Connorcest entry
Title: Falling
Author: Elisabeth
Summary: "When the truth is found to be lies…" Connor/Wesley, (slightly-in-the)futurefic, after the mindwipe is undone.
A/N: Written for doyle_sb4 for the Connor incest ficathon, who requested Connor/Wes, angst, not under Jasmine's influence. Thanks to sathinks for the patient assistance and megl42 for the thoughtful beta.
It was the empty days after Fred was gone, after he'd coaxed Illyria out of Fred's broken body and into a portal.
He sent the god to a world where it was still worshipped, hoping the gesture was appreciated.
After Fred's funeral, Wesley stumbled through the Wolfram & Hart offices. He tried to work; failing that, tried to read; couldn't. Tried to get drunk; succeeded, but it didn't work. The whiskey made him sob until he finally fell asleep. Even in his dreams, Fred danced through his mind.
One morning he woke up with fur in his throat and a jackhammer above his right eyebrow, and dragged himself to work a little before eleven. He looked at his emails; bored and irritated by their everydayness, he shoved his computer off his desk, shot the carcass on the floor.
The resulting explosion drew his assistant, lackeys, curious janitors - and Angel. The vampire's hard gaze was enough to almost clear the room, and he completed the spell with a few words.
"Everyone out. I need to talk to Wesley. Alone."
The onlookers gone, Angel moved restlessly, hands in his pocket.
"Sit, if you like," Wesley said. Angel did, but it was still another moment before he spoke.
"I'm worried about you, Wes. Wanted to let you know I'm, you know, here if you need to talk."
Wesley glared at him, but the vampire kept talking. "I know losing Fred was tough for you. But it's been a hard couple years for all of us. Too many losses. Fred, Cordelia, Lilah, Darla, Connor. I think that we need to-"
"What was that last name?," Wesley said, cold and clear.
"Darla? Okay, maybe that was just hard on me, with the whole seeing her as a human years after I killed her thing. I don't want to sound all Anne Rice, but the vampire-sire connection-"
"No. Connor."
Angel stared at the floor. "Connor? Who's that?," he mumbled.
Wesley's eyes were bright. "You tell me. You said that name, Lilah said it, Cordelia woke up asking about it. It must mean something: I just don't know what."
"Slips of the tongue, Wes. Slips of the tongue. There's no mysterious Connor I'm hiding from you," Angel said with a nervous smile.
"Then you won't mind me researching it?"
"Of course not," Angel said, trying and failing to smile again.
After that, it was easy enough for Wesley to find the place in his journal where he had recorded the “the father will kill the son" prophecy. Easy enough, too, to tell that the text had been altered and was strangely vague.
Finding out more took every bit of a Watcher's command of Wolfram and Hart's library, and a rogue demon hunter's ability to bribe favors out of some demons and shamans and beat them out of others. It was a welcome distraction. In the end, he lit a pale green powder on fire, chanted in Sumerian, and was knocked backwards by the force of the memories flooding his brain.
- Darla, in labor, in the rain, screaming for release
- The smell of a month-old baby, asleep in his arms as he ran through the night
- Lilah Morgan, sliding up next to him on a barstool, pointing out a young man who moved like Angel
- Hitting a girl hunched in his closet, waiting for her to tell him the truth
- A boy, full of bliss, gazing at his daughter, the goddess they all adored.
The smoke from the green powder sifted through the room, then the hall, then the world, restoring everything. As it did, Wesley curled up in his apartment and wept, touching the rough spot on this throat where a scar was fading with the pads of his fingers. The phone rang until he unplugged it.
***
Hundreds of miles away, a student hunched over a psychology midterm, defining Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
The memories came to him as he finished his entry on the need for safety. Faces, names, feelings, rushing through his mind, creating chaos where there had been peace.
He stood up, howled, and ran out of the lecture hall. People followed him, at first thinking he was joking, later sounding concerned. He easily outran them.
He didn't stop until he got to Los Angeles.
