Title: An Ordinary Boy
Author: Troll Princess
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Knock yourself out.
Author's Note: Last week, my friend Don and I were discussing Connor when we had an epiphany. Several epiphanies later, this quirky little theory that will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever show up on either show emerged. (And don't expect a sequel. Because my brain is all gyah right now.)
Title Note: Blatantly ripped off from the lyrics to "Superman's Dead." Which, by the way, continues to be a kick-ass song no matter how many times I listen to it.

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An Ordinary Boy
by Troll Princess
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... because it's been one hundred and seventy-seven hours, forty-three minutes, and a handful of seconds, and neither one of us has slept, or shaved, or bothered with those annoying showers. So of course, Cordy continues to yell at the office door, pounding, raging against it, and Gunn keeps on telling her to lay off, and neither one of us has heard Fred's soft, smiling voice since Friday.

We have a phone. We have a mini-fridge. We have the Internet and access to a bathroom, not to menion that we know everyone else's sleeping hours. We may never leave.

Speaking terms were an issue on Monday.

"Pass me the Zoologica Libertarium, would you?"

By now, he doesn't even have to bother to ask. We've been in here so long, there's a pattern now. Books we've both read from front to back by the door. Books I haven't read, propping up his side of the table. Books he hasn't gotten to yet, stacked sky-high between the two of us. He's right about at the third syllable in "Zoologica" when I slide it wordlessly towards him. He takes it up in one swift, subtle motion.

Our gestures became finely tuned dances on Tuesday.

And now Cordy's trying to bash the door in -- again -- which would be funny if it weren't so inconducive to studying. I'm in the middle of glaring at the door when the phone rings. We learned fast after the first day not to take calls on the company line. Wes soundlessly removes his cell phone from whatever pocket dimension he's been hiding it in and says, "Talk."

We stopped being polite on the phone on Wednesday.

Wes's voice, raspy from disuse, drowns out Cordy's desperate pleading from the other side of the door. Cordy, who just got back from vacation days ago to find Connor gone, Gunn and Fred guarding the office like obedient sentries, Wes and I hidden inside for nearly a week, only coming out when we can get away with it.

Cordy came home on Thursday. She hasn't left the door for more than four hours total since.

Meanwhile, Wes is rambling on the phone, his voice sounding a little more stunned than usual. We've been getting calls at all hours from his contacts, feeding us whatever information they could find. And it still wasn't enough.

"Sarah ... no, no, I haven't forgotten. I just haven't seen you in so long, I thought ..."

On Friday, we were positive we'd found a reference to a Holtz in the 13th century, in what was present-day Germany. Turned out the man was barely a teenager when he'd died in battle. So, not Holtz, then.

If we look hard enough, though, we'll find him.

We will. Him and Connor.

And Wesley starts up again, all confused and maybe a little irritated. I can't blame him. After all, we're on the same mission, aren't we? "Sarah, didn't anyone tell you? No, about our research. Look, now is not the time ... This can wait, Sarah."

So I catch him glancing at me over the books, his blue eyes slightly questioning, like he wants to ask me something but can't bring himself to. I cock my head, a silent inquiry. He shakes his head, deadly serious --

-- and then it's gone.

He's frozen, solid, unresponsive, and he just continues to stare at me with slowly widening eyes and pasty white skin fading to translucent. His mouth opens, just a tad. The temperature in the room drops ten degrees.

"What?" he says.

And just like that, Cordy shuts up. As if she feels it, too. What the voice on the other end of the line has to say, what it means.

I only have a second to ponder that she might have picked up the phone and listened in when Wesley shoots up from his seat, the dark circles under his eyes now almost black instead of a tired, faded blue, and he snaps, "Fax it, now -- forget about our bloody research, just fax it!" before he hangs up.

"Wesley, what's going on?" I ask.

But he's not paying attention to me. For the first time in days, I don't exist to him.

So he flings the phone to the side, and he aims wrong so the phone slams into the wall and cracks loudly even before it hits the ground. I'm still staring at it when the fax starts spitting out sheets of paper, and I glance over anxiously at Wesley, hovering over the fax machine with his hands gripping the edge of the desk as he stares it down.

As soon as it stops reeling off the papers, he snatches them from the machine, skimming them over with barely restrained excitement. Then, he looks up at me, hands trembling, and when he finally speaks, his voice cracks like brittle glass.

"Oh, my God," he says.

The words fall around me like anvils, shaking the floor below me, whisking the world out from under me. And I stretch out my hand, demanding, "Let me see."

He doesn't hear me. Can't listen. Can't drag himself away from what he's seen, and just seeing his reaction fills me with ice water and fire from head to toe. "Then it is true," he says. "One way or another, you did kill your own son."

Oh.

