OOC: Personality and Background

[bumpychampion]

 Warning: The cut information below is quite lengthy.

PERSONALITY: As Angelus, he is the very personification of everything deviant, twisted and vile in the world. Showing something of a preference for destroying innocence and piety - especially if they’re nuns! - Angelus revels in tormenting others on every mental, physical and spiritual level imaginable. Although he is able to enjoy a good massacre as much as the next sadistic vampire, outright butchery is too quick and too easy for this demon. He would much prefer breaking them down, piece by withering piece, until they are more husk than person. In one horrifically shining example of this capacity and love for brutality, Angelus pushed Drusilla - a virgin girl gifted with the ‘Sight’ - to the zenith of madness before making her into a vampire to lock her into that state of mind for all eternity. Acts such as this earned him monikers like ‘The Scourge of Europe’ and even the First Evil, the one that came before it all, recognized how purely evil Angelus truly was. During it all, he grins and laughs and glorifies his own black brilliance.

Angelus’ time spent traveling across Europe with his Sire (and, eventually, two other vampires) might lead the uninformed to believe he’s something of a team player. In truth, however, he’s had sex with a male companion’s ‘love’ just to hurt him and has shown no qualms with betraying the woman - his Sire - who he was supposed to care about if it meant survival. Even when the Beast, a herald of the First Evil, gave him an offer of partnership that lesser demons would have groveled for, Angelus was quick to spit the deal back in the Beast’s face.

As Angel, he has spent over a hundred years trying to repent for his old life. There isn’t a moment the man isn’t plagued by guilt or haunted by the countless faces of those he has tortured and murdered. This karmic and self-flagellating weight has made him a somber, serious, and very introspective man with a seemingly limitless ability to brood. Normal social skills come hard for him - so don’t ask him to dance, or, *cringe*, sing - and he’s always more likely to be the proverbial wallflower than the guy mingling with the rest of the party. That said, he’s not one to be berated or intimated by others and would sooner taunt the face of his unavoidable death than cower or flee.

He possesses everything that Angelus does not; compassion, the ability to love, bravery, nobility and willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of others. To boot, Angel gives a loyalty and a trust to his friends that is nigh-unshakable. To whoever might come after the people he cares about most - or, worse, have the gall to actually harm them - there will be hell to pay. He knows that he’ll never balance the cosmic scale and that, most likely, his soul is still damned. Yet he keeps going, keeps trying anyway.

Angel has, and always will have, the world on his shoulders. Even when friends and lovers ask to help with the weight a little, even when they think he’s let them, the man always feels responsible for all the woes around him. He will go to extraordinary lengths to ‘help the helpless’ and has, on several occasions, been dubbed a ‘Champion’ for good. Despite situations where he’s shown the ability to bide his time when it might be wisest to wait, Angel has also displayed an impatience for thumb-twiddling when people suffer and can find himself in a place where he’s more inclined to run head-long into the fray than wait for a better plan.

Though he has stared into the eyes of thousands of nightmarish beasties and not flinched, Angel has still proved that even he is capable of being pushed too far. After nearly two years of being played by Wolfram & Hart, the law firm (shocker, I know) that represents and manipulates the whole of evil, Angel entered a dark period where he dropped his friends and brought a self-proclaimed war to his enemies. He did this with such viciousness that when Darla, the vampire who turned him, saw the changed man she declared that he wasn’t Angel or Angelus, but something unrecognizable even to her. In more recent times, when he joined Wolfram & Hart’s Los Angeles branch, he proved himself able of possessing both pragmatism - joining to get resources to help more people in a month than he could in a year normally - and a naiveté for thinking he could change the beast from within its belly. Neither of these moments lasted, of course, and he’s always come back to his old self swinging a sword at the things that go ‘urrrg, arrggg’ in the night.

As a father, Angel is very much capable of giving the tough love approach to raising his superhuman son and has been more than capable of beating the snot out of Connor if it knocked some sense into him. When Connor sunk Angel to the bottom of the ocean to get mistaken revenge on him for supposedly killing the man who raised him, Angel came back to his disturbed son with no loss of love, proving he had the critical component of patience and understanding that every good parent needs.
Surprisingly to some, given the right circumstances and the right company, he has been known to smile and get a teensy bit jovial in his billowing black monochromes. This is especially true by the end of the show where, when compared to his season one persona, a more notably open attitude is readily apparent.

BACKGROUND: Born Liam in Galway, Ireland in 1727, he lived a semi-comfortable life as the son of a merchant. There was no love between him and his overbearing father, but despite being a great disappointment to his parents, he shared a bond with his little sister, Kathy. This bad blood came on the coattails of Liam’s decadent lifestyle of laze, booze, fist fights and prostitutes. He was a man that wished to travel and meet thrilling women that weren’t bland or “simpering morons” as he considered the locals. During one of his altercations in a bar, he caught the eye of the vampire woman Darla who would, after leading him down an alley with promises of a more exciting life, turn him into a creature like her at the young age of 26.

