Funeral
Part IV

Faith stood outside what used to be Wesley's apartment, tried the door. The knob resisted her efforts to turn it; it was, of course, locked. She turned harder, and suddenly the resistance was gone. Oh, well. It wasn't locked anymore, was it?
She stepped into the apartment which had been her first refuge after leaving prison. Angelus had battered her into a bloody pulp, and Wesley had taken her here. To his home.
She stepped into his bathroom, into his bathtub. If she looked closely enough, she could see where the bathroom wall had been re-tiled.
That had been money wasted. She punched it, and then again, slamming her fists into the tile, watching it shatter until it was in as many pieces as it had been a year and a half ago. Even then, she didn't feel all that much better.
Suddenly, she heard a voice call out from the living room. "Um, is someone here?" It was a woman's voice, high-pitched, with a southern accent. Faith recognized the voice as Fred's without any difficulty.
"What if I had been someone dangerous?" asked Faith as she slipped back into the main room of Wesley's apartment. She was dangerous, of course. She had killed two men and who knew how many demons. Claiming to be reformed didn't make her less dangerous.
Fred shrugged. "I'd have screamed really loudly."
"And then they kill you."
"I can handle my own in a fight, Faith. I saw what happened to the door, though. I thought it might have been you."
Faith walked over to the wall. A one-dollar bill hung on it, held up by a dagger. "Guess I wasn't the only one to vandalize this place." On the dollar, in an elegant handwriting, was the name Lilah Morgan. Below that, in Wesley's distinctive script, was Wesley Wyndam-Pryce.
"Wesley put that there the night he went to face Vale," Fred explained. "He said he was going to do it for all of the women he had failed. For Lilah, for you, and—and me."
"Wes didn't fail me," Faith said, her voice firm. "Okay, he made some very bad decisions. But he was there for me when it counted. And you? What did he do to fail you?" Fred only looked at Faith, meeting the Slayer's gaze, refusing to answer.
Their eyes locked for a moment, the two of them together in the dead man's apartment staring into each other's eyes. For that moment, it seemed that Fred was the only other person in the world. But she knew in that moment that there was at least one other person who knew what she was going through, the pain, the burden. Then the moment passed, and Faith lowered her gaze.
"You miss him," said Fred. It wasn't a question.
Faith shrugged. "It's been a year and a half since I saw him, and I wasn't planning on dropping by L.A. anytime soon. But now that I'll never have the chance...yeah, I miss him." She paused, then exhaled. She'd never really had this conversation with anyone, not even Giles, certainly not Wesley himself. Except maybe the prison shrink (to whom she had given a strongly edited version), who seemed to have been more interested in how Faith may have projected her own troubles with her father onto the young Watcher. (Troubles? What troubles? She was just as sure as ever that all of that psychobabble was utter nonsense. After all, hadn't Buffy's Into Psych professor released a demonoid creature who had tried to destroy the world? Faith did not have an Electra complex—whatever that was.) "Wesley was my Watcher. He didn't approve of everything I did—in fact, he approved of very little I did for most of my life. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he bothered to have an opinion, that he paid attention no matter what. And now he's no longer watching, and I'm truly alone."
"You grieve for him."
"Hell, yeah. My first Watcher died too, you know. Murdered by a vampire. I watched the blood be sucked out of her. And I cried. God, did I bawl. But that didn't bring her back. Nothing could bring her back. Except the vampiric blood Kakistos gave her. That was the worse part, seeing the demon which took up residence in her body. I had to stake her. And now, I'll never have another Watcher."
"They fear you."
"I guess I gave them reason, didn't I? After what I put Wesley through, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that no one's exactly clamoring for the job. But you know what it means, don't you? It means no one is watching anymore. No one cares. I fight alone from now on. Without an audience."
Faith walked over to the desk which stood in the corner of the room, examined the contents atop it. Next to what she was pretty sure was an Oracle of Illa, there was a group photograph of Wesley, Angel, Fred, Cordy, and Gunn in an expensive-looking wooden frame, but it had been turned around to face the wall. "Fred, where's Angel?" Faith asked. "Or Gunn? Lorne?"
"Charles is dead—I think," answered Fred, her voice low, looking at the picture in Faith's hand. "Lorne is—gone. Angel and S—I don't know where Angel is. If he is?"
"How can you live like that?" asked Faith. "Don't you want to do something? Find out?"
Fred looked at Faith, and suddenly Faith saw a sorrow in the physicist's eyes which until now she had only seen in her own reflection's eyes, or Buffy's. "Wesley is dead," said Fred. "That is all I need to know."

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce
Requiescat in pace
1966-2004