******************
Title: Breathless
Author: ebonbird@hotmail.com
Summary: Wesley's late coming home with the Philly steaks.
May 30, 2001

June 9, 2001

******************
"Breath is momentary. What remains is eternal."


First, comes steam - gaseous water cooling and contracting around the 
absence of light - then comes Angel.  Leaving the bathroom, he makes 
no sound.  His dark gray shirt hangs on his effortless advance.  It 
drapes his torso and arms (loose at the cuffs).  Steam condenses on his 
cold, fine skin.

Cordelia is dancing to harpsichord cords.  Her wrists kiss at the 
pinpoint ting of a triangle sketched in the air.  Swooning cellos and 
thrusting violins twirl her through a waltz.  She glides from foot to foot, 
her arms thrown out, and up, then around her shoulders and torso in 
arcs, arclets and waves.  Cordelia's dark hair swings, screening her face 
in wavelets and curls.

"Come on, it's war, come on," entices the singer.  The coquette has 
pitched her voice midrange.

Angel would let his hands approach, flow with and around Cordelia.  
Clasp her hands and lead her around the coffee-table and couch . . . 

Cordelia's thin, tanned ankles turn.  Her hips and shoulders follow.  Her 
stomach is tight, then fulsome and loose as she waltzes herself through 
half a measure.  She steps around crumpled newssheet, steps on paper 
filthy with color - umber, cerise, claret, bronze.  Purple.  Her footsteps 
leave a riptide of pastels on the floor.

The apple scent of her perfume wafts like gauze, light and distinct, over 
the barb-wire snarl of the sodium laurel sulfate and carageenan in her 
shampoo.  She's begun to perspire, ever so slightly, her youth and 
energy on the verge of gilding her beneath her arms.  There, where 
she's layered perfumes and powders to guard against perspiration, 
Cordelia sparkles, but only to his eyes.   

His eyes fill.  Part of him is glad that he can bleed this way.  Cordelia's 
hair is shiny and tangled and full. Wealth beyond dreams, over her 
shoulders and bare arms.  Her top is orange.  Her skirt is full.  Angel 
thinks of Gypsy girls fleeing before him into thickening underbrush, 
tearing their skin on branches, leaves and thorns, their flight framed by 
narrow trails of blood.

*  

"Anyahasseo" Wesley calls over the bell tinkling at the deli door.

"Next time, get more food.  You are much too skinny, skinny man," 
responds the proprietress.  Her grey-threaded, skull-shaped hairdo 
follows the curve of her head so closely it's like someone painted it on. 
Her eyes are tired, but the automatic smile that pushes wrinkles around 
them enlivens them.

Smiling a little stiffly, Wesley exits the deli.  He could continue 
walking on Sunset until he reaches Pacific Palisades but he turns on 
Embury toward home.  Wesley carries the bag of Philly Steaks a little 
in front of himself, holding his hand beneath the bag because removing 
grease stains from fabric is not his forte. The plastic bag contains three 
wrapped sandwiches - one for Cordelia, one for him, and one for them 
to fight over.  

The smell of grilled onions and beef soaking into yeasty French rolls 
teases him through the plastic wrapped paper.  As Wesley turns steps 
out from under the canvas awning of the doorway and faces west, his 
glasses darken appropriately in the light of the setting sun.  Setting his 
shoulders and straightening his back, he sighs and walks straight down 
the center of the sidewalk.  He stops at the flower vendor's, which is an 
arrangement of two men and a series of deep plastic buckets parked by 
the intersection. He admires the blooms, but he doesn't relish toting the 
gladiolas the XX blocks he has to go before reaching home.  

It is the summertime, tank tops abound.  Artfully arranged hair, exact 
accessories and appropriate footgear adorn cookie-cutter people, for all 
that their accoutrements mark them as different types. Wesley looked 
up the neighborhood in a travel guide when he learned the location of 
Cordy's apartment. There was a rather long section about Silverlake in 
the Lonely Planet.  The travel guide described it as trendy but laidback.  
In the early evening, when the pace of the day has begun to slow and 
the heat is radiating off the sidewalks and back into the air, Wesley sees 
that those who walk the sidewalks are carefully dressed but carry 
themselves as if they wore 'this old thing?'

Even Angel, no native Angeleno he, has more than a bit of that.  Black 
on black outfits, and painstakingly arranged hair that Angel himself can 
never ever see, no matter how much time he spends in the wc.

In a sense, Angel is his own mortician, preparing himself for a funeral 
that took place long ago.


*

Cordelia has her back to Angel.  Her bark brown hair pours smoothly 
from her head to hang across her back, ending in a gradiated froth of 
teak-dyed waves.  As she sways, her hair parts over her shoulder, 
revealing a quadrangle of tanned flesh.  The muscles beneath her skin 
play golden against one another and she holds her hand in front of her, 
swaying from foot to foot.  