When he clawed his way out of his grave, Liam went about turning his entire village into a river of blood. His first stop was his own house and Kathy, believing he had returned to her as an angel (likely the source of eventual change in name to Angelus), invited him in without hesitation. He spared no one. After this, he left Ireland in 1753 and joined Darla to carve out a trail of corpses through Wales and northern England before they reached London in 1760. There he would win Darla away from her own Sire, the Master, with words that demeaned the deformed vampire’s underground life and promised her luxury and cruel violence aplenty.

In 1764, Angelus and Darla murdered the family of the vampire hunter Daniel Holtz after he chased them across Europe. This lit his hunt with an entirely different fire, of course, but after nearly a decade of pursuit, Holtz eventually retired in York as a weary and bitter man. In 1773, however, the demon Sahjhan offered to get him to a future where he could continue his revenge anew. Though a devote man with a love for God and a great hatred for evil, he accepted the demon’s offer.

In 1786, Angelus would Sire a Puritan named Penn who would copy his signature at the time and carve crosses into the faces of his victims to mock God. Two centuries (and some change) later, he’d end up killing Penn after the vampire’s killing spree comes into his Los Angeles territory. In 1789, Angelus encountered the Beast in Prussia who tried to enlist his help in killing the Svear Priestesses who sought to banish him. Angelus refused and, before the Beast could finish beating him to bloody pulp, it was banished as it predicted. For decades more, Darla and Angelus would continue to wreak havoc and nightmare through the continent until, in 1860, Darla gave him a ‘present’ in London. This gift, the previously mentioned virgin that had the psychic ‘Sight’ by the name of Drusilla, would be one of Angelus’ most darkly beautiful masterpieces. Posing as her priest, he cut down her family in front of her and caused her to run to a convent. On the same day that she was to take her vows, he massacred the entire convent, too. After this, Angelus’ last act was to have sex with Darla in front of Drusilla, something that finally nudged the girl into the yawning abyss of insanity. In the midst of this, he turned her into a vampire and imprisoned the still-Sighted woman in a mind that would forever be unhinged and tainted by a demon.

Lonely and envying the connection between Darla and Angelus, Drusilla (who had been traveling with the duo every since her change) decided to Sire someone for herself. The man she turned, a poet named William, would look to Angelus as a mentor. Though he basked in causing William - later to be known as ‘Spike’ - pain and jealousy, he would teach him every blasphemous thing he’d need to know to be a proper bloodsucker. When Angelus slept with Drusilla, William continued to travel with the other three, but it was a betrayal that he would never forgive.

In 1898, while in Borşa, Romania with his gluttonous crew, Angelus killed the daughter of the Kalderash gypsy clan. Seeking revenge, they cursed Angelus by giving him a soul that would condemn him to an endless life of guilt for every atrocious deed he had ever committed. Darla tried to threaten the rest of the clan to remove the curse or face death themselves, but Spike ruined it by prematurely making a meal of the rest of them already. Taking the name Angel now, he failed to rejoin with Darla, Spike and Drusilla during the Boxer Rebellion in China when he couldn’t pass his Sire’s test by eating a baby. His last ditch effort to return to his former glory was dashed and, controlling the urge to feed on humans completely, he went to the United States to begin his isolation. Arriving in New York by the way of Ellis Island in 1902, he would spend some time in Chicago in the 1920s and in Missoula, Montana during the Great Depression.

Later, during World War II, the Demon Research Initiative of the United States government forced Angel to rescue an American submarine crew from three Nazi vampires, his old friend Spike amongst them. When the sub was badly damaged by a depth charge, Angel had to Sire a crewman, Sam Lawson, to get everyone out of there alive. Sam would be killed by Angel decades later after trying and failing to get revenge on his Sire by killing his friends.

In 1952, Angel stayed at the Hyperion Hotel in Los Angeles. He tried to keep to himself and blatantly ignored the strange string of murders and suicides going on within the hotel. When he found a woman, Judy Kovacs, hiding in his room from a private investigator (she had stolen a great deal of money from her last job after they fired her for being of mixed race) he attempted to get rid of her but only began to develop a mild, friendly relationship with her instead. As he watched Judy, too, become changed by whatever was afflicting the hotel, he was compelled to finally help and discovered that a paranoia demon had taken residence there. He gathered the materials necessary to defeat it, but when he returned to the hotel and found Judy being hounded by a mad mob that blamed her for the deaths, she accused him to save herself. This led to him being hanged (which obviously couldn’t kill him) and, when the crowd dispersed, the bitter and betrayed vampire left the demon alive and allowed it to continue to prey on the hotel occupants. It wouldn’t be until several decades later that he’d return to kill the demon and allow Judy, the only victim still kept alive to be fed on, to find peace in her own quickly-following and natural (if one could call it that) death.

In New York in the 1970s, Angel witnessed a robbery at a doughnut shop where the owner was shot. He wasn’t strong enough to resist the sight and smell of the man’s blood and, for the first time in nearly a century, he fed on a human being. When he was done, Angel was so horrified with what he had done that he condemned himself to a life of homelessness and feeding on rats for the next twenty years. There, a presumably good demon by the name of Whistler would find the emotionally tortured Angel and persuade him to finally join the fight against evil and help the newly awoken Slayer, Buffy Summers (slayers are a mystical line of females, only one supposed to be alive at a time, with ancient demon power randomly chosen amongst Potentials every time one dies). Going to her high school, he watched her change from normal cheerleader to vampire slayer, he fell in love from afar and found a new purpose in life. Unbeknownst to her, Angel would follow her to Sunnydale, California.

