Strangers in a Strange World
The first time he met Joshua it had been raining, as it was wont to do in Seattle, and he had been smiling despite the aching cold. This city with its teeming masses and angry mobs felt like freedom, and the fact that he hadn't felt a single demon or vampire pinging on his radar since he slipped past the sector cops made the miserable weather seem better than spring sunshine. No hellmouth, no Champions, no mystical destiny. Just humanity in all its forms, good and bad. It was perfection.
Then one of those angry mobs had come rushing past, chasing a tall man with a strangely dog like face that didn't feel demonic at all, and he had decided to interfere. Half a city and several broken bones later, and the dogman was helping him limp past chain link fences into the aptly named Terminal City.
He still tasted freedom amid the blood where he had bitten through his tongue, and ignored the strange looks that his bruised but cheerful grin was getting from the other residents. Joshua, he had learned his name between punches, introduced him to Max and after they determined that no, he was not a governmentally engineered soldier or the result of a millennia's worth of breeding by some cult, they had offered him a place to stay on the condition that he help with food and guarding and he had accepted with that same happy smile.
It had taken him weeks to convince them that he wasn't insane. That he was just used to fighting and conspiracies, and that to him their war was a nice change of pace. Some of them still gave him odd looks every now and then, especially if the word demon or magic fell off his tongue, but Joshua had become the best friend he'd never had and Max had loosened up after a while. Although he'd never live down the one time he accidentally called her Buffy when she surprised him in the middle of the night with an impromptu test cleverly disguised as a sneak attack.
When he wasn't helping with supply runs or delivering messages to Logan as one of the few barcode free members of their little resistance, he talked with Joshua for hours or just sat and watched him paint, canvas after canvas of brightly colored disasters flowing from his shaggy hands, all profit going to the cause and the ones who needed it the most despite Max and Alec's insistence that he should keep some for himself.
Regardless of the obvious differences, he felt a kinship with the hybrid who only wanted peace and who remained, in some ways, perpetually innocent despite his impressive capacity for violence and the many traumas of his life.
They hadn't asked to be brought into this world, or to be shoved to the side when they didn't meet expectations. Connor didn't wear his differences on the outside as Joshua did, but both of them were freaks in a freak society and both of them just wanted to belong.