If Cordelia's head had spun when Willow had arrived at the her door in Buffy's car not with a greeting but with a warning that the spell would create an incorporeal demon and Gunn had burst out of his truck at the same moment with an imitation relic from Wolfram and Hart's basement, it threatened to twist its way entirely off her head as she lurched through the Hyperion's open door. Nearly everyone needed some kind of first aid, and no one wanted to take the time to apply it, or even the time to feel safe.
Gunn did help Cordelia change Doyle's soaked outer cloak for a huge black garment of Angel's.
"I--I'll talk to her. I just need a quiet place," said Tara. She was tall and blonde with wide-set eyes and a very expressive face. Her taste in clothes was about like Willow's, just one step up from Doyle's, but she was extremely pretty beneath her 1800s school dress, and her voice held an odd, lilting musical quality.
"Contact her by magic. Good idea. Angel, the nearest quiet room?" Buffy said.
Did Buffy look a little less self-assured than usual? Cordelia remembered Buffy as a commander, a leader and a charmer who invariably took attention away from Cordelia herself. Now, her presence seemed...muted, and Angel and Doyle were the most prominent figures in the room.
Doyle. Alive. A little...worse for wear, having just come out of the sea, but alive. Willow had said Doyle would be confused at first.
Angel vanished with Tara and Buffy for a moment, and when he and Buffy returned, a little glowing ball of light followed them into the lobby, then winked through the front door and was gone.
Wesley Wyndham-Price burst through the door a bare moment later. He looked around, and Cordelia followed his gaze, noting Gunn's bleeding arm, Fred's singed hair, and Buffy's presence. "What the bloody hell is going on here?"
Giles added, "I think Cordelia should explain. It was her idea, was it not?"
"I thought you were mad at Willow," Cordelia said.
"Willow? What does...why do you all look...who is...?" said Wesley.
Cordelia gently took Doyle's hand off her shoulder and guided him to the couch. "Fine," she said, standing up again. "Everyone. Everyone who doesn't know, this is Doyle. He worked for Angel, two years ago when we first started Angel Investigation. He died when he pushed--well, punched, actually," Cordelia grinned at Doyle, "Angel aside and threw himself on a deadly weapon to save a lot of people's lives, Angel's included. Willow just cast a spell and brought him back from the dead. Some--" Cordelia stifled the word she had intended to use--"okay, someone over in the bitch department at Wolfram and Hart is spying on us, because they knew exactly where we'd be and what we were doing, and it wasn't like we were going to keep the urn Gunn borrowed from their basement last night. They tried to kill us all, but they only captured Willow, and they took her off in their car. So we have to rescue Willow, and then we can party. Can you believe Doyle is here?"
It was a minor miracle that no one had interrupted her, but maybe Wesley, Giles, and Angel were all in shock. Cordelia tossed her ponytail and went to sit down next to Doyle. Every moment his presence became more real.
"Uh, my turn," Buffy said. Her voice was softer, but it was still Buffy, and she had just been bossing them all around out there a few minutes ago. "We...we don't have time for this, every minute Willow gets farther away--" Buffy cast a look over her shoulder to the room where Tara was, presumably, still spell-casting, and continued, "and I suppose what's done is done now, but, Cordelia, you shouldn't have." Her voice gained a little strength. "Giles, you're not telling the others, they can never know. You don't go to a hell dimension when you die a hero's death. You go to--"
Everyone started talking at once.
"You came back from Heaven?" Fred, although it wasn't clear which 'you' she meant.
"I am shocked," Wesley, and he would be.
"I can't reach Willow at all, and Buffy, I'm --" Tara, in the door frame, looking a lot more shy than she had when she had left them to try.
"Don't anyone say you're sorry," Buffy, and Cordelia had seen Buffy cry before, but this thing in her voice was different, a kind of edge that sounded like the edge of an abyss.
"The one who used to have the visions?" Gunn.
"I only meant to kiss you," Doyle, in a whisper.
Cordelia answered that one, "I know. I'm not sorry you passed the visions to me, I understand now that they're a gift--"
"You're Angel's guide?" Tara, although whether to Cordelia or Doyle it wasn't clear.
"You're Willow's girlfriend?" Cordelia returned.
"Look out!" Gunn.