(Seasons 1-3 of Buffy) Presenting himself to her as a mysterious man that offered warnings and cryptic messages, Buffy would fall for him as well over the course of several weeks. Via the devious workings of Angel’s sire, Buffy discovered his vampirism and ends up engaging him in combat, demanding answers. During this, he recounted to her how he was given a soul by the Gypsies and she realized why he felt different from all the other vampires. Darla chose this moment to take her place on the stage, so to speak, and in the confrontation that ensued, Angel staked and killed the one that made him a monster. After this, despite attempts to stay as allies only, the two eventually started dating.

Spike and Drusilla, the remains of Angel’s former Europe-bloodying posse, came to Sunnydale to find a cure for Drusilla’s weakened condition; one brought upon her under the torture of a human inquisitor. They discovered that the blood of her Sire, of Angel, could be used in a ritual to restore her. Angel was captured for the ritual and, although Buffy and her friends - the so-called Scooby Gang - saved him, it was not in time to stop the ritual from being a success. Drusilla, reinvigorated, carried an unconscious Spike from the scene as well and the two disappeared into the night.

Down the line, on the night Buffy and Angel consummate their relationship, Angel learned of another aspect of his curse the hard way. When the Gypsies worked their spell, they made it so that the moment he experienced true happiness (a.k.a. sex with someone he loved) he would also lose his soul. So, waking in bed with Buffy in the middle of the night, his soul left him and Angelus was reborn. Angelus seethed at the thought of what Buffy had made of him, of what he had become during his time with a soul, and with this hatred he allied himself yet again with Spike and Drusilla while making the lives of Buffy and all of her friends miserable. With the help of his companions, he unleashed a powerful demon, called the Judge, but Buffy was able to defeat it almost as soon as it had been put together. Frustrated yet more, his plans became more sinister. Through his furious campaign, he would do such things as prey on the Scooby Gang and leave Buffy drawings he had done of her while she slept, but in comparison to his ‘finale’, they were little more than child’s play. By killing Jenny Calendar, a teacher at Sunnydale High and a member of the same Gypsy clan that originally cursed him, he not only was able to slake a little of his thirst for revenge, but in turn also killed the love of Buffy’s Watcher (a society of people that guide and train Vampire Slayers).

After this, Drusilla got him scheming on unleashing the demon Acathla. Showing just how much he wanted to see all the planet burn, Angel was unhindered by the fact that unleashing this demon would mean the end of the world. He succeeded in completing the ritual needed to awaken Acathla and, though Buffy fought him and tried to kill him, she was defeated. Instead of killing her when he had the chance, however, Angelus chose that time to gloat over his victory and the impending apocalypse in a true villain-esque fashion. Buffy took advantage of this, as one would expect, but before she could deliver the killing blow herself, her friend Willow (a member of the Scooby Gang and budding witch) succeeded in restoring Angel’s soul. Though he was again himself, dazed and confused though he may have been, Buffy knew she had to kill him. The only way to close Acathla’s portal was to feed it the blood of the one that had opened it so, after trying her best to sooth and assure the vampire, she had no choice but to impale him on an enchanted sword before the vortex. This closed it, but also snatched Angel into the depths of the hell dimension contained within.

Months after the incident, Angel reappeared in a crackle of energy in the mansion he had been staying at in Sunnydale. It’s unknown how this happened, but it’s theorized that by putting the same ring Angel had gifted to her in the spot where the portal had opened, she had somehow catalyzed the event. In any case, time operated differently in the hell dimension and Angel had really been in the grips of its grueling torments for what amounted to a hundred years. Back though he may have been, Angel was a crazed animal barely kept calm even in Buffy’s presence. After finding him, she cared for him in secret, bringing him back to himself without the knowledge of the others. She had done this because she knew that, after what Angelus had done, none of them would have put up with her aiding the vampire. The Scoobies did eventually discover it and their fury was only kept in check when Angel saved Willow from being killed by a rogue Watcher. From the moment of his return, however, Angel was plagued with worry. He didn’t know how he got back, but formed a theory (during what he believed to be an assault of hallucinations) that it wasn’t for the purpose of good. In turned out, however, that the hallucinations were actually being caused by hauntings from the First Evil. The First had the ability to look like anyone who’s ever died and used this power to come to Angel in the forms of his past victims to torment him yet further. This went on until, unable to take the paranoia that he might snap again and attack his love, Angel waited outside for the sun to rise and burn him to ashes. Rather than doing so, in what could only be described as a miracle, snow clouds that day were so heavy that they blotted out the sun. In light of this, Angel started to wonder if he hadn’t, in fact, been rescued from the hell dimension to serve a higher purpose after all.

While hunting with Buffy, a second Vampire Slayer by the name of Faith Lehane accidentally killed a human being she mistook as a vampire. The guilt caused a fissure in her sanity that resulted in her going rogue. Angel attempted to rehabilitate her, but before he could get through to her, her Watcher - Wesley Wyndam-Pryce - and a special team interrupted their progress and sent her into the arms of Mayor Wilkins. The Mayor had been hatching a plan to Ascend into pure demon form on graduation day, but he showed Faith a fatherly love that the disturbed Slayer needed.

