Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"...trash and you always will be trash. You don't fit in around here; nobody likes you. You're a stain on our good name. You might as well just end it all right now."

He can hear Natalie sobbing, and he prays that she resists his mother's prodding, but so far it seems to be a losing battle. She's too far gone. Dennis presses against the wall, but there is no give. Just like for the last 48 years.

He wants to scream. He wants to bang on the wall and let Natalie know she's not alone. He wants to be able to talk and manifest himself like his mother can, but after being trapped for so long, he doesn't know how. He thinks he had a physical form at one point, but it has deteriorated until he is nothing more than a shifting presence that can manipulate the objects around himself.

"You'll never be good enough for my son. He doesn't really love you - he's young and foolish. He doesn't know what love is."

"I don't want to marry your son," Natalie cries. "I don't know your son. Please..."

"You just want to use him and then leave him like the nasty little liar you are. You'll end up in trouble one of these days, you mark my words. And I won't have you dragging my son into your mess."

"Please.... please...."

"You can make it all go away. You can make everything better. It won't take long."

Panicked, Dennis throws all his force into the wall. It makes a loud bang, but just as he was scared it would, the sound only makes Natalie cry harder. The same thing happened with Jenny Kim 28 and a half years ago almost exactly; he didn't try to intervene until she was too far gone and by that point everything he did only made matters worse. She'd heard the thumps and it had pushed her over the edge.

Dennis will never know for sure if he was the one who finally caused her to commit suicide or not, but he learned his lesson then. Early intervention was the key. Loud sounds, doing the face trick with the wall and the drawer, little stuff that he could enact from within his confines usually worked to scare off the tenants who were in danger. Not every tenant was, but the ones who were....

Well, it had been 28 years since Jenny Kim. He'd clearly been doing something right.

But Natalie doesn't stand a chance.

He can hear - although "hear" isn't the right word, exactly - her in the bedroom, crying as she strips the sheet from her bed. There is still time, not everything is lost yet. A friend could come over or the phone could ring or something else might snap Natalie out of the influence Maude has her under. He remembers the four other women whose suicide attempts had been intervened upon; they had moved out almost immediately afterwards. Someone could still do that for Natalie.

Mom.... Mama, please..... but he has no voice, no lips to form the words, and he learned a long time ago that pleading does no good.

He curls himself into a small ball of selfness. He wishes he could block it out. There is nothing he can do now but pray to a God he knows abandoned him a long time ago.

48 years. Nearly half a century of being trapped in a wall, held against his will, and forced to stay there by the very person who killed him. She talks to him sometimes, but he can't answer her and even if he could, she wouldn't listen. The only thing he has had for company - other than the muffled voices of the tenants - is his own rotted corpse. He watched himself decay.

It was easily the most horrifying thing of his entire existence. And there was no way to escape.

His fiancee....Joan.... He never heard anything about her again, not even gossip from the neighbours. He hopes she still left L.A. like they had been planning. As far as he knows, the police never tracked her down to question her about Maude. He likes to think she met a nice fellow who treated her right and by now she has a small pack of grandchildren running around. White picket fence - the whole ideal.

The sounds from the bedroom are slowly quieting down. Despair washes over Dennis; he knows how this will proceed. Natalie will hang from the ceiling until the sheet strangles her. She will lose consciousness fairly quickly, but she won't die for several minutes afterwards. Even if she is rescued at last minute, she would be facing serious medical problems. But if someone doesn't interrupt her (which seems more and more to be the case), she will eventually suffocate. She will be reported missing or a concerned friend will drop by or she will begin to decay, and eventually the police will become involved. They will take the body away. They never seem to realise the truth; he hears them talking and the word "suicide" is used, as well as the phrases "no sign of forced entry" and "it looks like there was a struggle." But even with the signs of struggle, eventually the police tape is taken down and neighbours shake their head and lament about the nice woman in apartment 212 who killed herself. The debris from Maude's temper is chalked up to signs of a disturbed mind.