I don't --

Oh, no.

I reach for the papers again. "Wesley, let me see."

His blue eyes darken, and he glances between the papers in his hands and my anxious, needy expression. He sighs then, and before I know it, he hands me the papers.

So I'm shuffling through the papers, and I'm sure at first that this is like all the other information we've dug up in the past days. Useless, toying with my hope, using me up even more.

But then I get deeper, read further, and my soul drops away from me.

Oh, God.

"Oh, God" is right.

And that's when I start laughing.

************

... so I haven't stopped laughing since we hit the highway, this weezy hysterical laughter that can't decide whether to precede a crying jag or pure insanity.

And I'm not really all together with it when I blurt out, "I killed him."

Wesley glances over at me, jaw muscles tensed up, fingers gripping on the steering wheel with enough strength to turn his knuckles white, and he says, "You didn't kill him, Angel. It was my stupidity that --"

"Wes."

He stops talking, and I get the impression he can feel my guilt weighing on him from the other side of the car.

My voice is raspy from the laughter when I say, "I made the weapon that killed him. I forged it, I fine-tuned it ..." The words trail away in dawning horror and revulsion, and I add, "It may not have been at my hands, but I killed Connor just the same."

And I nearly laugh again, harsh and hollow, as soon as I say his name.

************

... but we're walking through this cemetery, this graveyard that looks just like a knockoff of every other cemetery I've ever been in, and all I can think of are the little things.

Dru. I think of Dru first and foremost. Something she once said sticks in my head, runs in circles and replays over and over again. Something she said when Spike and I were fighting once, about the king of cups going on a picnic.

In tarot, the king of cups stands for an important male figure in someone's life. And vampires on a picnic ... well, you can guess what they eat.

Usually not small, wriggly human children that they fathered, but you get the idea.

"You sure about this, Angel?"

So I nod blindly, because it's all I can do, and because I can barely focus on Wesley walking beside me, I have no idea whether he buys it or not.

Darla. Darla comes to mind. She insulted Connor in the womb like it would make him go away, make him vanish into thin air. Not like she hadn't tried it before. The first time she'd seen Spike, she'd called him a drooling idiot, or something like that.

A flash of white marble out of the corner of my mind, and I'm dragged back to reality, me and Wesley and a blessedly empty graveyard.

"We don't have to do this," he says, and when I look at him, I finally see what a hundred and seventy-seven hours in the same room with me as done. Pale and haunting (haunted) in the darkness, wrinkled clothes hanging loose from his frame, this shadow in his eyes that wasn't there before.

"I do," I say. "Don't have much of a choice. I have to see ..."

My voice trails off, because I'm honestly not sure what I have to see.

Spike, I think about. We'd all known his human name. After the first few cracks Darla had made, about how Liam used to be short for William, after all the Angelus Jr. jokes she'd tossed out capped with a teasing smile, Angelus had gathered up a few hot pokers and some holy water and had made sure she'd never make another joke about it again.

I never bothered to find out his last name.

But now ... now ...

"Do you want me to go back to the car?"

I shake my head, stare at Wesley in more terror than I've ever felt in my life. "No. No, I can't do this alone."

He nods curtly, and we keep walking, keep dodging tombstones on the way to see what's left of my son.

Spike, again. There's this thread in my brain, making connections, tying knots, weaving conclusions. His poetry and my sketches. His early defiance, and how it reminded me of the way I'd treated my father. Far too familiar eyes, lips, cheekbones. And, if Harmony was any indication, his thing for ex-cheerleaders.

And my gaze drifts down to the worn, manhandled paper in my hands, dirtied from checking it too many times, like if I looked at it one more time the names would change. So I don't see it when we stop walking, and I don't see it when Wesley knocks on the door before us.

"Bloody hell!" echoes from behind the heavy door, and I glance away from the sheet of paper in my hand, the words "William Holtz" still etched across my brain.

"Slayer, that you, pet?" he says, and there's a split second where I shut down, where I look to Wesley for guidance and find just as much fear and uncertainty as I'm feeling, where I'm pretty sure that any reaction I have in the next five seconds will be grossly inappropriate.

And then the door swings open, and he's there.

Oh, God. I can't do this.

His lips curl in that arrogant smile of his, and he says, "Peaches? What are you doing here? Wrong turn at Albuquerque?"

I can't speak. I can't ... I think I left my vocabulary at home.

But then I start spotting these quirks. Darla used to tilt her head just so when she was amused. Used to lean just like that, with the same relaxed swagger contained in one graceful, non-walking motion. Used to get that same wicked glint in her eyes at the first sign of trouble.

I'm amazed I never spotted it before.

And all I can bring myself to do is hand him the paperwork and say the words I've been dreading since we left L.A.

"Spike, we need to talk."