***
Harmony came to Wesley's apartment the next night, and knocked until the noise drew his next-door neighbor into the hall. Shooed away, she left cookies covered in pink plastic wrap, with a bow on top, and a note that said "Sorry about your memories!" in loopy handwriting.
Wesley threw the cookies into the trash, kept the note.
Then, Gunn came. Tried to reason with him through the door. Pretended the new memories had hurt him, too.
"C'mon, bro. I'm not into mind rape either, but Angel had to do what he did. It was for his kid, and it ain't like you can claim the moral high ground." A pause; Wesley could hear expensive shoes scuffling in the carpet outside the door. "English, c'mon. We just wanna know you're okay."
Wesley pulled out his handgun, fired through the top right hand corner of the door; high enough to miss Gunn's head, low enough they couldn't be sure he had missed on purpose.
"Guess you don't want company," Gunn said, and left.
He assumed the next visit would be from Angel, but it wasn't. The one living person he would open the door for came instead.
"Wesley? Are you in there? I have some stuff I need to talk to you about." It was Connor's voice. "They told me at that place that I could find you here."
Cautious, he opened the door. The young man stood there, thinner even than Wesley remembered and with shorter hair, but otherwise the same. Including the naked pain in his eyes.
"Come in," Wesley said, and stepped aside, closing the door after Connor.
Seconds later, his back was against the wall, a knife at his throat. Wes remembered his own times at the other end of the knife, and did not struggle.
"I can kill you, you know," Connor informed him.
"I know."
"I mean it. I will. My father may have screwed with my head, but the memories coming back is worse."
"And I gave him to Holtz and started this all," Wesley thought. "Ruined his life twice now." He held up open palms. "Kill me if you must. Better than living with this, anyhow."
"It would be a waste of a good knife edge," Connor said, sheathing his weapon. "Sit down," he said, pointing Wesley toward the couch. Connor leaned against a wall, silent.
"Did you kill them at Wolfram and Hart?"
Connor shook his head. "No. Wasn't worth it there, either. Scared Angel pretty good, though." He paused, disgusted. "I wanted to see Cordelia, but they told me she was gone."
Wesley nodded, then asked the only question he could think of. "Is your name still Connor?"
He laughed. "That's your question? But yeah. I'm Connor Czlonka, and I was born November first, 1984." He kicked a dent in the wall, then looked up. Wesley saw his eyes were wet. "I go to Berkeley, I grew up in Santa Cruz, I have a sister named Kaitlin."
His red eyes held Wesley's gaze, steady. "Only none of that is real. None of my report cards or soccer teams or anything really existed. But you know that."
"I do," he said. "I'm sorry."
The boy moved around the apartment, restless, picking up books and putting them back down.
"I hate you," he said, conversationally, as he studied the cover of Prophecies in Ancient M'Faushnik. "I hate Angel, and I would kill Holtz myself if I had the chance, but you… Gunn told me you undid the mindwipe. Why did you have to go poking around in your memories?"
"You know the saying about a little knowledge," Wesley said. "It's dangerous. I didn't know what I'd find." And as he spoke, guilt twisted his insides: He had been reckless and desperate, and thought of nothing but his own curiosity, the bliss of losing himself in mission.
But arrogance rose, quieter than the guilt but overcoming it: He had been right.
"Glad I could help with your research," Connor said, jerking Wes out of his thoughts. "Anything else I can do for you today?"
"Yes," Wesley said, ignoring the sarcasm. He paused, ran a fingertip over his throat again. "Go away. Go home to your parents and Kaitlin and your classes, where you're loved. Forgive me. Forgive Angel. Forgive us all."
Connor laughed, a barking sound. "Forgiveness would make this all so easy. I don't even know what to forgive anymore. Don't know," he said, voice dropping almost to a whisper, "if I can forgive myself."
"I would have thought you were the only one who had done nothing to forgive," Wesley said. "You were manipulated. I was stupid."
"I killed a girl. Would have killed more people if Angel hadn't stopped me."
"This fight gets blood on everyone's hands," Wes said.