Neither Jenny's nor Margo's spirit stayed in the apartment for long after their deaths - a day at the most. They moved out of this plane of existence and hopefully onto something better. He watched them go, straining to ride on their trails into the unknown, but he can't go anywhere; she is holding him back. When Jenny departed, he had been dead for just 19 years. Now, he has been dead for over twice as long as he had been alive.

He feels eternity stretching onwards.

All sound from the bedroom has ceased. His mother returns to the living room and stands in front of his wall. "You're safe now, Dennis. I will always protect you. I know what sort of girl she was, and she was going to hurt you. You'll thank me one day, Dennis."

And then they'll clean up the apartment, clear out Natalie's belongings, and get it ready to show again. And someone else will move in and start the cycle all over again.

"You'll thank me."

Dennis tries to ignore the endlessness of it all. He wishes someone would just demolish the whole complex and set him free. He tries to lose himself.

But it's hard to lose yourself when you're the only company you have.

Chapter Text

Cordelia is finally asleep. She looked absolutely wrecked when she stumbled home at half past two in the morning. She had all the traditional hallmarks of a vision: hair down to hide her face from curious passersby, a look of weary resignation, and one hand that could not stay away from her temple for more than a couple minutes. But beneath that was a grim sort of satisfaction; whatever she had seen had been dealt with swiftly and effectively by her coworkers. Dennis feels a rush of gratitude towards them - they take care of Cordy when he cannot.

He owes her so much. Not only did she release him from his excruciating prison and help him banish his mother to …. well, somewhere that wasn’t here …. but she lets him stay and treats him like any other person. She asks his opinion on outfits, obliges when he asked her not to play certain music anymore (except when she wanted to threaten him, apparently), and she leaves books in the living room that she thinks he would enjoy. She communicates with him, understands his various questions and expressions of emotion better than he ever thought would be possible.

She lives in a dangerous world. Dennis wants to protect her from it whenever possible, but she is so stubborn sometimes. Christopher Wilson, Harmony Kendall - the people who are supposedly her friends seem to want to hurt her just as badly as her enemies do. She may have forgiven Angel for his hissy fit half a year ago, but Dennis is reserving judgement. He worries all the time about the day Angelus will show up at their door; and he knows Cordelia shares in that worry.

But Dennis is just a ghost; there is only so much he can do. So he focuses on those things: wiggling the faucet to ask her if she wants a bath, and drawing it for her when she nods wearily. He readies it for her, piling the bubbles high and adding bath salts for relaxation as she strips down. She has long since lost any sort of modesty around him. He has seen and known more of her than anyone else in her entire life. He loves that she trusts him so much but hates the necessity of it.

When she climbs into the bath, he goes for the loofah, asking if she wants her back scrubbed - or whatever she may need - but she shakes her head, wincing as the movement sends pain radiating over every inch of her scalp. He lowers the loofah back to its original place and reaches out to brush a lock of hair out of her eyes instead. Although “reaching” isn’t exactly the word to use when he has no physical form. He is nothing but a shifting current of energy that can be directed to manipulate objects; right now he is manipulating the hairs falling into Cordelia’s face and pushing them back behind her ear. And then he is manipulating the tense muscles in her temples, scalp, and neck in a deep tissue massage that leaves her sighing and more or less relaxed.

She stays in the tub for nearly an hour before Dennis is able to prod her into going to bed lest she fall asleep and drown. The last thing he wants is for her to be in the same predicament as him. By now, Dennis is good at moving even some larger objects, but he has never tried lifting and carrying Cordy before, and he’s not sure even he could pull water out of her lungs if necessary. She stumbles into a pair of pyjamas and murmurs her gratitude as Dennis pulls the covers up over her. He makes sure her alarm has been turned off, though he knows she’ll be up and taking more pills in just a couple of hours. Angel probably won’t be expecting her until noon, but depending on how bad the pain is, she might go in at her normal time because the only other alternative is to lie in bed and think about how the visions are killing her.

