A/N I know, I know, this part has been a really long time coming. But the site was having problems, and then my computer got a virus, then I got a virus, and. . . . Anyhoo, here it is, finally, the next part. Please send me lots and lots of feedback. The more I get, the more I want to write.
Past Echoes
**********
Unsure of what to do next, slayer and watcher stood staring at each other. The echo of the door closing drifted through the quiet apartment. Both occupants of the room knew that that sound signified an enormous change in their lives. But neither Wesley nor Faith knew what to do next. The closing door was closing not only the apartment from the world, but the pair from their pasts as well. And neither of them were any good at new beginnings. They always seemed to lead to bad endings. This was one case where practice hadn't made perfect.
Faith began to be uncomfortable as the moments stretched into minutes. She shuffled her feet as she stood there staring at her once and future watcher. Faith actually shuffled her feet, and caught the girlish behavior, about to sharply reprimand herself when her foot brushed against the paper among the remnants of the box that still remained strewn on the floor. The envelope under her foot seemed out of place to her. Moreover, it just felt wrong. And Wesley had been uncomfortable about something in the box. She had felt that too. But she didn't want to draw any attention to it. It had made her curious and Faith always tended to satiate her curiosity. So she casually pushed it back with her foot as she knelt to finish picking up the mess. She placed the remaining items back in the box with one hand while pocketing the envelope with the other. She managed to hide the movement from Wesley as he bent down to pick up the box.
"I'm here with you less than ten minutes, and I'm already wrecking the joint. I guess I'd better get a handle on that, huh? I mean, since you seem to be willing to let me stick around for the time being."
Wesley looked as if he was going to speak, so she held up her hand to stop him.
"Forget it watcher man." She stood up, walking towards the kitchen as Wesley put the box on the table and looked around his apartment with weary eyes.
"You need to save your voice. Don't talk." When he tried again, she looked at him sharply, causing him to stop.
"Me first. I have a voice. And a story that we need to figure out. I'll talk, you think." She continued to the kitchen, his eyes following her movements as she filled the kettle with water. "And drink tea. You drink tea, right?" She glanced at the almost healed cut on her hand from the china service. "Yeah, you drink tea. It's English, you're English. Besides, it's soothing. For your throat and all. You need that. Trying to talk."
She said all of this while she puttered around his kitchen in a very domestic way. Wesley watched the brunette with interest and no small amount of skepticism. Faith had always been the furthest thing from domestic that Wesley could have imagined, even if she was good with a knife. He unconsciously rubbed his wrists at the thought, as though the ropes still bound them.
"Don't look at me like that, Sir British. They have a kitchen in the joint. And they sometimes make you work there." She chuckled at the look on his face at her joking about prison. But Faith believed in that old philosophy, something about laughing or crying.
And Faith was no crier.
Before Wesley could wrap his mind around the fact that Faith was making him tea, he was sitting on his couch, amidst the papers he had never left there, and listening to her think aloud, puzzling out why she was now free.
* * * * *
He sat in the darkness, the glasses that he usually wore set aside on the table. He ran his hand through the hair that was getting a little longer than he normally wore it, and looked at the girl asleep on his couch. Could she really be called a girl? After all, she no longer was one in numbers. And the watcher wasn't sure if she had ever been one in life experience.
He looked at her sleeping face again, and he decided that yes, in sleep, she was a girl. In sleep, she regained that innocence that she had lost so very long ago. Wesley suspected that it was something she had lost long before she had been called. Faith was the opposite of most people. She had the nightmares while she was awake. It was when she slept that she escaped them.
He watched her sleep, heavy thoughts weighing on his mind.
Her eyes had started to droop while she was telling him what had happened, how Lindsey McDonald had come to her, how she had stood in front of a judge in clothes that should have belonged to someone else, and hair softer than she wore it. It still fell around her face in untamed curls, instead of the waves that she usually tamed it into. She had told Wesley about how she had stood there and heard the judge saying that Lindsey was right. That her rights had been violated, how it was unconstitutional to keep her in prison. And now she was free to go.
