Angel/Connor: Pentecost
Mar. 19th, 2004 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doylePhew, finally done on my Connor Incest Ficathon assignment. Check out the master list for all your incestuous Connor needs.
Title: Pentecost
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Angel/Connor, in such a way that you can probably pretend it isn't (and Angel/Jasmine, with hints of Connor/Jasmine. Some mention of Connor/Cordelia. Hell, there's even the tiniest hint of Connor/Darla. Hmm, is the 'fun for all the family' joke a tad too distasteful?)
Rating: PG-13 for content, R for admittedly very non-explicit incest, just to be on the safe side
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
researchminion who wanted an AU where nobody found out about Jasmine.
Los Angeles was too small. When Connor had first fallen into the world he had felt as if he'd been swallowed by some huge beast - the largest encampments in Quor'toth, places he'd once thought of as citadels, would have barely covered ten streets. Now, though, there wasn't space for the thousands of pilgrims flooding into the city to see Jasmine. Connor stood beside her when she addressed the crowd from the roof of the hotel, and couldn't see any end to the mass of people around the building on all sides. When she finished speaking and they dropped to their knees, one row after another, it looked like a stone dropping into water.
"You're leaving, aren't you?" Fred asked at dinner that night.
Jasmine had suggested a private dinner that night in her suite, just for herself and her six original Faithful, and that alone told Connor there was something unusual happening. Meals were normally huge, loud occasions with as many people as could fit in the Hyperion's converted lower floor. Jasmine made time for all of them, especially for her blood family, but a private couple of hours with all of them together had hardly happened since the rest of the world found out about her.
Connor had just been picking restlessly at his food, and now he put down his fork and looked to Jasmine. The link was strongest when they were all together like this. He could feel Fred, how scared and close to tears she was. He would have said something to try and comfort her, but Wesley took her hand, and Gunn said something close to her ear that made her relax, and he felt her calm down. She'd always been the one among them most anxious about the possibility of ever losing Jasmine, and Gunn and Wesley had always been there to centre her.
Jasmine laid her own cutlery neatly by her plate. "I'm going to leave Los Angeles for a little while, yes," she said. She held up a hand and smiled as Fred and Lorne burst into pleas for her to stay. "Just for a little while. I adore this city. It was my birthplace, my first home, and it has all of you. But there are other places, people who haven't yet heard my message, and they can't all come to L.A."
"They're trying," Gunn said. "News said the airlines can't get enough flight here. They're booked solid for the next half decade."
"The city simply can't accommodate the number of people who want to see you in person," Wesley said. "So if the mountain can't go to Mohammed…"
"Mohammed must go to the mountain," Jasmine finished, beaming in delight at his understanding. "Yes, of course."
"It's just we'll miss you," Fred said in a tiny voice. Wesley was still holding her right hand, thumb moving over it in small, soothing circles; now Gunn took her left. She gave them both grateful smiles.
Connor felt a prickling of jealousy so sudden and unexpected that he wondered if he was picking up on somebody else's feelings and confusing them with his own. He frowned down at his half-empty plate while Jasmine assured Fred she'd miss them all too, terribly. He couldn't be jealous, he decided, because he wasn't in love with Fred or Wesley or Gunn. The only person he loved - besides Jasmine, that didn't even need to be considered - was Cordelia, beautiful and asleep in her shrine at the place where Jasmine had been born.
He'd been frightened the first time they went to see her, because the medical apparatus was tucked away in the base of her altar, and he'd thought she looked dead. Jasmine had stroked his arm and said that she wouldn't let anything happen to her mother, and when he had looked again he'd noticed her chest rise and fall, and how the glass of her enclosure fogged just slightly when she breathed. Fred had said Snow White and Lorne Evita. Connor didn't know either of those names and had just thought that she was Cordelia, and that he loved her.
He wasn't jealous, then. It was probably confusion over everything changing, over having to leave Los Angeles for the first time. Connor never considered that he might not be going with Jasmine. She'd smiled at him when she said she was leaving, and he'd heard in his mind as clearly as if she'd spoken 'and you and Angel are coming with me'. They were her blood family, and they couldn't stay behind while she went to save the world.
