Birthday greetings and Fic!
So ::drumroll:: please:
Happy Birthday myfeetshowit!!!!!!
So a long while ago, myfeetshowit made me this wonderful banner:
the banner myfeetshowit made
but there was no fic to go with it. So in honour of the banner, and of the wonderfulness of you, myfeetshowit, and for your friendship and support, I've written you a fic for your birthday to accompany the banner. It's a mere drop in the ocean for what you've done for me, but I do hope that you enjoy it. And, more importantly, that you have a superb day! :)
Title: Stretch the Colours of Your Dreams
Author: lillianmorgan
Setting: pre and post Origin AtS Season 5
Categories: Gen Fic
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I don’t own Joss’ or ME’s toys.
A/N: Thanks very much go to yourlibrarian for the super-speedy beta. Thank you!!!
Written in celebration of myfeetshowit’s birthday.
Stretch the Colours of Your Dreams
Los Angeles had always been his home. The place he returned to, the place where his parents are and his sister too, the place where he thinks of happy memories, the place he thinks of when he wants to rest.
If he stopped to think about it, it was odd the way memory works. The way he might be researching for a school final about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and a word or phrase made him think about another dimension, another place in time, the man who haunts his dreams.
Yet Daniel Holtz had always instructed him that the one thing he did own were his memories, and how to use memory as a weapon, how to hone it like you would a sword, carry it with you in the blackest pit where your heart should be, how to distil a memory in order to know your enemy better than he knows himself.
It was not as if one day he had the memories and the next day he did not. It was like a cascade of emotion, a spectrum of highs and lows, something unexplainable, wholly inexplicable. The closest he could come to putting it into words was that day in Biology when the professor had rigged up a centrifuge and the liquid was whirring around and around. He could see the liquid, knew intellectually what it was, and yet the speed of the machine turned it into something else, a blur, incomprehensible.
The Starbucks in the Downtown financial district wasn’t a usual haunt of his crowd and that’s why he’d taken the pretty librarian on their first date there. A different scene without the threat of prying eyes, slap bang in the business district where his frayed brown cords and blue Stanford T-shirt with the golden lettering stood out and gave him edge.
The girl was nice enough and they were chatting about pretentious stuff, trying to impress the other with their knowledge of Russian writers. He noticed that their cappuccinos were drained and he was getting thirsty too from all this impressing.
“Like another?” he suggested, with a winning smile and clinking the mugs.
She nodded and so he loped down the stairs and waited in the queue. While he stood there, he listened to the conversations around him, not to pry but just to appreciate the cadence of the voices, because he could remember, only vaguely, moments in his life when he had had to be so silent that his existence had depended on it.
In amongst the voices discussing stocks and office gossip, he caught one that made his skin jitter. As a consequence, he was all out of kilter when he had to order the drinks. But when he turned around he sought out the voice as if there was a radar inside, directing him to it.
“But sweetie, that role’s as perfect for you as a maraschino cherry hanging off a Seabreeze. You’re gonna be a star again. I’m seeing your name in lights and they’re flashing, baby, in the night sky of fantabuloso fame.”
Connor’s feet took him over to the voice quite without his brain’s direction, until he was standing before the voice’s owner, who was animatedly discussing how amazing his guest was.
It was the other person who noticed Connor first, a faded starlet that Connor barely knew, eyes wrapped in huge black glasses, hair bleached blonde and skin so smooth, it belied her many, many years of living.
“And you are?” she demanded.
“Do I know you?” Connor asked, ignoring the woman but focussing on the individual who had drawn him over. He realised then that the voice did not belong to a human but to a green … demon … thing with red eyes. The demon had done an adequate job of hiding his appearance, with a trench coat pulled up around his ears and a trilby hat flattened low over his head, but there was no mistaking those red, inquisitive eyes.
Connor could not work out how he knew instinctively that the thing was a demon (did demons really exist anyway?) nor why, armed with this piece of information, he didn’t run fleeing from the café. Instead he stood before the demon, shuffling his feet and waiting for an answer.
“You’re …” he paused and relaxed his mind, biding his time until the name might pop into his consciousness. And then with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow, it did. “Lorne, aren’t you?”
The demon barely faltered but Connor had instincts that were hard to fathom. They gave him a perception on reactions and people and the way eyes jumped when the truth got too close.