Before Angel drove her mad and killed her, Drusilla never danced.  
Afterwards, afterwards she jigged like a fey thing, to shattered 
harmonies and strained melodies that he could never perceive, but only 
feel as a rhythm faintly thrumming beneath his fingers when he held 
her down and broke her again and again.  Drusilla's madness, within it, 
framed for only him to see, were the wailing remnants of the fragile girl 
he'd trapped for an eternity.

The shifting quadrangle of flesh on Cordelia's back prickles from 
smooth girl-flesh to goose flesh.  Cordelia sweeps to the right and his 
fingertips catch a weft of teak-blurred brown hair suspended in midair.    
She turns her head to regard him, her profile limned satin-platinum in 
the rays of the setting sun, and a smile touches the corner of her mouth.  
She extends her hand.  A buttery bar of setting sunlight bends 
diagonally across the length of her lower arm and splashes to the floor 
between their feet.  He grasps her shadowed hand and he leads her 
backward into a quiet dark. 

They circle each other, palm to palm, profile to profile.  Her eyes are 
clear but she sees nothing in how pale his face becomes.  She is a seer 
but she can't see Drusilla shadowing his eyes.  And he whirls her thus 
and thus.  Her skirts swish as she steps twice to the his left, and to the 
right.  Their knees brush, and brush, and she snickers.  But her eyes are 
clear, but she sees nothing.  Nothing of who he was.  He draws her 
close.  Directs her flush along the length of his body, with the edge of 
one hand firm between her shoulder blades and the other rigid with all 
of his preternatural strength.  Cordelia is a natural follower, her 
understanding of the dynamics of motion ground in grace and long 
hours of cotillion. Her eyes narrow.  "Do it."  He smirks and dips her 
and her eyes widen with delight.  He draws her up, checks her raised 
hand to his, and sets her off in a spin, whirling her away from himself 
and back into the light.

* 

Heavy glass and metal door resists Wesley's pull.  He gasps, releases 
the tension in his arm, resettles the warm packet of sandwiches on his 
hip and attempts another pull on the door handle.  The hair fringing his 
forehead trembles.  Tendons stand on his neck. He grits his teeth, 
strains, and with a low groan opens the door.  Old condensation, drips 
from the overhead window air-conditioning unit and misses Weseley 
by inches.  Overripe banana must weighs the air.  Fluorescent gray 
shapes impose themselves on Wesley's vision as his pupils dilate and 
his vision adjusts to the lighting.  Refrigerators are humming in the rear 
of the shop and Elvis Crespo sings tinnily from a radio propped against 
the bank of cigarettes on the wall behind the counter.  

The dirty linoleum floor has been recently washed with a silty mop.  A 
wide variety of dish washing liquids, soaps, and cleaning agents crowd 
the shelves of the second aisle.  The sizes of the bottles are so small, 
they remind him of home.  He looks for candy, and comes upon a 
section of American, Mexican and Asian candies.  He buys several 
packets of chewing gum, perceiving that he is in the mood for grape - 
not realizing that he's chosen them on the basis of the brilliant purple 
cow Cordelia had been drawing when he left.  He pays at a counter 
crowded with breath aids, first aid paraphernalia, grooming guides, 
horoscopes and hanging produce.  The door is heavier when he exits 
than when he entered the store.

* 


Wordless hum, urgent and gleeful sounds in Cordelia's throat.  She 
releases Angel's hands, trips over the rug on the way to the stereo and 
she drops a cd into the slot.  She rocks, snaps her fingers, ignores him.  
With daylight gone, and the streetlamps yet unlit, the only thing that 
angel can see clearly in the living room of Cordelia's apartment, is 
Cordelia's hair


*


Back on the street, shops begin to close. Aluminum screens scroll down 
to the pavement as daylight fades.

A tow-truck, its cab festooned by yellow streamers written with 
Chinese characters and rosaries, limps along the west-lane of the street.  
Wesley feels the tow truck driver's eyes on him.  He continues on his 
way home.  Blue leaches out of the sky.

Eventually, Wesley's the only person on Embury.

Around the edges, the sky's an eggshell brown, smash the egg, let drop 
the yolk, turn the shell inside out - that brown. Then it's gone - 
Sundown.

Ataxia, when one foot in front of the other literally becomes another.  
Simple walking becomes an impossibility when Wesley  - seeing that it 
was almost nightfall - picks up his pace and feels in his pocket for the 
cellphone that isn't there. His knees bend abruptly.  

He flinches at memories, only they are real. Faith, pretty Faith with the 
wonderful eyes and aggressive mouth, licking the flat of a blade before 
applying lighter flame to it.  Dancing slashed oval of white within, 
dancing slashed oval of blue within darker blue.

Colors, Wesley's thinking in colors, the vanishing colors, changing 
colors, fading disappearing colors.  Blue to brown, gold to nothing, 
white to grey smears against night sky.

One foot trips over the other, and Wesley sprawls.  Simple ataxia, 
really, he tells himself.  His mouth is dry.  Simple ataxia. Tachy-tachy-
tacky, tacky, for a Watcher to be out in Los Angeles with nothing more 
than a wooden crucifix around his neck. Ataxia, it's the drugs, a side 
effect of the drugs.

