Lost in Their Overcoats, Waiting for the Sunset

Author: Lynne

LJ: lynnenne
Pairing: Angel/Spike
Rating: Teen for language
Spoilers: All of Angel
Beta: kita0610 ♥
Author's Notes: Characters by Joss Whedon. Title and lyrics from "Old Friends" by Paul Simon. No profit created or intended.

Summary: "Memory brushes the same years." Quiet future-fic.


**

There’s a bench, in a heavily shaded corner of Griffith Park. Where Angel can sit in late afternoon, out of the sunlight. Where he can watch his grandchildren play with their grandchildren, pushing them on swings, playing tag, tossing baseballs and those new-fangled gadgets that look like Frisbees but are made of some bizarre material that morphs into new shapes in mid-air.

Today, it morphs into a dragon, and little Charles runs up to him and asks if it’s like the one he killed. Angel sits him on his knee and tells him the story for probably the fifteenth time.

“He loves hearing that story.” Angel smiles as Charles runs back to his game.

“Almost as much as you love telling it.” The scoff from the bench next to him comes with a puff of smoke. Cigarettes are high-tech now. They don’t cause lung disease anymore, so Spike is back to smoking around humans. Everybody smokes, these days.

“Niblets going to the concert later?” Spike asks. “The POPS are playing the Greek tonight.”

Angel shakes his head. “They won’t sit still for classical music. Their parents are taking them to a holomovie. Some kids’ cartoon.” He turns to look at Spike. “We can go to the concert, though. After we clear out that nest in the hills.”

It’s taken them two centuries to get to the point where they can socialize in public. The first time Spike asked Angel to go to the movies, Angel had asked if it was a date. Spike had punched him in the face.

“Yeah. Alright.” Spike takes another drag. “Big nest?”

“Eight, maybe 10 vamps. Nothing we can’t handle.”

“Shame. Been a while since we had a decent brawl.”

Angel turns back to watch. Katleena’s hair is white-blond under the sun, whiter than Spike’s used to be.

“I saw Neil Diamond at the Greek Theatre, when he recorded Hot August Night.”

“Hmm,” Spike grunts. He’s gotten more taciturn over the years, at least around Angel. The kind of comfortable silence where you’ve said everything there is to say. Ten times. “Good show?”

“I liked it.”

“Never was much of a fan,” Spike says.

Angel reaches over and lifts the cigarette from Spike’s fingers. Spike lets it go without argument. Angel puffs, twice, then hands it back.

“This year’s the hundredth anniversary of Woodstock,” Spike says.

“Huh.” Angel’s brow furrows. “Any plans for a reunion concert?”

“Doubt it. Cultural significance is long gone. Everyone who was there is dead. ’Cept me.”

Angel turns to look at him. “You were at Woodstock?”

Spike blinks at him in surprise. “I never told you?”

“I think I’d remember that.”

“Huh.” Spike looks back toward the games. Angel can’t remember the last time Spike surprised him.

It’s sort of nice.

“Good show?”

“What I remember of it, yeah. Was high for most of it. Too much acid in the food.”

A hundred years ago. Dru would have been with him, then. Spike has barely spoken her name since they heard about her death, at the hands of one of the few remaining Slayers.

“Hendrix was bloody brilliant, though. Remember that much.”

Angel shrugs. “Never was much of a fan.”

“Figures.”

“I was into the Rat Pack, back then. Sinatra. Sammy Davis. I went to Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding.”

“No shit?” Spike raises an eyebrow. He looks almost impressed. “Never figured you for Vegas. Thought you spent the Sixties holed up in a monastery in India, or some such.”

“Tibet. But that was later.” Angel’s never actually been to India. But there’s always time. “I did like Ravi Shankar, though.”

“Of course you did. Beatles fan, too?”

Angel shrugs. “They had their moments. You?”

“Rolling Stones, all the way. And The Who. Saw them at Woodstock, too. What about Santana? You must have liked him.”

Angel shakes his head. “Bob Dylan was alright.”

“Great songwriter, but the man couldn’t sing worth a damn.”

“I kind of liked his singing.”

Spike chuckles. “You would, Mister Cat-in-the-Throat.” He elbows Angel in the ribs. “C’mon. Who else?”

“Joni Mitchell.”

“Prefer Janis Joplin, myself. Joe Cocker?”

“He sounded like a frog. Beach Boys?”

“Crosby Stills and Nash.”

A chorus of laughter rises from the shrinking patch of sunshine. Angel will have to ask Ennis what’s so funny. He never gets the joke, but he likes hearing Ennis try to explain it. He always smiles at Angel, fond and indulgent, like he’s trying to explain rocket science to a child.

Ennis is Connor’s oldest son, and his smile looks just like his father’s.

There’s about a dozen family members who meet here, on any given Saturday. Connor is seven years gone, but Angel sees his face everywhere. His and Darla’s. Ennis even says that little Charles looks like Angel. Angel doesn’t see it, but he likes hearing it all the same.

When they have family milestones – weddings, graduations – there are 34 people. Including himself and Spike. Once, Ennis’s wife asked them why they didn’t get married, now that it’s legal. Spike had choked on his cigarette.

For no reason he can think of, Angel says, “Simon and Garfunkel.”

Spike sits up at that. “Concert in Central Park. Now that was brilliant.”

Angel was at that concert. He’d known Spike was in the crowd somewhere. Hunting. He’d carefully avoided him. Things were so different, back then.

Funny how, with the passage of time, common ground appears. With every birth and death and shared battle. Memory on the scale of geology, glaciers and tectonic plates that creep along at a centimetre a year. But eventually they build a mountain. Or scour a plain, where comrades at arms can meet under the stars and share stories by firelight.

Spike tosses his cigarette into the trash bin. They snuff themselves out, these days. Automatic sensors to keep the California forests from accidentally catching fire. Angel wonders if Spike’s chip was somehow a forerunner to this technology. Thinks, maybe the thing did have its uses.

And then Spike starts to sing, somewhat off key:

"Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy"

Angel chuckles. “A hundred and eighty-seven years, and we finally found music we both like.”

“Wonders never cease.” Spike smiles, and his grin hasn’t changed since 1880.

The shadows are long now, and Angel feels it on the back of his neck as soon as the sun goes down. He and Spike both stand at the same time. The kids are calling to come and push them on the swings. Vampire strength means they can fly almost to the sky.

“So. Concert tonight?” Angel asks as they amble towards the gaggle of small, eager faces. “What are they playing?”

“Beethoven, I think.”

Angel smiles, pleased and surprised. “I like Beethoven.”

“Me, too.”

Another mountain moved.

“Race you to the swings,” Angel says.

“You’re on, old man.”

But as they’re running, little Charles runs up beside them with the dragon held aloft. “Grampie Angel!” he yells. “My dragon can beat you and Grampie Spike!”

So of course, they have to let him win.

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