The talk turned to plans for what Fred and the others would do while Jasmine was gone, and Connor just listened, following the feelings of the conversation rather than the words. It was nice being here with all the people - all the people except one - who he was closest to, and he didn't know when they'd all be together again. He let his eyes close and drifted along the link, and it was a few minutes before he noticed anything strange.
He could feel Jasmine's presence. It was always there, regardless of physical distance, huge and bright like Quor'toth's orange sun. Fred felt like tiny bolts of lightning, Lorne like cascading music - Connor didn't know the word arpeggio, but he made the best approximation he could. Gunn was solid, warm, chaotic. Wesley felt quieter, but his presence rippled across the link like the ocean.
Connor could feel all of that. But Angel was right there, just across the table, deep in conversation with Gunn over organizing patrols while they were gone, and there was nothing. With his eyes closed, it felt as if there were just the six of them in the room. His father could have been looking at them through a TV screen, flat and cold and unreachable.
**
He'd never been on a plane before. It was a few hours into the flight before he was completely convinced that whatever magic was keeping them off the ground wasn't about to break down and send them into the sea.
The aeroplane's interior had been divided into private compartments about the size of Connor's room back at the hotel. He spent some time with his forehead angled against the window watching the ocean below and wondering at how vast it was, and then he turned on his video screen and watched some of the movie. It was a new one, about a young woman whose life was meaningless until she found Jasmine. Everybody discovered Jasmine's love and got a happy ending and Connor, who hadn't seen very many movies either before or after Jasmine's impact on Hollywood, thought it was pretty good.
The trailer for the next movie, promising that Elijah Wood had wowed critics in his groundbreaking role as a young man who found the love of Jasmine, looked good too, but Connor felt a gentle tug at his mind and switched off the TV. Jasmine's room was adjoined to his, and she extended her hand to him as he entered. He took it, seating himself on the floor at her side.
They didn't speak for a while. Beneath them, Connor felt the roar of what he assumed was some vast engine.
"You're worried about your father."
He rested his head against her thigh. "He's closed himself off, hasn't he? Not just to me. To everybody." He looked up at her. "Not you, I guess."
"No, he can't shut me out. I don't think he would even try."
"I can't feel him," Connor said. "He wasn't there my entire life and when you came… I thought it was different. And now he's gone again."
Jasmine stroked his hair.
Connor said, "I wish my mother was here," not even realizing he'd been thinking it till it was spoken. He hated that his only memory of Darla was that thing masquerading as her, trying to prevent Jasmine's birth. Months ago, when they'd fought a creature in Sunnydale that could wear the faces of the dead, he'd wondered if maybe he'd been fighting the same thing that had tried to trick him. It was better than the alternative, that his mother had been as truly, irrevocably evil as Holtz had schooled him to believe, and that she had tried to keep Jasmine from him.
Jasmine said, "Angel's in pain, Connor. He can't let himself be happy, truly happy, until all evil is gone from this world, and until then, he suffers. He thinks the best way to keep that from the people who love him is to build a wall around himself, so high that nobody can get over the top."
"But you can," Connor said, his faith absolute.
"Yes," she said. "And in time, so will you."
**
At first they were ushered to the very finest suites in the best hotels. As news of their visits spread, palaces were built especially for Jasmine and her family. Connor had no idea how long such building projects would normally take, but did a good job of looking impressed when he was told how quickly the structures had been finished. "Everyone wanted to help, of course," the President of France told them in accented English. "We had to turn thousands away. They all wanted to build something they knew She would use."
"That's cool," Connor said. "Right, Dad?" Angel seemed not to have heard him. "Dad," Connor said again, and his father pulled himself back from whatever he'd been.
"What? Oh. Oh, sure," Angel said. "This place - it used to be a nightclub, didn't it? It was a bordello."
The President reddened beneath his moustache and hurried the tour along. But Connor concentrated, putting all his energy into finding a crack in the wall Angel was keeping around himself, and he found it.
For an instant the room was darker, and older, and stank sweetly of blood. The marble floor was polished wood, and they were walking over and through girls with torn dresses and broken bodies.