“Maybe,” the demon, who Connor felt sure was Lorne, began, “didya catch my show in Vegas, champ? Is this what the big song and dance is for? Do you want my autograph?”
Connor wasn’t exactly sure what he did want, standing there rather oddly, the coffees cooling in his hands, expecting an answer from this demon that he thought somehow he knew.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, “that’ll do.”
Lorne pulled out a gold fountain pen from his coat pocket - he was even wearing gloves to hide the green of his hands - and scribbled something on a Starbucks napkin.
Connor placed the drinks on the table and ignored the fallen starlet’s bristle. Lorne pressed the napkin into Connor’s hand and said, “There you go, champ. Be seeing you then.”
Connor folded the napkin delicately and placed it in his back pocket, picked up the mugs and turned to go. He stopped and called back, “Thanks, Lorne. See you later.”
When he got home, after dinner and his mom’s good-natured prying about his date, he shut the door to his room and got out his books.
The napkin made a crackling noise as he sat down, so he pulled it out and smoothed it across the table.
“Stay safe, kiddo. Yours affectionately, Lorne,” read the message and for some reason Connor smiled.
It was not much longer after that when the strange behaviour got out of control and things took a turn for the worse.
**
The weird thing was putting the name and the face together and realising that the man who had lived beside him so long, like a second skin, was in fact his father.
Not the guy who had raised him, watched him do all the first things that any Dad does, but the vampire who looked at him with the oddest expression of love and hope and fear and devotion as the elevator doors closed and separated them. Connor hoped that their time spent apart wouldn’t last for another forever.
As the elevator descended, Connor tried to marshal his thoughts but knew in his heart of hearts that the memories had always been there, living and existing with him, helping him breathe, helping him to make judgements and decisions.
When the doors pinged open and he walked out into the lobby, and then into the LA twilight, so familiar, yet now so strange, he knew, somehow, that he would always be tied to his fathers: to Laurence Reilly, to Daniel Holtz but most especially to the vampire named Angel. And -
“Wait!” A British voice called out to him as he walked across the Wolfram and Hart courtyard. He stopped and turned and discerned a man, who he could only suitably describe as haggard, walking hastily toward him, the man’s arms propelling him forward in order to keep up. In his wake, followed what looked like a woman, except that her armour-like body and her blue hair made her strangely other.
“Thank you,” the man said, his breath rasping from his chest.
“That’s ok. Wesley,” Connor replied, but his eyes were drawn to the woman beside them. She was in turn watching him intently, no fear of impropriety dropping her gaze.
“I just …” Wesley began, but then stopped as if not sure what to say next. He blinked at Connor then, and his gaze became sadder and sadder as the silence extended.
“I guess the truth had to come out sometime,” Connor observed, raising his hand, wishing he could pat Wesley or do something to wipe that expression from the other man’s face. “It was never going to be easy, was it?”
Wesley lowered his head, in thought, and then quietly continued, “I thought he was lying to me about her, about what happened to her. I never thought that the secret would reflect so poorly on me,” he raised his face and his blue eyes, catching the light of a streetlamp, shone at Connor, “and would instead be about you.”
“Who is she exactly? I mean Angel kinda explained … only not really,” Connor asked, looking beyond Wesley to the strange creature who was tilting her head on its side. It made Connor remember the way a bird might contemplate a worm as its prey, deep in concentration, before diving its beak into mud.
“Insubordinate being! How dare you discuss me in such an unseeming manner. I am Illyria, God-King, older than time and space together.”
Wesley ignored her and continued, “I have learnt, more recently than I would ever have presumed, that the truth is not the comfort I once believed it to be. For now, what she says, that is enough.”
Connor opened his mouth, wanting to ask the millions of questions that tumbled through his brain at once, but Wesley interrupted him. “And how are you anyway Connor? Are you still at school?”
Connor frowned and nodded. “Yeah, I just got into Stanford.”
“Excellent!” exclaimed Wesley. “A very good university.” Then softer as if it were a memory of his own and he was loosening it from his tongue, he continued, “I always knew you had it in you.”
“The boy has power,” Illyria observed, leaning closer and peering at him, her two beady blue eyes knocking inside him with their intensity.
“Perhaps,” said Wesley, stiffening, “but he is of little consequence to you.”
“He would make a fine acolyte. The shell has memories of his strength and prowess, but he was not ever loyal. Explain to me about them.”