"Does it? Can I be… " Connor's voice broke and he collapsed at Wesley's feet, cross-legged.. "Holtz told me I was a miracle, a pure spirit come out of so much evil. I used to believe him. Now I know I'm just a vampire with a beating heart."
Wesley noticed, as if at a distance, the beauty of the boy's form: The long straight limbs, the heart-shaped mouth. He could not believe it held any evil. "I held you when you were a baby," he said. "I knew you when Jasmine was here, when you had as much peace as you ever knew. Holtz was right. This world made you do evil things, not your nature."
"I wish I believed that," Connor said. Wesley plunged ahead, thinking of what he would want to hear in Connor's place, thinking of how much the world had wronged him.
"Connor, you've been through … too much. You met us at your age, when Lorne's spell went wrong. You saw what innocents we were except for Charles, and even he was mostly bluster. You never got that privilege until this mindwipe gave you a new past. It's understandable that you were confused."
"Not confused. I was broken. Always. My pieces don't go together. The mindwipe made me think I knew where I fit, but it was all a lie. I don't even know if my parents - these parents - will ever want to see me again."
Wesley thought of a phone call from Giles years ago. He had hung up shaken, picturing twelve-year-old Dawn bent over homework in the Sunnydale High School library, nagging Willow for help with her math and whining about how Buffy never got her home in time to watch Total Request Live. Even knowing it had never happened, he couldn't imagine it any other way.
"I know a girl," he said. "She was magicked into existence when she was 14 - part of yet another attempt to save the world. Her sister found out she wasn't real, and she still loved her enough to value the girl's life over her own. I'm sure your parents would feel the same."
"That girl - is she okay? Knowing nothing she remembers is real?"
"She had bad days when she first found out. It's been a few years." Wesley hesitated, realizing he didn't know, could only gather so much from the scattered reports he'd gotten from Willow and Andrew. "As far as I know, she has a normal life now."
Connor shook his head. "Amazes me how many powerful people think they have the right to screw with other people's heads." In his voice, Wesley heard the echo of college bull sessions, of proving points about capital punishment or the rain forest.
"That's one thing about power - people who use it always think they're making the right choice," Wesley said, dryly.
Connor snorted. "Yep. I got three fathers to prove that to me."
"It only took me one," Wesley thought, but said nothing.
The young man sprawled back on the floor, propped up on his elbows. "So, you're the smart one, right? What do you think I should do? Angel said he would help me with whatever I wanted."
"And what do you want?," Wesley asked.
"I want something that isn't a lie," Connor answered, fierce. "Which pretty much eliminates everything."
Wesley looked at the boy, saw how much hurt was masked inside his anger. "Same Connor," he thought. "You aren't a lie," Wes said gently. "Some of your memories are fake, but you and your choices are real."
"I'm a lie. A freak with dead parents and fake memories. And, anyhow, you know who told me something was real? Cordy. Or the demon in her. And that was a lie, the night she fucked me."
The word made Wesley flinch, made him want to wrap the infant Connor in his blue blanket, start over, feed him formula and strained peas and watch him grow to be a different person, someone healthy. He chose his words carefully. "We don't know how Jasmine possessed her. I don't think Cordy - the Cordy I knew - would ever choose to hurt you."
"Still doesn't make it real. But you were screwing that lawyer, right? At least you knew she hated you. I thought Cordy was love."
Wesley's body stiffened as he remembered Lilah, thinking how much of the hatred was on his side, of her light amusement at his efforts to do good. "Lilah didn't- ," he said, then broke the sentence, unable to finish it. "There's usually more than one reason people do anything," he said instead. "Let alone something as complicated as relationships. Such as" - he paused - "Well, why are you still here? You aren't going to kill me, you know all I know, and I hardly think you plan to spend your life sulking around an evil law firm. Why not go back to Berkeley?"
There was no answer.
"I'll make some sandwiches and tea, and then we can figure out where you go next," Wesley said, standing to go into the kitchen.
He didn't see Connor stare after him, and neither man saw the tears in the other's eyes.