Connor pulled himself out of the link, slamming every mental door he could find behind him. Angel was staring at him, and Connor saw on his father's face the puzzlement turning to fear, and then to terrible shame.
**
"…saw me, Jasmine."
"He's seen Angelus before."
"Not like that."
The summer he'd stayed at the hotel, Fred had gotten mad at him a couple of times for listening to what she'd called private conversations between grown-ups.
"Angel, Connor loves you."
"How can he?"
It wasn't like he was intentionally listening in. His room was right next to Jasmine's, and Angel kept getting louder.
"He's your son."
"And now he knows what I was."
I always knew that, Connor thought, as Jasmine said, "He always knew that. Daniel Holtz made sure Connor grew up hating you - as he had to, for me to be born."
Angel quieted down. Connor slid off the bed and moved to the door, silent as a ghost. Hatred for Angel hadn't been the only thing Holtz had taught him.
"There's knowing what I've done," Angel finally said, "and there's seeing it. Jasmine…"
He didn't say anything more. Connor wondered if he was silently not quite crying, as he had on the night Jasmine was born when she'd left them in the warehouse. Jasmine said, "Give me your pain," and Angel protested that he couldn't, and then there were no more words, just soft noises that Connor didn't understand until the door accidentally swung open and he saw them.
Connor had had sex twice; he'd lived a floor away from Fred and Gunn and Wesley, feeling their joy and love for each other many times. None of it had been as intense as seeing Angel and Jasmine together. Neither of them looked up, but he felt Jasmine's acknowledgement of his presence, a warmth in the back of his mind. He leaned against the door, struck by the beauty of it, and he wondered what Jasmine must look like to Angel, whether he thought she had brown eyes and smooth skin.
He was glad he could see her true face. He couldn't imagine her, them, looking more beautiful.
**
Angel seemed better for a while. He smiled a lot more, and talked to people, and at night he went to Jasmine's room. Connor started to relax. The stopovers in Italy and Spain were kind of fun. He started to recognise familiar faces in the crowd. People were following them from country to country, desperate for another few hours to be in the same vicinity as Jasmine.
Jasmine spoke in front of crowds, always in the biggest stadiums the countries had to offer, and afterwards she met with the nation's leaders to discuss eradication of demons and vampires. Connor sat in on a few of the meetings until he could nearly recite the plans for turning unneeded police and armed forces over to the cause of fighting the only evil left in the world. Angel and Connor spent a lot of their nights hunting, with inexperienced but eager cops and soldiers as their backup.
After the diplomacy was dealt with, Jasmine walked among the people, talking to them in their own languages, and selecting her chosen few to join her in her rooms. The people she selected always looked so happy that Connor nearly envied them. When she was done, the families came by to collect their personal effects, almost always tearful with joy that their loved ones had been selected.
England was Connor's favourite place so far. He liked the climate, and the accents, and he enjoyed trying to look for the places Holtz had described to him when he was a child. Angel seemed less suited to the country. He was quiet again, the defences around himself so solid that Connor couldn't find a single gap.
It only got worse. After they'd finished with Britain they moved on to Ireland, and Angel was worse then than Connor remembered him being a year ago, back when they'd only just left America.
"All of us have a purpose," Jasmine explained one night in Dublin, when it was close to sunrise and Angel hadn't come back. Connor was stretched out on the couch beside her, head pillowed in her lap. Her skirt was smooth beneath his cheek. "The artists who glorify me with their paintings or music, the missionaries who spread my word, even the scientists who make it possible for Angel to fly in an aeroplane without fearing the sunlight - every one of those people is serving me in the best way they can, just as they were meant to."
"That's why Fred and the others couldn't come with us," he said, getting it. "Because they had to serve you in LA instead."
"Yes, and we'll go home to see them very soon."
"I was born so I could be your father," Connor said.
"And so much more. But in order for you to be born at all, your parents had to go through so much. Darla had to be made a vampire, and sire Angel in her turn. Your father had to spend a century tormented by his soul."
