FIC: i've looked at you ... (Angel, Angel/Cordelia, PG) for kita0610
i've looked at you with the focus i gave to my birthday candles (Angel/Cordelia, PG) for kita0610
“Make a wish,” they say at the end of the world, and Angel has a long life full of regrets, but one image fills his head, and he says, “Cordelia.”
***
Cordelia wakes up after the world ends. Or maybe it isn't waking. It's just she opens her eyes and she's standing on a city street. It's a bright, sunny day, and she breathes in the smells of car exhaust and chain coffee, and it strikes her that she's breathing. She hadn't planned on doing that again.
Cordelia spins until she catches her reflection in a shop window. She is wearing a long, ivory-colored coat over a wrap dress with a bright poppy print, and her hair is sleek and shiny in a cute bob.
She looks well rested and happy and young and alive.
A flicker of movement catches her eye beyond her reflection. A television set, tuned to a morning talk show. They are discussing an anniversary, the one year anniversary of the tragedy in Los Angeles. Cordelia’s heart is a stone in her chest as she watches the images fill the screen: fire and smoke, evacuees bleeding and screaming, the hole in the world.
One image floods her mind.
“Angel,” she says.
And it happens again, but this time, it's like walking through an open door. Cordelia blinks, and when her eyes open again, she is standing on a different street. She is in the cool forest, a worn asphalt road beneath her feet. She can hear seabirds, and before her is a house, half tucked into the trees and half built on beach rocks. It’s beautiful, but she can only look for a second, because coming up from the house is Angel, standing in the sun and looking at her. For a moment, neither of them moves, stuck in their gaze, and then in another blink of the eye, she is being pulled into his arms.
“I built it for you,” he says. “I knew you’d come. I just had to wait.”
It’s the last vision either one of them ever has.
***
One year later, they name their first child Harriet after a book Cordelia liked as a child. There are fallen comrades--too many--they could honor, but they decide without discussion that their daughter deserves a new beginning. Harriet has Angel’s eyes and wrinkles her nose the way Cordelia does when she’s amused. Dawn and Buffy come for the christening.
“We want you to be her godmother,” Cordelia says, gently laying the swaddled infant in Buffy’s arms.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Buffy says. “She’ll probably outlive me.” She catches Cordelia’s expression. “But, you know, I’m totally flattered, and … happy. I’m so happy for you guys. Really. You are winning this adulting thing.”
“I’ll do it,” Dawn says, fussing with Harriet’s blankets, and she does.
***
They’re human now--or, at least, as far as anyone can tell--and they’ve done their duty. That doesn’t mean they’re abandoning the good fight, just that they have two little girls and a little boy--Cordelia just knows--on the way, and there are other ways to help.
Angel, while he was waiting for Cordelia like the Powers told him to, built incredible things into their house. It has eight bedrooms and hidden doors, halls in the walls and rooms behind bookcases. He didn’t know why he had to build it like that, but Cordelia figures it out one day when she’s pulling cobwebs from Lacie’s pigtails after finding the girl in the little room behind the fireplace. Within days, their little family grows as Angel’s extra rooms, even his secret rooms, are occupied by young warriors and people fleeing demons and anyone else who needs safe harbor.
“It’s not like we’re getting any younger,” Cordelia says. “I mean, you’re, what, five hundred now?”
Angel scowls. “I am not five hundred years old.”
“Are you counting your time in hell, because that adds candles to the cake, mister.”
“Cordelia.”
“The point is,” she says, “we’re not exactly in derring-do prime, but we should do what we can.”
He kisses her. “You’re absolutely right.”
She grins. “I always am.”
***
It’s a boy. Angel names his son Sean, and invites over the usual suspects once Cordelia is comfortable at home.
Connor holds the baby. “He looks nothing like me. Does he?”
“No,” Cordelia says. “Not even you as a baby.”
“Probably a good thing,” Faith says and elbows Connor in the ribs, leading Angel to steady the baby. “I’m still confused about how Angel’s offspring grew into this beanpole.”
Connor frowns, but even Cordelia is laughing.
***
Angel and Cordelia teach their children, and scores of the children who come through their home for a night or a week or a year, how to fight. How to balance a sword against the weight of their bodies, how to use their weaknesses as strengths.
“You should be able to protect yourselves,” Cordelia says during these sessions. Later, in arguments over the dinner table, she tells her children she doesn’t want them hunting demons. She goes up to bed flushed and upset, to find Angel sitting on the edge of the bed, the room dark.
He looks at her. “Rats are low,” he says, and holds her while they both cry.
***
Lacie wants to go to college. A real college, with dorms and libraries and homecomings. Harriet had gone off with Dawn to learn more about magic, which had been hard enough, but somehow this is worse.
“It’s because neither of us have any idea what we’re doing,” Angel whispers during an orientation meeting.
Cordelia arches a brow. “When has that ever stopped us?”
***
The children are grown and have children of their own, but the house Angel built is still safe harbor to anyone who needs it. The older she gets, the more Cordelia finds herself thinking about Angel Investigations, about the hotel that was never empty--long nights with Gunn and Wes and Fred. The hotel is rubble now, and Gunn and Wes and Fred have been gone for a long time, but sometimes she thinks she and Angel built their lives up to feel like that.
It’s been a damn good life.
And when their grandchildren ask how they came together, they just smile and say, “Magic.”