crack_van | Dreaming In Blue by Uberaeryn (R)

Fandom: ANGEL
Pairing: Wesley/Illyria; Angel/Spike
Author on LJ:

uberaeryn
Author Website: none
Why this must be read:

Angel is a wonderfully dark and serious show, often heart-breaking in its depiction of isolation and loneliness. However, there are great comic moments in canon as well, and plenty of examples of strong friendships bolstered by laughter and silliness in times of great duress. It seems appropriate to close out the string of more serious fics already recommended this month with one very funny and endearing fic, which nonetheless manages to be true to the spirit of the series.

The character "Illyria" and the phrase "happy fic" are not often found matched in story summaries. But

uberaeryn presents a version of the future in which Wes survives. A few years after the events of NFA, he is slowly falling in love with a god king who likes to spend her spare time stapling things so she can work Angel into a snit. The opening description eases us into the change with hilarious details:

“Illyria? Illyria. Illyria. Illyria!”

She looked up from her work and stared at Angel, and for a brief moment he marveled once again the metamorphosis she was undergoing, the blue in her hair becoming more pronounced so that there was very little of the brown left, the blue deepening almost to black and taking on a silky sheen; the color on her face seeming to shift, even to move, it would darken and then lighten depending upon her mood or the light; and the icy tint of her eyes had changed to a deep, iridescent indigo blue edged with black. It was beautiful. She was beautiful.

***

But her beauty, however, did not change the fact that she’d fallen in love with his stapler and was now insisting on stapling every piece of paperwork that came into his office, whether it needed to be stapled or not. She worked like a seamstress, staples running around all four edges of the paper like a thin, metallic, decorative hem, making it impossible to read anything unless he pulled out the staple remover and carefully plucked out each and every staple.

Nothing he’d done had worked. He’d hidden the stapler; explained to her that he appreciated her help but nobody needed this much stapling; had asked her to please put just one staple in the upper left corner, but she hadn’t listened. He’d even resorted to sleeping with the stapler, but somehow she’d always manage to sneak past him and get it, which still mystified him; for a while, every day, he’d gone for a drive in the evening and tossed the stapler out the window while cruising down the freeway, but the next day it would be back in her hands, the same damned stapler and staples all over the place.

She’d even scratched through his name and had written all over it in big, black letters: ‘Illyria’s Stapler – Touch and Die a Thousand Deaths.’

This fic isn't just silly and fun, though it is those things too. After all, there's a stapler, and ice cream, and a birthday party with practical jokes. But it's also about about how staying in her human shell inevitably begins to affect Illyria, making her curious about relationships and interactions, and drawing her into trying them out herself. It's about the joy of learning to be human as well as the loneliness it brings, the way in which humor is both a test and a mark of humanity, and the attempts that people make to connect themselves to others to find affection.

Dreaming In Blue

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Dreaming In Blue by Uberaeryn (R)

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