Title: The Borogoves

Chapter 8: Antipodes

Rating: R for language/themes

Disclaimers: Not mine. "Antipodes" means "the other side of the world," and is a British term for Australia & New Zealand. Apologies to residents of NZ, about which my knowledge comes from the Encyclopedia Britannica and the I Lord of the Rings /I films. As for these films, the real reason Wesley doesn't like them has nothing to do with New Zealand, or Tolkien. He's still reeling because Fred dragged the gang to a 9 hour showing of the trilogy and spent the whole time squeeing over Viggo. Harmony is a Legolas girl. Lorne prefers hobbits, although Middle Earth is really a bit too Pylean for his comfort. Angel fell asleep in the first five minutes. Gunn and Spike stuck around for the fighting, but they threw popcorn during the exposition scenes.

Thanks: To lj user"inlovewithnight" and lj user"stoney321" for early comments and insights. "Interfectum" is Stoney's word, but a lot of people, including lj user"Paynbow" , lj user"smashsc" and lj user"daveworrell" weighed in on the Latin.

N.B: picks up right where the last one left off.

I Antipodes /I

"Do you have something to tell me," Wesley asked, "about New Zealand?"

Roger fixed his gaze on his son and took another long slow drink of the old Scotch. "New Zealand," he began slowly, "is a remote land, one which lies far from the nerve center of the Watcher's council. Historically, it was one of the last sizable territories, suitable for habitation and population, to be settled by humans. . ."

"And the capital is Wellington, there are more sheep than people, and the major exports are sheep parts and overpraised film adaptations of derivative, dubiously idolized fantasy epics. I was rather hoping you would tell me something that I didn't know."

"And I was rather hoping," said Roger, without a change in his monotone inflection, "that you would shut up for two minutes and overrule your narcissistic impulses long enough to actually listen to what I have to say. Remember, I didn't even know your mother then."

Wesley's grip tightened around his glass. "I didn't ask if you cheated on Mother." His voice rose along with his heart rate as he spoke. "I asked if you fucked a sixteen year old girl, sent her off to die, chopped her into little pieces, and then came home and told anyone who would listen about how she wasn't completely human."

"Whether."

"What?"

"I didn't ask I whether /I you cheated, et cetera. . .that would be the preferable construction in this instance. Instead of 'if.' And don't take that morally superior tone with me; you can ill afford it."

"Morally superior?" Wes repeated, disbelieving. "No, Father. I think I get to be morally superior about this."

"Once again, your sarcasm serves no purpose but to block up your own ears." He shook his head, and sighed before going on. "You've come a long way to hear my story, son, so do yourself the favor of listening. In 1958, the Watcher's Council faced its greatest nightmare. The previous slayer had succumbed, but although we believed we had located every potential, not one of them showed signs of becoming active. We went on a mad scramble worldwide, searching for signs that we might have missed. Despite all the modern methods of communication, despite the magicks at our disposal, it was the longest period of interfectum – the time between the slayers -- since the seventeenth century. We had to resort to the ancient methods, traveling the world, drawing on underground sources and folk legends. A girl in the jungles of Brazil who slew a leopard with her bare hands. A street urchin in Khartoum who broke the necks of a gang of rapists. The stories amounted to nothing – exaggerations, misapprehensions, or out and out lies.

"Finally, it was the vampires themselves who led us to Mina. They spoke of a thing on a distant corner of the South Island, a thing too terrible to name. A gang had set upon a village of peaceful people, outside at night for their harvest festival. It should have been a massacre. But it was the vampires who were destroyed. Dusted, to a man, all by the same small girl. All except for one. She cut off his ears and gouged out his eyes, leaving him to find his way home by the sense of smell. And she carved a symbol into the flesh of his back; fear, it meant, in her language. This girl became the thing that they feared, and she sent him back, as a warning to his people."

"I I have /I read the Chronicles, Father," Wesley sighed. "I remember the story." I I've told that story, /I he thought, cringing at the memory of his pompous young self giving penny tours to his school fellows. Then he went on to tell it one last time. "Watcher follows the rumors to the girl's village. Chief captures Watcher and threatens his life. Chief's daughter risks her father's wrath by putting her life on the line to save the Great White Watcher, becomes the Pocahontas of the Tasman Sea. After which the Father consents to turn his daughter over to the Watcher, to be her guardian. Everyone knows that story."

"I'm not telling you the story," Roger snapped, "I'm telling you the truth. Bloody hell, schoolboys really will soak up any rot they print in a textbook." Leaning across the table, he spoke more quietly. "Mina wasn't the chief's daughter. She wasn't anybody's daughter. She was an orphan with no status in the village until she fought off those vampires. She was fourteen then." He shook his head. "I met many of the Maori in my time in the country. I fought beside some. They are fine people, noble people, and their traditions give them a conduit to powerful magicks. But the chief of Mina's village was not noble. He was a corrupt, petty, power-hungry man, such as you find in any hierarchy."

"Including the Council," Wesley said dryly.

