The Bottom of the Deep Black Sea

by Jeanne Rose

It was dark. And cold. And very quiet.

He didn’t mind the dark. Once upon a time when he had lived up in the world of men, he had preferred dark places. Or perhaps, by comparison, dim ones. He was after all a creature of the night, moving in shadows, dark alleys and darker countrysides, forever stalked by the coming sunrise. But here, at the bottom of the sea, there was no sunrise, and therefore no night either. There was simply no light at all. And most likely nothing to see.

He didn’t much mind the cold either. He felt it, but since his body didn’t need to maintain an internal temperature, it didn’t distress him as it would have if he were human. It chilled, then numbed his bound limbs, which wasn’t really that unwelcome. He grew accustomed to it.

He didn’t notice the pressure for very long, either. When he had first descended, the mounting pressure of the water had been an unspeakable torment, squeezing every part of him in a merciless watery vise. But all the air had been forced out of his body rather quickly, and before long his undead flesh had come to accommodate the enormous weight of the water above him.

But the silence was another thing altogether. He couldn’t get used to it. It roared in his head like a sound too great for comprehension. He’d heard that water carried sound better than air, but no whisper of ship motors or whalesong or even a faint slough of ocean currents penetrated his watery grave. Apparently the slope of the continental shelf was too deep for even bottom-dwelling fish, for nothing disturbed his metal coffin half sunk in the fine, lifeless mud. With lungs full of silt and sea water, he even couldn’t talk to himself.

Even worse than the silence was the absence of time. Seconds went by, minutes melted into hours, but with no way to measure their passage, they slipped through his fingers and were lost in the vast darkness around him. He didn’t even have a heartbeat to count by. He hadn’t realized how knowing what time it was, what day it was, what year it was, had tethered him to reality.

For a little while he could guess how long it had been by how hungry he was. The first twinges told him it had been several hours, then the cramping of his gut indicated that at least a day or two had passed. For what seemed like a week the need for blood became a torment, driving him to puncture his own lips or tongue with his fangs just for a swallow. But soon it dulled into monotonous starvation, which was no help at all.

He tried counting seconds in his head. It was hard to concentrate, but it kept at it doggedly, until somewhere in the hundreds of thousands he realized he was dropping digits and repeating himself, and eventually he gave up in confusion. He tried counting backwards from one hundred thousand and was able to force himself to keep count until he reached zero. Exhausted, he slept, and awakened again in blackness and silence.

He began to drift in and out of consciousness. He could not always tell if he was asleep or awake. Once in a while, though, he dreamed - sharp, bright, vivid dreams of the world he had lost.

In dreams he dared to remember Cordelia’s liquid brown eyes and megawatt smile, and to worry that she hadn’t met him at their rendevous on the beach. Had she gotten into trouble along the way? Was she wondering still why he hadn’t come to her rescue? And just what had she intended to say? Did he honestly imagine that she could ever see him as more than a friend, a partner in the fight against evil? Or had he lost something infinitely more precious?

At other times he watched Connor’s hunched shape wandering some empty street alone, dark pain burning in his eyes, and wanted to kill Holz himself for the legacy of hatred he had left his son. Angel had almost believed him, believed that despite a lifetime of hatred he had come to love the son he had stolen. How had he died, that Connor believed Angel had done it? There was only one answer. To use Connor so, and deprive him of both of his fathers at once, was an act of hatred too deep for love to survive. Fury burned Angel’s heart, but anger was too hot an emotion for the cold, dark sea, and he was left with only the ashes of anguish.

Once in a while after one of these dreams he would wake in a blind panic and thrash helplessly against the metals cords that bound him until he bloodied the water and exhausted what little strength remained to him. He wept bitter tears into the salty ocean until the stillness and the darkness lulled him back to sleep.

From time to time he indulged in the agony of hope. Surely his friends would find him. Perhaps not right away, but sometime. Surely somehow they would track down Connor, learn what had happened, and find some way to bring him back.

