The Iron is Hot - Cordelia & Wesley
Full Day's Work
by Seana Renay
Contact: seana@blazenet.net
Summary: Cordelia tells Wesley a few things she should have told him a long time ago.
Spoilers: "The Shroud of Rahmon" and "Guise Will Be Guise"
Timeframe: Directly follows "TSOR." We're working on the basis that the lights did not go out at the end of the episode.
Pairing: Wesley/Cordelia
Rating: R
Archive: If you'd like it, I'd be honored.
Disclaimers: All things A:tS belong to Joss the Creator. The story is mine. If I was getting paid for it, I wouldn't be working overtime.
Notes: This is my first completed Buffy-verse fic. Yeesh. I'm nervous.
Warnings: Watch for falling angst. Also, there's shippiness of the W/C variety, so if that's not your bag, keep on truckin'.
Special Thanks: Kathryn and Starla, beta readers extraordinaire, for catching what I missed and helping me fix a few mistakes.
Dedication: To my huggy bear, Angel-Kate, for getting through a full four seconds of "TSOR" before shouting "Oh, my God, Wesley is hot!" I knew I'd convert her someday.
Date: Nov. 22, 2000
Darling, give me your absence tonight.
Take all of your sympathy and leave it outside,
'Cause there's no kind of love that can make this all right.
I'm trying to find a place I belong.
-- Fiona Apple, "The Child is Gone."
Rising from the sofa and following her toward the desk, Wesley wrings his hands in front of him momentarily and glances nervously at the staircase. "Do you think it's safe to leave him alone tonight?"
"You want to chain him? Go ahead. I think it's your turn this time, anyway." She kneels down to grab her purse from behind the desk, and, with a disgusted groan, pulls her stained shirt from the shelf she'd left it on. "Ugh!" She whirls to face him, thrusting the shirt into his face. "No way this is going to come out now. We couldn't have taken a little break in the demon sheet destroying for me to go home and Stain-Stick?"
He leans against the counter, and with a tolerant smile, sighs, "I do apologize, Cordelia. Funny how I keep forgetting that popping off to the dry cleaners takes precedence over Angel being in mortal danger."
He expects a returning jibe on his own lack of fashion sense, but instead, she frowns and replies indignantly, "It's not like I've got money to throw around on dry-cleaning, anyway! Or on clothes, in the first place, for that matter. And I really liked this blouse!" She's getting angry now. "God, not that you'd care."
She doesn't do this often, really. Complaints, of course, are an everyday occurrence with Cordelia, but real anger is rare, and he rarely knows how to react to it. This has happened very, very quickly, and he wasn't given any opportunity to stop it. He deems it unfair, this surprise attack.
When she begins to pace, and her voice raises, he refocuses on her words, and he hopes he didn't miss an explanation of some sort.
"...So I like nice things, so I can still be superficial sometimes. What the hell else do you two expect from me? You both knew me back then, and you know how much I've changed, how much I've had to change."
He wonders if Angel hears her, and if he'll come down if he does. He's ashamed that he wants it to happen. Comfort from Angel can soothe almost anyone, he knows. Especially Cordelia. Wesley has never been particularly adept at soothing. He steps toward her, but doesn't speak or try to touch her, because it feels wrong.
Cordelia's eyes, wild and glittering, are beginning to scare him considerably more than her tone or words. She's talking about Angel now, and the realization that she's capable of referring to him with even the smallest tinge of anger, of scorn, takes him completely by surprise.
"I've given up any hope of ever having a life that even approaches normal. All of a sudden, I'm Destiny-girl. Thanks again, Doyle!" she exclaims, with a brief upward glance. "But even when I'm scared, even when I want more than anything to just get the hell out of this place, I stay right beside Angel. And not metaphoric-beside, right physically-beside! And suddenly he's Mr. I'm-All-Alone-in-the-World. What the hell have I been doing for the past year and a half? 'Family,'" she sneers derisively. "Yeah, right.
It hits him suddenly that the shroud's affects may not have worn off yet, and that this may bear no relevancy to anything. But he's feeling undeniably lucid, and as erratic as her behavior may be, she sounds more like Cordelia being honest than Cordelia being insane.
