Warnings: Spoilers for Angel, manipulation of plotholes, and profanity.

Much Wanted
Chapter 1: this is a rubbish of human rind

Blue eyes are derived from a recessive gene. Darla would have had two, and the kid must be only a carrier since his eyes are brown. Blond hair is recessive too. Darla was blond. Angel comes from a family of dedicated brunettes. So... that means the boy is a recessive blond, an expressive brunette. Skin. There are many melanins for skin pigment; the more you inherit, the darker you are.

Physically, Angel reminds himself.

He casts his eyes over to the photograph reposing precariously against his pen holder. There is a boy with dark hair and long white hands, red lips flared into a sneer and narrowed eyes wary and distant, indefinitely blue. This is the only photograph of his son in existence, as far as he knows. The identical boy that smiles from the glossy pages of yearbooks and the foregrounds of family portraits, in somebody else's home, is somebody else's child.

Shit. What is he doing? Since when were genetics relevant to creating life out of vampirism, and -- and...

Darla's hands. Darla's lips. My strength. My soul.

The pen snaps in Angel's big white hand, inky trails clasping his knuckles and twining sloppily down his wrist. There is now an enormous black starburst growing off-center on his page of meticulously diagramed Punnett squares, radiating wetly onto the table surface, rippling off the table's edge, obliterating carefully printed genetic terms and BBs and Bbs and YyBbs and -- and damn, his shirt was not cheap.

"Hey Angel food," Lorne says, shutting the door behind him. Spinning back around, he sees the mess and dismay asserts itself on the demons' green face, an 'o' forming between his lips: "Ooh. Sorry about that."

Angel crushes the dripping paper between his hands and throws it into the gleaming, industrial strength waste disposal unit, broken pen fragments clattering away shortly after. "Ahh," he waves one big, black hand cautiously, avoiding spattering his shiny new office with residue. "Don't worry about it." With the still-clean pinkie and ring finger of his other hand, he surreptitiously grabs the photograph, slots it into his breast pocket while Lorne is still distractedly roving the room in vain for tissue paper. "It wasn't you."

In fact, he hadn't even noticed Lorne trotting in at all. CEO lifestyle is beginning to tell on him: he's getting sloppy. "We get a call?" Angel inquires on reflex, before remembering that news like that would come in a manila folder, delivered by infernal hand. Invisible. Invisible infernal hand, that is.

"Not just so, peanut!" Making sure that Angel is still listening, black brow craned and swivelling on his abundantly voluptuous and equally annoying swivelly-chair, Lorne then continues: "Considering that we now have a multi-billion dollar operation full of, ya know, myriad stafflings and their eyes and their ears and their big guns and mass-produced stakes and stuff at our disposal, the gang and I have decided that you could use a little --"

"Not interested." Finger points, freezes Lorne's fish-gasp facial expression before a single word can escape the demon's opening mouth: "Not brooding."

New fish-gasp, "B--!"

"Executive decision," Angel says, nodding in agreement to his black hands laced together in front of him. Still swiveling too, of course.

Lorne windmills his arms, a frown creasing his horned brow. "I... we don't get it. Look, Angel sweets," he says, ignoring the obvious fact that Angel is steeling himself against a sympathetic flood, "we're all worried about you. Even Gunn, and you know how he's been all [movie] recently. You have no play. No work -- assuming you differentiate. You've occulted yourself in the wuthering heights of the shimmering two-hundredth executive floor of W&H and the people who saved the world with you a--"

"Don't understand."

"Bluhh! Yeah!" With his hands, Lorne describes an arrowhead that ends at Angel. "It doesn't take extrasensory perception to tell that something's smoking your fish. You just sit up here drawing boxes all day. And night."

Smoking his what? "Smo -- look," Angel says, stopping his endless abortive rotations to straighten up in his seat. "Lorne. If there's something you can do, I'll tell you. And if there's something I can do for..." He pauses, has an epiphany, squinches one eye shut across the room at Lorne. "--unless there is something? Did someth--?"

"No," his friend cuts him off, crestfallen as he shakes his head. "We're fine. Come on. Is it Cordelia? We all know how hard this has been. Jasmine. The endless sea of love and world domination... Ever since Cordy popped out that mysterious bastard goddess and you were forced to kill h... Angel?"

