FYI: Connor POV, gappy stream-of-consciousness-ish. [overwritten memory fragments] formatted like so. I'm afraid that I hadn't done too much beta-ing for this one, although I went over it a few times. Feel free to shout about errors.
Much Wanted
Chapter 2: this is a girl who died in her mind
Connor loves Tracy.
[--and Connor loves Cordelia but--]
Wait. What?
Startled, he glances over his shoulder, instinctively looking for whoever -- whatever echoed his thoughts just then but that brief flare of curiosity shorts out in an instant, overwhelmed by the urgency of the present. Shit, shit shit. He lifts his hands from the steering wheel and buries his pale face in his palms, not a single thought given to the various dangers of doing such things in the midst of moving traffic because the traffic isn't moving. He hates traffic. It makes him want to bust out and run over metal roofs, clear the cluster as if the vehicles were no more than cobbles under his skimming feet, fly far, far away.
Most of the time, he doesn't have to worry about big city problems like those in a small town like this. There's never traffic in this sunny little town marooned in the virescent jumble of trees and yellow roads, except somehow, today there is. His life had been normal up until now, a safe, domestic affair conducted flawlessly according to the ethos of happy family television. Impossible traffic jams, terrible accidents befalling female friends, it would have driven anyone as unfamiliar with such things to one Hell of a breakdown, writhing on one's butt with impatience, fear, grief -- things that, Tracy would have fondly said, make him human.
Except -- inexplicably -- they don't. Even in this state of emergency, Connor doesn't curse, he doesn't writhe or fidget no matter how much some more normal part of him wants to, his lean, loosely-clad body tapers motionlessly over the ergonomic contours of the automobile's leather seat, relaxed yet ready, the automatic preservation of fuel for torrents of either action or emotion. Even the exhausted fly trapped in the back of the car senses his agitation, empathizes, redoubling its clicking, buzzing efforts against the window glass. Nervous kinetic energy, despite temporary suspension, radiates palpably along every fibre and muscle and bone in Connor's body, blistering and crackling like static in electric blue irises, hackles, his unbrushed hair.
He gives the traffic jam five minutes, before cool, logical deduction leads him to an equally logical conclusion: "Fuck this."
Connor opens the car door and slips out, with the eerie grace of some fucked up ghostly thing (which he doesn't believe in. Ghosts, that is.), face white as bone, heartbeat tolling with more of the morbid regularity of a church bell than a fleshy organ. His hair flips like something tragically poetic, according to his brain, which temporarily disassociated itself from the rest of his body and soul for sanity's sake. He crosses half the town and closes in on his school on foot, making good time -- even for himself -- despite the unprecented bustle of road action, with the same predatory efficiency that his little sister does on unguarded Pop Tarts.
The first thing he sees is an ambulance, flashing, red, white and blue beneath the ripple of his [--their--?] nation's flag.
He plows through the crowded street, sends small children tumbling aside like upset china.
By the time a police officer manages to get some sort of grip on him, Connor has broken well into the cordoned-off perimeter, wearing torn yellow tape around his waist and an unusual amount of clear saline fluid on his face. He carefully reminds himself not to break anyone, and then promptly grabs the officer by the shirt.
A hundred pounds heavier and two chins greater, the officer in question gets his head yanked down by a dainty, girl-wristed hand. The older man proceeds to look distinctly put upon, not afraid -- yet. Surprise takes a few milliseconds to kick in. Good for him.
"WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?!" Connor yells.
"Are you a family mem--"
"I'm her boyfriend," Connor seethes, conveniently forgetting the last conversation he'd had with Tracy just a few days before. 'It's not you, it's me.'
Connor's mind skips backwar--
[--to a bed, a low roof, a makeshift home and a slender, brown-skinned body silken and voluptuous in his arms and legs. "We can'd do this again." A woman's voice.
"Why not?" His voice.
"Because you're Angel's s--"]
"--Ohhhh," the officer says.
Connor startles, again, finds that sympathy tamed the neon pink conflagration that had roared up behind the meaty panels of the older man's face, his humiliation dying under the weight of one meaningless, overextended syllable. No doubt, the kid's... remarkable strength -- or rather, the older man's inability to extricate himself from the kid -- is being attributed to angsty romantic zeal. Temporary adrenaline rush. Oh yes, poor kid. "It looks like suicide," the officer says, then adds, sincerely, "I'm sorry."
