who. cordelia chase what. after spending some time acclimating to being alive, cordelia decides to go visit an old friend. when. same time as the buffy/angel/justice thread. where. wesley's apartment. locked to. wesley. rating. pg status. incomplete.
Death wasn't all that bad. Not compared to a lot of things, anyway. Cordelia hadn't even felt it when she'd died, thanks to that handy coma. People say you can't see or hear anything when you're in a coma, but when she'd died, Cordelia could remember the faint sound of a line going flat. Or maybe she only thought she had. The only thing she knew for sure was that there had been no pain. Only the sense of leaving a place that no longer existed. Before dying, she remembered the Powers letting her have one last hoorah in the form of helping Angel find his path. It was blurry, but she could remember it like one might remember a dream just after waking.
Dying wasn't the bad part.
It was the living part that sucked major ass.
One would think that it being so close to Christmas, there would be lots of cheer and yule tide ( whatever that meant ) all around. Instead, everywhere Cordelia went all she saw were the varying symptoms of pain. Maybe it was because she'd been a higher being for three years, but Earth looked like a terrible place to be. Stop it, Cordy. She'd been the one to beg The Powers to bring her back and it had been for a damn good reason. Her friends were floundering like fish out of sea and she had every intention of helping them. The only problem? Cordelia didn't know how exactly. It had been two weeks since she'd been brought back and she still wasn't adjusted. Not really, anyway. For the entirety of those two weeks, the Seer had sat in her motel room, going over ways that she could offer some ultimate solution to all their problems. Which would have been great if she had actually thought of any. One of those problems - one of the biggest - had been taken care of just the day previous. Angelus was gone, replaced thanks to a deal made by a grieving Slayer. ( Don't ask how she knew these things. She had been a higher being, after all. Information wasn't hard to come by. ) But that left a plethora of problems that Miss. Chase didn't have even have the beginnings of a plan for.
So after days of pacing in her motel room, Cordelia decided to visit the one person who had always been the best at these sort of things.
It hadn't been hard to find the apartment Wesley was staying at. She remembered watching him from where she'd been. ( Not heaven, exactly. Something much more complex. And way more boring. ) Even as a Power, she had scoffed at his choice of the company he chose. And with the scoff came the guilt. Lilah Morgan had never been a favorite person of Cordelia's, but she'd never wanted to see her dead. Especially not at her own hands. Despite the fact that it hadn't been Cordelia in the driver's seat, she could remember every action she'd committed when that parasite had taken her over like some sort of disease. The one that stuck out the most was burying the dagger into Lilah's slender neck and watching the woman's eyes roll back into her skull as she crumpled to the ground in a graceless heap. It had been like being forced into a cage and being made to watch as your own body did terrible things to the ones you cared for. It hadn't mattered how hard Cordelia had fought against the parasite, because it only pushed her further into the oblivion until it was entirely impossible to claw herself out.
Once at the apartment, Cordelia stood at the door, ignoring the small flakes of snow that managed to drift into her dark hair. Instead, she stared at the mahogany door and the numbers that were nailed there. A deep breath was taken and when she released, her breath materialized in front of her face. She should have worn something warmer than the thin, blue sweater but she hadn't been focusing on a wardrobe for once. Just knock. Finally, her fingers curled into a fist and she rapped on the door three times and waited. Since it was the middle of the afternoon, Cordelia didn't have to worry about Lilah answering the door. The Spawn Of Satan still had to make a living, after all.
After a long moment, the sound of feet on the other side of the door caught her attention and she tensed, waiting for the moment when the door would swing open.