Rating: PG
Summary: When a bird flies into his window, six year old Wesley tries to bring it back from the dead.
Wesley sat by his window working on his Latin by reading the Aenid. He had only recently started it, and was enthralled by the description of the Trojan war. When Laocoon said, "Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes," Whatever it is, I fear Greeks, even when they bring gifts Wesley wanted to shout out to the Trojans to listen to his warning, and not bring the horse in the city.
He was so enthralled that he almost fell out of his seat when something slammed into the window and he saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of his eye. Whatever had hit the window and fallen to the ground, but he couldn't open the window to look. So he put down his book and ran downstairs.
He ran out into the crisp spring morning and around the house to the ground below his window. There lay a sparrow which had flown into his window. The bird lay still on the ground.
"Mommy, mommy, mommy!" he shouted as he ran back inside.
His mother came barreling out of the kitchen, and nearly ran him over.
"What is it? Wesley? Are you hurt?" she asked.
"A bird," he told her. "It hit my window. It's hurt mom."
His mother sighed with relief. "Come dear. Show me your bird."
He took her by the hand and led her outside.
He pointed to the bird, "Make it better?"
She crouched down by the bird and looked at it for a minute.
"I'm afraid it's dead Wesley. I can't help it"
"Why?"
"Sometimes bird's fly into windows, dear. They don't see the glass. It just happens, you can't do anything about it." He looked as if he were going to cry. "Why don't you get the shoe box from your new shoes and we can burry it? Give it a proper send off."
Wesley nodded and they went inside to get the shoebox. His mother got some newspaper and they started back outside when the telephone rang. His mother answered the it.
"Hello? Mother, what a surprise. Oh really?" Wesley tugged on his mother's skirt. "This really isn't a good time, Mother. Can I. . ? Right, just one second." She covered the mouth of the receiver with her hand. "Take the paper ,dear, to pick it up with. Don't touch it with your hands." He nodded. As he started to head out his mother called after him, "Don't dig up the flowers. Bury it under the oak."
Wesley nodded again as he went outside. He picked the bird up using the newspaper and put it in the box. He was very careful not to hurt it further. He looked at the sparrow as it lay in the tissue paper that had once held his shoes. It looked just like a live bird. It just didn't move. He thought that if he could just make it move, everything would be all right.
Then he had an idea. He crept back into the house carrying the box, careful not to let his mother see. Then he snuck into his father's library.
Although he'd been in the library many times, he'd never been there by himself. He wasn't supposed to be in there alone because many of the books were dangerous.
Even so, he knew how to use his father's index to locate books. His father had insisted that Wesley know the system, and how to correctly return a book when he was done.
After searching through the index, he found a scroll listed as a resurrection scroll. Unfortunately it was on one of the top shelves. Warily, Wesley looked at the rolling ladder that led up to the high shelves in the room. He'd been up the ladder before, but it scared him. His father always held the ladder still for him, but even so Wesley was afraid he'd fall off.
But then he looked at the bird again, and made up his mind. It was his window it had hit. His fault. He'd fix the bird. He'd make it better.
He rolled the ladder until it was lined up at the right shelf. Slowly he climbed the ladder, careful not to make it shift. He reached the shelf and looked for the scroll. He saw it, but it was out of his reach. His father would have simply pushed the ladder along from up there, but Wesley climbed down the ladder, moved it, and then climbed back up.
He got the scroll and sat down by the bird to read it. As he opened it he scrunched his brow. He didn't know what it said; it was written in a language he wasn't familiar with. However, the alphabet he did know. Whatever the scroll said, it was written in cuneiform.
He thought that spells often had components, but he wasn't sure what to use. He looked around his father's library and saw several candles sitting in a box on his desk. Wesley grabbed the box and began to set the candles in a circle around himself and the bird. He wanted to light the candles but he wasn't allowed to use matches so he settled for unlit candles.
However, it wasn't a full circle. He knew it was important to have an unbroken circle on the floor.
He didn't see anything in the room he could use, so he crept out of the library into the rest of the house. His mother was still on the phone and he quietly made his way past her into the kitchen.
He opened the door to the refrigerator and took out a jar of mayonnaise and took it back into the library. For several minutes he struggled with the lid. Finally he got it off. He dipped his fingers into the mayonnaise and began to make a white circle around the candles on the floor. When he was done he put the lid back on the mayonnaise, put the jar back in the fridge, and wiped his fingers off on the towel on the stove.
Now that he was finished setting out the circle, he noticed the library window was closed. He figured he should open it, so that the revived sparrow didn't fly into a second window. He dragged a chair over, and struggled to force the window up. After several minutes of trying, he managed to open the window.
