( event | closed ) soap opera bitches!

[tact]

Who: Slayer, The [ rulebreaks ] and Queen C [ tact ]
Where: Soap Opera TV Set. Really random room.
When: July 1.
Rating: G. But very dramatically bad.
Summary: Buffy and Cordelia end up on a soap. Someone's marrying someone's father's brother's sister's daughter's cousin's son. Or something like that.
The Story: This is new leaf time. While Cordelia has her guard raised around Buffy, for Buffy is Buffy, an important person in her life and in Angel's, and someone she hasn't quite seen in years, she figures it's best to put past grudges aside and try and make amends. Or something like that. She's not quite sure what she means by this, except for the fact that Cordelia Chase is lonely.

They're in a room in the mansion, one that Cordelia had figured would be nice for them to merely sit down and just … be adults. Reconnect. Talk. Avoid the sensitive subjects. Whatever.

But it appears Wonderland has other plans for the both of them.

It takes a few minutes to hit Cordelia after she enters the room, this desire to be utterly dramatic, to press a hand against her forehead, to accuse Buffy of the things she would already accuse her of if there was anything to accuse. But she smothers that down, if only for a moment.

But, Cordelia turns dramatically. "It sucks being here without him."

Comments

[rulebreaks]

Buffy gives a loud, world-weary sigh and sits huffily at the large table in the center of the room.

"You mean Angel." It's for the audience. It's all for the audience. "It's harder adjusting to my watcher being twelve. But that's just me. Personally."

[tact]

Giles being twelve is very weird to even think about. Giles has always been so old, dressed in plaid, always covered in dust, and to find him as a twelve year old - and completely likeable! - is weird for Cordelia.

She sits on the other side of the table, her arms resting along it. She looks as though she's thrown herself dramatically on it. Perking up, she frowns, "If he's twelve, does it mean I have to listen to him?"

[rulebreaks]

"He's still pretty Giles-y so I'm going to go with... yes." Buffy nodded definitively and then across the table. It was too long for this to make any sense, but it made for a nice wideshot.

"What's the last thing you remember - from home?" It was oddly sentimental, but everyone else had already asked her. And she was feeling a strange urge to ~bond~ with Cordy. At least until she took her next dramatic cue.

[tact]

"Ugh." She'd face plant onto the table, but it wouldn't be visually stunning.

And here's a question she had thought she had avoided. Does she say she died? This isn't really the time or place to say she'd been promoted to a Higher Power, fallen, ruined her best friend's life, then consequently died after abandoning him and breaking her promise. While it's all incredibly dramatic, Cordelia doesn't let it pass her lips. "Being with Angel. Fred, Lorne, Gunn, Wesley," she smiles as she glances away. "They were making it big. Saving the helpless."

And it's not a lie, either. It's what she remembers from her last few days back home.

[rulebreaks]

Buffy rolls her eyes in a grand gesture. "Well, duh. I know that."

It would be funny if it weren't so sad that they both keep tip-toeing around telling the other they're dead. So Buffy just frowns, eyebrows furrowing and face crinkling up. "We're back on the depressing thing, aren't we?"

[tact]

"No," she says, quickly. Yes, they are, and Cordelia doesn't like it one bit. While she had practically outed the fact that she was dead on the network when she first arrived, keeping that up isn't something she wants. "You asked, I answered. Unless you're boarding the depressing train. My bags - and me - are still standing at the station."

Waiting for either the drama train or even more depressing train.

[rulebreaks]

"You got to bring bags? That's so not even right." She loses a little of her dramatic edge though, instead just kind of staring across the table at Cordelia.

She really wanted to avoid asking this, but if they were going to be here a while... without him... As the other once-Sunnydalite had so conveniently already pointed out. She could at least know, right?

"Um. How is--he? Angel, I mean."

this is more sad than super dramatic!

