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Shadows Still Remain	By : addielogan Category: Angel the Series > Het - Male/Female > Angel(us)/Cordelia > Angel(us)/Cordelia Views: 3578 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Angel: The Series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 7
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- 9
As soon as Cordelia walked back into the
Hyperion after lunch, Angel rushed her, grabbing hold of her arms as if to
assure himself she was there as he began talking in a rush that even Cordelia's
battered memory could tell her was strange for him. "Cordy? Where were
you? I was panicking not knowing where you were, especially since it's the
middle of the day, so I couldn't go looking for you, and�"
Cordelia pulled back from Angel, breaking
the hold he'd had on her arms. "Geez, Angel, chill. I went to lunch with
Anne. I left a note on the desk."
Angel went over to the desk and picked up a
piece of paper, reading it with a sheepish expression. "Oh. I didn't see
that." He looked up at the blonde woman now standing beside Cordelia.
"And hi, Anne. I didn't see you either."
"Hi," Anne replied, keeping her
distance from Angel. Her body language made it clear she still didn't trust
him, and Angel couldn't begrudge her that. Were he in her place, he'd probably
feel the same way, given their history.
"I wasn't even gone that long, you
know," Cordelia said. "Not long enough to panic."
"I know, but�" Angel sighed. He
lowered his voice, glancing quickly over at Anne before he spoke, keenly aware
he wasn't alone with Cordy. "I lost you once. I
keep expecting you to disappear again."
Cordelia softened as her hand reached out to
cup Angel's cheek. "I won't."
"You can't know that. The Powers,
they�"
"I do, Angel," Cordelia told him
softly. "I'm here now."
Anne shifted uncomfortably as the tone
between the two brunettes seemed to change and she felt as if she were
intruding on a moment. Cordelia had told her at lunch that she and Angel
weren't a couple and never truly had been, but the chemistry between them was
obvious.
"I should be getting back to the
shelter," Anne said, taking another step away from the other two.
"Lunch was nice, Cordy. It's good to see you doing better."
Cordelia's hand dropped away from Angel as
she turned to look at Anne. "Oh, okay. We need to get together again
sometime. Call me?"
"Of course," Anne replied with a
smile. "I'll talk to you later."
After she'd said her good-byes with Anne,
Cordelia turned her attention back to Angel, a silence falling over the
Hyperion. Finally, Cordelia spoke, asking him a question she wasn't sure she
really wanted to know the answer to.
"Did I disappear once?"
Angel looked at her sharply.
"What?"
"You said you keep expecting me to
'disappear again.' Did�did I just disappear before? Angel, what happened to me?
Why wasn't I with you anymore?"
"What's the last thing you can really
remember?" Angel asked her, his hands crossed over his chest.
"God, I don't know. Everything's pretty
jumbled. Let me think." She sat down on the round couch in the middle of
the lobby, her chin resting in her hands. For several minutes, she was silent,
her brow creased in concentration.
"I�I remember calling you," she
said slowly, trying to pull the memories to the surface. "Groo�Groo had
left. He told me he couldn't be with me if I was in love with you, and first I
said that was crazy because I wasn't, but then I realized I was. So I called
you, and I was going to tell you at the Bluffs, only I�I never made it?
Everything after that is hazy, and some of it just isn't there. I think that
was a couple of years ago, but what should be there isn't. It's not like the
fog over my other memories, it's�" Cordelia dropped her hands and looked
at Angel with a frightened expression on her face. "There's nothing there
at all. It's like I just�stopped existing. Where was I? Was I here?"
"I'm not sure," Angel replied as
he came and sat down beside her. "Do you remember Jasmine?"
Cordelia frowned in confusion. "Jasmine? The princess in Aladdin?"
"The what?" Angel asked, his own expression mirroring Cordelia's
now. "No, the hellgod. She showed up about a year
ago, tried to take over the world. Ringing any bells at all?"
"No. I told you, there's nothing from
the past couple of years at all. What happened?"
"Are you sure you want to know?"
Angel asked. "It was pretty intense."
"Angel, if it was some part of my life
that I'm not missing, I need to know," Cordelia insisted. "There
hasn't been a lot in my life�at least since I met you�that couldn't be
classified as 'intense.'"
"I know, but this is worse." At
Cordelia's response of a quirked eyebrow, Angel sighed. "Okay, fine. But
don't say I didn't warn you. What you remember, about calling me and asking you
to meet you at the Bluffs, that happened. And no, you
didn't make it. Only neither did I, but that's a story
for another time. You had this demon guide�"
"Skip," Cordelia interjected.
"I remember Skip. I met him�on my birthday. When my head
was about to explode. He made me part demon." As she remembered her
semi-demon status, Cordelia wondered if that was why she was able to fight the
way she had been, but decided to file it away to contemplate later. "And�and that night!" Her eyes widened, the other
pieces of what had happened coming back to her. "I met him that night. He
froze everything and then told me I was supposed to be a Higher Being. I told
him I didn't want to go because I wanted to see you first, but he said I had to
leave, and I did. I remember that. There was a bright light, and I rose up into
the sky, and then�nothing. There's nothing after that, not until the night Anne
found me."
"Skip was working for the hellgod we
called Jasmine," Angel explained. "Honestly, a lot of it still makes
no sense to me, but from what I gathered, he chose you to carry Jasmine back to
this plane. You were gone for the summer, and I was able to locate you in the
Higher Realms, but you came back suddenly. I never knew how. Only when you did
come back, well, you had amnesia."
Cordelia's eyebrow
quirked. "I'm noticing a
theme."
"Yeah, me, too, which had me a little
worried," Angel admitted. "Only you seem different now. For one
thing, you remembered everything except personal details about your life then.