Connor thought of the girl he'd dragged to her death, his handprint and her blood on Cordelia's belly. One death, one that had brought infinite peace to the world, and her own family had come to the hotel and thanked him for choosing their only daughter as the sacrifice. That girl's death had been a good, noble thing. And still, he'd looked at her picture at Cordelia's shrine and felt guilt.
How much worse to have thousands of murders on your soul, girls ripped apart like the ones in France, children murdered in their cribs like Holtz's son.
"I have to find Angel," he said. "I can bring him back here and you can help…"
But she was shaking her head. "I don't think I can any more."
Connor remembered Cordelia saying 'You have to kill your father' and said, "No…" but he'd do it if Jasmine asked him. He couldn't do anything else.
She bent down and pressed her mouth to his. Without meaning to, Connor gasped. The kiss intensified the link past anything he'd ever known. It was like being enfolded in fire.
This is what it's like for Angel, he thought. This is what it feels like when he's with her.
"I can't help him," Jasmine said. "You can, Connor. Father." He moaned against her mouth. She tugged him gently to his feet and said, "Go."
**
They got inside just ahead of the sun, Connor slamming the door behind them and blocking it with his body, just in case his dad was going to immolate himself.
Angel was against him a second later, his weight knocking the air out of Connor's smaller frame. "Let me go."
"No," Connor said, shoving him back.
Angel slammed his hands on either side of Connor's head. The heavy, ancient door shook with the impact. "You don't understand, Connor. You don't understand anything."
"Explain it to me."
He didn't like the look that came over Angel's face. It reminded him too much of how Angelus had looked at him through the bars of his cage.
"Okay," Angel said. "The street where you found me? I killed four people there. A family. Well, I say killed… slaughtered. Brutally. Drank enough from the woman that she could stay awake but not run. Had to make sure she was alive to see what I was doing to her husband and children." He'd stopped shouting. The quiet recitation was much more intimidating. "Two streets over. A girl. Fifteen, sixteen, younger than you. People can stay conscious while you skin them alive, if you go slow and stop when they pass out from the pain, did you know that?"
He was right in Connor's face now, one hand gripping the back of his neck hard enough to cause pain. Connor didn't flinch.
"I've got stories like that for all over Ireland, Connor," he said. "For all over fucking Europe. That's what I am. That's who your father is."
"I know," he said.
Angel sighed heavily, looking like all the anger had seeped out of him. He slumped forward, head almost on Connor's shoulder. "You have no idea how happy Jasmine makes me."
"Yeah, I do."
"If I lose my soul, I won't feel her," he said flatly. "That's why vampires and demons don't love her. She makes me so happy, and if I give in to that, I'll lose her forever."
Connor was out of his depth. He didn't know how to comfort anybody who hurt this much. His single model was how Gunn and Wes always dealt with Fred, and she'd never been this upset, even the day they'd left Los Angeles. And they'd had the link to help them calm her down.
The link…
He closed his eyes and felt the people around him. Jasmine's sun, the firefly-specks that were their entourage and the palace's staff, none of them closer than a floor away. Right against him, if he focussed on it, the cool blankness that was Angel's wall around himself.
"Dad," he said, out loud and in his mind. "Angel. Invite me in."
In the real world, Angel tried to pull away. Connor kept his eyes clamped shut and held on.
"Connor…"
"It's okay," he whispered, blindly lifting one hand to touch his father's face. "It's okay. Hold on."
In their minds, the defences fractured and fell.
Connor felt Angel, inside and out. He saw Darla and knew what it was like to love her, in action if not in emotion. He saw a beautiful blonde girl in the sunlight outside a school, and Cordelia holding a baby that he realized was himself, and he unlocked a hazy, distant memory of her holding him that way when he was far too young to remember, if this had been normal memory, and he knew Angel was seeing it too. He saw a girl without skin and rooms full of corpses, and a deeply hidden memory of a place that could only have been Hell.
"Oh, God," one of them gasped.
Connor fisted his fingers tight in Angel's hair, nearly weeping with relief as he realized that the heavy, aching feeling deep inside him was love, or as close to it as he'd ever known; it hurt less than he thought it would, and he knew that when it was over, when he opened his eyes, he would see his goddess watching from the door, beaming her approval.
