Disclaimer: No, I don't own any of these characters.
Set up: this one takes place after one of Angel and Buffy's many patrol sessions in early season two. Angel waxes poetic on home and family. (get out the hankies hee hee!)
I really enjoyed writing this one, please let me know if you enjoyed reading it!
I watch her as she sleeps, chest rising and falling. I don't think I've ever seen anything so beautiful. She is quiet, full of peace; her face, so often stretched in a frown, calm now. I know this is a bad idea a very bad idea my rational mind thinks, but I'm too far gone now to do anything but stare at her. I should be sacked out as well; patrolling takes it out of both of us. Seven vamps and one very large and angry troll is a lot for one evening. It had been her idea to come here and rest afterward; "post slayage nap" as she put it. For some reason I'm not sacked, though. I have of late been fixated on a very strange emotion I'd like to push away. However, tonight I think I have begun to realize that the reason I have been feeling so restless is sleeping next to me, all blonde hair and innocence, seemingly as comfortable here in my bed as she would be in her own home.
This place isn't really my home; I'd like to pretend I have a real home here. I haven't had a real home since leaving Galway so long ago. It's a son I wished for; a man, instead, God gave me you. The words come unbidden from the recesses of my mind, a place I haven't visited in too long that voice whispers again. I shake my head, trying to quell the sudden ache I feel in my dead chest.
My home. My family. Oh, God, my sister. She thought me an angel returned to her from beyond. How I proved her wrong!
The one gift Darla ever gave me was that evening… a demon is not welcome in a place it's not invited- Oh, I was invited…. although at the time I would not have recognized it for what it was. I've won. Have you? She asks. I've proved who the strongest one was here, I retort, confused by her answer. You could never please him in life, now you never can. I stare at her, not comprehending her wisdom. So young, still so very young.
My father, so very large, so imposing, so impressive. It was amazing to me on that first night back that such a "trembling thing" could have inspired such fear and such emotion in me while I was alive. I left my concept of home and family behind when I left that place with Darla a few nights later. It honestly had never come up in all my time since then. Even when my soul was restored, I never worried, never even considered trying to belong. I knew I would wander the earth, cursed, soul blighted and shivering, trying forever to atone. To understand. Alone, alone. Always alone.
Until that day in New York, when Whistler came along. Ah, now there was a character! I'm not one to notice small details about anyone really, but the clothes on that guy could have woken an entire army of bats. I wasn't trying to be funny when I told him
I want to learn from you. But I don't want to dress like you. See, I have my moments.
It was his fault for my current predicament. Had he never taken me to California, had I not been there that bright sunny morning to watch her walk down the steps of her school, a child, not even close to the woman she is now, things would have been so different. That slayer, she's gonna have it tough. My current obsession would be blissfully staking her way through as many bad things as possible, and I would still be…alone.
Buffy makes me see that there can be more to life…or unlife, or whatever it is I have. With her, I start to feel that home and family might be something I want again. Her little extended family, the children and the teacher; I find myself reluctantly missing them when I am left out of any nights patrol. I take it personally when they don't get me involved. And yet they can be almost scarily kind and generous at times- always including me in the most mundane of activities, even though some of them don't have much tolerance for me or try to understand the depth of my feelings for their young leader. It is in these moments most of all, when I realize how different and alien and divorced I am from all of this, that they manage to notice me and draw me back in.
This is something my family, my blood family, could never do, as much as I know now that they loved me. Even then I was too strange, too inappropriate, too young.
As I watch my young love continue to sleep, I am suddenly hit with a bolt of though: that no matter how silly, how annoying, how inconvenient family can be, when you need them, if the timing and your luck is just right, they can be exactly what you need. Friends, compatriots, companions, lovers, soulmates. They are all family in their way. And I know that that occasional tug I feel for some sense of belonging, some sense that I'm not just wandering the dark corners of mankind, a stranger always on the other side of the glass, is a good feeling, a right feeling, and that the cause of this newfound peace in me is now snoring softly next to me on my bed, my sheets pulled tightly around her shoulders.
You wished for a man, father. I am one now.