// Candles
Disclaimer: The characters of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel are not mine and belong to Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Mutant Enemy. They are used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Feedback is incredibly welcome.
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Angel S3-S4 AU, spoilers through "Home." plus assorted spoilers for Buffy S6. If Angel had had a daughter, among other changes. For Oyceter, for many, many reasons.
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CANDLES
A little tart, he had said of Lilah. It was still true. This wasn't the room where he had tasted Wesley in her mouth or smelled him on her, it wasn't the rooftop or the desk or any of those places, but she was smiling. She always smiled--sometimes with her mouth, sometimes with her eyes. Sometimes with the arch of her neck.
Your son, she had said with her eyes. Yours. The only one you'll ever have.
He wondered what the blood tasted like beneath that scarf, wondered if there was blood to taste at all. He had lifetimes of experience ignoring temptation.
End world peace and you got to make a wish, kind of like blowing out birthday candles. No one ever thought about what happened to the candles.
Faith, Hope, and Love
Faith didn't dream much, here. Dream was the kind of word you saved up for weird-ass things like making the bed (oh, yeah, like her mother had ever given a shit about clean linen) or creepy six-legged statuary. Naw. Her sleep was filled with the good things, the simple things. Sleep, food, dust...things they had plenty of here.
It had been something like a year since Angel last visited. That was cool. Vampire with a soul and all that had to have a pretty full agenda. He could be old-fashioned about these things: schedules, showing up on time, the whole shebang. Faith had never been big on the whole R.S.V.P. deal herself. And she had a lot to think about, or to not think about, in here. That was the point.
The blonde cop never visited, but that was entirely expected.
Faith hadn't known when Buffy died. It didn't sting much. Probably they'd been grieving (as though she wouldn't). Probably they'd figured she would know through that mumbo-jumbo connection. No: it was when Buffy returned that Faith felt it and realized that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
It took her some time to work this out, in between pull-ups and the petty pecking-order scuffles. Slayer dreams weren't exactly written in See-Rover-run English.
She knew the way to Sunnydale. She also knew she was breaking a promise to Angel, sort of, and to Buffy herself. But she couldn't not go. It was a Slayer thing, and a sister thing, and--if she'd admitted it to herself--a person thing. What you did for someone because they were (kind of) human like you, and that was that.
Faith couldn't know that, before she got there, Buffy was burning herself against a dead thing with a heart more living than her own worn one. She couldn't know that Angel had become a father. Aside from the souled vampire thing, she'd only imagined him as a big brother, the kind who stepped in front of your mom while she was weepy and got her to sit down before she got to the hitting stage. Faith had a pretty good idea of what a big brother was supposed to do. If Angel's not riding to the rescue, Faith told herself, he would want me doing the support system thing.
Faith couldn't know that she would die to stop Willow, just as she'd lived to bring Angel back in a world one step over from this one. Promises didn't have anything to do with it, in the end, just the things you had to do and the things you couldn't do.
Windows
She has her mom's eyes, Gunn said. I don't know why that's so freaky. All the vamps we've met have eyes, right?
Fred and Cordelia looked at each other and rolled their eyes.
Fred hissed, Charles! But it was true. She couldn't imagine Angel's daughter as an adult. Would she be quiet, given to brooding? Was brooding genetic? No, she wasn't going to tackle that one in the waiting room.
The waiting room had the usual assortment of magazines. Gunn was leafing through one of them; Wesley didn't even pretend. Well, Fred didn't see the appeal either. If it weren't for all the butterflies in her stomach she'd have brought a chemistry journal with her. Actually, that would have settled her stomach but the others would have given her one of those looks, and that wouldn't do anyone good, now, would it?
Darla's blood, as the child tore her from within, had been very, very red; and the alley in the rain had been so grey and glistening-dark.
They brought the baby out, pronounced the usual good news. They wanted a name. None of them had thought about a name, or thought about asking Angel about a name. After all, two vampires having a child, it wasn't like you'd picture them paging through baby name books.
Wesley said, very quietly, It might be Kathryn. Fred remembered what he'd told her about Liam's history--she had the notes in a filing cabinet somewhere--and was about to say, Yes, yes, that'll do, which was even sillier of her. Names were important. The way Gunn was Gunn and Charles to her, the way Wesley was sometimes Wes, the way she was Fred mostly, the small divergences, and Angel had the big ones.
Then Angel came through the doors and said, Dana. Her name is Dana. And spelled it for them, as though he'd planned it all along. As though he saw, through a veil darkly, the ruins of a woman he would have called art, once.
Fred couldn't stop thinking, At least she doesn't look like she's going to be blonde.
Through the Looking-Glass
The father will kill the child.
