Work Text:
Wesley
Every Father's Day Wesley locks himself up in his apartment with an enormous quantity of good scotch.
It doesn't work unless he's drunk enough to forget about how the neighbors can probably hear him shouting bitterly at a man who isn't there and breaking the bottles against the wall.
His mother notices that he always finds an excuse to call the day after Father's Day, the guy at the liquor store notices the large purchase and Angel and Cordelia notice he doesn't come in that day.
No one says anything when he shows up the next day disheveled and hoarse.
Cordelia
She checks the computer calendar for client appointments, and stops in surprise.
It's Father's Day. Huh. How the time flies when you're working your ass off.
She leans into her hands. She hasn't talked to Daddy since...geez, it feels like forever. Not since high school and the whole IRS thing and graduation and coming up to LA to make it big.
And that's just...well, if she's learned anything in this line of work it's that life is short, and probably damn shorter than you thought it'd be.
She locates her address book and starts flipping through it for his number.
Angel
Fathers are highly overrated.
When you come down to it, what do they do besides ensure the actual production of an infant? They don't cook, they don't clean, they don't take care of the children, they don't love the childr—
Really, these days, women can basically support a child or two alone—any more than that and you're just adding to the overpopulation problem anyways.
And now men can just deposit some...seed in a bank, and the woman can do the whole thing without them.
Father's Day is a pointless exercise in idiocy, and Angel refuses to take part in it.
Fred
Fred quietly finishes chewing her tree bark, and settles against the cave wall.
Tonight she's in the kitchen with her father, making fried chicken in delicious heaps like they always do for Father's Day dinner. The kitchen is a greasy mess, but it only makes them laugh harder and fling bits of breading at each other while her mother knits in the dining room, clucking her tongue at them goodnaturedly.
A branch cracks in the wind, and her eyes fly open with a start, fantasy interrupted.
She tries to pretend that her parents' arms are around her while she cries.
Lorne
They celebrated a sort of Father's Week in the fall. But instead of the picnics and the greeting cards, there was more ritual sacrifice of cows and beating of children, especially for the grand disappointment of the Deathwok clan.
Lorne doesn't miss it. It was terrible in Pylea, and he barely ever saw his father unless there was an all-my-children style family gathering.
So why is it, he muses pensively over a sea breeze, that he always gets so guilty and mopey when he checks the Pylean bisolar cycle on his PDA and realizes it must be time for Branash?
Gunn
He never told nobody cause it would just make them feel sorry for him. He don't like pity.
But yeah, he knew his dad. Stuck around for a few years he still remembers—like he'd known he wouldn't have much time with him—or that's what someone way sappier would think.
Doesn't really care—gang was always his real father, guy just hung around for a while, showed him the ropes he was high enough to reach.
But he always remembers when it's Father's Day, and he makes sure to get to the street he died at and stand there for a moment.