But the familiar ghosts of despair whispered that no human technology could find him here, and no magic that he knew of could help. Even Kortath didn’t seem unreachable compared to this place. And what if Connor told them that he was dead, reduced to a handful of untraceable dust? They would grieve and move on with their lives. Perhaps it would be better than being tormented with the knowledge of his fate and their helplessness to rescue him.

Despair never quite took him, though, because deep in his heart he was sure that the Powers that Be knew where he was. If they still wanted him for their cause, then perhaps they would find a way to get him out. But they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry about it.

Eventually, time became fluid. People came and talked to him.

Fred calculated the depth of the ocean based on the pressure in pounds per square inch and explained why there weren’t any currents and told him what Gunn was wearing and what it was like to kiss him.

Lilah gloated dryly about how fitting it was that this should be his fate, and how perfectly it fit in with the plans her firm had for him.

Buffy assured him that if she had any idea what had happened to him she’d certainly find a way to get him out of it, and asked him what in the world had he been thinking to fall in love with Cordelia of all people.

Wesley explained in a calm, sad voice that he understood now why Angel could never forgive him, and that given everything that had come of what he’d done he wasn’t sure he could ever forgive himself, either.

Lorne chatted companionably about life in XXX, and lamented that since Angel was unable to sing in his present circumstances, he couldn’t be of much help.

After a long time, Cordelia came.

She did not say anything at first. He stared at her face, smooth and beautiful, framed in the window of his coffin. She was surrounded by a strange white light that should have hurt his eyes, but didn’t. With the patience of prolonged immobility, he waited for her to speak.

*     *     *

Cordelia peered into Angel’s prison, untroubled by the darkness, the cold, or the silence that surrounded it. She knew that Angel could see her but had lost the capacity to respond, trapped in a cocoon of impotence, anguish, and imagined voices.

She knew how he had come to be here. With the new eyes she had been given, she saw it happen as clearly as if she had been standing with Connor and Justine on the deck of the boat. Gratitude filled her that the Powers had not asked her to make her final choice in the face of this dreadful knowledge. If she’d known what was happening to Angel she was not sure she could have done it.

Strangely she had imagined that as a higher being she would pass beyond simple human emotions, but instead found that her capacity for joy, sadness, and empathy had grown greater than she could have conceived. Seeing Angel buried alive by the son he loved in an act of mistaken vengeance, her heart swelled wide as the ocean with sorrow and pity for both of them.

She saw the pain locked in every cell of Angel’s body and knew she could dispel it with a touch. She longed to rip open the door of his coffin and tear out the cords that bound him and carry him away on wings of light. But she knew with the certainty that was now the essence of her soul that it was not the right thing to do. And with this kind of power couched in her every action, disaster lurked if she indulged the tiniest fraction of her own desires when they ran contrary to her sense of what was meant to be.

Instead she gave him the only gift she could.

*     *     *

All she said was his name. Her lips didn’t move, but he heard it as a soft voice in his head. There was no ardor in it, no longing, simply a statement of fact, giving him back to himself. It went through his mind like a wind through tall grass, untangling the snarls of confusion and grief and sensory deprivation. For a moment he saw and thought clearly.

In that moment he looked into her eyes and saw love, deep and strong enough to warm the boundless sea. It bound them in a way he could scarcely grasp, and on its wings knowledge passed from her soul to his like a nerve impulse across a synapse.

Everything will be all right.

A dozen questions were born and died helplessly in his waterlogged throat. She did not answer them, but her gaze held him fast until the need for answers passed. Then the light drew in around her and began to fade. In an instant she was gone.

With her going most of the clarity left him. Darkness soon swallowed the memory of her face, and in the silence he could not hear the sound of her voice. But even the vast cold sea could not completely steal away the warmth of her love or the message she had brought. Hope, no longer an agony, became an anchor to which he clung, refusing to be sucked down into hallucinations or despair. He wasn’t entirely lost. His plight was known. Help would come. It would be all right.

He could wait.

The End.