was in her right mind, she wouldn’t even need to answer that question. She knew from years of carefully perusing beauty magazines as the leader of her clique just exactly what harm it can and very often does do, but the ache of the scar and the bloatedness she feels and the headache that seems to be liquefying her every thought is not helping her.

She groans again, her eyes fluttering tiredly, and then she suddenly drops to her knees before the toilet bowl, sticking her finger down her throat and gagging before she has the chance to change her mind again.

Acid burns all the way up her oesophagus and her stomach seems to have lurched up to her lungs. Her body convulses as she flops over the rim of the bowl, her dinner and lunch and maybe even breakfast exiting her body in the worst way possible.

When it’s over, she lies there afterwards, sprawled out on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, beads of cold sweat lining her forehead and tiny chunks of digested food still floating around unchecked in her saliva.

After a few minutes of gathering herself up, she stands on only slightly shaky legs and walks to the sink. Turning the tap on, she splashes her face with cold water, gargling with the mouthwash she has in the cupboard and scrubbing at her face and throat with a washcloth.

When she’s done, she dries herself off and looks carefully in the mirror, ignoring the dark rings around her eyes and focusing instead on the lines of her face, trying to see whether there was any change. Whether they seem a bit sharper or whether they’ve remained the way they always were.

There’s no change of course, she should have known.

She would have too, if only her head didn’t feel as though it was being constantly pounded at with a hammer.

And now that she’s done it and knows it hasn’t accomplished anything, she’ll never do it again. Cordelia Chase will go back to being herself, and will never speak of this to a single soul. Her one moment of weakness when she bowed down to shallow vanity will never be repeated.

But she’s underestimated the urge, and next time she’s waylaid with a headache that puts her out mentally for days, anguish and desperation and fear of Failure that she hides so well during the day as she works steadily at the office clawing to the surface to rip through her stone wall defenses, then the need to repeat the act, to prove to herself and to all those casting directors out there that she does have that special something if they’d only be able to see pasther waistline, will be even stronger than ever.

Like an addiction, it will creep up on her, giving her the illusion of control until one day, her stomach will cramp when she actually wants to hold the food, and there won’t be a damn thing she can do about it.

But she’s Cordelia Chase.

She can get through that. She can get through anything she puts her mind to.

Right?

And as she nods her head at her reflection in the mirror, she vows that she’ll never ever do that again. Her scar does a jiggy dance to mock her mental thoughts as her temples throb and her eyeballs itch, her body no longer bloated, and with a turn of her heel, she unlocks the bathroom door and goes out.

Time for bed.

Tomorrow’s an important day.

Audition at 9:00am.

~Finis~