Through all of it, Angel and Buffy attempted to rekindle their relationship, but Angel’s constant thoughts on his inability to give her a family, a future, or any kind of normal life broke them up again. He did this before they could go to prom together, but he showed up at prom anyway to give her that moment. To keep Buffy distracted, Faith managed to shoot Angel with a poison that could only be cured by the blood of a Slayer. Because Buffy was unable to get Faith for him to feed on, she forced Angel to drink from her instead. Not only did this break a fast on human blood that he had had for decades, but he nearly killed her in the process. After that, he told her that although he’d stay to defeat the mayor, he was going to leave after graduation. He did and, because it would be too painful to try, did so without saying goodbye.

(Season 1 of Angel) With his thirst for human blood returned after having fed on Buffy, Angel spent the next few months in his new Los Angeles home killing vampires and struggling with his hunger. A half-demon that received visions of people in trouble from the ‘Powers That Be’ (a benevolent, higher force of good), Doyle, comes to Angel with talk of fighting the good fight and keeping on. Not long after his new ally joins with him, the two ran into Cordelia Chase (a cheerleader and quasi member of the Scooby Gang in Sunnydale). She had come to Los Angeles to find fame and fortune after her family’s tax evasions were caught and they were dropped into poverty. Together, the three formed Angel Investigations with a mission of ‘Helping the Helpless.’ Though it would change in time, Cordelia’s initial incentive for being a part of the agency was her need for a steady source of income while she pursued her dreams of becoming an actress.

Back in Sunnydale, Buffy had wrestled the Gem of Amarra away from Spike; a ring that, while worn by a vampire, removes them of all their weaknesses. Instead of destroying it outright, she sent it with Oz - a werewolf and member of gang who had a gig in Los Angeles - to give to Angel. Spike followed and tried to torture its location out of Angel, but Angel’s crew managed to both rescue him and drive Spike away. Sitting atop a building in broad daylight, the Gem on his finger, Angel watched the sun go down with Doyle at his side. The half-demon tried to convince him that the ring was his redemption, but Angel simply stated that it ‘only looked like it.’ When the sun disappeared completely, he smashed and destroyed the Gem.

Around Thanksgiving time of that year, Doyle had a vision of Buffy in trouble and Angel returned to Sunnydale to thwart the threat. Although his stealth wasn’t at its best, resulting in him running into just about everyone but Buffy, he managed to both protect and allude her. Were it not for Xander - yet another Scooby - slipping about him being there, the Slayer would have been none the wiser. When Angel returned to Los Angeles, Buffy showed up to vent her frustrations at how unfair it was that he could see her, but she couldn’t see him. In the middle of this argument, a Mohra demon smashed through his office window and attacked the two. Mohra demons are soldiers for darkness and the struggle eventually ended up with the demon’s blood mixing with Angel’s own. As Mohra’s have special regenerative blood, when this happened Angel’s vampiric condition was cured and he became human again. Him and Buffy rejoiced for, finally, there was nothing holding them back from being together. They spent much of the day in bed, eating and, ahem, exercising, but when they confronted the Mohra demon again Angel discovered he didn’t have what it took physically to fight anymore. Needing to continue his quest, to continue to battle evil, he went to the Oracles - representatives of the Powers That Be - and convinced them that he was willing to give up all he’s ever wanted with Buffy if they returned his power to him. To do so, they said, they’ll have to use a temporal fold that bends the day back before his encounter with the Mohra demon and only he will remember the events that transpired. Angel accepted these terms and, going to say goodbye to a distraught Buffy who claimed she’d never forget, he watched as the day is undone and he’s back in the office where he and Buffy had been arguing. When the Mohra busted in that time, Angel killed it within seconds. Having vented, Buffy leaves again for Los Angeles unaware of what happened, as the Oracles promised.

Later, when a race of pure-blooded demons known as the Scourge came to Los Angeles hunting some of Doyle’s people, a race of benevolent demons, Angel Investigations got involved in their rescue. The Scourge ended up activating a special bomb that would kill any creature with an ounce of humanity in them for quite a distance and, when Angel tried to sacrifice himself to disarm it, Doyle knocked him over and did it himself. Before he did, however, he kisses Cordelia and passed on his visions to the girl. From there, he succeeded in disarming the mystical weapon, but was burned away in the process. A few days afterward, the struggling duo was joined by Wesley Wyndam-Price, Faith’s old Watcher, who had been kicked out of the Watcher Council and become a self-proclaimed ‘rogue demon hunter.’

Faith was hired by Wolfram & Hart to kill Angel, which is a task she gladly accepted. The Slayer ended up torturing Wesley for failing her as a Watcher, but when it came time to kill Angel, she was unable to. Instead, she screamed at him to kill her, which Angel refused to do. Instead, he went about trying to rehabilitate her as he had tried to back in Sunnydale. The rest of Angel Investigations and a returning Buffy try to talk him out of what they said is a foolish attempt, but he ignored them all. Even when the special tactical force of the Watcher’s Council tried to capture her, he risked his life to fend them off. He succeeded and his influence with Faith leads her to voluntarily confess her past crimes to the police and get thrown in jail. At the jail, Angel and Buffy erupted into an argument that had him telling her to get out of ‘his city.’ Feeling guilty about this, however, he returned to Sunnydale to apologize, but not before getting into a few confrontations with her new military boyfriend Riley (which he clearly wins on all fronts). Him and Buffy, after she scolded him again, made up and Angel left once more for Los Angeles.

