Cordelia had a nasty gash in her right leg and bruises all over, but no other lasting injuries. Well, unless you count the amount of money it would take to buy enough makeup to cover those shiners...but she could worry about that later.
One moment she had been mentally drafting another pep talk for Willow, keeping herself from shaking from the lawyers' last bout of torture--although she'd received only a feather's touch compared to Willow--and not letting herself wonder why it had been almost a day and Doyle still hadn't led a rescue.
Then it happened, and the rescue itself was almost anticlimactic. Angel grabbed one end of the cell bars and Buffy the other, and they pulled in unison while Doyle, in Brachen form, tore away the ropes now binding the girls in place. Cordelia shrieked and hugged Doyle, saying "I knew you heard me," over and over while the spines appeared and disappeared at random. Angel gently gathered Willow, heedless of the power crackling around her, while Buffy said "now, Tara."
As they were breaking their way out, some generic evil lawyer hustled Tara into the room. Tara gave one cry, broke away, and rushed to Willow. Angel knocked out the lawyer. They climbed, Angel carrying Willow, and tumbled into an empty conference room on the basement floor. The noises from through the door were unmistakable.
"They're having a meeting out there?" Cordelia said in a harsh whisper. "At half past midnight?"
"Clients are probably vampires," Angel said. He carefully lowered Willow to the floor, and sniffed. "Can't smell through the walls; means they can't smell us. I wonder if there are any mind readers."
Tara's features took a distant cast. "No," she said. "No glimmer of intelligence out there, actually," with a bit of her old sly humor.
"Willow needs to get to a hospital," said Buffy. "Like, now."
"Magic..." Willow whispered.
"Shhhh," said Tara, rushing to Willow's side.
"Break...the magic...the power well..."
Buffy nodded, her face set in an expression that Cordelia remembered all too well. Like when she was promising Cordelia, Xander, Willow, and Oz that they would have a nice normal prom if she had to kill everything in Sunnydale to give it to them.
Tara, on the other hand, was closer to breaking than Cordelia had even seen in the white room. She leaned over Willow, kissing her and shutting out the world. Cordelia couldn't look away. It was a tender moment, and the sense of total comfort and forgiveness seemed to spread to all of them.
Cordelia had felt the same thing once. Her hand was dwarfed in Angel's as she came back to herself in a hospital bed, realizing at once that she was truly thankful for the visions and that she had a real family. The same comfort she saw in the present without the sexual dimension. An impossible mission, but an absolute trust to make the mission possible .
What had happened to them--what had happened to that once upon a time family? Cordelia stood, well, leaned against a wall in a supply closet just outside a dungeon exit, in worse physical shape than she had been at any time since that day in the hospital, and bearing the scars of eight hours of intense pain that had been her own. She hadn't even known that Doyle was coming. For all the confidence Cordelia had pretended through that ordeal...she had become better at it, the pretending, but there had been a time when she hadn't needed to pretend. What had happened to that time?
She didn't let on how many times she heard voices from the past. "You're all fired." Cordelia had forgiven Angel. At least the old shallow Cordelia, who Angel had said once that he liked just as well, had forgiven him. He'd presented her with the most beautiful wardrobe that she'd ever had, beyond even what her rich parents could have given her. Still, nothing had been quite the same since. There wasn't just serious disconnect in this guy at this point, there was darkness, and the members of Cordelia's little family had been just a little bit afraid of him ever since.
What had happened?
Watching Willow slip in and out of consciousness locked in an embrace with Tara, Cordelia fought tears of her own.
"The power well is the thing that you were saying they were using to bind Willow's powers?" Buffy asked Tara.
"What? Um, I think so."
"Can you ask her where it is?"
"Room just beyond...it's this glowy thing and they disguised it as a Minnesota winter cow paper weight," said Willow.
Buffy chuckled. The redhead immediately blacked out, and Buffy sobered.
"It's like a lightning rod," said Doyle. "Demons have this sense about magic, how it's all connected to the earth. There's a spot where Willow's power is concentrated."
"Would breaking it hurt her?" said Tara. "And what about d--demons?"
"Demons have less magical power than humans," Doyle said, earning an incomprehensible brilliant smile from Tara. "Just more awareness, that's all. And no, breaking it would only return what is hers."
