Author: Meltha
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: Yes, thank you. Meltha
Spoilers: Through the BtVS episode “Angel”
Distribution: Fanfiction.net and the Bunny Warren. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: Owen meets a fellow booklover after Buffy dumps him.
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.
Author's Note: Written for maleslashminis’ minor character round for silentflux who requested Owen/Angel, nothing terribly angsty, blood, ice, and a Rumi poem. The quotation is from “Reality and Appearance.”

In the Stacks

After Buffy had refused to go out with him again, Owen felt awkward going back to the library. He knew she spent a lot of time there hanging out with her friends, which just went to show how much deeper she was than she let on. But for Owen, the books were his friends. He missed them, missed the reassurance of Emily’s quiet lines and Byron’s sturdy verses, the timelessness of the Bard’s words. He wasn’t quite ready to admit to anyone other than himself that he missed Ginsberg’s work too, but he did.

At first he tried the public library, but its collection wasn’t very good. He could never figure out why they had so many books on sewer maintenance and so few on nineteenth century romantics. Just when he felt like he would practically die if he didn’t get a leather cover in his hands again, he discovered a tiny secondhand bookshop off Maple Lane, just a few blocks from his home. As soon as he opened the door, heard the bell above it jingle in greeting, and was hit by the earthy smell of old paper and ink, he knew he’d found exactly the right place.

Owen discovered the poetry section quickly enough. It was towards the very back of the shop, tucked into a corner that was full of shadows. Happily, he ran his fingertips over the spines of the volumes of Burns, Rich, Angelou, Basho, and Tennyson, sighing in satisfaction as though he were taking in their words through touch. He never noticed the other man until he literally ran into him, knocking a small red book out of his hands and to the floor.

“Sorry,” Owen apologized immediately as he bent to pick it up. It wasn’t entirely clear whether he was apologizing to the man or the book. “I should have been watching where I was going.”

“It’s fine,” the man said, apparently deciding the words were meant for him, though Owen seemed almost startled at the sound of his voice. “The whole point of poetry is for it to take you somewhere else. Just, not usually before you open the book.”

The man smiled, and something about the turn of his lips was almost painful, as though he weren’t used smiling. It was sad and somehow tragic, and Owen couldn’t help finding that sort of attractive. Owen looked at him closely. He was a tall guy, broad through the shoulders, and his hair and eyes were dark. In fact, he could easily have been the emotionally tortured hero of a gothic romance: Mr. Rochester immediately leapt to mind, swirling through misty moors and brooding about forbidden mysteries and past moral errors. But there was something else familiar about him, something much closer to home.

“You’re that guy Buffy talked to in the Bronze,” Owen finally realized.

“Yeah,” he said, turning back to the shelves, his voice somehow as dark as the shadows. “That’s me.”

“She’s not my girlfriend or anything,” Owen found himself saying quickly. “She sort of dumped me.”

“Did she?” he said, and the smile got just a fraction larger, and maybe a degree or two warmer into the bargain. “What was your name again?”

“Ehm, Owen,” he said, and it was nearly a question. At the moment he couldn’t seem to manage recalling such very difficult pieces of information as his own last name or how to move his feet or possibly breathe.

“Angel,” the other man said, extending a hand.

“Neat name,” Owen said as he shook the hand offered to him, then suddenly pulled back involuntarily. “Wow. Your hand is like… ice or something.”

He mentally kicked himself because he should have come up with a better simile, like frozen rivers tumbling from a glacier or the breath of winter on the Siberian steppe. Ice was so… banal. Plebian? Mundane? Maybe he really shouldn’t have read that entire thesaurus in sixth grade. Ever since, he’d had a tendency to go off on mental tangents looking for the perfect word, and it could get kind of distracting.

“I’m always a little cold,” Angel said as he put the book back in its place.

“Like the world,” Owen said, sounding melancholy. He found he had a knack for that.

“Maybe,” Angel agreed, and if Owen had melancholy down pat, Angel sounded like he’d had a century of practice at being morose. “You like poetry?”

“Yes,” Owen said breathlessly, feeling suddenly back on firm ground. “It’s just so… poetic, you know?”

Angel nodded, not even smirking at his poor choice of words.

“Exactly,” he said, as though that were enough, and somehow it was.

The two of them stood looking at the books in the sort of companionable silence that exists only between booklovers who have found one another. At length, Angel took another book off the very bottom shelf, his fingers removing it reverently from its place. Its cover was pale green, and a line of golden writing was embossed across the cover in flowing letters that looked Arabic.

“What’s that?” Owen asked.

“The collected poems of Rumi,” Angel said, carefully opening the book. Owen could see that it was entirely in another language.

“Can you read it?” he asked, then kicked himself at once because if Angel had been able to read the title he could obviously read the inside, but Angel took a different meaning from the question.