While working on a blackmail case, Angel found a street gang that was battling vampires and demons to keep the city safe, much like him. Though it took some talking and some convincing, their leader - a man named Charles Gunn - believed Angel was an ally. Gunn would eventually join Angel Investigations, first as a side job for money and eventually as a full-time gig. A short while after this, Lindsey McDonald - a lawyer for Wolfram & Hart - rebelled against the firm when he learned he had to be a part of something that would get three blind children killed that were a supposed threat. Instead, he helped them get to safety with the help of Angel, only to return to Wolfram & Hart when, impressed with his brazen actions, they actually promoted him. What trust Angel may have ever had for Lindsey died there. During the course of his helping Lindsey, Angel had also stolen a scroll from the Wolfram & Hart vaults that had instinctually called to him. This scroll, the Scroll of Aberjian, was believed by Wesley at first to contain a prophecy - the Shanshu Prophecy - that said Angel was going to die.

While Cordelia was out buying gifts for Angel, a demon named Vocah hired by the law firm came into contact with her and inflicted upon her hundreds and hundreds of visions. That cripples her, as each vision always gave her a powerful migraine, and when Angel went to the Oracles to find help for her, he discovered Vocah had butchered them. One Oracle’s spirit, however, told Angel that he could read the words of Anatole from his scroll to heal her. Vocah had stolen the scroll, of course, so Angel was forced to hunt the demon down and reclaim it. Unknown to him at the time, however, he didn’t manage to do it before the ritual Vocah started with the scroll is completed and Angel’s Sire, Darla, is brought back to life. With The Scroll of Aberjian back in hand, Wesley discovered his initial translation of the Shanshu Prophecy was wrong. Instead of saying he’ll die, it said he’ll be made into a living human being upon completing all of his duties. Angel was filled with a new hope.

(Season 2 of Angel) When trying to find a pregnant woman who’s guardian he had mistakenly killed, Angel enlisted the help of a bar owner, Lorne, who could read the destinies of any entity while they sing. Lorne would steadily become a more involved part of the team.

Angel found himself dreaming more and more about Darla, dreams that were erotic and strangely real, and it comes to light that Wolfram & Hart had brought her not only back from the dead, but as a human being instead of a vampire. She reveled in sneaking into his room and having sex with him while he sleeps under mystical persuasion, steadily trying to win him over in his dreams, but her plan was foiled and she found herself slowly losing her mind under the undeniable guilt brought in toe with her new soul. To make things worse, the disease she had caught as a prostitute during her human years several centuries back, syphilis, emerged again in a stage far too advanced to be helped by modern medicine. Angel, persuading her away from Wolfram & Hart, brought her to a set of mystical trials that were supposed to cure her. He was even willing to get himself killed in the process, but even the trials ended up unable to fix her because she had already been saved by mystical interference once. Darla conceded to simply living out the rest of her days with Angel, but she was stolen away by the firm and made again into a vampire by her old companion Drusilla with Lindsey McDonald’s help. With Darla and Drusilla proceeding to go on a blood-spilling rampage to celebrate Darla’s return, Angel finally lost it. He found the two vampires about to feast upon a big gathering of Wolfram & Hart people, but instead of saving them, he locked them in the cellar and allowed them to get massacred. Unwilling for his rage to go hindered by his friends, he fired Gunn, Cordelia and Wesley and began training himself for his coming revenge.

Angel learned that a 75th year review was coming for the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram & Hart and, with it, a Senior Partner (one of the head honchos of evil incorporated) would be visiting. He discovered that the Senior Partner would be wearing a ring that, if worn by him, would take him to the “Home Office” where he could try to kill the rest of the Senior Partners. He succeeded in getting the ring, but when he put it on and took the elevator ride down to what he assumed was going to be hell, he was consumed with sorrow when he walked out where he had started - Earth. Told there is no place more purely filled with evil than Earth, thus its position as the Home Office, Angel wandered solemnly back to his place with a sense of hopelessness for his mission. There he discovered Darla who, though there to fight him, eventually sleeps with the man who just wants to feel something; anything. He doesn’t lose his soul in the process, however, as rather than experiencing a moment of perfect happiness, he experienced ‘perfect despair.’

With his revenge having run its course, Angel sought to reconcile with his friends and rejoin Angel Investigations. They allowed him to, but as a member instead of the leader, all of them still very much hurt by what he had done. When they discovered a secret lab where human parts are being harvested for Wolfram & Hart people, Angel temporarily teamed up with Lindsey again (who had received a new hand after Angel cut it off that ended up being mildly possessed by its old ‘owner’) to find the lab and destroy it. This accomplished, Lindsey leaves Wolfram & Hart and Los Angeles to strike it out on his own, finally fed up with the law firm.