Instead of explaining everything, and giving Connor the closure to the day that he would have hoped for, Wesley turned around and walked away. Over his shoulder he called, “It might be advisable for you to follow, O Wise One. You have not yet trained your first pet, adopting another might prove onerous.”
Connor could only watch as Wesley walked back into the building, and he certainly didn’t want to look at the Blue Goddess looking at him. In time, she straightened herself up.
“I wish to check on my pet,” she exclaimed, and walked toward the main door, where Wesley was waiting for her.
Connor shook his head. Hadn’t Wolfram and Hart always been a place of bad? It was all too weird, too overwhelming but somewhere deep inside he felt it was also too satisfying, a validation on the dreams, an understanding of the memories.
They were his own, and like Daniel Holtz had said, he would always own them.
**
Coda
As Spike waited for Illyria to return, so more of the pummelling could commence (his pummelling of her that is), he watched from a distance of protected subterfuge as Angel moved toward the window. Angel placed his large, right hand against the necro-tinted glass, spread it wide as if trying to capture something and looked down toward the street. Spike knew that figuring out what it was that Angel had taken such a fancy to in his observations would give away his position, and thus his venture of one-upmanship. So he shuffled his feet and waited. Angel would give the game away in the fullness of time and the truth would be revealed some day. Or Spike could just go rushing over to the window to discover what it was.
He was surprised somewhat to see it was the boy who had appeared earlier in the day, standing in the courtyard and talking to Wesley.
“Seems he’s famous,” Spike acknowledged, but Angel merely grunted in reply, lost it seemed in a memory. “Everyone wants a piece of that boy.”
It was strange but meeting the boy earlier in the day, the wonder etched across his face as Spike had tumbled out into the corridor from one of Illyria’s parries, reminded him of a memory of the first time he had ever pleased Darla. He shook his head and tried not to giggle at the absurdity; he had far too many memories, they were all melding together.
Oddly, Angel said even less this time to Spike, tightening his lips together in a grimace of annoyance. Spike backed away with his hands in the air. It seemed far too easy to get on the rough side of Angel these days, and rub him like sandpaper. Gone were the days of balm.
Finis
Happy Birthday myfeetshowit!!!!!!
So a long while ago, myfeetshowit made me this wonderful banner:
the banner myfeetshowit made
but there was no fic to go with it. So in honour of the banner, and of the wonderfulness of you, myfeetshowit, and for your friendship and support, I've written you a fic for your birthday to accompany the banner. It's a mere drop in the ocean for what you've done for me, but I do hope that you enjoy it. And, more importantly, that you have a superb day! :)
Title: Stretch the Colours of Your Dreams
Author: lillianmorgan
Setting: pre and post Origin AtS Season 5
Categories: Gen Fic
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I don’t own Joss’ or ME’s toys.
A/N: Thanks very much go to yourlibrarian for the super-speedy beta. Thank you!!!
Written in celebration of myfeetshowit’s birthday.
Stretch the Colours of Your Dreams
Los Angeles had always been his home. The place he returned to, the place where his parents are and his sister too, the place where he thinks of happy memories, the place he thinks of when he wants to rest.
If he stopped to think about it, it was odd the way memory works. The way he might be researching for a school final about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and a word or phrase made him think about another dimension, another place in time, the man who haunts his dreams.
Yet Daniel Holtz had always instructed him that the one thing he did own were his memories, and how to use memory as a weapon, how to hone it like you would a sword, carry it with you in the blackest pit where your heart should be, how to distil a memory in order to know your enemy better than he knows himself.
It was not as if one day he had the memories and the next day he did not. It was like a cascade of emotion, a spectrum of highs and lows, something unexplainable, wholly inexplicable. The closest he could come to putting it into words was that day in Biology when the professor had rigged up a centrifuge and the liquid was whirring around and around. He could see the liquid, knew intellectually what it was, and yet the speed of the machine turned it into something else, a blur, incomprehensible.
The Starbucks in the Downtown financial district wasn’t a usual haunt of his crowd and that’s why he’d taken the pretty librarian on their first date there. A different scene without the threat of prying eyes, slap bang in the business district where his frayed brown cords and blue Stanford T-shirt with the golden lettering stood out and gave him edge.
