Author note: Big thanks to everyone who has offered me feedback. I live for the stuff!! And an even bigger thanks to Kel, the world's best beta. Girl, you rock. Now, on with your regularly scheduled fic already in progress….

**********

Cordelia sighed loudly at her desk, tapping the eraser of her pencil rhythmically against the wood. She could feel the slow scream rising up in her body, and she was very close to letting it out.

For the past hour, Fred had been walking back and forth before her desk. She'd walk to the left and fidget with an object on a counter. She'd walk to the right and fidget with another insignificant object on another insignificant counter. Back and forth. Back and forth. She had not stopped.

"Fred!!" Cordelia finally exclaimed, tossing her pencil onto her desk. "Would you just say what's on your mind already before you walk a hole in the floor?"

Freezing in front of Cordelia's desk, Fred replied with an innocent smile, "Nothing's on my mind."

"So, there's no real motive behind your let's-see-if-we-can-drive-Cordy-insane walk besides driving me insane?"

"Okay," Fred sighed, fidgeting with a dainty butterfly bracelet on her wrist. She glanced around the lobby for a moment to assure no one was listening to their conversation before leaning in and whispering, "It's Wesley."

"What about him?"

"I think… I think maybe you should go to see him."

Cordelia frowned in response. "I will… when the time is right. Right now, I need to focus on Angel and getting Connor back."

"But Cordelia…"

"Look, Fred, Wes and I go far back. I won't deny that, but he took Angel's son. Wes is my friend, and I will go see him eventually because he is, and will always be, my friend. But not right now…"

Fred shrugged slightly. "I just thought that maybe if you talked with him…"

"Fred, why are you on this Wesley thing suddenly?"

Fred shifted her weight uncomfortably before admitting, "I… I went to his apartment this afternoon to return some of his belongings I found lying around the hotel. You all told me that we had to clean his stuff out and I did, but then I got to thinking that maybe we should take his stuff to him and…"

"Fred," Cordelia interrupted, concerned by the girl's nervous ramble, "what did he say to you?"

Fred fidgeted with her bracelet more intensely as she began to babble again, "Actually, he wasn't there. There was… A naked woman answered his door. Well, not naked naked because she was wearing this big fluffy bath towel but…"

Cordelia held up her hand to stop Fred's ramble as she asked, "A naked woman answered his door?"

Fred nodded. "She was pretty." With a mumble she added, "In a skanky kind of way."

Cordelia sat back in her chair, letting the news sink in for a moment. After the moment passed, she frowned deeply and sighed. "What is it with men and drowning their guilt by sleeping with skanky women?"

"But Wesley wouldn't do that," Fred argued, even as her face showed her doubt.

"He's a guy," Cordelia fumed. "Of course, he'd do that."

"Not Wesley," Fred said, shaking her head, determined. "He's a good man. He would never do that."

"And a few weeks ago, we would have said that he would never betray us like he did, but he did. Wesley may be a good man, Fred, but he's not the man we all thought we knew."

Cordelia turned her attention back to her computer as Fred remained in front of her desk, silent. Fred took a deep breath before asking again, "Could you talk to him, Cordelia? Please?"

Cordelia closed her eyes, breathing in deeply. "I will," she said quietly, slowly opening her eyes.

Fred stood her ground, staring at Cordelia in silence.

After a moment, Cordelia turned to the girl, giving an exasperated sigh. "Look, it's getting late, and I'm sure he's going to have his hands full with his little friend. So, I'll go see him in the morning. It's not like he's going anywhere."

Fred finally smiled at her. "Thanks, Cordy," she praised as she finally left Cordelia in peace.

Cordelia had to give the girl credit—she didn't give up easily. She supposed it was finally time to go see Wesley, but what would she say to him once he opened his door to her? She couldn't forgive him, her heart wouldn't let her just yet, but she wanted to understand. She needed to understand why he did what he did, and this would be her chance to finally hear the story in Wesley's own words.

**********

"Even with the whole kick-ass-now, ask-questions-later makeover, you're still a stuffy British guy at heart," Faith teased as he filled her wineglass.

"I'll take that as a compliment," he replied as he placed the bottle in the center of the table with the open pizza box. He sat down across from her as she took a big bite out of her slice of pepperoni pizza.

"So, how was your stay at the prison?" he asked, before taking a bite of his own slice.

Swallowing hard, Faith replied with an exaggerated giggle, "It was a total blast. Everyday we got to sit around and draw pictures of rainbows and tell stories. And every night, we had pillow fights and painted each others toenails and braided each other's hair."

Wesley smirked in response. "Glad to see your sarcasm remains intact."

Faith laughed, taking a large sip from her glass. "It wasn't any different than any other day in my life. It was all about staying out of trouble, or at least not getting caught, and proving that you take shit from no one."

"And you learned nothing else?" Wesley asked, genuinely curious.

