A/N: Phew! I'm really gonna kill whoever invented homework. You would not believe the amount of work I had! Hence, no updates...until now! Lol. :-D

Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, nyah! (Apart from what is, but we went through this already!).

Dedication: To Milly Dowler- rest in peace.

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Gracia raced out onto the broad balcony, skidding to a halt. Her dark eyes were riveted on Cecelia. Cecelia was standing completely still by the battlements, staring silently ahead of her. This indifference only served to increase the young Slayer's sense of furious betrayal.

"You..." She shook her head. She still couldn't understand.

Slowly, Cecelia turned, her sweeping robes brushing the balcony floor. Her eyes were cold and scornful, but she wasn't the Watcher any more.

She was the traitor.

"Don't start sentences you have no end for." Cecelia snapped. "You should be down there battling with your brother, and friends, and boyfriend." Each category was spat out as though they were bitter.

Gracia forced a deadly calm to veil her. "You were one of them. I had to come after you." Then she realised exactly what Cecelia had said. "Boyfriend?"

"That blonde vampire you all call Spike." She studied the confusion on the girl's face haughtily. "Oh, don't act so surprised." she retorted. "I can tell you think highly of him just by the way you look at him, by the way you act around him. You are a disgrace."

Gracia might have blushed had she not been so angry.

"And you're not? You signed a pact with vamps to get me and the others killed! And you were supposed to be helping me!"

Cecelia's eyes flickered away momentarily before looking back at her. Venom sharpened her voice until it was as keen as the dagger blade she had held to Gracia's throat earlier. "I knew you were too weak to survive without any help. Couldn't stand on your own two feet. Incompentent, immature idiot."

"How dare you?" Gracia hissed. "You're not exactly picture perfect. You think you're so great, but you're not. You're the nothing. You're pathetic."

She wasn't prepared for the Watcher's next move. One of those pale hands lashed out and slapped her viciously across her left cheek. Gracia reeled back with a shocked gasp, clutching at the pained flesh. Cecelia clenched her fists.

"Never, NEVER, call me that!" she growled. "You don't know what I've been through! You don't know what it's like to be dying of stomach cancer!"

There was silence for a long, long time, apart from the faraway sounds of battle, as this sank in. She gaped at her in disbelief. Cecelia smiled bitterly, the first real smile Gracia had ever seen on her pale face.

"You...you're what?" she eventually managed to stutter, still holding her stinging cheek.

Cecelia laughed, high and cold. "For once, you're silent. What, didn't the Almighty Slayer realise that I was dying?"

Gracia was still confused, shocked, startled. "What? But...I don't understand...how?"

Cecelia's smile became a vicious smirk. "Shut up and I'll tell you a little story."

And so Gracia stood in silence on the balcony and listened.

"My whole family have always been Watchers. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents...you get the idea. I was to be the next, my whole life planned out for me whilst I was still developing in my mother's womb. I was never a child in their eyes. I was the family's honour, I had to uphold it.They never loved me.

"When I was three, my mother contracted cancer of the stomach and died. Nobody mourned her passing or ever spoke of her. She, to me, was merely the stern-looking woman glaring down from the family portrait above the fireplace.

"My father was distant, too concerned with his work to notice a daughter. On the occasions he did notice me, it was to criticize and reprimand. Eventually, when I was sixteen, he left London to train a Slayer in New Zealand, and I saw nothing of him until I was twenty-one. A week after his return, he was killed in a battle against some demons. This gave me the escape I needed.

"I left the Watcher's Council, for whom I was by this time working for, and travelled the world to learn about my real interest- magick. Good and bad. But I soon discovered that if you truly wish to succeed in anything, evil is the only path."

Gracia shook her head. "Cecelia..."

"Shut up!" the woman snapped. "Don't interrupt!

"This continued for several years. All the while my strength increased until one day I began to feel...strange. Tired. Sick. I had never known such feelings until then, but for months I tried to explain them away. Eventually, I went to see a doctor and they told me plainly. I had stomach cancer like my mother but it was too late to cure. At twenty-nine, I was told I would die of some mere illness. Not exactly the glorious end I had planned, wasting away alone in some hospital bed. There was just one solution to my problem.

"I returned to the Watcher's Council in London, using my powers to disguise and ease my condition. After explaining an excuse for me disappearance those years ago and almost begging, I was allowed back. I don't deny that IA used a few little tricks to gain my will, but they aren't important. The fact remains that I was restored to my former position without much question. I worked hard- kept my head down. Nobody knew the extent of my powers or of my increasing illness.

"A couple of years had passed when the next Slayer was called in Belfast. You. I used my magicks on the minds of those fools at the head of the Council to ensure that I was Chosen as your Watcher. Because I had heard of Zachary and your parents' thoughts to leave Ireland."

Gracia's eyes narrowed slightly but never left Cecelia's. "but what difference would it make? I had a Watcher, first of all, right at the beginning."

"A temporary one to instruct you in the basics." Cecelia sneered dismissively. "he left as soon as he was sure you could cope, which was just as your family's move was finalised."

Gracia knew she was right but didn't want to admit it. "So why was there so much trouble about you becoming my Watcher?"

"At my age, I was younger by far than most Watchers have ever been. But simply spells on their minds told them that my years of absence accounted for research and first-hand experience, and so I was stationed here shortly after you moved in. But I came before it was required of me to do so so that I could seek out and associate myself with these vampires you have battled today.