The shirt collar slips out of Connor's fingers.
Time slows down; fearful parents and inquisitive children, sirens and meaty policemen, fade from the foreground into the background.
Where does his mind go at times like these?
Soft, wrinkled hands perfumed with soap abruptly close on Connor's cheeks. Lovingly. He feels the cold sickle of his mother's [--fangs--?] bracelet against his flushed ear. Turning around to face her is a slow, ponderous process, the revolution of a planet, heavy with the leaden sorrow in his belly. She and Dad had never approved of his relationship with Tracy, but they never, ever would have wished this upon her. Now, her eyes are pink and wet with the meltwater of human [--alien--] decency.
"I'm so sorry," his mother tells him, and pulls him into her arms.
He makes an effort to hug her back, stiff and awkward like a walking dead person. See, Connor doesn't want to be held, he doesn't want a shoulder to cry on, he doesn't want to know what I'm sorry, it looks like.
"I want to see the body."
Just to see it. What Connor doesn't know, or want to know, is how remarkably sharply pale his eyes are, under the slow evaporation of spent tears; hardly aware even that the tears stopped flowing, he doesn't want to know why he wouldn't be able to bring them back at his ex-girlfriend's funeral. [Ears, souveniers per each of hundreds of other lives lost, so what's one more?] He would prefer the concrete existence of Tracy's body to the vast and precarious implications of the knowledge that she had cursed his name in a broken monster's voice during the last seconds of her life.
His mother is shocked, but she can't really be surprised. "Connor..." Defeat.
In the course of his young life under her care, the frail embraces and propriety of humanity have never held sway over the direction of Connor's thinking. Sometimes, he frightened his father with the calculating detachment with which he did simple things, from poisoning rats for his mother to studying psychology, peeling back the metaphorical layers of people-souls in search of something else. Sometimes, he breaks his mother's heart, remote in her fingertips and his privatized miseries. She's a homely woman, who loves to share both knowledge and comfort; a great believer in mankind.
["Then I'm a demon."
"No, no, my dear boy." Holtz always seemed so certain, but now he looked... old, as well. "God, I wish I knew what you are."]
Tracy's father lets him through. Over the telephone, that is. The obscenely wealthy man has not left his engagements in Los Angeles for quite some time, according to Tracy and the slew of servants who have cared for her since birth. Gratefulness tempers the old self-righteous rage that Connor has always felt on his ex-girlfriend's behalf: every child needs a father.
[Even the offspring of two demons.]
--despite Dad's joking insistence to the contrary when he finds Connor correcting mathematical errors in the older man's accounting papers.
"Please don't go," his mother says.
"I have to, Mom." No, he should have been able to save her.
[--and she should have been able to save him.]
He should have been there for her.
["You told me you'd always be here for me, Cordy, where are you now?"]
Long frame contracted into a white-faced ball in the chilly recess of a corner of the ambulance, Connor momentarily wonders who the shit he's thinking about. Stop it, he tells himself, promptly focuses on the present with a jungle cat's hair-raising intensity.
Tracy's chest balloons out beneath two heavy gray slabs of electronics which look more like they might crush the last vestiges of life out of her crumpled body than jolt it back to animation. Still, the two hospital attendants seem to know what they're doing. For the msot part, they ignore him; at least, after the first four times he asked -- told them to SHUT THE FUCK UP AND DO YOUR JOB.
They didn't waste time on pity.
Tracy always is [--was -- no, stop it--] a headcase. Even Connor's mother, one of the most forgiving teacher to preside over the school's kindergarten department, thought Tracy's obsession with the occult and sundry other dark, revolting things difficult to tolerate. When she'd been a toddler, there had been excessive usage of black crayons occasionally rosetted with carmine and stories of her father, who apparently resided in an alternate dimension wherefrom he puppeted life on Earth using the shiny chrome and "necroplastic" veneer of a law firm; and there had been, of course, the day when she had come to class with an inverted cross etched into her left palm with her new compass. While most of the moments in Connor's early memory are fuzzy at best (or at worst, wobble in strange, misfitting duplicity), moments with Tracy had a magical clarity about them.
When they had first met, in second grade, Tracy Hart had told Connor that she would change his life. She had not counted on him changing hers.
Some lower part of his conscious, less embroiled in anxiety and nostalgia, watches the yellow roads and dusty chaparral climes segue into a more urban setting. A loud click-thump of hospital workers unlocking the ambulance doors is enough to send the separate parts of Connor's mind into a dazing convergence, confusing at first, but it sorts itself out.