The girl was nice enough and they were chatting about pretentious stuff, trying to impress the other with their knowledge of Russian writers. He noticed that their cappuccinos were drained and he was getting thirsty too from all this impressing.
“Like another?” he suggested, with a winning smile and clinking the mugs.
She nodded and so he loped down the stairs and waited in the queue. While he stood there, he listened to the conversations around him, not to pry but just to appreciate the cadence of the voices, because he could remember, only vaguely, moments in his life when he had had to be so silent that his existence had depended on it.
In amongst the voices discussing stocks and office gossip, he caught one that made his skin jitter. As a consequence, he was all out of kilter when he had to order the drinks. But when he turned around he sought out the voice as if there was a radar inside, directing him to it.
“But sweetie, that role’s as perfect for you as a maraschino cherry hanging off a Seabreeze. You’re gonna be a star again. I’m seeing your name in lights and they’re flashing, baby, in the night sky of fantabuloso fame.”
Connor’s feet took him over to the voice quite without his brain’s direction, until he was standing before the voice’s owner, who was animatedly discussing how amazing his guest was.
It was the other person who noticed Connor first, a faded starlet that Connor barely knew, eyes wrapped in huge black glasses, hair bleached blonde and skin so smooth, it belied her many, many years of living.
“And you are?” she demanded.
“Do I know you?” Connor asked, ignoring the woman but focussing on the individual who had drawn him over. He realised then that the voice did not belong to a human but to a green … demon … thing with red eyes. The demon had done an adequate job of hiding his appearance, with a trench coat pulled up around his ears and a trilby hat flattened low over his head, but there was no mistaking those red, inquisitive eyes.
Connor could not work out how he knew instinctively that the thing was a demon (did demons really exist anyway?) nor why, armed with this piece of information, he didn’t run fleeing from the café. Instead he stood before the demon, shuffling his feet and waiting for an answer.
“You’re …” he paused and relaxed his mind, biding his time until the name might pop into his consciousness. And then with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow, it did. “Lorne, aren’t you?”
The demon barely faltered but Connor had instincts that were hard to fathom. They gave him a perception on reactions and people and the way eyes jumped when the truth got too close.
“Maybe,” the demon, who Connor felt sure was Lorne, began, “didya catch my show in Vegas, champ? Is this what the big song and dance is for? Do you want my autograph?”
Connor wasn’t exactly sure what he did want, standing there rather oddly, the coffees cooling in his hands, expecting an answer from this demon that he thought somehow he knew.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, “that’ll do.”
Lorne pulled out a gold fountain pen from his coat pocket - he was even wearing gloves to hide the green of his hands - and scribbled something on a Starbucks napkin.
Connor placed the drinks on the table and ignored the fallen starlet’s bristle. Lorne pressed the napkin into Connor’s hand and said, “There you go, champ. Be seeing you then.”
Connor folded the napkin delicately and placed it in his back pocket, picked up the mugs and turned to go. He stopped and called back, “Thanks, Lorne. See you later.”
When he got home, after dinner and his mom’s good-natured prying about his date, he shut the door to his room and got out his books.
The napkin made a crackling noise as he sat down, so he pulled it out and smoothed it across the table.
“Stay safe, kiddo. Yours affectionately, Lorne,” read the message and for some reason Connor smiled.
It was not much longer after that when the strange behaviour got out of control and things took a turn for the worse.
**
The weird thing was putting the name and the face together and realising that the man who had lived beside him so long, like a second skin, was in fact his father.
Not the guy who had raised him, watched him do all the first things that any Dad does, but the vampire who looked at him with the oddest expression of love and hope and fear and devotion as the elevator doors closed and separated them. Connor hoped that their time spent apart wouldn’t last for another forever.
As the elevator descended, Connor tried to marshal his thoughts but knew in his heart of hearts that the memories had always been there, living and existing with him, helping him breathe, helping him to make judgements and decisions.
When the doors pinged open and he walked out into the lobby, and then into the LA twilight, so familiar, yet now so strange, he knew, somehow, that he would always be tied to his fathers: to Laurence Reilly, to Daniel Holtz but most especially to the vampire named Angel. And -
“Wait!” A British voice called out to him as he walked across the Wolfram and Hart courtyard. He stopped and turned and discerned a man, who he could only suitably describe as haggard, walking hastily toward him, the man’s arms propelling him forward in order to keep up. In his wake, followed what looked like a woman, except that her armour-like body and her blue hair made her strangely other.