She continues before he has a chance to respond, and he's measurably grateful, because he's still awfully confused. "He'll do it one of these days, Wesley, you know he will. He'll hurt one of us, bad. Or kill us. Or just decide to leave, and he won't even say a word. I've been waiting for it. All self-sacrificing, like it'll be so much better for us without him. We're just another teeny, little, insignificant part of his life. Two hundred and fifty years...And he forgets that our feelings matter to us, even if they don't matter to him. You'd think he would've learned by now, with..."
She trails off, and looks as though she's trying to remember how she found her way from her stained shirt to Angel. She doesn't appear to figure it out, and doesn't seem to care. "Oh..." she starts, her eyes searching the room wildly for a means to express her frustration, and Wesley is unsure of his safety, in a room full of weapons.
Then the frantic, twitchy energy just seems to disappear completely, as suddenly and inexplicably as it was brought on, and Cordelia crumples onto the blue sofa in the center of the office, holding her short hair away from her face. He sees that she's crying, and the moment he notices, it worsens, and her shoulders are shaking as she sobs.
He steps lightly toward the sofa, and sits a good distance away. He places a hand on her shoulder tentatively, and when she leans into his touch, he moves his hand farther down her back, and up again, softly rubbing her tense muscles. Her cries begin to dissipate, and he moves a little closer to her, his touch becoming more confident. She shifts in his direction, and he thinks she's going to let him hold her, but a pained moan tears from her lips, and she's on her feet again.
"No!"
Her cry is loud, and he's becoming more perturbed than hopeful about the fact that Angel might have heard it.
"You know," she begins, her voice shrill, "even when Angel's thoughtless, even when he's mean, at least he's honest. Pretending that everything's just peachy, pretending that nothing's changed...It hurts. And what's even worse is that you don't care, Wesley."
Shocked by her accusation, he begins, "Now, wait just-"
"You don't care," she repeats, her voice wavering with a heartbreaking sadness that makes him hate himself for having anything to do with it. "That, or you don't even know, and if that's the case, I'm really going to have a little less faith in this whole 'I'm so smart, look at my big smartness' riff. Because, to be honest with you, you'd have to be pretty fucking stupid."
He realizes that he must look terribly foolish, staring at her blankly. He doesn't know. He doesn't know what he's done to make her hurt this badly, and she's making it sound so blatantly obvious. And she's never used that word in front of him before.
She's looking at him with such pain in her eyes, and he wishes to God that he knew what she was talking about, but she's playing the pronoun game, 'it, 'this,' 'that,' and he knows that if he takes a guess, and is wrong, she will never, never forgive him for it.
"You know, I really thought that I'd be okay. Even if it didn't automatically go away," she says, turning from him. "Or ever go away."
He wants desperately to know the perfect thing to say, to say it, and to make this stop.
"But here you are, and all of a sudden, you're having all this sex that I didn't know about, and how exactly is that supposed to make me feel?" Her chin trembles and there are more tears as she continues. "I saw you with her tonight, at the party. Virginia." It's petty, but she can't keep the mocking contempt from her voice when she says the woman's name. "It's like nothing even happened. You can look at each other and smile, and be friends, and nothing's wrong. Nothing's bad."
She takes a deep breath, and her tone changes; softer now, and with a hollow feeling to it. "You...You took advantage of her, Wesley. I really think you did. And it's not fair for you to do something like that."
Wesley opens his mouth, and realizes that he's been holding his breath since she mentioned sex. "I had no idea that you felt that way about it," he says quietly.
"Well, I do. It's not fair, and it's not right, and to tell you the truth, it makes me a little sick to my stomach to think about it. You lied to her. You played the tall, dark, and deadly card, and of course, she fell into bed with you, because guess what? It's sexy!" She's gripping the edge of the desk, to steady herself.
She pauses, and he knows she has more to say, but that she's finally begun to wonder whether or not she should say it. It doesn't surprise him when she decides to. "She called you by his name, didn't she?" She's looking at his face peculiarly. "And you liked it."
"Cordy!" he exclaims, in that high-pitched nasal voice he hates, the one that comes out when he's feeling particularly helpless.