Vampires crashed every window in the Hyperion lobby. Six of them, all men in full vamp faces, simultaneously shed dark blankets and advanced, surrounding the humans. In one fluid motion, Buffy pushed Wesley out of the desk chair he had been sitting in, smashed it on the floor, and took a splintered arm out of the wreckage. She staked one vampire before Cordelia could do more than get herself in front of Doyle.
"I’m not somethin' to be protected here," Doyle said softly, working his way out beside Cordelia.
Strangely, though, the other vampires made no move to attack. They stood their ground in a threatening circle, all with eyes glued on Angel.
"Angelus? You will not bite the girl?"
Angel's answer to that involved a wooden bolt, a crossbow, and an angry vampire's reflexive aim. Then there were only four vampires in the room.
Wesley worked his way behind Buffy and took another chair arm.
"The witch said she had..."
"removed Angel's soul?" Buffy finished the vampire's sentence before staking it. "Willow would never use a spell like that. She isn't like..." As Buffy trailed off, her face set in a cold fury and she aimed the stake at the next vampire, who had been about to cut its losses and attack Giles.
She never got the chance, however; Wesley staked it from behind, and then finished the other two with a swiftness Cordelia had rarely seen in an ordinary human.
"Never mind. I know what happened. The question is what we are going to do about it," Wesley said.
"Like getting Willow out of there," said Buffy.
"Before she ends the world," added Tara, softly. Something passed between Tara and Buffy. Some primal protectiveness that transcended "dumb," and "evil," a common bond to a special person.
The vision hit Cordelia before she had a chance to think or plan. It was Doyle, then, holding her up from the floor rather than her supporting him, but then the migraine hit, and the fast-forward movie began, and Cordelia desperately tried to close her inner eyes. She had said once that she didn't just see the visions but felt them. The times, the places, the sensations all whipped through her as if she experienced the things she saw in compressed form. This time, though, she was still in the present, and she was in Doyle's body.
She could see everything. The hotel, the people gathered in it, her own body sprawled in Doyle's arms with pain all across her face, the tangible do-something anxiety that permeated the room. But it was all changed. Dimmer, somehow. Less intense than it should have been. Comparisons, memories--those were physical things, more real than reality itself. There was this overarching memory of peace. Quiet that was not boring, a sensation of being complete, of not being able to mess up or do evil any longer, the peace found at the end of the journey. Only, as a memory rather than as itself, it was a tangible kind of pain rather than a good thing. Memories of searing white light and icy ocean water pranced across the sight and touch of the here and now. And there was a knowledge. Life was a journey, and it was beginning again. The road stretched ahead and twisted off indefinitely; the pitfalls held no rescue and the cliffs were always there but would just regenerate you if you fell off them; and it was a place where no one would even know if you didn't get back up after falling, if you were sitting on the side of the road crying, because you would have to get up eventually; time had no meaning here.
It was over. The sights and sounds of the hotel itself were almost as overwhelming to Cordelia as a vision usually was, after that dimness that had existed in her mind for a moment.
"Is that what it's like for you?" Cordelia said. She had intended that only Doyle hear, but everyone reacted as if they had.
Buffy was standing right there next to her with her arms crossed. "They warned you," said Buffy. "Your Powers that Be were telling you what you did to Doyle."
"They couldn't have told me that yesterday?"
"Would that have changed anything? Would it have been a warning, or was it a punishment?"
"Cordelia," said Doyle quietly. "You never know until you've been tested. Maybe this is another test." It wasn't clear for whom Doyle meant.
"Sorry, Doyle," said Buffy. "I know exactly what's happened to you. I think Cordelia and I need to have a little talk, something about meddling with forces you should never get near." She advanced on Cordelia, putting her body between Cordelia and Doyle.
Angel intervened. "Enough. Buffy. We rescue Willow first."
"Fine." Her voice could have frozen enough ice to put on everyone's wounds. "Cordelia. Take Doyle upstairs. Get dry clothes. He needs to rest."
One look at Buffy, and Cordelia decided she'd help plan Willow's rescue later. Besides...
Even with the horror of the vision clouding her mind, Cordelia couldn't quite bring herself to be sorry for initiating the spell. Sorry that she had hurt Willow and Doyle, yes, sorry for that with all her heart--but not sorry the spell had worked...