Wesley wrote it again. Wrote it in mirror-writing, wrote it upside down, wrote it in a circle, wadded up the paper, tossed it on the floor. Folded a paper airplane and wrote it on the wings. Things no one would ever have expected him to do, as though he'd never been a schoolboy.
Angel had once been a man.
No, that wasn't fair. Angel still did most of the things a man did. And Wesley--Wesley had seen worse fathers. Known them.
He wouldn't, Wesley said to himself. He wouldn't.
He wanted to believe it so badly. But wasn't that what he'd wanted to believe of Roger Wyndham-Pryce, that the family name was inextricably tangled up with the Council and the Slayer line and that all the small belittlements, all the exhortations to strive harder and harder until you broke--wasn't that what he'd wanted to believe? And Roger wasn't a monster. Angel was, and knew it.
No. No. No. It had to be the other way around.
It had to be.
Under the Hill
The accounts of Quor'toth in Wesley's books, Angel's tomes, and Fred's calculations did not match up. If Wesley had been talking at all, let alone to the other two, he wouldn't have been surprised. It wasn't as though people generally came back.
Ave Atque Vale
Except when they did.
Cordelia dived for the crossbow, which was more than she could say for anyone else. Like she didn't know what Darla looked like after returning again. Some people wouldn't stay dead if you stuffed them in a box and sat on it. She got off maybe one shot.
And all Angel could do was stand there frozen and breathe, Dana. It's you.
She wasn't Darla after all. She sure as hell didn't move like Darla; she moved like someone who wanted one strike to end everything. No teasing, no quarter. And dark brown hair, almost Angel's shade. And dammit, she was shooting stakes. And whatever other weapons and--
Daughter, Angel said.
Dana paused for half a breath and laughed, lips pulled back, no sound emerging. Vampire, she shot back.
Angel had two hundred years of combat duty on her, more or less. But he let her go. Into the sunlight, where he couldn't follow her. Maybe because he didn't want to follow her. She belonged in the sunlight, he belonged in those shadows, all that jazz. It was always a guilt thing, with Angel.
Or maybe not.
Contact Wesley, Angel said, contact Giles, contact anyone in Sunnydale--hell, I don't know. Joyce.
He didn't seem interested in following her, period. Cordelia grabbed his arm. He shook her off--with force. She stared at him. He knelt to pick up the stakes on the floor and broke them. Pinpoints of red appeared where the splinters pierced his palms.
Your kid's come back and you wanna make phone calls? Gunn demanded.
Angel lifted his head. Dropped the broken stakes. Told them.
Only days gone, and the girl had come back a Slayer.
Dead Men Rise Up Never
Three months.
Wesley didn't know where Dana had been those three months. Slaying, probably. She had that look about her. And those eyes--My father said you brought me to him, Dana had said. Wesley had ached at the trust in her eyes, the fact that a Slayer from Quor'toth, the child of two vampires, could be capable of trust for any period of time. You're my Watcher.
Wesley had reminded her that her father was a vampire.
A little of that light had gone out of her eyes. She knew. She didn't have to say so.
She had something of Angel's height, and she wore her hair short. It looked good on her. Nothing of Fred's bashful bubbliness, or Lilah's sophistication. Slayer, woman, sure in her own skin; nothing more or less. The kind of Slayer, if truth be told, that he had been raised to expect.
Angel's daughter.
And she told him where Angel had been for three months.
Of Earnest Grasping
It wasn't that the beacon hurt his eyes. It wasn't that kind of light: green-tinted, like memories of algae. Wesley's blood tasted like itself, like the salt water that had filled him without filling him, and it wasn't until he had sated himself that he saw the woman standing above him, her expression cool. Not cold, not compassionate, but cool.
Darla, he said. And knew he was wrong.
Miss me? she said.
You should have staked me, he said. Swords, stakes, and now drowning. Perhaps Buffy's death by drowning had felt like his three months. He had lived so long, what was three months? And hers, like Faith's or Doyle's, hers was a candle.
Oh, no, Father, Dana said. It's not about counting time. It's about coming home, and going away, and wishes and cake. It's about the son you couldn't save and the daughter you couldn't keep.
Wesley helped him up, wrapped him in a blanket: simple, human gesture, as though a thing unliving needed that kind of warmth. Which, come to think of it, he did, at that moment.
The curve of her mouth straightened. You always thought it was about vampires and Slayers, Father. You tell me: Do I have a soul?
He saw then who she was, and what he had given away, who he had changed. He told her he would have done it again. He told her that he loved her.
His name was Connor, she said, and I wouldn't have.
Ouroboros
This time it wasn't his wish. It was hers.
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