Angel's in his own little world. "Hmm?"

Lorne stares at him.

Memory is such a frail thing, soft and weak, warm and alive with a quiddity that is as easily killed as puppy's breath. If not killed, then mutilated, bones ground and flesh reworked into new seams, to create something not entirely different but not at all the same. Perhaps Angel should be regretting what he had done to his friends. Who's Connor? he still remembers Fred asking, ringing out dimly behind him beneath the chatter of a hundred shoes in the marble gut of the Lobby. Perhaps Angel should be back in the century-old act of contemplating his own hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of telling them that they would be corrupted by dawn. Perhaps he should be asking himself whether he saved the world or damned it.

But no. Angel is wondering. Is that my boy? Soft and weak, warm and alive, malleable. As if the boy was sprung from the same clay that humans -- which his son is so like, and not at all -- supposedly were; remoulded at Angel's unilateral command, as mankind had supposedly been from the fingers of an ambiguous Creator? Nothing but a memory?

Does Angel have any right to make him so?

Sacrifices have to be made, Jasmine reminded him. Memory. I would have given them everything they could not attain for thems--

"I'm sorry, Lorne," Angel says as he stares at the woody silhouette that the paper left on his desk, a letter-sized window slowly being swallowed by ink that flows faster than it dries.

The demon pauses by the door, his suit fireball-purple relief against the dour sophistication of the office. "It's okay," he says, then goes away.

Angel's finger collides with the comm-system panel before he remembers where the call button is. He finds it soon enough, his other hand drumming slim, ebon fingers against the smearing ink spilled on his table. "Lilah," he says, "I--"

"Got it," the syllables roll over the speakers like a fat kitten. "the cleaning personnel will be right up."

"--want to talk to him." Angel wishes someone would turn the sunset off, necro-plastic windows withstanding. Curtains drawn, his office is lit up, orb like fire, sky like Hell. He's used to being in the dark, damn it. "I think I may have made a terrible mistake."

"Annnd the Heroic Cycle starts," Lilah's voice replies, tone incurably ironic, abrasively amused. "Nadir's a long way down."

"Just get me a num--"

His fax machine wheezes, smooth paper unscrolling from its flat mouth.

"You're pushing the envelope, Angel. I've got to warn you. Everyone understands the occasional compromise, but the senior partners are only going to bend over backward so many times for you."

"The senior partners can lick my sack," is out of his mouth before he can stop himself, knuckles glowing white and rigid as he grips the armrest of his chair. He reaches out with the other hand, snatches the pooling sheets up with his other hand and rips it out of the slot before the machine finishes severing.

Lilah tsks across the wires, filling his desk space with playful, sibilant clicks. "Temper, temper. Fine. Disregard the bad guys if you want to, Angel, just remember what's important to you. Connor has a funny aptitude for breaking free of the magic that binds him. What's a memory spell compared to Quor-toth?" Distractedly skimming the communication controls with his fingers, Angel can't find the off button fast enough; his eyes are glued to the paper, insensitive to the curdling irritation of blood red sunset outside and the dead girl's voice in his office. Lilah sounds like she's quoting a movie. "Stay sharp, hero. The night is young."
* * *

Author's Notes: R&R is muchly appreciated. I haven't written in this... 'style' in a very long time, and I'd never experimented with Angel or Angel fanfiction before I heard Vincent Kartheiser stepped in and rabidly KaZaAed all of his episodes.

My reason for writing this fanfiction (other than the fact that I'm a fledgling writer with the regular impulses of rabid fangirls and a penchant for abusing my freedom of speech), is because I like Connor. Well, I liked him a lot when he first showed up in the series, all animal skins, dark humor and feral ass-kicking and interesting connections with daddy, then I started disliking him intensely along with Cordelia when the repetitive angst and (quasi?) pedophiliac fucking occurred, then he killed Jasmine (whom I found boring) and I just fell in love, totally.

Then Joss Whedon bastardized him again. I don't like the ending of that story arc, and I really hope the series gets more of our little Destroyer. Therefore, I'm writing and posting my alternative continuation based on various plot holes I spotted and how much reading and reviewing I get.