She spoke of how she had stood there in the sunlight, staring at the sky, not believing that it had happened.
Not knowing where else to go, she had headed towards her watcher, not knowing how he would take it, not knowing how he would take her.
"It's one thing, you being okay being my watcher when I am behind bars, but quite another when I am free and can hurt people," she had said.
She was much harder on herself than Wesley had imagined Faith would be. He could still hear her words, echoing in his head.
"I killed people Wesley. People. I don't deserve rights." She had told him this after relating the judge's decision.
Plus, she had hurt him. She had been unsure how he would accept her, but she had come to him.
And found out what had happened.
Or part of it, anyway. He knew she had been reading through the material strewn through the apartment. Things that Gunn and Fred had to have discovered. And he had felt compelled to tell her the truth, to tell her his side. To tell her what he hadn't gotten to tell his "family".
It had been right after she had told him about seeing him in the hospital that he had once again tried to talk.
And once again, she wouldn't let him. And she did something the others hadn't. She understood. Without the benefit of words. Even if she didn't know the whole story.
"Don't." she had said, hands held up at his indrawn breath and open mouth. "I know that you are going to try to explain how you ended up in that hospital bed, but don't. With me, you don't have to."
At her words, he had released his held breath.
"I'm not entirely sure what's going on." She had continued. "Angel seems to have a kid, and I don't know how." She had held up her hand to stop him before he had even tried to speak. "And you'll explain it all, in a couple of days, when your voice comes back. But I know you, man. You're a good guy. A white hat. Whatever you did, you did out of necessity, not out of cruelty" She had sighed then, turning into couch and bringing her knees up and her feet on the cushions, "Not like me." Her head had dropped onto the back of the couch, her cheek, brushing the fabric as she yawned. "Cruelty's my bag, not yours." Her eyes had drifted shut, and then back open as she fought to stay awake. "I guess I should get . . ." She never finished the sentence as she lost her battle and succumbed to sleep.
As she had relaxed into sleep, she had curled in on herself, laying on the couch with her knees pulled up to her chest in a very protective gesture.
A gesture he had found himself in when he had awakened from the nightmares that first night in the hospital. After Angel had tried to press the breath out of his body.
And his heart went out to her.
He covered her with a blanket, wishing that he had the strength to carry her to the bed, before realizing that she probably wouldn't have appreciated the gesture. She was too tough for things like that. At least that was the image she tried to project. But he couldn't go to his room, leave her there to wake alone on the couch. It seemed so cold.
So he sat. And he watched, as a watcher was wont to do, and he marveled at how his world had shifted when he had walked through his apartment door.
* * * * *
The very first rays of the early morning sun needed only to touch the dark slayer's face in order to wake her from her restful slumber. It was an instinct that she had gotten from prison, she supposed. It certainly wasn't a natural slayer instinct. Her slayer instincts told her that sunshine was the best time to sleep. It was the time of day when her enemies had to run off and hide from the cleansing and killing rays of earth's biggest star. Daylight had once been welcomed and cherished by the slayer.
All that had changed in prison.
You couldn't sleep while others were awake. It left you vulnerable. Open.
Faith couldn't sleep in the daylight anymore.
She'd have to get over that.
The brunette woke with that feeling of disorientation you get when waking in a new place. It was no longer disconcerting.
Faith couldn't remember the last time that she had awakened without having that feeling.
Even in prison. She had never been comfortable enough there to have that feeling of familiarity, and was glad. To her, that would have meant belonging, and although Faith longed to belong somewhere, she had never wanted to belong in prison. So she awoke suddenly, pushing a handful of curls out of her face and trying to come to grips with her surroundings. But the pounding disorientation ended when her eyes landed on her watcher, asleep in the armchair nearby.
That was when the curiosity had taken over. Why hadn't he gone to bed? He was still healing. Why had he stayed there? And why had he covered her with the blanket she now clutched, for only he could have. For one brief moment, Faith imagined that it was because he cared about her. Cared about Faith. But the warm glow faded a little as she realized that he did care. As a watcher did. About his slayer.
Still, it was more than anyone else had cared in a long while.