The sullen glow of the lamps presented an ambiance of melancholy which seemed to permeate the entire space. The small room was filled with all sorts of knick-knacks from times past, memories of a forgotten innocence. Bookshelves surrounded the walls of the area, filled with novels of grand stature that had been marveled upon for centuries before the present. Picture frames housed a sad medley of the world's past, forever preserving those much better forgotten memoirs of the very core of inhumanity.
Angel sat on his couch, musing upon his own problems. He looked about the room and hung his head. " Why do I do this to myself?" he thought aloud. Each little picture, each frame, each tiny figurine that adorned his living quarters had the power of returning some sad realization to his already depressing thoughts. He looked around the room and could do nothing but repent. That was why, he thought to himself. It makes me stronger. To go forward in the future one must always face his past, he thought. "And this is my own."
He got up and began to walk about the room. He passed over the literary works he had so often perused and looked towards his favorite, which lay alone atop his desk. He picked up the book and flipped through the pages in anticipation. "Dostoyevsky's, 'Crime and Punishment'" he spoke, reading the title out loud. Let's see what Mr. Raskolnikov is up to now, he thought as he spoke of the main character.
Angel sat back down and read the book cover-to-cover in a matter of hours, saddened by the fact that it could not have been longer. He was always intrigued by Dostoyevsky's stories, even though he had read every one of them at least fifteen times over. "Crime and Punishment" was his favorite. It was about a young man who tries to discover if he himself is capable of killing, if he is the superior man, or the "ubermonsh" as German lore would call it. In the book he discovers himself and realizes that he is not capable of such horrible things. Angel was always engrossed in the thought of if killing was ever justified, if there was such a thing as this "ubermonsh". I should know, he thought to himself. Often times the vampire would consider himself to be such a creature, to be above common law. Angel laughed sadly in realization that he himself once thought that he could be such a man. He had gone on to decimate entire villages, killing little children before their parents. He had often experimented with the babies too, seeing what would happen if they themselves would drink the blood of an immortal. He shuddered at the thought of his past self. "That's all a memory now," he said to himself. "I've changed." But how could he assure himself that he wasn't the same person as he was before, wasn't the vile creature who had inhabited his body? It was why he began helping the slayer and her friends in their quest. It was part of why he began to fall in love with Buffy.
Angel set the book down on the table and left himself to further musing. He looked at the window, still glowing with the afternoon sunlight. He remembered how he had so often wanted to walk into the morning sunlight, to greet the dawn as it came over the little town known as Sunnydale. Often times he had even taunted himself by placing the occasional finger in the path of the sunlight, followed by the hand, and the arm. He had found it amusing to see how long he could stand the intense pain brought on by that of the sun. Now he looked down at the small beam of light that had managed to sneak past his curtains and now show itself on his carpet. Those times are over, he thought to himself. That won't solve anything. "Besides, I love Buffy. I would never want to leave her." He stopped in mid- sentence. How could he be saying these things? No, he couldn't love her, it was forbidden. Alas, he did, and he knew no way one could stop loving someone by simple restraint. Enough of that, he thought. Another time, another place would be more appropriate. He returned to his thoughts.
What had intrigued him so much about Dostoyevsky was the fact that he managed to combine fiction with truth, with thoughts that had so often plagued Angel himself. He thought of the character Raskolnikov and laughed silently about how true the story was. Here was a man who committed a double-murder and was only given a few years in prison, just because several people gave character evidence that he was, "A kind man". How reflective the story was of the times, now up to thousands of years ago. Angel had read the story when it first emerged from Dostoyevsky's own hand and onto bookshelves, and several years later it had yet to leave him bored with the subject.
"Enough of that," he said as he caught the light soon dimming across the curtain, a bright orange-red indicating the sunset. He got ready for a trip to The Bronze to see Buffy, as it had been an uncharacteristically uneventful week in the little town. Angel waited for the curtain to go completely dark and then left the little apartment he called his home.
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