Cordy isn’t good with confinement, and Dennis understands that all too well.

He picks up the debris of her homecoming. He should have made her eat something, but chances are she would just throw it up. He’ll make sure she at least has some cereal tomorrow before going to work. And juice, not coffee. A life of fighting evil may have honed her muscles, but she never seems to get a decent amount of healthy food.

Once all of her dirty clothes are in the hamper and the lights are turned off, and the pill bottles put away, Dennis takes up his post by her bedside. The long hours when Cordelia is away are usually filled with books and television and music, but the nights when she comes home - especially the nights when she is hurting and exhausted from a vision - he stays by her side just to watch her breathe.

Just to make sure she still is.

Chapter Text

“...doing that thing again, but there’s no breeze. Should we be worried?”

Dennis knows he should stop messing with the baby’s mobile, but little Skyler loves it so much. He’ll stare calmly for hours while Dennis spins the mobile or wiggles his stuffed animals (subtle, small movements that the parents won’t notice or will attribute to the baby). Dennis misses Cordelia so much, but Skyler takes his mind off the pain of her absence.

Sometimes.

Dennis gives the mobile another spin, a little bit harder this time, causing the father to jump. Dennis feels bad for that - they’re a nice couple, if a bit naive and fussy when it comes to their son. He doesn’t want to scare them, especially not badly enough that they move out. He wants to watch Skyler grow up for as long as possible. He imagines sometimes that it’s not Skyler he’s seeing, but Connor; Connor, who did not get the childhood he deserved with a family who loved him.

Dennis only met Connor once or twice, but Cordelia’s infatuation with him (not to mention Angel’s) was practically tangible. That was before Connor’s kidnapping and reappearance - and then Cordelia’s disappearance. It had been well over a year since the Angel Investigations team members had come by to pack up her stuff and left Dennis all alone. “She’s not coming back,” Fred had snapped at him, and she was right. Even if she did come back to L.A. (and Dennis firmly believed she did at some point), she never came home again. She couldn’t. Not with Skyler and his parents living here now.

Dennis watched the news whenever he could, hyper alert for anything that could even vaguely involve Angel Investigations or Wolfram & Hart. Not that he could do anything about it, but he wanted to stay in touch with his old friends in any way that he could. As a ghost, he was less susceptible to supernatural influence, which made some of the events of the last year all the more horrifying and unbelievable to him.

Skyler blinks and his eyes seem to follow Dennis. He wonders, not for the first time, if the baby could sense or even see him. Baby Connor never seemed capable of tracking Dennis’ movements, but maybe that was lack of interest rather than simply not knowing Dennis was there. Or it could be age difference. Or -

Dennis has a lot of time to think these days.

The years are starting to blend together. All that time in the wall seems so long ago now - a lifetime ago. It feels like an eternity and no time at all. His actual life no longer seems like it was real at all - nor does his mother. He wonders sometimes if it was all a hallucination. He wonders sometimes if he never died but is stuck in a very intense, very long (very mundane) dream. But those thoughts never last for long; he knows who and what he is, and nothing can shake this knowledge in the end.

He wishes eternity weren’t such a long time.

A breeze flutters the curtains even though the window is shut. Skyler’s parents look edgy again, but it wasn’t Dennis’ fault this time. He, too, is caught off guard by the indoor wind. Skyler’s mobile spins faster. Dennis prepares himself to face some supernatural entity that probably wants to do the family harm (life without Cordy has not made him any less paranoid about unwanted visitors).

“Hey, Dennis. Sorry it took me so long to get here. Don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

He knows that voice. God, he knows that voice. She is there before him, looking different but still with the underlying Cordelianess of her. If he had a body, he would cry to see her again. Her eyes are staring straight at him as if she can actually see him

Cordelia, he thinks.

She smiles sadly - though the sorrow isn’t for herself, he knows. “Oh, sweetie. Don’t worry about me, okay? I got something of a promotion at work, and I can’t do it without my best friend’s assistance. What do you say?”