END
Title: Pentecost
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Angel/Connor, in such a way that you can probably pretend it isn't (and Angel/Jasmine, with hints of Connor/Jasmine. Some mention of Connor/Cordelia. Hell, there's even the tiniest hint of Connor/Darla. Hmm, is the 'fun for all the family' joke a tad too distasteful?)
Rating: PG-13 for content, R for admittedly very non-explicit incest, just to be on the safe side
Notes: For
researchminion who wanted an AU where nobody found out about Jasmine. Los Angeles was too small. When Connor had first fallen into the world he had felt as if he'd been swallowed by some huge beast - the largest encampments in Quor'toth, places he'd once thought of as citadels, would have barely covered ten streets. Now, though, there wasn't space for the thousands of pilgrims flooding into the city to see Jasmine. Connor stood beside her when she addressed the crowd from the roof of the hotel, and couldn't see any end to the mass of people around the building on all sides. When she finished speaking and they dropped to their knees, one row after another, it looked like a stone dropping into water.
"You're leaving, aren't you?" Fred asked at dinner that night.
Jasmine had suggested a private dinner that night in her suite, just for herself and her six original Faithful, and that alone told Connor there was something unusual happening. Meals were normally huge, loud occasions with as many people as could fit in the Hyperion's converted lower floor. Jasmine made time for all of them, especially for her blood family, but a private couple of hours with all of them together had hardly happened since the rest of the world found out about her.
Connor had just been picking restlessly at his food, and now he put down his fork and looked to Jasmine. The link was strongest when they were all together like this. He could feel Fred, how scared and close to tears she was. He would have said something to try and comfort her, but Wesley took her hand, and Gunn said something close to her ear that made her relax, and he felt her calm down. She'd always been the one among them most anxious about the possibility of ever losing Jasmine, and Gunn and Wesley had always been there to centre her.
Jasmine laid her own cutlery neatly by her plate. "I'm going to leave Los Angeles for a little while, yes," she said. She held up a hand and smiled as Fred and Lorne burst into pleas for her to stay. "Just for a little while. I adore this city. It was my birthplace, my first home, and it has all of you. But there are other places, people who haven't yet heard my message, and they can't all come to L.A."
"They're trying," Gunn said. "News said the airlines can't get enough flight here. They're booked solid for the next half decade."
"The city simply can't accommodate the number of people who want to see you in person," Wesley said. "So if the mountain can't go to Mohammed…"
"Mohammed must go to the mountain," Jasmine finished, beaming in delight at his understanding. "Yes, of course."
"It's just we'll miss you," Fred said in a tiny voice. Wesley was still holding her right hand, thumb moving over it in small, soothing circles; now Gunn took her left. She gave them both grateful smiles.
Connor felt a prickling of jealousy so sudden and unexpected that he wondered if he was picking up on somebody else's feelings and confusing them with his own. He frowned down at his half-empty plate while Jasmine assured Fred she'd miss them all too, terribly. He couldn't be jealous, he decided, because he wasn't in love with Fred or Wesley or Gunn. The only person he loved - besides Jasmine, that didn't even need to be considered - was Cordelia, beautiful and asleep in her shrine at the place where Jasmine had been born.
He'd been frightened the first time they went to see her, because the medical apparatus was tucked away in the base of her altar, and he'd thought she looked dead. Jasmine had stroked his arm and said that she wouldn't let anything happen to her mother, and when he had looked again he'd noticed her chest rise and fall, and how the glass of her enclosure fogged just slightly when she breathed. Fred had said Snow White and Lorne Evita. Connor didn't know either of those names and had just thought that she was Cordelia, and that he loved her.
He wasn't jealous, then. It was probably confusion over everything changing, over having to leave Los Angeles for the first time. Connor never considered that he might not be going with Jasmine. She'd smiled at him when she said she was leaving, and he'd heard in his mind as clearly as if she'd spoken 'and you and Angel are coming with me'. They were her blood family, and they couldn't stay behind while she went to save the world.