Slowly, words came off his tongue that were completely foreign to Owen, a sort of musical river that took him someplace exotic and far away from the ordinary, humdrum world of Sunnydale where nothing interesting ever seemed to happen. He stood mesmerized, watching the other man’s lips move sinuously as they formed the syllables, and Owen couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to have those lips moving against his own. The thought startled him more than a little; it was so blatant. There had been those brief fantasies, of course, that starred Mr. Giles or, oddly, Larry the school bully, but he’d always thought he was pretty much straight. Right at the moment, though, he was leaning so heavily towards bi that he was threatening to topple over.

It took him a few seconds to realize Angel had stopped reading and was just looking at him as he stared dumbfounded at the other man. Owen licked his lips, which had dried completely, before he was able to speak again, and he could almost swear that he saw Angel’s eyes glow just a little in response.

“So… what does it mean?” Owen finally managed to say.

“’Tis light makes colors visible: at night, red, green, russet vanish from thy sight,’” Angel said softly.

“Night, that’s like… death, right?” Owen said.

“Actually it’s about God,” Angel admitted, “but somehow, when I read it, I always think of how things have changed, how the light that used to be there isn’t anymore.”

“And everything’s faded,” Owen finished for him, “sort of sapped out, like the colors in an old photograph.”

“Something like that,” Angel said, agreeing. “Did you find anything you like?”

“Uh-huh,” Owen responded a bit breathlessly, then came back to himself. “I mean, Dickinson. I’m going to get the Dickinson.”

There had to be a copy in here somewhere, he thought, trying to cover his slip as he scanned the shelves at top speed for his old friend Emily. He wondered briefly what she would think of all this. She’d probably write a poem about it, he decided as Angel handed him a copy of her work that had been practically in front of his nose. The poem would be dark and serious. And probably have bees in it.

“Thanks,” Owen said, suddenly a little bashful. “Are you going to take the Rumi?”

Angel nodded once, looking at the book in his hand.

“Maybe something else, too,” he said softly, and his hand was suddenly stretched towards Owen’s face, the fingers sliding softly over his cheek in almost the same way he would touch a particularly precious volume of poetry, running one finger delicately along the spine as though silently worshipping what was inside it. His eyes fell closed as Angel’s fingers brushed gently over his lips. Not quite aware of what he was doing, though some corner of his mind was still alert enough to be grateful for the shadows, he parted his lips, and the barest tip of Angel’s index finger came between them for a moment before his hand continued its path and circled the curve of his chin, lifting it as delicately as china.

There were lips now. Oh, Owen thought, oh, there were lips. He’d been right about those lips. They coaxed over his own, drawing forth a passion he didn’t know he was capable of feeling until now. Suddenly all the love poems he had ever read made sense in a way they never had before, and he knew this was what it was like to feel that swell of emotion that threatened to engulf someone whole. It was a little similar to what he thought dying must be like. As Angel pressed Owen’s back into the bookshelf, he could practically hear his friends catcalling and whooping in happiness, including Emily, who in his mind had a quite high little whistle, and of course Ginsberg was snickering lustily, but then what else would he be doing.

Owen was dimly aware of the taste of blood in his mouth, not that he really cared. Apparently the kiss had gotten a bit rougher than he realized, and he’d cut his lip on something. In the one percent of his brain that was still functioning on higher levels, he couldn’t figure out what he could have cut it on. Angel didn’t have braces, did he? No, he would have noticed that. But there was still something sharp there, and then, quite suddenly, Angel pulled back.

He looked up at him and panted a little. He’d gone rather a long time without breathing, not that he was complaining, but Angel had turned completely away from his, a hand up to his face.

“You need to leave, Owen,” he said, and there was a slight lisp to his words.

“But… why?” Owen asked. He wanted… something. He wasn’t quite sure what that something was, but he wanted it, wanted it badly enough not to care who saw him kissing the other man in the bookshop.

Angel glanced at him, the thinnest sliver of his face visible in the dim light, but it was enough for Owen to put two and two together. He remembered that sort of face only too well. Heck, he’d probably never eat another can of pork and beans as long as he lived.

“You’re a…,” Owen started.

“Yeah,” Angel said. “You really need to leave. Now.”

His head bouncing up and down wildly in agreement, Owen turned and fled, not realizing he was still clutching Emily until he was back in the safety of his own home. He felt completely heartbroken, so he made one of the biggest ham and cheese sandwiches he’d ever had (the cheese was brie, of course, not so much because he liked it as he liked the sound of it), then sat down at his desk in his bedroom, pulled out a fountain pen and a piece of paper, and began writing an epic poem about unrequited love between a monster from the pits of hell and a mortal who saw beyond his darkness. When he was finished, he sighed in contentment.

“Apparently,” he said to Emily, “the only thing more satisfying than reading about anguish and having false illusions shattered is living it.”

Emily may have quirked an eyebrow at him if she had really been there, watching him as he snuggled himself into bed, happy finally to have something that qualified as genuine angst.