She closes her eyes and turns away from him, placing her hands flat on the desk and breathing slowly, bowing her head. "I didn't mean that," she offers softly, but he knows she did.
He says nothing, but winces inwardly. After all of this, he owes her honesty, and what she'd said had hurt. He decides that avoiding the subject is not exactly lying.
Sighing heavily, and willing to except a slap or a scream, Wesley closes the few feet between them, and pulls her to him gently. With one hand supportively at her lower back, he raises the other to stroke her hair with his thumb. He kisses the top of her head and holds her close, and only remembers to breathe when he feels her relax in his arms.
"You didn't mean to hurt me," she says dryly. "Don't think I don't know that. But it does hurt, Wes. Just seeing you every day, it hurts, and sometimes I wish one of us would just end it. Sometimes I hope I'll come here to find you gone," she confesses in a whisper, and he's never heard shame like this in her voice. "Just gone, somewhere else, maybe where you don't have to kill things all the time."
She looks up at him with big eyes, struck by a new thought. "There are people that go through their whole lives never fighting anything, Wesley. Never killing anything. And they're not bad people. I used to be one, and I was happy." She leans her forehead against his chest and wraps her arms around his back. "Sometimes I wish I could go. But I could never leave him."
'Him.' It stings. He's beginning to wonder if she hasn't wildly misinterpreted something on his part, because he doesn't believe he could have overlooked an indiscretion so great as to warrant a comment like that.
"I don't remember how I got here, sometimes. I don't remember when I started needing you both this much. How did this become my life, Wes?" she asks sadly, lifting her eyes briefly to meet his. "I was happy," she says again, reaffirming it to him, and to herself.
He tries to speak, and can't. He chokes on the words, and before he can try again, he's crying into her hair. "I thought we lost him tonight," he finally says, which doesn't really have anything to do with anything, except he feels it.
"Again."
"Again," he agrees, wearily.
After a long silence, she asks, "We've set ourselves up for something awful here, haven't we?"
"I think we have done." He pulls back from her, looking somberly into her eyes. "Do you hate me, Cordelia?"
Her mouth falls open, and then drops quickly into a frown. She reaches up, touching his face just barely before she sharply wrenches her hand back, with a slight shake of her hand. She takes a step backward, and looks at the floor, shaking her head. "I can't. Sort of wish I could."
"If my presence here upsets you, I will leave. All you need do is ask."
"You're just now noticing that I might be upset? Where the hell have you been?" she demands, surprised that he's trying to back out now, after everything that's already been said.
"No." He shakes his head firmly. "If you want me to leave you and Angel, if you want me to quit, I'll go. It was never my intent to hurt you. But I didn't know. If you want me to, I'll leave at once. Angel needn't even enter into it."
The ghost of a smile curves her lips slightly upward. "You would," she murmurs, the sound something close to wistful. "No. It would be worse if you left. I talk kind of big, you know. But not being able to see you every day, not knowing you were safe..." She looks up at him, smiling sadly, with a small shrug. "It would kill me."
"Cordy, I won't ask that you tell me more than what you need to," he begins, walking to the couch and sitting, his elbows resting on his knees, a slight pain in his back from the poor posture. "But I want to know if I can make things right. I don't want to lose you."
Bitterness tightening her smile now, she counters, "I didn't want to lose you, either, Wesley. But I didn't get much of a choice. It's like I just looked up one day, and you'd shut something off to me, some part of yourself. You'd moved just out of my reach. But I can't blame you for all of it," she adds thoughtfully. "You can't be what I need you to be. But just because I finally realized that doesn't mean it's stopped hurting."
"What is it that you need from me?" he questions delicately.
Again, she braces herself against the desk with one hand. She tilts her head, and laughs at herself. "Just forget it, Wes. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. I'm tired, and-" She breaks off, waving a hand in front of her dismissively.
He sits up straight, his eyes imploring. "Cordelia? Please."
"God, Wesley, you are so stupid," she blurts, looking at the ceiling, the wall, anywhere but his face. "I can't change this any more, okay? I can't make it any worse, what's happened here between the three of us."
"Allowing me to try to fix it won't make anything worse, Cordelia." He stands and walks back to her, taking her hand and gently lifting her chin until she faced him. "What do you need me to do?"