Wesley placed the box with the bird in the center of the circle. He sat down indian style in front of the bird, before slowly beginning to sound out the scroll.
At first nothing happened. He had read about a third of the scroll. Just when he was about to give up, and look for a different scroll or book, he began to feel a tingling. Excited, he began to read faster. The language became easier to sound out and it almost seemed to make sense. The words began to glow.
"WESLEY!" his father bellowed, but Wesley didn't notice him. His whole world had become the scroll, until it was snatched out of his hands.
Wesley squinted. The scroll had left an after image on his eyes. It seemed he could almost make it out. His father shook him by the shoulders to get his attention.
"Wesley? Wesley?"
Slowly he came back from wherever he had been.
"Father?"
For a moment there was a look of relief on his father's face. It was immediately replaced by one of anger.
"What on earth were you doing, boy?" his father snapped at him.
"The bird. . ." Wesley was still a little out of it. "I was trying to-"
"To what? Get yourself killed? Raise on army of zombies? Do you have any idea the powerful forces you were tapping into? I had expected better of you. And what will your mother say when she sees the carpet? Go to your room!" his father barked.
Upset, but grateful to have been spared more yelling, Wesley escaped to the safety of his room. Once the door was closed behind him, Wesley threw himself on the bed and began to cry.
Once again he'd let his father down. He always did that. His father was right; he would never be a Watcher. The academy would never accept him.
"Wesley?" His mother's soft voice carried through his door.
She opened the door and sat down on the edge of his bed, gently patting him on the back.
"Wesley, I thought we were going to bury the bird?"
After a few moments of breathy sobs, Wesley answered her, "I wanted to save it mum."
"Wesley, it was dead. It's nice that you wanted to help it, but when something dies, you have to let it go."
"Why?"
"It's the natural order of things, Wesley. We can't interfere with that. It was that bird's time to die. All things have a natural time appointed to them, nothing we can do will change that."
"Then what's the point? Why do we fight evil. Aren't we interfering whenever we stop a vampire?"
"No dear. It doesn't work like that. We fight vampires and demons because they are not part of the natural order. Do you understand the difference?"
Wesley shook his head.
"Alright dear, why did you want to bring the bird back to life?"
"Because it hit my window and it stopped moving. And I thought I could make it better. And there wasn't anyone else and-"
"You felt bad?" his mother interrupted.
He nodded.
"As if it was your fault?"
He nodded again.
"Wesley, don't you see? You weren't helping the bird because it was the best thing for the bird. You were helping it so you would feel better. It wasn't a selfless act. We become Watchers, so that we can give our lives selflessly for the good of the world. We can never let out personal feeling interfere with that." She studied his face for a few minutes looking to see if he understood. "Someday Wesley, you're going to be a great Watcher. But for now I think you should stay out of your father's library, and away from his books."
He wiped the tears from his eyes, and nodded at his mother.
"There's a good boy. Oh and Wesley? Let us keep the mayonnaise on the bread from now on."
After his mother left, Wesley spent a lot of time thinking about what she had said. He didn't understand it all. He still didn't know why it had been wrong to try and save the sparrow. All he knew was that even though he'd failed, he felt better for having tried.
Holding Connor in one hand and his suitcase in the other, Wesley looked around his flat. He felt nothing. This place where he'd lived for the last couple of years held no pull for him. It was just the place he'd slept. He'd left his real home just a little earlier when he'd walked out of the Hyperion Hotel for the last time.
There was no going back. The prophecy was clear. "The father will kill the son," and Wesley would do whatever he could to prevent it from coming true.
It was hopeless he knew. That was the first thing they taught you at the Watcher's academy. It was hopeless. You could not win the fight against evil, and every Slayer died. All a Watcher could do was stand in the way. Hold up some small amount of light and hope it was enough to keep the darkness from taking over.
But that didn't matter now. Wesley was aware that by taking Connor away, it was entirely possible he was setting in motion the events that would lead to the child's death at his father's hands. He was prepared for that. He'd thought it over. If he did nothing and Connor died, he'd never forgive himself. It was better to try and fail than to do nothing and hope things worked out.
He wasn't just doing this for himself, but for Angel as well. No one had ever believed in him the way Angel had. Angel had taken him in when he'd been abandoned by the Council.
Kidnapping his son might seem like a poor way to repay that friendship, but he couldn't let Angel commit such a heinous crime. The pain Angel would experience when he lost his son would be better than the pain he'd suffer if he killed his child.
At least Wesley hoped that was true.
He had everything; he was ready. Events had been set in motion. He had prepared as best he could. There was nothing left to do but drive away and let the future unfold.
"The readiness is all," he said to the darkness as he turned his back on his old life.