Characters: Lorne

Pairing: None

Time: Pre-series

Warnings: None

Additional Notes: Because Lorne is awesome.

Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns them, not me.

Food for the Soul

One minute he'd been hiding in the woods from his brother Numfar and the next he was in a strange building. There'd been a strange portal and now he was somewhere… new.

"Anyone here?" Lorne called out, his eyes surveying the abandoned building. There was dust everywhere, circling in the air and coating every surface. Still, it sure beat Pylea.

When he didn't get an answer, he pushed himself up and walked to the stairs. There was an artificial light streaming down. Curious and quite a bit frightened, Lorne edged his way up the staircase.

And that's when he heard it. The melodic strumming, beautiful notes unlike the war bellows and drums back home. Lorne followed the sound outside into the warm night. He needed to find the source of this sound.

Lorne followed it. If it wasn't for these beautiful sounds, he would have been interested in his surroundings. All the metal and cement and asphalt, all the buildings standing so tall. However, he was too entranced by this sound to bother paying his environment much attention. He was the starvation victim finding a king's banquet.

The sound came from a man in a large overcoat, sitting with his back against the wall and plucking a strange device's strings. Lorne watched in fascination as the man's fingers produced such notes with the strings. Sadly he reflected on how he didn't have a word to describe this.

"What is it?" Lorne asked.

The man glanced at the green demon and then answered in a mellow voice, "Music, man. It's music."

"Music…" They didn't have anything like this back in Pylea. Everything there was harsh and brutal. Beauty like this, if it even rose up, was always squashed down as quickly as possible.

Unable to resist, Lorne began to hum softly. It only took a few moments for him to get into the beat and then his humming fell into perfect harmony with the strumming. It felt so good, better than anything he'd felt in Pylea.

The man stopped playing. He watched the demon continue to hum before nodding in approval, "You've got a lovely set of pipes, man. You should practice them."

Lorne grinned. This new world, despite all its strangeness, would be his new home right now. He was never going back to Pylea no matter how hard things got. But most of all, he was going to learn about this thing called music and let it flourish.