~finis~
The master list is here.
Author: Elisabeth
Summary: "When the truth is found to be lies…" Connor/Wesley, (slightly-in-the)futurefic, after the mindwipe is undone.
A/N: Written for doyle_sb4 for the Connor incest ficathon, who requested Connor/Wes, angst, not under Jasmine's influence. Thanks to sathinks for the patient assistance and megl42 for the thoughtful beta.
It was the empty days after Fred was gone, after he'd coaxed Illyria out of Fred's broken body and into a portal.
He sent the god to a world where it was still worshipped, hoping the gesture was appreciated.
After Fred's funeral, Wesley stumbled through the Wolfram & Hart offices. He tried to work; failing that, tried to read; couldn't. Tried to get drunk; succeeded, but it didn't work. The whiskey made him sob until he finally fell asleep. Even in his dreams, Fred danced through his mind.
One morning he woke up with fur in his throat and a jackhammer above his right eyebrow, and dragged himself to work a little before eleven. He looked at his emails; bored and irritated by their everydayness, he shoved his computer off his desk, shot the carcass on the floor.
The resulting explosion drew his assistant, lackeys, curious janitors - and Angel. The vampire's hard gaze was enough to almost clear the room, and he completed the spell with a few words.
"Everyone out. I need to talk to Wesley. Alone."
The onlookers gone, Angel moved restlessly, hands in his pocket.
"Sit, if you like," Wesley said. Angel did, but it was still another moment before he spoke.
"I'm worried about you, Wes. Wanted to let you know I'm, you know, here if you need to talk."
Wesley glared at him, but the vampire kept talking. "I know losing Fred was tough for you. But it's been a hard couple years for all of us. Too many losses. Fred, Cordelia, Lilah, Darla, Connor. I think that we need to-"
"What was that last name?," Wesley said, cold and clear.
"Darla? Okay, maybe that was just hard on me, with the whole seeing her as a human years after I killed her thing. I don't want to sound all Anne Rice, but the vampire-sire connection-"
"No. Connor."
Angel stared at the floor. "Connor? Who's that?," he mumbled.
Wesley's eyes were bright. "You tell me. You said that name, Lilah said it, Cordelia woke up asking about it. It must mean something: I just don't know what."
"Slips of the tongue, Wes. Slips of the tongue. There's no mysterious Connor I'm hiding from you," Angel said with a nervous smile.
"Then you won't mind me researching it?"
"Of course not," Angel said, trying and failing to smile again.
After that, it was easy enough for Wesley to find the place in his journal where he had recorded the “the father will kill the son" prophecy. Easy enough, too, to tell that the text had been altered and was strangely vague.
Finding out more took every bit of a Watcher's command of Wolfram and Hart's library, and a rogue demon hunter's ability to bribe favors out of some demons and shamans and beat them out of others. It was a welcome distraction. In the end, he lit a pale green powder on fire, chanted in Sumerian, and was knocked backwards by the force of the memories flooding his brain.
- Darla, in labor, in the rain, screaming for release
- The smell of a month-old baby, asleep in his arms as he ran through the night
- Lilah Morgan, sliding up next to him on a barstool, pointing out a young man who moved like Angel
- Hitting a girl hunched in his closet, waiting for her to tell him the truth
- A boy, full of bliss, gazing at his daughter, the goddess they all adored.
The smoke from the green powder sifted through the room, then the hall, then the world, restoring everything. As it did, Wesley curled up in his apartment and wept, touching the rough spot on this throat where a scar was fading with the pads of his fingers. The phone rang until he unplugged it.
***
Hundreds of miles away, a student hunched over a psychology midterm, defining Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
The memories came to him as he finished his entry on the need for safety. Faces, names, feelings, rushing through his mind, creating chaos where there had been peace.
He stood up, howled, and ran out of the lecture hall. People followed him, at first thinking he was joking, later sounding concerned. He easily outran them.
He didn't stop until he got to Los Angeles.