It’s her, it’s really her. Nobody could ever imitate that flippant attitude, the casual optimism, the tongue-in-cheek.

“Wanna get out of here?”

Dennis’ attention turns back towards Skyler and his parents, who are cooing over the now-fussy baby. He belongs at Cordelia’s side, always and forever, but who will watch over Skyler?

“He’s going to be fine. His parents are getting the hang of things,” Cordelia says, sensing the source of his hesitation.

Dennis returns his attention to her. Yes, he thinks. I want to leave here now.

“Then let’s skedaddle,” Cordelia says as if she heard him. But that’s impossible, since he doesn’t exactly have a mouth.

Except he does now. They are no longer in the apartment, but instead standing in front of a small cottage in the middle of a florid garden. He has a mouth and a face and head and arms and legs and a torso. He has hair and fingernails and eyelashes and internal organs. He breaths and his heart beats, though they don’t have to. He could stop them with a thought. But he is fascinated with the sound of his heart in his ears again and he wouldn’t stop this for anything.

“Welcome to Heaven,” Cordelia says. She sounds far away now, but maybe that’s because Dennis is listening with ears rather than perceiving the sound and meaning of her voice.

“I’m alive,” he says in wonder, knowing even as he speaks that it is not the truth. His voice sound odd, flat; he has forgotten what it’s like to make intonation.

“Not quite, sweetie,” Cordelia says. She lays a hand on Dennis’ arm and suddenly his whole arm is crawling with sensation: her skin, the breeze, the heat from the sun. Even the cottage’s wooden door several feet away seems to have a gravitational effect on him. The hairs on his arm stand up, and the feeling is almost unbearable. He is not used to any of this anymore, and he finds it overwhelming.

“It will be overwhelming for awhile,” Cordelia tells him, like she read his mind. He’s glad, because he can’t remember quite how to express his feelings in words. She removes her hand. “But you’ll get used to it again. You were stuck on Earth for fifty-five years; it won’t take you that long to readjust. And I’m here to help you.”

It’s strange to think how after all this time, all the ways he comforted and cared for her, she’s here now, offering to do the same.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and it is woefully inadequate. But he knows that she understands what he means.

“You’re welcome,” she says, grinning happily at him. “By the way, this place is yours. Your own personal heaven.” She looks around them, raising an eyebrow. “Not exactly what I imagined for you, but at least it’s nice and open.”

The garden is a wild mishmash of trees, bushes, and plants. He recognises a couple, but nowhere near all of them. He can’t wait to start learning what they are and how they grow. The cottage, too, is a mystery to be explored.

“I always wanted to have a garden,” Dennis says suddenly, the words jumbling up in their rush to get out of him. He blushes and tries to speak slower, organising his thoughts before speaking. “Our apartment complex wasn’t really equipped for one, but I’ve always been fascinated by plants and the countryside.”

“Looks like now’s your chance. You can change your heaven whenever you feel like, just so you know. If you get bored or want different scenery. And you can visit other people’s heavens or have them come visit you.”

Can I see your heaven? Dennis thinks immediately.

“Soon,” Cordelia answers out loud. “You should explore your own for a while. I’ll come check on you again in a bit; I’ve got-”

“Don’t leave me,” Dennis says quickly. “I mean… please don’t go yet.”

It feels like a dream again, but he knows it’s real. Everything is happening so quickly. He’s barely had time to process the fact that Cordelia is dead, and now they’re in Dennis’ own personal heaven. It’s a lot to take in all at once.

“Sorry,” Cordelia says. “Things have been happening very quickly recently and my mind is going about five thousand miles a minute. Of course I can stay for a while. We’ll talk - catch up. There’s a lot that’s happened since the last time I saw you.”

Dennis smiles, relieved and eager. It won’t be quite like old times, but it will be similar - Cordelia prattling on about the latest case and catching Dennis up on the details.

Dennis reaches out a hand and opens the cottage door. It instantly feels like home, and he leads Cordelia inside.