And your memories didn't come back on their own. Lorne
did a spell. It didn't exactly go as planned, but in the end, you had your
memories back."
"So why aren't I remembering any of
this now?" Cordelia asked. "Why is that time missing from my memory
completely?"
"I'm not sure it was you. From what I
gathered from Skip, Jasmine had taken you over. It was your body, but you
weren't in control. Maybe your consciousness was completely buried by hers. You
did people, er�things." Angel coughed, wishing he could bury one
memory of his own in particular. "You did things that I don't think you
ever would've done."
"Bad things?" Cordelia asked, her eyes
wide with horror.
"Yeah. You, it, her, whatever stole my soul and let Angelus
loose for one thing. There were some other things, too."
Cordelia flinched, then
looked down. "I�wow�"
"Hey, I don't think it was you,
Cordy," Angel said softly, his hand moving to rest gently on Cordelia's
leg. "Even Skip said you weren't really 'driving.' Jasmine or whoever
exactly was in you when you came down from wherever you really were was in
control. If none of that stuff is even in your memory, then, I really don't
think it was you. It was just your body, not your mind."
"Yeah, but my body is still me, Angel.
To think about someone wearing my skin running around and hurting people, I
just�" Cordelia trailed off as he eyes grew wide. "Wait, you said I
made you lose your soul? We didn't�"
"No!" Angel said quickly. "We
never�" He coughed. "Well, not really. This shaman was actually who
took my soul, and he created an elaborate hallucination where I thought we did,
but we didn't really."
"So you just had fake sex with
me?" Cordelia asked.
"Yeah, but it wasn't real. I mean,
really, it's not any different than any of the times I've dreamt�" Angel
trailed off as he realized what he'd just admitted to.
Cordelia blushed a looked down. "We can
move along from this topic."
"Yeah, I'm liking
that idea."
"So this Jasmine took over my body, and
then what? You said that was a year ago. Did I run off and you haven't seen me
since?"
"No," Angel replied, shaking his
head. "Jasmine used you to give birth to herself�and yeah, before you ask,
that really is as freaky as it sounds. After that, you fell into a coma, and
you stayed there until a few months ago. You were in the hospital, and I got a
call one day saying you were awake. I brought you back, we spent a day
together, and then you told me you had to go because your path was different
from mine. After that�" Angel had to stop for a moment, the memory still
hard for him, even now that he had Cordelia sitting beside him. "The
hospital called and told me you were dead."
Cordelia was silent for several moments
before she finally said, "Okay, I don't remember the last two years
because I had my body hijacked by a hellgod, then fell into a coma, and then
died?"
"To sum it all up,
yeah."
She let out a deep breath. "Wow. Maybe
not having those memories really is for the best."
"Cordy, what happened the night Anne
found you? She said she you were in an alley somewhere around Wolfram and Hart,
but I don't know what�"
Suddenly, Cordelia's eyes grew wide. "Wolfram and Hart! Angel, that's where I was when I
woke up! I was too out of it to realize it then, but
looking back, that's where I was. Did the building collapse that night?"
"Yeah, it did," Angel said.
"I, um, sort of pissed the Senior Partners off."
"I woke up in this lab there,"
Cordelia said. "I was in like�a refrigerator thing?"
"I think I might know what you're
talking about," Angel said, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he
pictured Cordelia in that sort of situation. "When Lindsey got his evil hand,
we tracked down a place Wolfram and Hart used for body part storage. They had a
secret lab where they kept people in some sort of stasis and farmed their body
parts to use in other people."
A look of pure disgust crossed Cordelia's
face. "Is that why they kept me? To sell my body parts. Or
maybe my eyes� They were after my eyes that one time because of the
whole seer thing." She shivered.
"I wish I could give you an answer, but
I can't. I didn't know anything about a lab set up for anything like that, so I
really don't know what was going on."
"Why would you know anything about a
lab Wolfram and Hart set up?" Cordelia asked. "It's not like they
sent us regular memos about their dastardly plans."
"Well, that's sort of the thing,"
Angel said with a sheepish look. "This past year, I was the C.E.O."
Cordelia gaped. "What? You�they're evil,
Angel!"
"I know, but after everything went down
with Jasmine, they made me an offer. They told me they were leaving Los Angeles
and conceding the territory to me, and I could use facilities and
manpower."
"And you just agreed to that?
Are you a complete idiot?"
"There were factors, Cordelia,"
Angel tried to explain with a heavy sigh. "And it was a good offer. I was
in charge, and I could use their own system against
them."
"But obviously you weren't! Angel, if Wolfram
and Hart was involved, they were tricking you. They had me sedated in a fridge,
so you weren't as in charge as you thought you were. They were playing you�they
made you part of them."
"No, they didn't," Angel insisted.
"I bested them in the end, Cordy. I was able to take down the Circle of
the Black Thorn, a group comprised of the most powerful of the evil. I was able
to do something good."
"That's how Wes, Gunn, and Fred died,
isn't it? It happened after you started working for Wolfram and Hart."
"They agreed to go in, too. We all knew
the risks."
"And you let them take them!"
Cordelia yelled as she pushed Angel's hand off her leg and got to her feet.
"I can't believe� You're supposed to be a Champion, Angel! Champions don't
make deals with evil, no matter what the costs!"
"Cordelia, wait�" Angel said,
reaching out for her. "There was so much going on. Just let me
explain."
"I can't�" Cordelia replied, backing away as tears formed in her eyes. "I don't
know�" She stopped in mid-sentence, then turned and fled the hotel,
disappearing into the sunlight where Angel couldn't follow.

***
*** ***
Sorry I didn't update last week. I just got
a promotion at work, and I haven't had much time to write. I'll try to update
when I can, and hopefully, I can still keep it fairly regular.
Please review!
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Shadows Still Remain