***
Harmony came to Wesley's apartment the next night, and knocked until the noise drew his next-door neighbor into the hall. Shooed away, she left cookies covered in pink plastic wrap, with a bow on top, and a note that said "Sorry about your memories!" in loopy handwriting.
Wesley threw the cookies into the trash, kept the note.
Then, Gunn came. Tried to reason with him through the door. Pretended the new memories had hurt him, too.
"C'mon, bro. I'm not into mind rape either, but Angel had to do what he did. It was for his kid, and it ain't like you can claim the moral high ground." A pause; Wesley could hear expensive shoes scuffling in the carpet outside the door. "English, c'mon. We just wanna know you're okay."
Wesley pulled out his handgun, fired through the top right hand corner of the door; high enough to miss Gunn's head, low enough they couldn't be sure he had missed on purpose.
"Guess you don't want company," Gunn said, and left.
He assumed the next visit would be from Angel, but it wasn't. The one living person he would open the door for came instead.
"Wesley? Are you in there? I have some stuff I need to talk to you about." It was Connor's voice. "They told me at that place that I could find you here."
Cautious, he opened the door. The young man stood there, thinner even than Wesley remembered and with shorter hair, but otherwise the same. Including the naked pain in his eyes.
"Come in," Wesley said, and stepped aside, closing the door after Connor.
Seconds later, his back was against the wall, a knife at his throat. Wes remembered his own times at the other end of the knife, and did not struggle.
"I can kill you, you know," Connor informed him.
"I know."
"I mean it. I will. My father may have screwed with my head, but the memories coming back is worse."
"And I gave him to Holtz and started this all," Wesley thought. "Ruined his life twice now." He held up open palms. "Kill me if you must. Better than living with this, anyhow."
"It would be a waste of a good knife edge," Connor said, sheathing his weapon. "Sit down," he said, pointing Wesley toward the couch. Connor leaned against a wall, silent.
"Did you kill them at Wolfram and Hart?"
Connor shook his head. "No. Wasn't worth it there, either. Scared Angel pretty good, though." He paused, disgusted. "I wanted to see Cordelia, but they told me she was gone."
Wesley nodded, then asked the only question he could think of. "Is your name still Connor?"
He laughed. "That's your question? But yeah. I'm Connor Czlonka, and I was born November first, 1984." He kicked a dent in the wall, then looked up. Wesley saw his eyes were wet. "I go to Berkeley, I grew up in Santa Cruz, I have a sister named Kaitlin."
His red eyes held Wesley's gaze, steady. "Only none of that is real. None of my report cards or soccer teams or anything really existed. But you know that."
"I do," he said. "I'm sorry."
The boy moved around the apartment, restless, picking up books and putting them back down.
"I hate you," he said, conversationally, as he studied the cover of Prophecies in Ancient M'Faushnik. "I hate Angel, and I would kill Holtz myself if I had the chance, but you… Gunn told me you undid the mindwipe. Why did you have to go poking around in your memories?"
"You know the saying about a little knowledge," Wesley said. "It's dangerous. I didn't know what I'd find." And as he spoke, guilt twisted his insides: He had been reckless and desperate, and thought of nothing but his own curiosity, the bliss of losing himself in mission.
But arrogance rose, quieter than the guilt but overcoming it: He had been right.
"Glad I could help with your research," Connor said, jerking Wes out of his thoughts. "Anything else I can do for you today?"
"Yes," Wesley said, ignoring the sarcasm. He paused, ran a fingertip over his throat again. "Go away. Go home to your parents and Kaitlin and your classes, where you're loved. Forgive me. Forgive Angel. Forgive us all."
Connor laughed, a barking sound. "Forgiveness would make this all so easy. I don't even know what to forgive anymore. Don't know," he said, voice dropping almost to a whisper, "if I can forgive myself."
"I would have thought you were the only one who had done nothing to forgive," Wesley said. "You were manipulated. I was stupid."
"I killed a girl. Would have killed more people if Angel hadn't stopped me."
"This fight gets blood on everyone's hands," Wes said.
