My Aching Heart (AtS Drabble)

[cordy69]

Title: My Aching Heart
Author: Pat
Rating: PG
Word Count: 503
Characters/Pairing: Wesley (Angel the Series)
Summary: Wes reflects on his concept of Family.
A/N: set Season 5, just after he killed the robot impersonating his father.
First Word: Family
Last Word: One

Part of the Whdeonverse Spring 2011 Story Tree


Family was my downfall; every time. As a young and lonely boy, I resented being sent to the Academy, away from the warmth of my mother kitchen, from the warmth of my daddy's study. Turning six meant becoming a man, being cast away from the house I grew up in, becoming the pride of my Dad, turning away from the only home I ever knew. I embraced it, and quickly learned to loath it, regret it, rebel. The United Kingdom has a long tradition of formal but impersonal education that trains it’s youth to be the intellectual, stated and accomplished society members the general status quo needed. It wasn’t something I could understand but it was something that too quickly became ingrained in me. The cane yielded on my poor backside by a series of headmasters made sure of it. For the holidays, we were allowed home, to a degree of comfort and love we were most certainly deprived every other day in these far away educational institutions. At first, I lived for those, relishing the food, the hugs, the attention. But as teen years claimed me, family became something else.

Now, I was part of a pack. Not the leader, never the leader, but one out of many; protected by the group, anonymous but yet untouchable. My deeds could now go unpunished, as long as my sole devotion was to the group. Each boy became a part of me, my extended family; more important and true than my real family ever was. They lost that privilege when they sent me away, telling me through their actions that the world was more critical to the man I was to be than their nurturing could produce. I miss them at time, most often than not I worked relentlessly at becoming someone else. My emotions had to be locked deep; my body and its hormonal urges had to be reigned in; my intellectual abilities pushed to their max. That’s how you become Headboy at the Academy, how you show to your Father that you matter, how you show to the World that you exist. All of this backed up by the underground fraternity that took me in and grew to be my safeguard, my de-facto family.

I have gain and lost more families with time. I am no longer a Watcher; I cannot be trusted with a Slayer. I have gone into the World a babe, unprepared but idealistic and came back a broken man. One that did the unthinkable: Patricide. I can’t think straight about what this action means but I can feel my heart break, in thousands of pieces. My mind can’t comprehend why the man that governed most of my actions from afar laid at my feet, wasted by my own bullets for a woman that have refused time and again to become my real family. The one I choose to create, rather than the one loosely made by Angel and the cohort we are. Not that I’d ever regret that one…



The End.