Title: Until the end of the world, 3/5.
Fandom: Angel.
Characters: Connor, Faith.
Summary: It's getting worse. Faith doesn't break. Connor doesn't quit.
Connor drags Faith ashore, climbs a cliff in the face of a storm dragging her behind him on a rope. Once she's conscious, they start walking; it's a long way to Rome, and they've got no supplies, although that detail is easily rectified. Despite all the predictions of anti-capitalists and economists, the consumers actually ran out before the products.
They don't see any living humans.
By the time they find another boat, in a village near Barcelona, they've stopped talking. They ran out of things to say to one another somewhere near Salamanca, where a particularly powerful tribe of demons had made a display of their victims in a wide perimeter around the city. There hadn't been much left of the city itself, by that time, but what there was, they burned to the ground.
Connor had learned a little about Salamanca in school; one of his Professors had studied there, and used to get misty-eyed with very little prompting. With everything he's heard about the beauty of the place, he should probably have felt guilty about destroying it. He doesn't feel anything.
They don't leave any survivors behind in Salamanca, but then, they haven't left any survivors behind anywhere.
--
Connor is a survivor. He knows this absolutely; he grew up in Quor-Toth, his parents were demons, he was created to change the world. Whatever Faith is, whatever she has in her past, he knows that she can never equal this. Nothing on Earth can equal Quor-Toth, not even now, with the sun gone from the sky and the rivers running foul with corpses; Faith's childhood, compared to his own, was nothing. This is why he cannot understand why she is so strong, how she survived when all the other Slayers died.
But he learns a little more about her in Rome, watching her face when they find the woman's head. It's been placed on a spike on the steps of St Peter's. There's a demon king of some sort holding court in front of it, legions of minions scattered around, but when Faith, her face expressionless, walks out into the square to look at the head, none of them move to stop her.
Connor is standing right next to her when she reaches the spike, and its burden. Even with his hypersensitive hearing he barely hears the single syllable that slips from her lips.
"B."
Then Faith turns around, her face still blank, and kills everything in sight.
Once she's done, she announces that they are going to Africa.
Once again, Connor doesn't bother to ask why.