Disclaimer: I don't own Angel. 'Nuff said.
Author's Note: After one chapter of sexy stuff, one chapter of mush, and almost an entire chapter of Illyria being…well, Illyria, we are now going back to our regularly-scheduled doom, gloom, and drama! Wahoo! Sorry if this chapter's a bit short—it's been a hard week. Oh, and it's Connor's POV.
---
"You gotta do what you can to protect your family. I learned that from my father." –Connor, "Origin
---
Imagine something really weird happened. Really weird. As in got-hit-full-on-by-a-speeding-car-and-weren't-injured weird. Not even a bruise. I think my ribs were red for a few minutes as if they were thinking about bruising, but they must have decided against it because by the time the cops got there, I didn't have a mark on me. The Corvette that hit me wasn't so lucky—it's entire front end had a huge me-shaped dent in it. If it weren't for the dent, I think we'd all have found someway to dismiss the accident as not real. That I had seen the car coming and somehow thrown myself out of the way. But, it's kind of hard to deny that the accident never happened with a dent that big staring you in the face. Oh, and shiny red paint under my nails from where they'd scraped across the hood of the Corvette.
That's how I met Angel—a cop suggested to my parents that we all visit a certain law firm, and he just happened to be the head of it. And a vampire. Mind you, he wasn't at all what I thought a vampire would be like—I would have thought he'd be more suave, more…French. Instead, I meet this big, muscular guy who seems happy enough to meet me but also nervous, like it's a blind date or something.
Didn't make any sense until I suddenly remembered that he was my father—my real biological father. I'm still not sure how it happened, but when I killed Sahjahn, I suddenly got this whole other lifetime's worth of memories—my memories. I'm pretty sure they're real—that I could never have gotten lost in the supermarket when I was five because when I was five I was living in Quortoth, thinking I was Steven Holtz, not Connor Reilly…or Connor Angel.
It makes my brain hurt to think about, and I'm no idiot. I got accepted to a boat load of schools last fall, and I'm going to Stanford now. But not only have I lived through two different lives—which may or may not both be real (I haven't decided yet)—but I spent most of one being brainwashed and lied to first by Holtz and then by my own monster of a daughter.
Yes, I had a daughter. 'Had' being the operative word there because I beat her face in. My first smashed through her rotting, maggoty, beautiful face, and then she was gone.
When I killed her, I lost everything. I did such horrible, disgusting, awful, evil things (stuff that I can't stand to think about without feeling sick to my stomach—I didn't really murder that poor girl, did I? Somebody please tell me that that's not what happened. Please?) to bring my daughter into the world. I remember thinking she would be this perfect little baby—as beautiful as her mother, with just enough of me in her to prove to everybody that she was mine. Someone I could protect—not Angel, me.
In one set of memories, I hate him. I can't help it. In the other, I respect him and actually think he's kind of cool, which is probably why it's his shoulder I'm crying into on the sidewalk, in public, in broad daylight, when everything in my world has gone completely to Hell.