Angel briefly returned to Sunnydale to comfort Buffy after hearing of her mother’s death. Not long after he came back from this trip, Cordelia was sucked into a portal back to Lorne’s home dimension of Pylea after following visions of a missing girl. The group followed her there where they discover Cordelia has been made princess by the local government and they found that the girl they had been looking for, Winifred Burkle, who had been stuck in Pylea for five years. Cordelia being made princess ended up being a ploy by the government demons to pass on her visions to their half-demon, half-human champion, the Groosalugg. She was unwilling, of course, and the team managed to bring down the old government (who had been a part of Wolfram & Hart) before rescuing Winifred (Fred) back to Earth. Upon their return, Angel found Willow at the hotel - Angel Investigation’s headquarters - and was told of Buffy’s death.

(Season 3 of Angel) Devastated by the news of Buffy’s death, Angel spent the next several months in mourning at a Tibetan monastery in Sri Lanka. As per his luck, the monastery ended up filled with demons and, after killing them, he returned to Los Angeles and to Angel Investigations. Despite Buffy’s eventual resurrection by the Scooby Gang’s Willow, who had since become an incredibly powerful witch, Angel had found that his feelings for Cordelia had become romantic. Yet, he was unable to confess these emotions before Darla returned to town somehow pregnant with his child, something that was supposed to be physically impossible. This child, a son he would come to name Connor, was unable to be born in the traditional fashion because Darla’s vampiric body didn’t have the ability. Sharing her son’s soul, Darla sacrificed herself by shoving a stake through her heart, a process that left her human son alive and kicking in her ashes.

Daniel Holtz, the vampire hunter who’s family Angel had killed and who had been brought to the future by a demon to get revenge, returned around this time. Wesley finished translating a prophecy he had been working on for a while and discovered it said that the father, Angel, would kill his son. It was a false prophecy planted by the same demon that had brought Holtz back, a demon named Sahjhan, who had done this because the original prophecy actually stated that Connor would kill him. The group would learn this too late, of course, and fearing for the baby’s life, Wesley stole him away and delivered him to Holtz. Before Holtz could get away, however, Sahjhan opened a portal into the hell dimension of hell dimensions, Quor-toth, that Holtz leapt into to get away from everyone trying to reclaim Connor. Figuring there’s no way to survive in a place like that, a satisfied Sahjhan left with no more fear of the boy. Wesley’s actions got him banned from the team and almost killed by a furious Angel.

A rip in the fabric of reality that Angel had created when he tried to find a way into the Quor-toth dimension ended up spilling dozens of otherworldly slugs into their hotel. These slugs had been running from someone called the “Destroyer” and, using her new demon powers that she had received to keep the visions from killing her, Codelia destroyed all of the invaders. Before the rip could be repaired, both Holtz (though they wouldn’t discover this until later) and Connor escaped through it. Connor, now a teenager thanks to the dimension’s altered flow of time, arrived as the “Destroyer” the slugs had mentioned with his mind bloated with Holtz’s anti-Angel propaganda. When his father proved too strong to kill, Connor fled into the streets of Los Angeles and the team gave chase. They found him and managed to calm him down enough to be brought back to the hotel. Holtz, however, set things up so that Connor would find him dead with two puncture holes in his neck, mimicking a vampire attack. Connor’s hatred for his father was refreshed. That said, he continued to pretend to be bonding with Angel, waiting for a moment when he might be able to take care of the man who he believed killed his real ‘father.’

Around this time, Cordelia and Angel decided to meet in a private location and finally profess their love for one another, but both are intercepted along the way. Cordelia witnessed time stop around her as Skip, a demon representative of higher powers, told her that she has been chosen to become a higher being in a heavenly dimension. She found herself unable to turn down the offer, filled with purpose, and she was unaware that Connor was finally fighting with Angel. The teen used a stun gun to win and trapped his father in a steel coffin that he sunk to the bottom of the ocean in hopes of making Angel suffer for all eternity.

(Season 4 of Angel) For months, Angel suffered a hunger-induced madness at the bottom of the ocean. Unaware that Connor was responsible, the remains of Angel Investigations (including only Fred and Gunn at this time) searched for clues of Cordelia and Angel’s whereabouts. Meanwhile, Wesley conducted a much more focused search for Angel with the help of Justine, a lackey of Holtz that both helped him commit suicide and helped Connor sink Angel. It was Wesley who succeeded and returned Angel back to sanity and a semblance of good health. When Angel came back to the hotel, he told his son that he still loved him, but that he had to leave because he was not ‘part of the solution’ yet (a reference to his speech about showing the world how it ought to be). Eventually, things started to warm up with Connor again and, when Cordelia came back from the heavenly dimension where she had grown bored and unfulfilled, Connor began to develop feelings for her. Cordelia had returned, initially, with no memory, but after a very amusing spell, she appeared to regain her personality. It wouldn’t be revealed until later that the mind that was awoken wasn’t, in fact, hers.

