Title: Dear Boy

Writer: Azure K Mello

Part: (3/?)

Challenge/plot bunny by Angela (who has been kicking major arse recently), who wanted chipped Spike interacting with human Darla and for Angel to swoop in playing our golden boy's brooding night!

Setting: After Angel's Untouched and set during Buffy's Crush which has been moved up in the time line as Dru went straight to Sunnydale and was never in LA.

Rated R

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She watched the sunlight as it played on her skin. A shudder ran through her and she wished, not for the first time, that she was dead. She hated this functional body. So loud, so filthy. *Humanity* what a horrible state of being. She didn't like being human the first time around and she certainly didn't like it now. The cities and towns flashed by her window on the train. She couldn't wait to get off the machine. Drusilla, the idiot, would turn her and in a few hours she would be as good as new. . . or should that be old? A mental "To Do" list flashed through her head. Rumors had reached her ears that dear William was dead. Apparently he went to Sunnydale to kill the slayer and was never seen again. She wanted to thank the girl personally. . . and then kill her. No slayer would ever kill someone in her bloodline and get away with it. Darla loathed the boy but he was hers to destroy and she wouldn't have it become common knowledge that the line of Aurelius had been bested by a mortal.

First she had to find Drusilla and coax her girl into turning her. She sighed and moaned slightly when she saw Lindsey coming up the aisle. What was the boy doing here? She was quickly losing patients. And he was close to getting struck off the very short list of people she would not torture before granting them death.

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Angel was sitting in his office four days after he had last seen Darla. Of course he had no idea that she had spent the last three days in Sunnydale, he had no idea where she was. He was doing something that he would never refer to as sulking. Nope, he definitely *wasn't* thinking about his youngest. And, no, those weren't tears he was fighting to hold back, it was allergies. Vampires can have hay fever. He scrubbed his face hard as he heard the door open. He looked up to see Cordelia staring at him.

"Are you ok? Only, I heard sniffing." Spoke in her normal affected bored drawl. He saw the worry in her eyes.

"Hay fever."

"You're never outside. Anyway, you're dead. Boy, why are you crying?" she meant for her words to sound firm.

He laughed at her unintentional allusion to Peter Pan. He was a little boy who couldn't grow up. So stuck in the here and now that he saw only the bleakness of his life and not the wonderful times of his past or the possible future that awaited him. She looked sternly at him and he burst into another fit of giggles. "Sorry, I'm not crying. I'm a vampire. We don't have the glands for it."

"Fine, What are you not crying about?"

The worry in her voice touched Angel and he felt he couldn't tell her to leave him be, "My family."

"The ones you killed?" asked Cordy bemusedly.

Angel smiled again at her innocence, "No. My real family. Spike, and Drusilla, and Penn, and Darla," her name caught in his throat, "I loved them all so much." Wistfully he said, "Dru and William would get into bloody fights in the middle of the night and I would go split them up and sleep between them. And I would slap their legs if they tried to kick."

Cordelia chocked on a sip of coffee. "What so you were all domesticated?"

He smiled ruefully his gaze set somewhere beyond Cordelia in the middle distance. "No, it was blood, and anger, and fun. But, I failed them. I worshiped and feared Darla. And she ruled us all. She dictated how my childer were raised. She was scary as all hell and I followed her. I was cold, mean to my childer and I hurt them because I feared what she would do if I showed my affection to them. She loathed human emotion. When she went off to see The Master, her sire, I got to treat them right. Usually she would take Dru with her, Dru entertained her. And Penn would always run off. And it was just me and Will and we would hunt. My dear boy. And I suppose we were domesticated then, it wasn't just about the kill, it was the hunt, and we would go to the theater, how he loved culture. I was so unkind while she was there, I belittled him into having the "Big Bad" complex, he thought he needed to prove himself and be tough. But he never was, he was an innocent child and my harsh treatment broke him. If she had known what I felt for him she would have killed him, slowly and painfully while I was forced to watch on and then she would do the same to me. I was trying to protect him. . . "

"I thought Dru sired Spike?" asked Cord looking very confused.

"Why would you think that?"

"That's what he told Buffy."

"When was he talking to Buffy?!" He could see Cordelia's mind start to backtrack. "Why was my childe anywhere near the slayer!?" He felt bile raise in him as he thought far too quickly. Spike had told her that Dru sired him? Was he ashamed? Did he hate Angel so much as to need to lie about his origins? And what in Satan's name was he talking to the slayer for?

"You can't kill me. I was sworn to secrecy. I'm sorry! It just slipped, I can't tell you."

"You will," Angel stood up and loomed threateningly, "Where is my childe?" His words weren't angry, simply informative.

Swallowing hard the girl said, "In Sunnydale."

"Why? And why is he talking to Buffy?" He hated the idea of his childe being anywhere near the killer of their kind.

"He went to kill her. He was captured by a army group. They put a chip in his head, he can't hurt living things. So he helps Buffy for money to by blood."

Anger filled Angel's body, ever fiber of him screamed out that he should break things. His childe was forced to work for a *human*? A *slayer*? He felt ill. His boy was a beautiful creature that was never meant to be tamed or captured. Spike wasn't evil, just in for a good time, out to prove that he could be someone. But who was he now? "Who did you promise that you wouldn't tell me?"

"Willow told me, but also told me that Spike didn't want you to know."

Angel felt the lump of heat burn his throat. Turning to the window he shut Cordelia out of his sight and mind. Vampires don't cry. And he certainly wasn't.