"Does it? Can I be… " Connor's voice broke and he collapsed at Wesley's feet, cross-legged.. "Holtz told me I was a miracle, a pure spirit come out of so much evil. I used to believe him. Now I know I'm just a vampire with a beating heart."
Wesley noticed, as if at a distance, the beauty of the boy's form: The long straight limbs, the heart-shaped mouth. He could not believe it held any evil. "I held you when you were a baby," he said. "I knew you when Jasmine was here, when you had as much peace as you ever knew. Holtz was right. This world made you do evil things, not your nature."
"I wish I believed that," Connor said. Wesley plunged ahead, thinking of what he would want to hear in Connor's place, thinking of how much the world had wronged him.
"Connor, you've been through … too much. You met us at your age, when Lorne's spell went wrong. You saw what innocents we were except for Charles, and even he was mostly bluster. You never got that privilege until this mindwipe gave you a new past. It's understandable that you were confused."
"Not confused. I was broken. Always. My pieces don't go together. The mindwipe made me think I knew where I fit, but it was all a lie. I don't even know if my parents - these parents - will ever want to see me again."
Wesley thought of a phone call from Giles years ago. He had hung up shaken, picturing twelve-year-old Dawn bent over homework in the Sunnydale High School library, nagging Willow for help with her math and whining about how Buffy never got her home in time to watch Total Request Live. Even knowing it had never happened, he couldn't imagine it any other way.
"I know a girl," he said. "She was magicked into existence when she was 14 - part of yet another attempt to save the world. Her sister found out she wasn't real, and she still loved her enough to value the girl's life over her own. I'm sure your parents would feel the same."
"That girl - is she okay? Knowing nothing she remembers is real?"
"She had bad days when she first found out. It's been a few years." Wesley hesitated, realizing he didn't know, could only gather so much from the scattered reports he'd gotten from Willow and Andrew. "As far as I know, she has a normal life now."
Connor shook his head. "Amazes me how many powerful people think they have the right to screw with other people's heads." In his voice, Wesley heard the echo of college bull sessions, of proving points about capital punishment or the rain forest.
"That's one thing about power - people who use it always think they're making the right choice," Wesley said, dryly.
Connor snorted. "Yep. I got three fathers to prove that to me."
"It only took me one," Wesley thought, but said nothing.
The young man sprawled back on the floor, propped up on his elbows. "So, you're the smart one, right? What do you think I should do? Angel said he would help me with whatever I wanted."
"And what do you want?," Wesley asked.
"I want something that isn't a lie," Connor answered, fierce. "Which pretty much eliminates everything."
Wesley looked at the boy, saw how much hurt was masked inside his anger. "Same Connor," he thought. "You aren't a lie," Wes said gently. "Some of your memories are fake, but you and your choices are real."
"I'm a lie. A freak with dead parents and fake memories. And, anyhow, you know who told me something was real? Cordy. Or the demon in her. And that was a lie, the night she fucked me."
The word made Wesley flinch, made him want to wrap the infant Connor in his blue blanket, start over, feed him formula and strained peas and watch him grow to be a different person, someone healthy. He chose his words carefully. "We don't know how Jasmine possessed her. I don't think Cordy - the Cordy I knew - would ever choose to hurt you."
"Still doesn't make it real. But you were screwing that lawyer, right? At least you knew she hated you. I thought Cordy was love."
Wesley's body stiffened as he remembered Lilah, thinking how much of the hatred was on his side, of her light amusement at his efforts to do good. "Lilah didn't- ," he said, then broke the sentence, unable to finish it. "There's usually more than one reason people do anything," he said instead. "Let alone something as complicated as relationships. Such as" - he paused - "Well, why are you still here? You aren't going to kill me, you know all I know, and I hardly think you plan to spend your life sulking around an evil law firm. Why not go back to Berkeley?"
There was no answer.
"I'll make some sandwiches and tea, and then we can figure out where you go next," Wesley said, standing to go into the kitchen.
He didn't see Connor stare after him, and neither man saw the tears in the other's eyes.
~finis~
The master list is here.