My Wayward Son
Author: Poisontaster
Fandom: Angel
(extremely mild crossover at the end)
Pairing: None.
Rating: Mild Violence. Language.
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: Set post-"Not Fade Away"; took some liberties.
AN: I didn't really like the character of Connor until after the series was
finished and I'd gotten involved in fandom. I've been wanting
to write SOMETHING about Connor for a while and while I'm not convinced this is
it, it's a start. Written for 60_minute_fics
and SO ridiculously rough and unbeta'd. OMG.
At one
point in time, Connor remembers thinking that the inhabitants of this dimension
were soft. Useless.
He hasn't entirely changed his opinion on the matter, but he has had to revise
it considerably.
Head meet table.
Table? Head.
Table wins, even when you're the son of two vampires and have spent most of
your life in a hell dimension. He feels the skin part and leak blood at
cheekbone and temple. The blood from his lip was already there and doesn't
really count. His anger—always present—bubbles and
froths quietly like a pool of magma. He holds onto it grimly, all that keeps
him alive and moving. But he doesn't let it escape.
The thing is, he knows he could take this human, this
stinking, redneck, fatbellied cop. He could
take him and a half dozen of his buddies before they brought him down. Probably. Probably. But this one for sure. But he's not here for that. It would get
in the way. And if that isn't a laugh, Connor (Stephen?
Am I Stephen too?) doesn't know what is.
People who meet him now tend to think he's a little insane. They're probably
right. He just doesn't know how else it could be, with two lifetimes, two sets
of memories set at ninety degree angles in his head. Two
memories, something like three people, none of them contiguously complete, and
the anger. That's the sum total of his inheritance from a man—well,
vampire—he's not sure if he likes, loves, or wants to destroy.
He supposes it doesn't really matter at this point. Angel's dead.
The cop—Branaugh—pulls Connor's head back again by
the hair and Connor spits and laughs. Because it's fucking funny, you
know?
"Oh, am I amusing you now?" Branaugh asks,
breathing hard. His face and neck are flushed a dangerous red and Connor
wonders what would happen to him if Branaugh stroked
out right here and now. He's probably never make it
out of the station alive. "Do I amuse you half as much as killing those
boys? Did you think that was funny too?"
Connor had read about the boys, of course. That was brought him here in the
first place, just when he thought he'd lost the trail. Back when he was in
school, people had been pretty impressed when he'd told them he was going to
Stanford. "You must be pretty smart," they'd said. But he clearly
couldn't have been too smart, not to think that the cops would suspect him—a stranger—found
nosing around the murder scene rather than the real culprit. Not a particularly
good hunter, either, if he didn't smell that particular trap.
"I didn't kill anyone," he says, as he's said—calmly, flatly—every
time Branaugh or his partner Frakes
has asked (accused). No one here, anyway, he amends, a moment behind it.
No one human. No one you would care about. Plenty of demons. My mom, if you want to be technical. And my own daughter. Who was a demon too, now that it comes
to it. Tried to kill my dad once, but that didn't
really work out. He laughs again, high pitched and yeah, crazy as fuck, and
he can't help it.
When he was Stephen, he never laughed. There was nothing to laugh about
in a hell dimension and Holtz (Father) would have only punished him for it
anyway. When he was Connor Reilly he guessed he'd laughed as
much as anyone. He'd never really noticed. He was more of a quiet smile
kind of guy. But now? Now when he was Connor and
Connor and Stephen all mixed up together? Now it all seemed sort of cosmically
funny and it felt like all he could do was laugh.
He thinks the word father and three pictures try to cram themselves into
his brain at the same time. He thinks home, and there's not even one.
And none of them mean a damn thing. Holtz is dead. Angel is dead. The Reilly's
are dead, killed by dumb bad luck in that last battle and even if they weren't,
even if they weren't, they wouldn't know him anymore. Of course, he
doesn't even know himself, if it comes to it. And if you couldn't laugh at
that, what else was there?
"We know you did it," Frakes says
lazily from his slouch on the damp concrete wall, toothpick twirling between
his fingers. He sound bored and calm. He's also a pusbucket liar, but Connor supposes that's par for the
course. "Found you at the crime scene, didn’t we? Found your motel room,
filled to the brim with that devil worship shit. This is a no brainer, kid. We just need you to tell us why."
"I told you." Connor looks Frakes in the
eye, even through Branaugh's grip on his hair, even
through the blood dripping into his left eye and turning half the room into an abbatoir. "I didn't kill anyone. I'm an innocent
man." And that time, he controls the laugh. Just a
little. So that it comes out a snigger instead of a
full on guffaw.
Branaugh takes hold of Connor's wrist and twists it
behind him; up high high high
until Connor feels it creak and want to break. At the same time, he pushes
Connor's head down down down
into the table again, but actually with less force. The pain in his cheekbone
blooms brighter anyway. "You're a ratsucked
punk, if'n you ask me," Branaugh
rasps.
"But an innocent one," Connor says. He marvels that the word can
still be applied to him in any context. It's hot in the interrogation room and
even skinny always cold ConnorConnorStephen is
sweating. Branaugh would stink even without vampire
senses; to Connor, the stench of him seems to coat his nose and tongue and
throat, present even when he swallows and swallows and swallows. "You got
nothing on me except your fat, sweaty hands."
He wonders what he's doing at all, how he'd gotten roped into all of this in
the first place. It was Wesley who'd told him. About the
battle, not the afterwards. In the afterwards, Wesley was dead too. He's
only had it—them—in his head a short time then, still trying to be a student, a
good boy, a human by day and hunting the nights away when he couldn't pretend
any more. And when he'd heard, when he'd gone to Wesley and asked, he'd
thought: This. This is why. Why it all came back.
But then it was over and everyone—or close enough as to make no difference—was
dead and it was
But he still didn't know why. Why he did this. Why he was still doing this.
Except what else did he have to do? If not this, there was nothing. Not any
more. Not Holtz, not Lawrence or Colleen Reilly, not Angel. Not a home, not
friends, nothing. He was what he did, and if that was all he could be, then it
had better be as good as he can make it.
"I didn't do it," he says for what he's decided is the last time. He
raises his head against Branaugh's grip and feels it
when the detective's wrist creaks and wants to break. He smiles at Frakes with a mouthful of bloody teeth. "Now either kick the crap out of me, lock me up, or let me
go."
In the end, it's some combination of all of the above. He is battered and
scabby when they let him out two days later on lack of evidence. Branaugh makes sure to be there when he's released; spits
thick and phlegmy in Connor's hair and pushes him
hard enough that—if he were anyone else—he would have gone sprawling. As it is,
he tucks and rolls, coming to his feet and grins.
They took the last of his money, the fuckers, and even his cheap Casio watch,
but Connor doesn't care. He'll manage. He always does. He sets off down the
blacktop out of town, knowing that the trail here will be cold anyway. He'll
have to cast around a bit before he can pick it up again. And he thinks that
makes him angriest of anything.
The rumble of an engine breaks the stillness. Connor squints back down the road
and sees a car, a black Impala with two silhouettes in the front seat. He
sticks out his thumb.
-fin-