"No, I learned," Faith replied, her expression turning serious. "I've learned from my mistakes. I have."

"I believe you," Wesley replied earnestly, taken aback by the distressed look hidden in the girl's dark eyes.

"Do you?" she asked, skeptical.

"I do." He shrugged as he added with a smirk, "You've always been a quick learner."

"I have to be. Not a lot of second chances when it comes to the guards," Faith replied, biting into her pizza. "You bust someone's skull in the yard, and they won't hesitate to bust yours."

"I guess that's a good lesson to learn in life, but at least now you won't have to worry about all that."

"For now." She finished off her drink and reached across the table, grabbing the wine bottle and refilling her glass to the rim.

Wesley raised an eyebrow at her as he asked, "You plan on murdering someone sometime soon?"

"Authority hates me," was her response.

"That doesn't exactly answer my question, Faith."

"Authority hates me," she repeated. "It's only a matter of time before I slip up, and do something that pisses them off. It's just the way my life works. I'm all about living my life to the fullest, pushing the boundaries, you know. That's what makes me feel the most alive. That doesn't mesh well with authority. You should know from experience."

Reaching for a second slice, Wesley replied, "Living your life to the fullest doesn't always have to involve you getting into trouble."

"Isn't that some kind of oxymoron?" Faith smirked.

"It doesn't have to be."

"Look," Faith replied with a soft sigh, "don't worry about me. I got a handle on it. If I can survive a couple of apocalypses, I can survive this crap." She grabbed a second slice of pizza as she continued, "Besides, I'm sick of talking about me. So, who's Fred?"

"Fred?" Wesley's voice perked at the mention of Winifred.

"Yeah, the girl who dropped off all those journals and stuff of yours."

"Angel Investigations has grown since you last saw us. Fred's one of our newest members. I guess you could call her the brains of the operation now."

Faith bit her lower lip before replying, "I know you said it was off-limits, but what's the deal with you and this whole separation from Angel and Cordelia?"

"It's a long story," Wesley sighed, sitting back in his chair.

Faith leaned forward in her own chair with a slight shrug. "It's not like I've got anywhere else to be."

Wesley took a few large gulps from his glass before talking. "Last year, after a dark period, Angel had sex with his ex-vampire lover Darla…"

"And I hit the pause," Faith interrupted with a tilt of her glass. "Okay, I know I wasn't the best Slayer-student, but I thought that anytime Angel got laid, we were all screwed… so to speak."

"And technically we should have been," Wesley shrugged, "but we weren't. It turned out that his little rendezvous with Darla ended up creating a human child." Wesley paused for a moment, raising an expectant eyebrow at Faith as he asked, "Would you like to hit the pause again?"

"No," Faith replied, sipping from her drink, "I'll tell ya when."

Wesley nodded, a slight smirk on his face. "Darla staked herself in order to allow the child to live. He seemed perfectly normal—ten little fingers, ten little toes, a beating heart. Completely human."

His smirk softened into a reminiscent smile as he mentally recalled Connor's early days with the family. "Connor, Angel called him. A good Irish name. He became Angel's reason to be, like any child to a new parent."

The smile turned to a deep frown as he continued, "A prophecy arose that the father would kill the son, which I took to mean that Angel would kill Connor. So to stop what I believed to be the inevitable, I took the child. In the end, I was tricked. Tricked by everyone. The child was taken from my arms as my throat was slit and I was left for dead."

Wesley watched Faith's dark eyes travel down to his neck, searching for the scar she had failed to notice throughout the entire day. Her eyes met Wesley's piercing blues again as he said, "And that's where the story ends. I betrayed my friends, who will probably never forgive me. I'm out of a job, and thus am searching for some other means to bring money into my home. My life is frankly empty and worth nothing right about now."

"Wow," she frowned. "That really… sucks. I wish I could come up with a better word than that, but I kinda can't get past sucks."

"I think sucks would be the most appropriate word at the moment," Wesley replied, finishing off his drink.

The two sat in silence for a moment, neither knowing what else to say. It seemed that everything had been said. The secrets had been spilled. The dark crevices had been revealed.

Faith finished off her second slice of pizza, tossing her uneaten crust back into the box. She wiped her hands on her napkin as she smirked, "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you successfully bring down the room."

"How ironic that it's my life that is depressing you," Wesley scoffed as he poured the remainder of the wine into his glass.

"You know," Faith replied, pointing a slender finger at him, "the old Faith would have gotten up from this table and mopped the floor with your ass, but I'll let that little remark of yours slide this time. That one was free. The next will cost ya."

"I'll keep that in mind," Wesley smiled.

"So," Faith sighed, running a hand through her hair. "What do you do for fun around here besides brood and feel guilty and read your stuffy old books?"

"Do you play darts?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Faith raised her eyebrow as well. "You shoot pool?"