The talk turned to plans for what Fred and the others would do while Jasmine was gone, and Connor just listened, following the feelings of the conversation rather than the words. It was nice being here with all the people - all the people except one - who he was closest to, and he didn't know when they'd all be together again. He let his eyes close and drifted along the link, and it was a few minutes before he noticed anything strange.
He could feel Jasmine's presence. It was always there, regardless of physical distance, huge and bright like Quor'toth's orange sun. Fred felt like tiny bolts of lightning, Lorne like cascading music - Connor didn't know the word arpeggio, but he made the best approximation he could. Gunn was solid, warm, chaotic. Wesley felt quieter, but his presence rippled across the link like the ocean.
Connor could feel all of that. But Angel was right there, just across the table, deep in conversation with Gunn over organizing patrols while they were gone, and there was nothing. With his eyes closed, it felt as if there were just the six of them in the room. His father could have been looking at them through a TV screen, flat and cold and unreachable.
**
He'd never been on a plane before. It was a few hours into the flight before he was completely convinced that whatever magic was keeping them off the ground wasn't about to break down and send them into the sea.
The aeroplane's interior had been divided into private compartments about the size of Connor's room back at the hotel. He spent some time with his forehead angled against the window watching the ocean below and wondering at how vast it was, and then he turned on his video screen and watched some of the movie. It was a new one, about a young woman whose life was meaningless until she found Jasmine. Everybody discovered Jasmine's love and got a happy ending and Connor, who hadn't seen very many movies either before or after Jasmine's impact on Hollywood, thought it was pretty good.
The trailer for the next movie, promising that Elijah Wood had wowed critics in his groundbreaking role as a young man who found the love of Jasmine, looked good too, but Connor felt a gentle tug at his mind and switched off the TV. Jasmine's room was adjoined to his, and she extended her hand to him as he entered. He took it, seating himself on the floor at her side.
They didn't speak for a while. Beneath them, Connor felt the roar of what he assumed was some vast engine.
"You're worried about your father."
He rested his head against her thigh. "He's closed himself off, hasn't he? Not just to me. To everybody." He looked up at her. "Not you, I guess."
"No, he can't shut me out. I don't think he would even try."
"I can't feel him," Connor said. "He wasn't there my entire life and when you came… I thought it was different. And now he's gone again."
Jasmine stroked his hair.
Connor said, "I wish my mother was here," not even realizing he'd been thinking it till it was spoken. He hated that his only memory of Darla was that thing masquerading as her, trying to prevent Jasmine's birth. Months ago, when they'd fought a creature in Sunnydale that could wear the faces of the dead, he'd wondered if maybe he'd been fighting the same thing that had tried to trick him. It was better than the alternative, that his mother had been as truly, irrevocably evil as Holtz had schooled him to believe, and that she had tried to keep Jasmine from him.
Jasmine said, "Angel's in pain, Connor. He can't let himself be happy, truly happy, until all evil is gone from this world, and until then, he suffers. He thinks the best way to keep that from the people who love him is to build a wall around himself, so high that nobody can get over the top."
"But you can," Connor said, his faith absolute.
"Yes," she said. "And in time, so will you."
**
At first they were ushered to the very finest suites in the best hotels. As news of their visits spread, palaces were built especially for Jasmine and her family. Connor had no idea how long such building projects would normally take, but did a good job of looking impressed when he was told how quickly the structures had been finished. "Everyone wanted to help, of course," the President of France told them in accented English. "We had to turn thousands away. They all wanted to build something they knew She would use."
"That's cool," Connor said. "Right, Dad?" Angel seemed not to have heard him. "Dad," Connor said again, and his father pulled himself back from whatever he'd been.
"What? Oh. Oh, sure," Angel said. "This place - it used to be a nightclub, didn't it? It was a bordello."
The President reddened beneath his moustache and hurried the tour along. But Connor concentrated, putting all his energy into finding a crack in the wall Angel was keeping around himself, and he found it.
For an instant the room was darker, and older, and stank sweetly of blood. The marble floor was polished wood, and they were walking over and through girls with torn dresses and broken bodies.
