FIC: Vessels (Cordelia/Darla, NC-17)
TITLE: Vessels
RATING: NC-17
FANDOM: Angel
PAIRING: Cordelia/Darla
SPOILERS: AtS S2, during the fucking with Angel’s dreams arc.
SUMMARY: Cordelia is impatient, and Darla is bored.
PROMPT: Written for getyourwings for the femslash_minis Darla round. Requested was water, gold, silk, and no adult toys or adult movies. This is a bit of a departure from your request, but I hope you like it.
Cordelia has never been patient. People born to privilege rarely are, and Cordelia is no exception, even after the privilege part went away.
In dreams, she never has to wait. Not lately, anyway.
The woman is small, and blonde, and looks familiar-like an actress from a movie you loved as a child, or maybe like what a friend from grade school might look like, now. Familiar, but unfamiliar. She is a solemn, golden presence in Cordelia’s sleeping world, and she always gives Cordelia what she wants, even before Cordelia knows she wants it.
Tonight Cordelia closes her eyes to sleep and wakes up with the blonde woman. They are outside, the early morning air cool and clean-smelling. Cordelia’s skin prickles; she is wearing nothing to protect herself from the cold.
Beneath her feet, old stone. Cordelia looks up, up into the pale blue slate of the sky reaching up into forever, unchanged by clouds or sun or pollution. Just an empty eternity of the heavens. To the east, the immense ruins of some great building rise up, the stone pale and crumbling. Cordelia thinks of the ancient Greece of her high school textbooks, of togas and olive branches and living gods.
Small, warm hands slip over her hipbones, curl around her waist. The sweet, warm scent of the blonde woman envelops her as the woman’s warm body - arms, breasts, pelvis, thighs - press against her.
“Poor Cordelia,” the blonde woman purrs against Cordelia’s supple neck. “Always alone.”
Cordelia wants to say she’s not, but she doesn’t get to speak here.
The blonde woman arches against her; she is silk slithering along Cordelia’s body; she is the gentle caress of the rain, the long-reaching touch of a laughing fire.
“They all forget about you,” the blonde woman says, the palms of her hands running slowly over Cordelia’s hips, her thighs. Her lightly splayed fingers tickling her, teasing her. “Boys. They take you for granted.”
The delicious warm tickle of the blonde woman’s mouth on the back of her neck. Cordelia moans and arches into the touch, and she is rewarded with more kisses, with the gentle pinch of teeth.
“It’s always about what they need,” the blonde woman continues. Her hands kneed Cordelia’s inner thighs, cup her pudenda. Her fingers slide easily into Cordelia’s slick sex. Automatic, no waiting, like they were made for this task alone. Cordelia lets all her weight fall to the blonde woman as the blonde woman’s fingers stoke the fire of her passion. “Men only want to know what women can do for them.”
No, Cordelia thinks. They’re family. She loves, and is loved in return. Isn’t how that works?
The blonde woman has so much so far into her that Cordelia is delirious with both pleasure and pain. She thinks about the last time she had sex, real boy-girl meeting in a bar sex, about the pain and the pleasure and about waking in the morning fully pregnant.
Is that love? Being treated as a vessel?
The blonde woman’s teeth clamp down on Cordelia’s neck, her jaw, her earlobe. Tiny points of pain, tiny enraged half-moons tattooing her flesh. Cordelia tries to remember ghostly memories from her life of academia, the Greeks taking women and marking them and locking them in temples to act as vessel for the gods. Tell me what you see.
The blonde woman has created a desire within her so strong that Cordelia finds her entire body rocked to the tempo of the blonde woman’s fingers in her sex. Her body dances ecstatically; she is tethered to this world only by the intense want between her legs, in her whole body, her whole being. She is only this desire; she is only this growing exultance.
Tell me what you see. Cordelia sees stars, a world of intense, meaningless colors; and she sees the oracles, painted and prostrate. Waiting to receive the word of the gods.
Waiting to receive.
The stars fade away, and the ruins and the pale sky return gradually. The blonde woman’s hands leave her body; Cordelia, like a snake charmer who has lost the holy spirit, no longer has anything to keep her weak human body erect, and she falls to the ground. The old stone is cool beneath her febrile skin, and Cordelia closes her eyes and concentrates on the tactile feeling of the stone on her skin.
***
She and Angel are soul mates now, but it’s not like Darla doesn’t have a life outside him. And it could be useful to have someone on the inside. Darla is a woman, and she’s beautiful, so most people don’t notice her steel trap mind; they forget that she is a general and a tactician and a blood letter.
And it’s not as though she doesn’t enjoy herself. Angel’s little Seer is a pretty thing-rich, ripe. And Darla knows something about that.