The words seem to come involuntarily. "I need you to love me, Wes!" She closes her eyes briefly and sighs. "And before you say you do, I know you don't. But that's the big deal, that's what I need. Pretty lame, huh? I know. It's just that..." She shrugs and admits with some effort, "Nobody that I've ever wanted has ever not wanted me. Except, of course, for Sleeping Broody upstairs, but he had some major extenuating circumstances at the time."
It's hard to talk again, and he clears his throat. "You love me?"
She makes a sour face. "Yeah, I do. You idiot," she adds angrily, unwilling to let this be complimentary in the slightest. She doesn't look at him, and it feels like he's looking right through her.
The time that passes might be seconds, but they are the longest seconds of Wesley's life, because this is a chance that will never come again, a chance he's been hoping for, and he's regretfully ill prepared, because it's a chance he never honestly expected.
"Oh," he manages finally. "Oh, Cordelia," and then he's reaching for her again, wanting nothing more than to hold her against his heart and tell her that she's right, he's a fool, and that he'll give the rest of his life over to proving himself to her again. But she pushes him away.
"No, please, I can't." She turns from him. "Please, just don't touch me, Wes." Desperate for a way out of this, she tries to walk away.
He catches her arm and pulls her back hard, and she stares at him in icy shock, her mouth parted in disbelief. He holds her firmly. "You're not leaving," he says, in a tone that can't be argued with. "There's no way in bloody hell you're leaving while you still think all of these things about me."
She composes herself as best she can, looking at him piercingly, and says nothing.
"I would have stayed, you know. Even if you didn't want me then." This is the first time either of them has referred to the kiss in Sunnydale in a very long time. "I would have doted on you, Cordelia, and loved you until it hurt. But you wanted me to leave, and I couldn't impose myself on you. Do you know why I stayed here? Why I stayed around until Angel gave me the job? It's because when I got to Los Angeles, and I saw you, I knew I was home."
She's crying again, but he can't stop.
"It was like something from a film, you kissing me then. I entertained the thought that you'd realized what a mistake had been made, and you'd been pining for me, waiting for the day when I'd walk through the door. And when I found out that was clearly not the case, I resigned myself to just being near you. To protecting you, although I knew you didn't need it. And after a few months, I gave up on the notion that you might come around, but I never stopped loving you, Cordelia." He takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly, fairly trembling now. "Don't you dare think so little of me."
Her eyes are wide, and terrified, like she expects him to start laughing, to take it all back. "You...You never told me."
Wesley smiles a brief smile and shrugs. "Well, you never told me, either. And you're not the only one that had something to lose." Letting go of her arm, he takes a step back, but she follows him, still watching his face pensively.
Hesitantly, she reaches toward him and asks in a tiny voice, "C-can I?"
Closing his eyes and turning his head for a moment in quiet amusement, he smiles at her broadly this time. "Come here," he says, nodding his head.
With a tearful sigh, Cordelia places her hands lightly on either side of his face. He lowers his head to lean his forehead against hers, his hands moving to the small of her back. They take a simultaneous deep breath, and laugh. And she thinks that laughing with him has never felt so good. And he thinks that being allowed to hold her like this is more than he deserves, but that doesn't stop him.
She wraps her arms around his neck, and closing her eyes tightly, rests her head against his shoulder. "Can we just forget everything, up until right now?"
He chuckles, and brushes his lips against her forehead. "I think it's best that we remember. I wouldn't want to lost sight of all it took to get us here."
"It took you being a moron," she offers with a smirk. "I'd be happy to remind you of that."
"Undoubtedly."
Breaking the warm embrace, she steps back and offers him her hand. "It's late," she says simply, with a glance toward the staircase.
"A bit early, actually," he corrects after reading his watch. He takes her hand with a smile.
She leads him up the stairs, remarking, "Angel won't be up for hours. We should get some sleep."
Entering a room near Angel's, he pulls her to him again, leaning forward so that she expects him to kiss her. Instead, he softly echoes, "We should," and the sweet, knowing love in his eyes makes all the months of pain seems a little less sharp, in perspective with this new openness, this honesty.
He closes the door behind them.
The End