Connor pulled himself out of the link, slamming every mental door he could find behind him. Angel was staring at him, and Connor saw on his father's face the puzzlement turning to fear, and then to terrible shame.
**
"…saw me, Jasmine."
"He's seen Angelus before."
"Not like that."
The summer he'd stayed at the hotel, Fred had gotten mad at him a couple of times for listening to what she'd called private conversations between grown-ups.
"Angel, Connor loves you."
"How can he?"
It wasn't like he was intentionally listening in. His room was right next to Jasmine's, and Angel kept getting louder.
"He's your son."
"And now he knows what I was."
I always knew that, Connor thought, as Jasmine said, "He always knew that. Daniel Holtz made sure Connor grew up hating you - as he had to, for me to be born."
Angel quieted down. Connor slid off the bed and moved to the door, silent as a ghost. Hatred for Angel hadn't been the only thing Holtz had taught him.
"There's knowing what I've done," Angel finally said, "and there's seeing it. Jasmine…"
He didn't say anything more. Connor wondered if he was silently not quite crying, as he had on the night Jasmine was born when she'd left them in the warehouse. Jasmine said, "Give me your pain," and Angel protested that he couldn't, and then there were no more words, just soft noises that Connor didn't understand until the door accidentally swung open and he saw them.
Connor had had sex twice; he'd lived a floor away from Fred and Gunn and Wesley, feeling their joy and love for each other many times. None of it had been as intense as seeing Angel and Jasmine together. Neither of them looked up, but he felt Jasmine's acknowledgement of his presence, a warmth in the back of his mind. He leaned against the door, struck by the beauty of it, and he wondered what Jasmine must look like to Angel, whether he thought she had brown eyes and smooth skin.
He was glad he could see her true face. He couldn't imagine her, them, looking more beautiful.
**
Angel seemed better for a while. He smiled a lot more, and talked to people, and at night he went to Jasmine's room. Connor started to relax. The stopovers in Italy and Spain were kind of fun. He started to recognise familiar faces in the crowd. People were following them from country to country, desperate for another few hours to be in the same vicinity as Jasmine.
Jasmine spoke in front of crowds, always in the biggest stadiums the countries had to offer, and afterwards she met with the nation's leaders to discuss eradication of demons and vampires. Connor sat in on a few of the meetings until he could nearly recite the plans for turning unneeded police and armed forces over to the cause of fighting the only evil left in the world. Angel and Connor spent a lot of their nights hunting, with inexperienced but eager cops and soldiers as their backup.
After the diplomacy was dealt with, Jasmine walked among the people, talking to them in their own languages, and selecting her chosen few to join her in her rooms. The people she selected always looked so happy that Connor nearly envied them. When she was done, the families came by to collect their personal effects, almost always tearful with joy that their loved ones had been selected.
England was Connor's favourite place so far. He liked the climate, and the accents, and he enjoyed trying to look for the places Holtz had described to him when he was a child. Angel seemed less suited to the country. He was quiet again, the defences around himself so solid that Connor couldn't find a single gap.
It only got worse. After they'd finished with Britain they moved on to Ireland, and Angel was worse then than Connor remembered him being a year ago, back when they'd only just left America.
"All of us have a purpose," Jasmine explained one night in Dublin, when it was close to sunrise and Angel hadn't come back. Connor was stretched out on the couch beside her, head pillowed in her lap. Her skirt was smooth beneath his cheek. "The artists who glorify me with their paintings or music, the missionaries who spread my word, even the scientists who make it possible for Angel to fly in an aeroplane without fearing the sunlight - every one of those people is serving me in the best way they can, just as they were meant to."
"That's why Fred and the others couldn't come with us," he said, getting it. "Because they had to serve you in LA instead."
"Yes, and we'll go home to see them very soon."
"I was born so I could be your father," Connor said.
"And so much more. But in order for you to be born at all, your parents had to go through so much. Darla had to be made a vampire, and sire Angel in her turn. Your father had to spend a century tormented by his soul."
Connor thought of the girl he'd dragged to her death, his handprint and her blood on Cordelia's belly. One death, one that had brought infinite peace to the world, and her own family had come to the hotel and thanked him for choosing their only daughter as the sacrifice. That girl's death had been a good, noble thing. And still, he'd looked at her picture at Cordelia's shrine and felt guilt.
