FICLET: Family Album (Angel & Connor, gen, FRC)
Title: Family Album
Author: Mireille (mireille719)
Fandom: Buffyverse
Pairing: none; Connor and Angel gen
Rating: FRC
Summary: likeadeuce wanted Connor and Angel (gen); photo album. This is set some time post-NFA (no comics spoilers).
Word Count: 550
Disclaimer: Joss's, not mine.
Feedback/Concrit: Both welcome, either here or at mireille719 {at} gmail {dot} com


Family Album

It's the pictures that creep Connor out the most.

They're him. They're definitely him, stupid floppy hair and girly face that he's finally starting to outgrow and all, and once they get past the toddler stage, Connor remembers them. He remembers being five, remembers his first sight of the red bike he's riding in the picture, remembers the thrill a few months later when his dad took off the training wheels and he was really riding it.

Except that didn't happen. When he was five--or so; they didn't pay much attention to birthdays--his father taught him how to read from the Bible he'd carried in his coat pocket; five different ways of destroying a vampire (staking, beheading, sunlight, fire, holy water; Steven recited them every night before going to bed, and Connor catches himself doing it sometimes now even though Steven isn't him any more, not really); and how to use the bow he'd given Steven as a present, the first present that he remembers. That's what's real. That's what happened.

But Connor only has his fucked-up memories to testify to Steven Holtz ever existing; and there are pictures of Connor Reilly: school pictures and Polaroids from Christmas mornings and newspaper clippings from when the debate team won the state tournament his junior year, and his mom had sent copies of the story to everyone they'd ever met. There's proof he's real.

That's what makes it creepy.

Angel doesn't seem to find it creepy; Angel turns page after page of the photo album, absorbing every detail, and Connor wonders if he's trying to imagine a third Connor in them: not Connor Reilly, who he thinks he is now; or Steven Holtz, the Destroyer, who he never wants to be again; but Connor--he doesn't even know what his last name would have been, but Connor in the one picture Angel showed him, from when he was a baby. Connor, who would have grown up in an old hotel, with his vampire dad and a bunch of honorary aunts and uncles.

He doesn't ask, because he thinks two people are enough for him to try to be, and because he and Angel--they're not there yet. They're not really at the share-your-hopes-and-dreams stage in their father-son relationship. But when Angel hands the photo album back to him, Connor refuses to take it. "No one will miss those pictures," he says. "They're all from the box of extras my mom keeps saying she's going to get rid of. I just put them in an album so they'd be easier to carry." And because he thought maybe Angel would want them, but he's not saying that. They're not at that stage in their father-son relationship, either.

But they're at the stage where, when Angel doesn't thank him because vampires apparently don't need social skills, Connor can take the way Angel flips back to the pictures from when Connor was really little, looking from the pictures to his face like he's trying to find something he recognizes in Connor's face, as a reasonable equivalent.

And they're at the stage where, from the way Angel looks at the pictures, Connor can decide that if his life had turned out the way it was originally supposed to be, that probably would have been okay.