Cordelia's apartment is not so far away. Not so far away at all.  He says 
this aloud, not more than a murmur over the shallow, whispery breaths.  
The need inside of him, need for air, need to breathe, expands thicker 
and thicker inside him, he's gasping on the sidewalk, reaching for his 
glasses that have somehow fallen off his nose.

She'd snickered that when she boiled his eyes, their whites would split 
like overcooked eggwhites.

He leans against a beige wall that's partially covered with weathered 
particle board.  Black on red posters advertising open mike night at the 
Perro Caf‚ descend in staggered diamonds from head height to 
shoulder level. 

Can't unbreak an egg.  Can't put the pieces back together again.  Angel 
is . . .  Angel is a man who is a demon.  What is Angel, exactly?  The 
stuff of darkness who is a warrior of the light?  

It's dark out.

He's out in the dark.  Alone, on Embury Street, and Cordelia was 
attacked near her own house.

 * * *



Cordelia fidgets. She's sentimental about her palomino Keanu.


To Shansu In LA:
? Wesley's harder on books than he should be.  He leans on 
them.

? He talks outloud.  

? Scroll: Dozen different languages.

? Torrid romance.  Massive wealth.  Settling for enviable fame.

? Cordelia's visions (things that hurt her head)

09 bracelets on her left hand (beads and  matching flowers, violet, 
like her eyeshadow, but more plum).

o Running person. Daylight. Wearing Jeans and a dark 
blue shirt.
o Dark haired person in white robes with crimson block 
vestments.  Looks to be in pain. Light flashes bright, 
then diminishes, brightens, then diminishes.
o Grey scale demons.  Eye ridges extending to upper 
cheekbones.  Yellowed teeth.
o Young woman with enormous gold dangling hoop 
earrings in a phone booth, in daylight, on the phone, 
screaming.  The wall behind her was red.  She was 
crouched in the phone book.  She was on the phone.
o Young boy crouching against a dark wall, or maybe 
the ground. Dark haired. he's frightened. He wears a 
red and white plaid shirt.
o Woman being held down on the ground. She's being 
raped.  I can see the shoulders of the man, and his 
extended arm.
o Young boy again.  
o Running man being pursued by gray scale demon.  
It's nostrils are very long.
o Priest in white robes with crimson vestments and 
blood on his right hand.
o A white man in profile. In daylight. Dark haired.  The 
color of his white dress shirt is loosened and he wears 
a black jacket. No tie.
o A white woman with blond hair. She looks directly at 
Cordelia.  Her eyes are distorted by flames.
o Dark boy with corn rows.
o Demon face, turtle lower-face (nose). Looks like a 
mask. Daylight.
o Woman against wall.
o Dark suited man on his knees amongst open cabinets. 
He's praying. There's a mustard/pea soup distortion. 
o White dude, blue shirt. Sunlight. He's talking.
o Ghoulish, pointy noised, bald-headed, eaten skin 
around dark/black teeth monster with reddish skin 
directly over. 
o People in black (black caps).  They look Swat 
teammish.  They are reaching for Cordelia.

To cure Cordelia's words, Wesley spoke. 

"And if the beast shall find thee and touch thee, thou shall be wounded 
in thy soul and Thou shalt know madness.  The beast, shall attack and 
cripple thee, and thou shalt know neither friend nor family.  But thou 
shalt undo the beast. Thou shalt find the sacred words of anatole, and 
thou shalt be restored.  3 times shall thou say these words:  Unbind, 
unbind, unbind."

Cordelia's doctor was Dr. Evans.


 
so wootie: okay, alright, yes... go on (you're really helping!)
CamDK: Angel's metaphorical breath - the oppressive there-but-not-
there breath: the steam clouds.
so wootie: that's another thing to think about. thanks.
CamDK: Most people, when coming out of a bathroom so full of 
steam, would be a bit breathless from the hot air. Know what I mean?
CamDK: Like in a sauna - I find it hard to breathe in saunas.
so wootie: me too. people shouldn't stay in them too long, anyway.
CamDK: No. Can't be healthy in the long run.
CamDK: Maybe Angel goes looking for Wes?
so wootie: i've considered it.
so wootie: why would he?
CamDK: Maybe Angel somehow - (un)willingly? - breaks Cordy out 
of her twirl to stop him thinking about gypsies
so wootie: good idea. 
CamDK: She notices how long Wes has been gone and that it's dark. 
Then she shoos Angel out to find him? Or Angel suggests it himself to 
escape her wrath from being disturbed in her twirl/trance?
CamDK: Then, Angel being the vampire he is and all, he can't help 
stalking Wes. ...Actually, that could be a really scary scene.
so wootie: hm.
so wootie: wow, yeah, especially if angel was keeping track of him, but 
really, Wes' watcher nerves know he's being watched by a vampire and 
he's only got a little wooden crucifix.
so wootie: um. wow.
CamDK: I dunno. I'm not the plot-meister by a long shot. Use any of it 
if you want. :-)
CamDK: Have I managed to inspire a bit?
so


Angel Investigations tel no. 555-0162