How much worse to have thousands of murders on your soul, girls ripped apart like the ones in France, children murdered in their cribs like Holtz's son.
"I have to find Angel," he said. "I can bring him back here and you can help…"
But she was shaking her head. "I don't think I can any more."
Connor remembered Cordelia saying 'You have to kill your father' and said, "No…" but he'd do it if Jasmine asked him. He couldn't do anything else.
She bent down and pressed her mouth to his. Without meaning to, Connor gasped. The kiss intensified the link past anything he'd ever known. It was like being enfolded in fire.
This is what it's like for Angel, he thought. This is what it feels like when he's with her.
"I can't help him," Jasmine said. "You can, Connor. Father." He moaned against her mouth. She tugged him gently to his feet and said, "Go."
**
They got inside just ahead of the sun, Connor slamming the door behind them and blocking it with his body, just in case his dad was going to immolate himself.
Angel was against him a second later, his weight knocking the air out of Connor's smaller frame. "Let me go."
"No," Connor said, shoving him back.
Angel slammed his hands on either side of Connor's head. The heavy, ancient door shook with the impact. "You don't understand, Connor. You don't understand anything."
"Explain it to me."
He didn't like the look that came over Angel's face. It reminded him too much of how Angelus had looked at him through the bars of his cage.
"Okay," Angel said. "The street where you found me? I killed four people there. A family. Well, I say killed… slaughtered. Brutally. Drank enough from the woman that she could stay awake but not run. Had to make sure she was alive to see what I was doing to her husband and children." He'd stopped shouting. The quiet recitation was much more intimidating. "Two streets over. A girl. Fifteen, sixteen, younger than you. People can stay conscious while you skin them alive, if you go slow and stop when they pass out from the pain, did you know that?"
He was right in Connor's face now, one hand gripping the back of his neck hard enough to cause pain. Connor didn't flinch.
"I've got stories like that for all over Ireland, Connor," he said. "For all over fucking Europe. That's what I am. That's who your father is."
"I know," he said.
Angel sighed heavily, looking like all the anger had seeped out of him. He slumped forward, head almost on Connor's shoulder. "You have no idea how happy Jasmine makes me."
"Yeah, I do."
"If I lose my soul, I won't feel her," he said flatly. "That's why vampires and demons don't love her. She makes me so happy, and if I give in to that, I'll lose her forever."
Connor was out of his depth. He didn't know how to comfort anybody who hurt this much. His single model was how Gunn and Wes always dealt with Fred, and she'd never been this upset, even the day they'd left Los Angeles. And they'd had the link to help them calm her down.
The link…
He closed his eyes and felt the people around him. Jasmine's sun, the firefly-specks that were their entourage and the palace's staff, none of them closer than a floor away. Right against him, if he focussed on it, the cool blankness that was Angel's wall around himself.
"Dad," he said, out loud and in his mind. "Angel. Invite me in."
In the real world, Angel tried to pull away. Connor kept his eyes clamped shut and held on.
"Connor…"
"It's okay," he whispered, blindly lifting one hand to touch his father's face. "It's okay. Hold on."
In their minds, the defences fractured and fell.
Connor felt Angel, inside and out. He saw Darla and knew what it was like to love her, in action if not in emotion. He saw a beautiful blonde girl in the sunlight outside a school, and Cordelia holding a baby that he realized was himself, and he unlocked a hazy, distant memory of her holding him that way when he was far too young to remember, if this had been normal memory, and he knew Angel was seeing it too. He saw a girl without skin and rooms full of corpses, and a deeply hidden memory of a place that could only have been Hell.
"Oh, God," one of them gasped.
Connor fisted his fingers tight in Angel's hair, nearly weeping with relief as he realized that the heavy, aching feeling deep inside him was love, or as close to it as he'd ever known; it hurt less than he thought it would, and he knew that when it was over, when he opened his eyes, he would see his goddess watching from the door, beaming her approval.
END
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-03-19 04:30 pm (UTC)