1793.
Angelus’s favorite invention had been the flintlock pistol. A bit messy, perhaps, if you hit an artery directly, and yes, it wasn’t very sporting (the cat lets the mice run, Dru sing-songed, or else it spoils the soup)
…but since when were they sporting?
Just like tapping a tree, my love, he’d tell Darla, and fire.
1905.
Angel had liked gas lamps, the forgiving light of them, the shadows they cast, the lamplighters of New York, who kept the same hours and called him by name.
Electricity didn’t smell of anything.
1913.
He rode the Overland Route so many times that the rocking of it was lodged somewhere in his bones, mountains emblazoned on the back of his eyelids. At night he would climb onto the roof of the car and lay there, wind tugging at his shirt-tails, looking up at the stars.
1923.
The first time he heard a Victrola played, his soul (twenty years in and still raw, aching, ill-fitted under his skin) had burned, overwhelming and brutal as death. Angel had panicked, he had thought this some fresh twist of the curse—
It wasn’t until he saw the woman beside him smiling so beatifically that he remembered—joy.
1948.
There’s a shoebox somewhere around of the Polaroids he took—chorus girls smiling over the rim of their champagne flutes, Bugsy Siegel with his tie askew, the main street lit like daylight (though it looks dinky, hokey compared to the sprawling behemoth Las Vegas became.) There are flashy cars in the artificial light, smiles, cowboy hats and hills.
There are a few of him, mixed in there—when someone wrenched the camera from his hands, forced him to sit still. Don’t you want to be immortalized? they’d always ask, laughing, before the shutter clicked.
In those few photographs at the bottom of that shoebox, Angel looks suddenly fully of grief.
1969.
He was two hundred and fifty, crowded around a television in the back room of some shithole bar with more than a few half-drunk demons and one mildly disapproving bartender. When, They had watched the grainy footage silently, everyone holding their breath as a man in white stepped out, onto the grey surface of another world, and said for mankind.
Damn, one of the demons breathed softly. Look at that. Nothing but fire and a tin can, and the little monkeys actually did it. They did it.
Angel was silent, thinking of those two men, millions of miles from the earth, defying the cold silence of eternity just by breathing. Just with hope.
1997.
Buffy gave him a Tamagotchi once, because—well. Buffy.
It was inexplicably still in his pocket the day he was resurrected from Hell; it was still there the day he finally said goodbye to her. But he lost it somehow, moving to Los Angeles, or it got left behind, or—
He hoped its new owner was feeding it properly.
2003.
Search engines. He might still type with his pointer fingers and get confused about which buttons do what, but the day he realized that someone had scanned most of the really important 17th century grimoires and made them keyword-searchable was the day he surrendered to the computer age.
The day he stumbles onto Cordy’s audition reel, it’s like—
He’d forgotten how bright her smile was.
+1
He really likes his rolodex, okay? So everyone can just stop with the 80s jokes.
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