The Beast, a demon lord and emissary to a higher evil, rose in the same place that Connor was born and began to set a dark series of events in motion. With the sky belching out fire, Cordelia seemed to believe the world was going to end and decided to give Connor ‘something real’ by sleeping with him. This would later be revealed as a ruse and a seduction by a completely different entity that was in control of Cordelia. The group failed to stop the Beast from blotting out the sun in Los Angeles, but in trying to, the Beast let it slip that Angelus knew how to defeat him. It was not a decision made lightly, but the team and Angel decided to extract his soul to find out what Angelus knows about the Beast. Angelus revealed nothing and ended up escaping from his prison. The Beast and Angelus meet up but before the Beast can do much, Angelus took the knife crafted of the creature’s own bone, a tribute he had made for his master, and used it to slay the Beast. This restored the sun. Meanwhile, Wesley went to Faith in prison and got her to break out so she could help contain Angelus. She managed this by poisoning her own blood with a potent drug, Orpheus, and got Angelus to feed off her. The two both fall into a drug-induced coma where their minds linked and Faith witnessed a showdown between Angel and Angelus. During all of this, Fred had called Willow to Los Angeles to restore Angel’s soul for a second time, which was successful.

With Faith gone, Cordelia revealed to the group that she was pregnant with Connor’s child. The team eventually uncovered that not only was Cordelia possessed by the Beast’s master, but this master was a rogue member of the Powers That Be that had been orchestrating a number of key events in their lives. She was the one that allowed the mystical pregnancy of Darla to happen and had commanded Cordelia be Ascended as a heavenly being just so she could use her body as a vessel back to Earth. There, using Connor, she had made sure that him and Cordelia would have sex together so that she would be able to be birthed into her very own physical body. Angel Investigations tried to stop the birth from happening, Angel even reluctantly willing to kill Cordelia, but Connor came to her rescue and facilitated the birth of their child. The rogue divinity, who they came to name Jasmine as she claimed to have no name, arrived to life fully grown. In her presence, Angel was enraptured by the aura of peace she projected and was won to her side by its mystical influence. Though her methods could be considered evil, Jasmine only wanted world peace.

With the help of Fred the group freed themselves from Jasmine’s mind control using Jasmine’s own blood. Using a demon head from another dimension, the one Jasmine had used as a practice run for Earth, Angel had Jasmine’s true name announced over a global television broadcast that broke her spell over the world and robbed her of most of her power. When Connor killed her, the last of his wobbly, precarious mind was broken (as he had loved Jasmine, despite knowing her lie). When Connor tried to kill a store full of people with a bomb in a fit of his madness, Angel knew something needed to be done and that it was outside of his own power to help his son. When Wolfram & Hart, pleased with Angel’s ending of world peace, offered him control of their Los Angeles branch of operations, he accepted with a combination of knowing that the resources at his hands would help him save hundreds more than he ever could normally and the condition that his son be given a better life. Wolfram & Hart managed this by rewriting reality and nearly everyone but Angel’s memory so that Connor was now the son of a normal family with an equally normal existence.

Soon after this, he traveled to Sunnydale to deliver an amulet to Buffy given to him by the firm that was supposed to play a big role in defeating the First Evil. She gave it to Spike who, now with a soul like Angel, burned to ashes when he used it to destroy the First’s super vampire army with a wide-sweeping beam of sunlight.

(Season 5 of Angel) Shortly after beginning work at the law firm, Angel received the amulet he had given Buffy back from an unknown source which spilled out Spike’s ghost from within. With Spike fading in and out existence, Fred tried to find a way to cure him and keep him from slipping into Hell while Angel saved a woman, Nina Ash, from a werewolf attack. The two started to develop a romantic relationship as she continued to come to the law firm to be locked up during the nights of the full moon. Eventually, he would find through sleeping with Nina that he could safely have sex without losing his soul, so long as it wasn’t someone he was truly, deeply in love with.

Angel’s time spent running the law firm was one riddled with self-doubt and the difficulty of trying to battle evil from within the belly of the beast. Good and evil became a murky grey puddle for him and he learned that his allies back in Sunnydale now thought he was untrustworthy because he worked for Wolfram & Hart.

On a seemingly normal day, the ghostly Spike received a package from an unknown person that, when he opened it, turned him corporeal again. This immediately started to cause strange events in the building that Eve, the group’s link to the Senior Partners, explained was because there were now two vampires with souls that matched the Shanshu Prophecies and this was causing the world to spin off its axis. A man at the law firm lied to them and told them the only way to right things was to have one of them sip from the Cup of Perpetual Torment to decide who the prophecy was really referencing. The two found the cup and battled over it where Spike, wanting his mortality more, defeated Angel for the first time. To his dismay, the cup was only filled with Mountain Dew and they realized they’d been duped. That said, the fact that Angel lost, that Spike wanted it more, made him think that he might not actually be the chosen vampire from the prophecy. They returned to the firm where Eve was just as surprised as they were (supposedly) and the man who had lied to them was gone. The strange happenings in the office had ended, however, and Eve claimed that she managed to get the Senior Partners to temporarily fix the prophecy problem. In truth, however, it was a failed ploy by Eve and Lindsey McDonald to try and get Spike to kill Angel.

Lindsey McDonald returned under the assumed identity of Doyle and tricked Spike into believing he was the new champion for the Powers That Be and that he was the one who had sent the amulet back to Los Angeles and who had restored Spike’s body. The latter part was true, but Lindsey did so to eventually try and get Spike to kill Angel, his nemesis. Cordelia awakened from the coma she had been trapped in since giving birth to Jasmine when she got a vision that Angel was going to be attacked. Together with Cordelia and Spike, they learned that Lindsey was the real identity of Spike’s benefactor after Lindsey, fearing Cordelia would point to him, convinced Spike that Cordelia was evil which caused Spike to try and to kill her. Angel and Lindsey battled one last time and, using Wesley to remove the tribal tattoos that kept Lindsey invisible to the Senior Partners, Angel’s rival was sucked away into a torture dimension to pay for his betrayal against the firm.