He doesn't even have to look; he knows.
"She's dead," he tells the workers softly.
One woman hesitates; a few brows flatten, but they motion at him still. "Come down, sir."
Defeat.
He begins to climb out in the wake of the stretcher, when something small happens, a wheel or something hollow snaps or breaks loose from beneath the corpse -- boom -- and above the buckling steel and leather and panicky medical personnel, Tracy's slender, bruise-black arms come up as if in unholy worship. Familiar, so famil -- abruptly, Connor's vision divides, a black spike winding into the center of perception and ripping a tunnel through space, but for once, not through time.
A moment of lucidity: I'm just hallucinating. Lucidity shatters like dropped glass when he glimpses something just outside the growing darkness in his eyes and he feels hope, pernicious and painful:
Tracy's crazy green eyes were open for an instant.
Then a hole yawns up where her eyes, nose, mouth were, and Connor sees someone else, darker-skinned, darker-haired, fuller-lipped and more classically beautiful, eyes glistening like liquid pitch and sightless from pain and her mouth flies open, screaming, screaming as if something is pulling itself out of the fetters of her flesh, and even though it's not part of her she'll be gone in some vague but irrecoverable way when it's leaves her -- screaming, screaming, as if she's going to die.
[But last time, at least she didn't die.]
Who? Connor wonders, desperately, who?! before his senses are swamped by the same powerful force as before.
"Connor," oh but she's bleeding, belly no more than an oozing gash, exhausted but indescribably beautiful and wild, and the people in white coats who had been detachedly crouched over her nails and hair with beauty products while she slept, peacefully comatose, are now unconscious on the floor with bruises darkening on their temples. "Connor, honey, it's happening again," Cordelia moans, faintly, fainter and fainter. "You have to -- stop him." Her eyes fall shut, her head to the side, an eerily familiar stillness overtaking her damaged body.
Stop wh--?!
[--sword swinging, jacket as black as two hundred years of undead history, such an ironic contrast to his (their) skin and the twisted nobility of his (their) intentions--]
"No! Angel!" he shouts. "Stop him!"
Someone in the throng of blue nurse uniforms straightens and sets themself apart. "What?!" They look around, "Who?!"
He tears forward, hair flying and teeth bared, looking every which way. The guy's about to murder a baby, his baby, who do they think?! "God damn you morons, I mean--!"
[-- Angel, because it's always Angel's fault, except the Devil shows such pretty colors and Angel's all monochrome and wears his sins out there on his (beast) face, so maybe just this once --]
Connor stops himself running and speaking both, long white fingers wrapping around his mouth. Familiar, it's all so familiar, and yet incongrous with the world he sees, concrete under his feet, light over his head. Metallic blood slides down his throat; his own, he reminds himself. Just his blood. He bit his tongue, that's all. And yet, Connor then finds himself flattening an arm over his own chest, as if to disguise a smear and torn shirt from unknowing eyes, and floating strains of some exotic, herbal perfume tantalizes him from the deeper parts of memory, warm and feminine, perhaps something his mother wore. Names elude his grasp. Java? Juniper? [--Jasm --]
"Sorry," he mumbles, "I'm... having a moment."
That one attendant strides over to him as the rest of the rabble gets Tracy's body moving again. "Who was that?" kind tone, pleasant girl-voice, a look of empathy and concern.
"Oh, you know," such a headache, spots dancing in his eyes, "just a religious thing."
"Of course. I didn't mean that." --because it wasn't really Angel's f-- oh, Hell, he's never had a headache like this before. The well-meaning samaritan doesn't let up though. It'd be tempting to put her out of her misery. "Who's Cordy?"
"Oh, her." Connor begins -- and as if from a nightmare finally, truly realized, he feels a terrible, penetrating truth in his own words: "Another person who died."
If you want more, or more in less extensive chapters, or more in any form whatsoever, please do toss me a review. It's great incentive to actually get things down on the computer, since I've already got my fairytale in my head.
Chapter 2: this is a girl who died in her mind
Author's Notes: Aiieee, I'm so sorry this took so long! Senior year just started and I have a lot of GPA points to pull myself up to. But, I swear, I will finish this fic. For Connor. For Angel. For even stupid Jasmine and Cordelia. For the fandom. Suffer me convoluted plot.