[tact]

"Besides being tall, dark, and extra broody?" She says it cheerily, but she instantly loses the straightness in her back as she slouches. Cordelia sighs. It's only awkward because she's making it awkward. Buffy and Angel. It's a romance of the decades. While Cordelia and Angel barely experienced lift off. She glances down at the table, her fingers drawing circles on the surface. "He's as well put together as a puzzle with all the wrong pieces. The Powers That You Know What have dealt him a few cards that I'm not quite sure he thinks he can handle." Not without her, anyway. And, by the sounds of it, thanks to Giles, not without half his team.

All aboard the depressive train, Cordelia Chase wants to board.

Buffy deserves the truth, not something sugar-coated. She shrugs. "He's Angel." And she misses him.

alas 8(

[rulebreaks]

Her expression grows increasingly more grave, but as Cordy wraps up she finds herself nodding. "He is. That's something I've always liked about him." But it isn't as light as it should be.

Though her brain can't even fire at the level required to pick up on Cordelia and Angel. Outside of herself, Buffy never imagines that he could be with anyone else--and really doesn't want to know if he is.

"But you have the... vision-y things, right? Can't you just vision your way out. His way out."

[tact]

And isn't Buffy Summers backing Cordelia Chase into a wall for once? "Can't really do that when I'm here," she says, rather than the truth. It's the truth, that she can't vision him a way out while she's here, but it's not the whole truth. It's a good thing they don't swear Bible in Sunnydale. "Either way, the visions are just snapshots. Sometimes it takes way too long to piece them together. And the Powers are never that helpful, Buff."

[rulebreaks]

"I guess it would be too much to ask for, them giving you actually useful visions. I know with my dreams, it's... cryptic. At best." She makes a face and chews on her lip, feeling as akin to Cordelia as she'd ever felt in that moment. Which wasn't overly, but it was still something they hadn't had before. "At its most like, optimistic, wishfulthinkingest best."

[tact]

"The visions are like getting flashes of images and sounds and scents and thoughts. It never makes sense. Like speaking another language? Sometimes I can piece them together like a really great puzzle, and sometimes ... It'd be much better if it was a clearer, sharp image, rather than distorted and in chunks." Maybe Buffy will get it. Cordelia had forgotten Buffy had her own channel to the Powers That Be, and while it was one that was possibly less painful than Cordelia's connection, she hadn't really had much of a chance to bond with someone over it. No one really understood what it was like to be pummeled with these images and thoughts and all of these things that hit all of her senses at once and try to make a coherent and cohesive story out of it within seconds of hitting the floor.

"It makes putting it all together a lot smoother." It also means people are saved within a shorter, more succinct time-frame.

[rulebreaks]

She nodded easily; it was definitely something she could commiserate with.

"Or it doesn't fall into place until like, way too late. And by then what's even the point of all that cryptic... stuff." With a sigh, Buffy rested her head on one hand. "At least you don't have to deal with the First Slayer. She's like, the opposite of a Pantene commercial. And she's obviously never heard of a toothbrush."

Now they were getting somewhere, she thought. This was the real meaty stuff. "Not that she talks much anyway."

[tact]

"I take it she just smiles a lot?" Cordelia allows herself to smile. While she's glad she doesn't have to deal with someone who is basically to blame for the mess one finds themselves in, she kind of wishes that things were less painful on her end. Or were. Past tense is awfully hard to get used to.

"I can tell you right now, the Powers need to tone it down with the bright lights. Makes it difficult to see the nasty stuff that's right under their noses." Like a rogue agent, perhaps? She speaks of it as though she were speaking of the weather. Those urges to be dramatic are gone, temporarily or permanently, Cordelia's not even thinking about that at the moment.

[rulebreaks]

"She's not really the smiling type..." Buffy, too, had completely forgotten their assignment. But even if she had remembered, she wouldn't have cared.

She frowned, trying to process that. "Bright lights?" This was a particular thing they did not share, and she couldn't wrap her head around its meaning.