"I hid my identity, calling myself by a name of power. Ambulo Mortuus, as you heard earlier. I continued to mask my cancer by magick and luckily the vampires seemed to not notice. Usually, they'd smell the death on me, the ever increasing power of it, but not this time.

"Zachary reluctantly accepted my help in the Resurrection because his desire to raise the Anointed One was so great. He may have been proud, but he was no fool. He knew he needed my help to achieve what he wanted, and my price for aiding him was relatively small."

"What did you ask for?" Gracia queried, voice a whisper of dread.

Cecelia straightened herself a little. "I asked to become one of them. A vampire."

Gracia couldn't stifle the sound that escaped her upon these words, a shocked sound almost like a sob. Cecelia was obviously dismissive of such emotion and looked her up and down mockingly.

"Oh, don't be so immature!" she snapped nastily.

"But..." The impossibility of it all weighed heavily on her soul. "But if you became a vampire, you'd be dead anyway. Don't you understand that?"

"Of course I do!" Had she been a normal person, perhaps her tone may have been desperate. But as it was, it remained hostile and cold. "But tell me, what would you choose? To die or live on in whatever manner possible?"

Gracia stood to her full height, her face serious and showing how certain she was of her answer.

"I would die a thousand deaths sooner than become a vampire."

Cecelia did something unexpected then.

She laughed.

It was longer and worse than the last, a hard, stony sound that made a shudder run up Gracia's spine. The accompanying words were just as harsh.

"Well, what else could I expect from someone who has had a life as easy as yours? When I cast those spells to harm your family and those worthless associates of yours, all you could think about was them and the comfortable existence you shared. You were never scorned and hated by them. You never faced a crisis."

With a strangely stunned shock, Gracia realised that there was a note of bitter jealousy in the woman's voice. But she pushed it aside as her defensiveness rose.

"I haven't always had it 'easy'. I was left on the streets as a baby! I lived in a children's home until I was five!" Gracia shot back angrily. "And even now I have all my family and friends, I find I've been Chosen as a vampire Slayer! That's not easy, either!"

Cecelia sneered. "Oh, aren't you such a martyr! I guess you're fortunate that your own stupidness will kill you long before you endure as long as I have." Her eyes slid away at this point, just briefly, towards the hard ground below. Then she spoke once more, very slowly and with more coldness than ever before.

"Thirty-three years of my existence is too long." she said. "It is about time I ended it all."

Gracia always wondered afterwards why she didn't understand those words until the woman moved suddenly. She cried out her name in horror.

"Cecelia!"

There was a thump, then only the sound of her heart pounding in her chest, blood roaring around her skull.

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The last vampire was dust.

Apart from a few more serious cuts, everybody seemed fine. None of the injuries were that major, Angel decided, nothing a quick first aid kit couldn't solve. Luke was walking with a bit of a limp, but seemed to have decided it was unimportant. Angel made a speedy count up, then froze.

Gracia wasn't there.

"Where's Gracey?" he asked, panic beginning to seep through him. "Has anyone seen her?"

They all stared at him, faces slowly showing a share in his emotion.

"I saw her stake Zachary," Willow said, biting her lip. "He didn't harm her."

"And then?" he questioned.

She lowered her eyes. "I was trying to fight a vampire off me."

"I know where she is."

They all turned to see Spike sidling up, calmly wiping his bleeding nose on the sleeve of his duster. He stared back at them nonchalantly as he searched his pockets for a cigarette. A few moments passed until Angel roughly prompted, "Where?"

Spike smirked and said nothing, lighting up an uncovered smoke and taking a deep drag.

Seeing that Angel was very likely to lunge at his grandchilde to stake him any second, Willow intervened, "Spike, tell us, it's serious!"

He rolled his eyes and tossed the cigarette aside. "Her Watcher went upstairs, so it follows that the Slayer went after her." He gave them a look as if to coin a popular Sunnydale phrase and add, "Duh."

Angel didn't hesitate in heading to and up the rickety stairs at breakneck speed, the twins and Wiccas following closely. Spike hesitated, then rolled his eyes again and set off after them.

Angel was the first through the abandoned office and out onto the wide balcony. For a desperate moment, he couldn't find her, until...until his eyes were drawn to a dark shape near the floor of the balcony.

Gracia was huddled against the railings, arms tightly wrapped around knees drawn up so high that of her adverted face, only her eyes could be seen. Her wide, staring eyes set in a face that was pale and blank, which she turned up towards them at the sound of her name.

"Angel?" she whispered. "Guys?"

"Where's Cecelia?" Angel asked, offering her a ahnd to help herself up.

Uncurling slowly, Gracia gave the quickest of glances over her shoulder and swallowed hard. "She...she...oh god, she..."

Angel peered briefly over the railings to where the Watcher's broken body lay in a hideously contorted position on the cold earth far below, eyes emptily staring skyward. She was too obviously dead.

Gracia hauled herself up with Angel's help, wrapping her arms around herself. His gaze snapped round to her immediately.

"You're shivering."

"I'm fine." she assured him, sounding anything but convinced by her own words.

Saying nothing back about that, angel took off his coat and put it over her shoulders, his arm also around them to support her.

"Let's go." His voice was plain and tired, reflecting all of their emotions.

And so the seven left, the battle won but no victorious feelings except relief within them.

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EPILOGUE ON THE WAY! I'll start typing it up soon. As for now, please review and tell me what you think! Thanks!