“Thank you,” the man said, his breath rasping from his chest.
“That’s ok. Wesley,” Connor replied, but his eyes were drawn to the woman beside them. She was in turn watching him intently, no fear of impropriety dropping her gaze.
“I just …” Wesley began, but then stopped as if not sure what to say next. He blinked at Connor then, and his gaze became sadder and sadder as the silence extended.
“I guess the truth had to come out sometime,” Connor observed, raising his hand, wishing he could pat Wesley or do something to wipe that expression from the other man’s face. “It was never going to be easy, was it?”
Wesley lowered his head, in thought, and then quietly continued, “I thought he was lying to me about her, about what happened to her. I never thought that the secret would reflect so poorly on me,” he raised his face and his blue eyes, catching the light of a streetlamp, shone at Connor, “and would instead be about you.”
“Who is she exactly? I mean Angel kinda explained … only not really,” Connor asked, looking beyond Wesley to the strange creature who was tilting her head on its side. It made Connor remember the way a bird might contemplate a worm as its prey, deep in concentration, before diving its beak into mud.
“Insubordinate being! How dare you discuss me in such an unseeming manner. I am Illyria, God-King, older than time and space together.”
Wesley ignored her and continued, “I have learnt, more recently than I would ever have presumed, that the truth is not the comfort I once believed it to be. For now, what she says, that is enough.”
Connor opened his mouth, wanting to ask the millions of questions that tumbled through his brain at once, but Wesley interrupted him. “And how are you anyway Connor? Are you still at school?”
Connor frowned and nodded. “Yeah, I just got into Stanford.”
“Excellent!” exclaimed Wesley. “A very good university.” Then softer as if it were a memory of his own and he was loosening it from his tongue, he continued, “I always knew you had it in you.”
“The boy has power,” Illyria observed, leaning closer and peering at him, her two beady blue eyes knocking inside him with their intensity.
“Perhaps,” said Wesley, stiffening, “but he is of little consequence to you.”
“He would make a fine acolyte. The shell has memories of his strength and prowess, but he was not ever loyal. Explain to me about them.”
Instead of explaining everything, and giving Connor the closure to the day that he would have hoped for, Wesley turned around and walked away. Over his shoulder he called, “It might be advisable for you to follow, O Wise One. You have not yet trained your first pet, adopting another might prove onerous.”
Connor could only watch as Wesley walked back into the building, and he certainly didn’t want to look at the Blue Goddess looking at him. In time, she straightened herself up.
“I wish to check on my pet,” she exclaimed, and walked toward the main door, where Wesley was waiting for her.
Connor shook his head. Hadn’t Wolfram and Hart always been a place of bad? It was all too weird, too overwhelming but somewhere deep inside he felt it was also too satisfying, a validation on the dreams, an understanding of the memories.
They were his own, and like Daniel Holtz had said, he would always own them.
**
Coda
As Spike waited for Illyria to return, so more of the pummelling could commence (his pummelling of her that is), he watched from a distance of protected subterfuge as Angel moved toward the window. Angel placed his large, right hand against the necro-tinted glass, spread it wide as if trying to capture something and looked down toward the street. Spike knew that figuring out what it was that Angel had taken such a fancy to in his observations would give away his position, and thus his venture of one-upmanship. So he shuffled his feet and waited. Angel would give the game away in the fullness of time and the truth would be revealed some day. Or Spike could just go rushing over to the window to discover what it was.
He was surprised somewhat to see it was the boy who had appeared earlier in the day, standing in the courtyard and talking to Wesley.
“Seems he’s famous,” Spike acknowledged, but Angel merely grunted in reply, lost it seemed in a memory. “Everyone wants a piece of that boy.”
It was strange but meeting the boy earlier in the day, the wonder etched across his face as Spike had tumbled out into the corridor from one of Illyria’s parries, reminded him of a memory of the first time he had ever pleased Darla. He shook his head and tried not to giggle at the absurdity; he had far too many memories, they were all melding together.
Oddly, Angel said even less this time to Spike, tightening his lips together in a grimace of annoyance. Spike backed away with his hands in the air. It seemed far too easy to get on the rough side of Angel these days, and rub him like sandpaper. Gone were the days of balm.
Finis