"Can you show me what it's doing?" said Buffy.
Tara reached over to Buffy with the hand that wasn't supporting Willow, closed her eyes, and looked distracted for a moment again. Buffy jumped a good deal higher than an ordinary human would have been able to. "Remind me to ask you to paint that world you see sometime," she said, shaking her head. "It would make a great advertisement for Giles' store."
Cordelia rolled her eyes and drifted to the edge of the closet to check on Doyle. He'd looked so confident in demon form, more so than Cordelia had ever seen him, not that she had seen the demon form before the Quintessa, but even more confident than he acted as a human.
"Try to look a little less shocked, Princess?"
"Thank you." Cordelia couldn't think of anything else to say, not yet. Thank you for bare-handedly ripping off the ropes those goons tied to me? Thank you for making me think that maybe there's a chance of getting my family back?
"Buffy, can you carry Willow through the sewer exit?" Angel was saying.
"Yes, but--"
"Doyle and I will break the power well. I trusted you before, remember, when you were scared to let me come in. Trust me now?"
"Of course. All I was going to say," Buffy pointed to the gashes on Cordelia's legs, "was that Cordy might have trouble with the ladders. Tara, can you support her?"
Through the tail end of Buffy's words, Cordelia said, "What do you mean I'd have trouble? I'm staying right here, and I'm going to help smash that magic box."
"Cordelia--" said Angel.
Doyle whispered, "Did they make Willow hurt you?"
Cordelia returned, "Just indirectly; they turned her own power into a creature she couldn't stop."
The Angel and Buffy show was still going on. "You've worked with her this long and you haven't stopped trying to give her orders?" said Buffy as she gathered the unconscious Willow in her arms and stood. "Tara--"
"She's my everything," Tara said sotto voce.
"I know you're coming. I was just going to ask you to hold the door?"
"Of course."
Cordelia peeked out the front of the closet door as Buffy, Willow, and Tara silently left. "Some vamp-face is gesturing at a laptop. I didn't know vampires knew how to work computers." She turned back to her friends, ignoring Angel's injured expression. "All the others look bored. Why haven't they already heard us in here?"
"Wolfram and Hart soundproofs all its closets," Angel said shortly. "They never know when they might have to kill somebody in one."
"Gross!"
"Earlier, when we came in,” Doyle said, “How did you cross the vampire threshold?"
"Lilah knows I'm here," said Angel. "I timed it so that our arrival would be about on time by the fake prophecy, but all the higher-ups know I've crossed the barrier and not left. You can beat Wolfram and Hart, but not trick them, not really. That was what all the delay was about, Cordy. We left a fake prophecy to make them think we'd come at a different time and place to rescue you, hoping to get ourselves in and out afterward."
That made a lot of things make a lot of sense. It also made Cordelia wonder anew just how Angel's mind worked. She shuddered. Then she nearly slipped in the blood that had dripped unnoticed down her front.
Angel was at her side in an instant. He eased her to a sitting position as he had done so many times as she'd had visions, tore off one of his sleeves and started tending her wounds. Cordelia made no move.
"What is it?" said Angel.
"No one told me how brave you'd become, not that you weren't before," said Doyle to Cordelia.
She kept up the act, flashing him a mock-annoyed glare. "I'm a bitch, remember? I always fight back." She hadn't intended to add in a whisper, "This time, I was only trying to fix my own evil. Guess I finally have something in common with you atonement-guys."
When had Doyle taken her other hand? "You did it for me, Princess." There was this sense that the last secrets were coming to light. "I'm not worth that."
"And you didn't do the evil."
"I thought I knew that. They tested us all. In the white room. The little girl, she made everyone look at scenes from their lives and make changes--except me, because she said I'd already changed things because of what I wanted, that I'd already failed."
Doyle had looked about to burst through the last half of that. "You wait jus' a minute before you think that what you did was some kind of failure. I'm supposed to be here, and I have that on very good authority." He shrugged. "No rest for the weary, and it's gonna be hard, but I have a job to do." He looked around, at Angel, back at her. "I thought I was the only one havin' trouble with this, with me bein' back. You're actin' like..."