"We use this hotel instead of our old office because...well, history later; we use this hotel now, and Angel and Fred have their own rooms here. This...how is this one, or do you want to go up a floor and see if there's something bigger?"
Doyle laughed. It was only a shadow of his old laugh, but it was still the same. "I seem to remember Angel begging me to get you out of his apartment. Rather ironic, yeah?"
Cordelia made herself laugh. That actually was funny; it was just hard to laugh with so many things still unspoken.
"Are you okay?"
"Am I...? Yes, of course. That was more of a warning than a vision. You're--not, are you?"
"Okay? Here with you, princess?"
"Don't tell me love is enough."
"Are you telling me you love me?"
"Yeah, of course. What? You think that I meant it when I used to reject you, or that two years changed anything?" She sighed. "Secrets are bad, right. Doyle, a lot has happened. Obviously. I didn't think it was fair when you...left...and Wesley just kind of hung around and stayed, and I was screaming at the Powers that Be to stay out of my head, and then Angel and Wesley proved I could trust them, and somehow Angel's mission became more and more a part of me." She took a deep breath. "At least one thing never changed. How badly we...I...we wished you were still a part of it. I would have brought you back right when you were gone if I had known it was possible."
He was silent. They sat on the edge of the bed in the bare room. Cordelia wondered what it must look like to Doyle, if it was this washed out to her. Excusing herself for a second, she first left one of Wesley's castoffs for Doyle to change into, then she ran downstairs for the most colorful sheets she could find.
"Is that all right?" Cordelia babbled. "We have to get you some new clothes soon." She snickered. Doyle looked worse than usual in tweed. There was actually something worse than his usual clothing selection.
"Yeah. Yeah, thanks."
"Okay. I, uh, I'm really sorry I, uh, I'm really sorry for the way..."
"Don't." Doyle turned those incredible blue eyes on her. "I get it."
"But you were done," Cordelia wailed. "You were done, and I wanted you here, and now your world is all washed out and horrible and I still, I'm still so glad..."
"Now I have the chance to ask you for that dinner," Doyle interrupted.
"You keep on doing that. You keep on pretending what I did is no big deal to you. I might believe you if it weren't for the PTB and their messages in my head."
"Cordelia. It is a big deal, but this is too." He paused. "You really love me?"
"Doyle," she started to add qualifiers, like 'this world isn't like the one you left but it's the one I'm living in too,' but she stopped herself, and just said, "I missed you. I brought you back because I love you."
He smiled. His eyes were half-closing--no kidding, that, about his probably being tired after coming back from the grave.
She bent to kiss him.
"Wait." Off Cordelia's look, he said quickly, "Princess, I love you. I've been crazy about you since the moment we both joined the team, and that's not gonna change. I love you too much to..."
"I get it. You're so tired."
"No. It's...this whole back from the dead thing...it makes it hard to feel things here on earth. We start doin‘ anything--it would be like I was using you."
"Oh." She actually understood that now.
"It's like--I'm gonna have to wake up again, and I don't even know how."
"Oh! Doyle, you could talk to Buffy while she's still here, that is, after she saves the day and rescues Willow and everything. Willow brought Buffy back from the dead, too."
"Buffy--she was dead? Angel?"
"Took it kind of hard. But she had already been so far away, and Angel--well, kind of shut down when you weren't here. No one can figure out what's going on with him anymore. He was more upset that he was able to keep going without Buffy, more upset that he didn't die for her."
"That explains a lot."
"We're getting sidetracked again. I mean, Buffy knows what it's like. She can tell you how to make your world normal, not all dark and--"
"She's not okay. Buffy."
He had the funniest way of saying her name, like the 'u' was an 'oo' sound. "What?"
"That just explains what I saw in her. Cold. She's been defeated; she’s walking around defeated, and she hasn't even tried to rescue her friend yet. That connection that the mission is about? It's not there anymore."
Cordelia was silent. The problem she had helped to create seemed larger than the city of Los Angeles.
"Don't look like that."
"Don't try to be brave."
His face fell a little. "I'm not. I'm just saying this is going to take a long time to fix. Then--then I'm taking you to the absolute best--"
"Shhh. Sleep now." Cordelia added, "I'll stay, in the chair or something."
"That would help."
"Are you going to be able to sleep?"
There was no answer from either Doyle or Cordelia, as the room faded to silence.