Cordelia revealed to Angel that she had to go, that she no longer belonged there, and that Angel wasn’t on the right side of the fight, having been overtaken by the glamour and power and money offered to him by Wolfram & Hart. She kissed him, giving him a vision of all of the Senior Partner links on Earth, and vanished. The hospital called him not long afterward and informed him that Cordelia, who had apparently never actually woken from her coma, had died at the hospital.

In perhaps one of the saddest moments in the history of television, Fred was infected with one of the first demons’ essence when she accidentally opened an ancient sarcophagus. Angel learned that the only way to save her was to call Illyria, the demon, back to her prison via a process that would result in her killing every living thing in her path on the way back. Angel knew that he couldn’t do that, that Fred wouldn’t want to be responsible for it, and he was forced to go back to Los Angeles empty handed. The group could do nothing as Fred’s very soul was burned to ashes in the fire of Illyria’s resurrection. Illyria’s attempt to bring back her army was foiled when she discovered that her kingdom was long, long gone and that no one was left but her. She remained with the group as something of a tentative ally.

Hoping to discover the end game of the Senior Partners, the group rescued Lindsey from his hell dimension prison where Charles Gunn stayed behind to replace him, feeling a need to be punished after his accidental part in Fred’s death. Lindsey explained to them that the Senior Partners did what they did, hiring Angel and the gang, to keep them distracted while they continued their machinations to bring about the apocalypse, the one that started the moment time itself began. Afterward, Illyria managed to rescue Gunn from his prison in the hell dimension, but upon her return she found that her powers were unable to be contained within the ‘weak’ human shell. She was essentially going to burst with an energy that could wipe out the planet. Angel managed to contain her, to stop the bomb’s proverbial countdown, but doing so drastically limited Illyria’s power.

During this time, Connor’s fake parents came to Angel’s firm when they heard they might be able to help with their unique problem. They said that their son was hit by a car, but left perfectly unharmed. When Angel discovered they were talking about Connor, he said they couldn’t help them and sent the family on their way. Baffled by this, Wesley investigated why Angel might have done it at the same time that Angel was threatened by the very warlock that created Connor’s alternate reality. He blackmailed the vampire, saying that he’d destroy his spell if Angel didn’t get Connor to kill their mutual enemy Sahjhan. The warlock had been keeping Sahjhan trapped in a special jar up until that point, but he knew of the prophecy where Connor is the only one able do the deed. With no other choice, Angel informed Connor of his task and, thinking he was some kind of superhero, Connor accepted. It turned out, however, that he didn’t have the killer instinct needed to down Sahjhan and only when a suspicious Wesley shattered the spell and imbued Connor with his old memories does the boy finally kill the demon. Despite having his memories back, Connor appeared to be incredibly level-headed and stable, viewing his real life as little more than a violent, and ‘sometimes erotic’ dream and chose to continue his false life with the people that still believed they were his parents.

Angel had begun to exhibit strange behavior (things like allowing a demon clan to have rights to a woman’s baby) that had his friends concerned that he may have gone over to the side of the Senior Partners. They found out he had joined a group of elite baddies, the Circle of the Black Thorn, that he could have only done by killing Dogyn - an ally. Although it was a part of his plan to infiltrate the group, he did indeed kill the man to do it and even ended up signing away his place in the Shanshu Prophecy to prove to the Circle that he was in it for the long haul. Despite what he did to Dogyn, Angel convinced his friends of his plan to take down every single Senior Partner link in Los Angeles. Doing so was an absolute suicide mission, as the wrath of the Partners would be staggering, but everyone agreed that it was time, that what they had been trying to do as the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram & Hart was never going to work. They may all die, but at least they’d be going out in a single, glorious act of defiance that would show the Partners that they didn’t own them.

Sending Nina off with her family so she’d be safe from the fallout, Angel gave everyone a task, a person or persons to kill, and even Lindsey was recruited into the fight. Although Lindsey claimed he was helping to be a part of the good fight, when he finished killing his targets with Lorne, Lorne stated that Angel never believed him to be a part of the answer. He was just as likely to replace Angel in the firm so, despite Lindsey’s pleas that he wasn’t a bad guy anymore, Lorne shot and killed him. Wesley was the only one to not only fail in killing his target, but get killed in the process of doing so. Having bonded with Wesley, Illyria felt a genuine amount of overwhelming grief at his death and killed his target for him. With everyone dead that they had sought to kill (something Angel accomplished with one last moment of help from his son), the remaining members of Angel Investigations - Angel, Spike, Illyria and a lethally bleeding Gunn - met in an alley and stared on at the army of demons and ogres, and a dragon!, that the Senior Partners had sent to obliterate them. Hefting up a sword and claiming dibs on slaying the dragon, Angel gave a final command - “Let’s get to work.” - before swinging the blade and fading to black.