"I only feel guilty," Cordelia said. "Selfish, and I made this mess!"
Angel said firmly, "So you opened the door for Wolfram and Hart to do the evil. Opening doors--well, sometimes it's stupid, sometimes it's necessary, and sometimes it's stupid and necessary. It's not the evil itself."
"Everythin' I see," said Doyle, motioning to her wounds, "tells me you're not selfish."
Angel paced a little, checking the closet door again. "Still here," he said. "Cordy, don't trust everything the bad guys tell you. Sometimes you can't even trust everything the good guys tell you."
"Like the head-splittin' invasions from the Powers that Be," said Doyle, as Cordelia had easily predicted he would say.
"Fred calls them 'The Powers That Screw You.' They promised they'd turn Angel human two years ago, but they've done nothing but put obstacles in his path since. They'll never let him win."
"You'll be human again, man? Are you goin' to stay that way this time?"
Angel looked a little embarrassed. "Cordelia doesn't know about the first time," he hissed.
"I had to tell her," Doyle mumbled. "She was all ready to go snap you out of the Buffy brooding with her fists and her tongue."
"Would've done quite well."
"Besides, I saw it in living color in the white room," added Cordelia.
"Yeah, that's what Buffy said." said Angel.
"Is she goin' to be okay?"
"I don't know. I wish the Powers would try to release Buffy instead of me. I deserve this fight. She was chosen for it when she was just a kid. But look at all these futile prophecies, promising release--the Gem of Amarra, the Moira demon, the Beacon...oops..."
"No one ended up forgiven after destroyin’ the Beacon," Doyle said. "So stop it."
Cordelia peeked through the bottom of the door, the only part she could see from where she sat. Her legs had stopped bleeding, but they hurt--but irrationally, she hoped the lawyers would still be out there and they would be able to keep on talking. At least, long enough for Doyle to get through to Angel. Somebody was projecting Power Point slides right over the closet where the three till hid, mostly invisible and sound-protected if not silent. Wish granted.
Doyle was still talking. "I had the easy way out there."
It was Angel’s last secret. "You were there, you showed me the task I had to do when all I wanted to do was go back to being rat-boy...no, don't ask...and forget...and then you showed me what the reason was that I was there in the world." Angel softly struck the wall, with sheer controlled force behind the blow. "The Powers--they showed me at the beginning--but then Wolfram and Hart said they were breaking the connections I had to them, and I haven't found the connection again. And I lost the mission again, finally. And...damn, I've missed you."
Doyle, still sitting beside Cordelia and holding her hand, reached up to touch Angel's shoulder. "We're gonna get through this, remember?" He shook his head. "Never though I'd be pep talk guy. We don't have the same guide, but the visions still show us how to do good. And I'm--not goin' anywhere. I'm glad to be here. Not just because of a mission."
Recalling that horrible vision in the Hyperion lobby, Cordelia said, "Wasn't it better where you were?" She felt herself tense, and that hurt, physically, but she had to know.
"Different," said Doyle. "Less stress--so much easier--and the way there was no direction made no difference 'cause I was already at the end. But this is important too. This--" he waved his hand around. "We're back. We have a job to do, and we're gonna do it. Together. The next time I find out I know you're okay--many years from now--it'll be because you really are. It won't be just an untouchable fantasy. It'll be true. It kinda already is." The Irishman sank down as if just becoming aware that he had made a speech.
Cordelia had a sudden urge to kiss him.
It was brief, more of a sealed connection than anything more, yet everything hit Cordelia at once, the way it used to when she still had the visions. All the horror of the past few hours, all the grief of the past few years, the shame she could now give up and the sensation that Doyle was really there, alive, holding her.
Angel had a hand on each of their shoulders. There was no fear anymore, from them or from him. Trust overrode even conscience. "It's real, isn't it?" he said after a long while. "We're really back."
"We're really back," said Cordelia, drawing her hand across her eyes, composing herself as best she could. She looked awful. But she felt better than she had in a long time.
The lights went out in the room beyond.
"Thought they'd never leave," said Cordelia. "I don't get prophecies and Powers. I get helping people. Let's go make the evil lawyers leave Willow alone."