"Including the Council," Roger said without missing a beat in his story. "This man saw Mina for what she was, a great warrior and natural leader. All the things that he could never be himself. And her power frightened him. He quarreled with his own holy men. They wanted to elevate the girl to her natural status and honor her as a warrior and a hero. The chief drove them away. It was one of them, a great wizard by our reckoning, who led me to back there. At last. But it was two years from her first battle to the time that I came to the village. And what do you think the chief did with her, in that time?"

Drawn into his Father's telling against his own will, Wesley said, "I don't know."

"Oh, don't you? I think you can guess. He made her his concubine. He hoped to raise strong warrior sons out of that stock." Roger leveled his gaze at Wesley. "She was fourteen," he repeated. "And she couldn't give him children. Perhaps she was too young. Perhaps her body knew she needed her strength, and simply resisted conceiving. But she was nubile enough for him to keep her, until he got bored with her. And then he passed her down to the village elders. And then they got bored with her. And so on. She had no vampires to fight. Her warning had served for that; they have stayed clear of that region to this day. The village had no need for her in combat. And so when I found her, our Chosen One had spent two years doing nothing much. Nothing much but being raped by every man in that village."

Wesley thought of the lovely, vibrant teenager he had seen in that picture, the girl he had imagined into a sister. He remembered the fights he had started in defense of Mina's honor. But it wasn't an adolescent's idea of a girl's virtue that disturbed him now. He actually wanted to be able to spare the girl from such unthinkable pain, even pain that had been over for more than forty years. And he could only do that by denying it. "Surely," he said, "I can see they might have wanted to do that to her. But she could have fought them. She was stronger than any of them."

"Stronger than all of them," Roger answered. "And she knew her own strength, or at least she had an idea of it. She had dreams, the dreams of the Slayers. She hated everything those men did to her. And she knew, the whole time, that she could break any one of them with little more than a finger. But she didn't. Because she believed those were the men that her god had placed in charge of her. And she felt that she hadn't the right."

"Dear God," Wesley said quietly.

"Oh, it's an old story. Not a pretty one. But perhaps now you understand why the Chronicles prefer to take the focus off of the Slayer's personal history, and on to the Watchers. The manifestation of power in the girl has rarely been well-received."

"But then the chief gave her up to you?" Wesley asked.

"Oh yes, I became her guardian. That part is true. And do you know what miraculous instrumentality brought that to pass? Cigarettes. The chief had no interest in my money, not in a place that remote. And so I bought my Slayer for twenty cases of Lucky Strikes. And I truly believe the man considered that he was cheating me blind."

"And then?" Wesley prompted, still trying to fit everything together. His father's words, the history he was learning, the girl in the picture. "Happily ever after?"

"And then I took her to Auckland, set up a household, and began a course of education. Social graces, ancient and modern languages, mathematics, and combat. Over three years, I taught her to channel her innate power until she became one of the most powerful slayers this century has known."

"And just incidentally, you fucked her."

"You keep coming back to that. Rather obsessively, I might remark. It's the Puritan streak surfacing again; the Scottish and American blood on your mother's side, no doubt."

"It's hardly Puritanical to believe that a man shouldn't take sexual advantage of a girl who is under his care. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yet you're ready to excuse it, because she'd been used worse by other men before you? That's rather like justifying the European slave trade because some Africans were slaves already. But that's garbage. Don't insult both of our intelligence. Mina's people treated her like a whore, and then you paid them off – cheap – and she became your whore. Only this time with clean sheets and trigonometry."

Roger leveled a warning look at his son. "Don't use your facile analogies to cheapen things that you can't understand. Mina was brilliant. The quickest study I ever saw. A scholar's mind and a warrior's intuition. And pretty, of course, but they're always pretty. The primal power that chooses these girls doesn't waste its time on ordinary ones. Mina was beautiful. Luminous. Divine. And fierce. And hard. The child in her was long gone by the time we met. Part of her what those men had made her, but at the bottom, she was more than that. She was a force older than time. She was Slayer. She was hard like a diamond is hard, and the only thing that can cut into it is another diamond. There was no working halfway with Mina. You had to be together with her in every possible way. And we were. Together. And that was our strength."

"Stop," Wesley said, looking down at the table and shaking his head. "Please stop, before you feel compelled to tell me you loved her."

"Is that so difficult to believe?"

"Yes," Wesley snapped, then looked up and studied his father's face. "No. Maybe it's not so difficult. Because a man has to love something in his life. Even you, I suppose, only I could never make out what it was. Certainly never Mother or me."

Roger's eyes narrowed. "And what is it that you think you've loved? You've never been with a woman the way I was with Mina. I can look at you, and I can tell that. So what do you think you have loved? Vampires? Demon lawyers? Finding ways to humiliate me in the eyes of the Council?"

Wesley slammed a fist on the table. "Do you really flatter yourself that I have kept you in mind at all? You, who never deigned to express approval of a single choice I've made in my life?"

"Approval?" Roger repeated, as if mulling it over. "Is that what you're after? In that case, son, I am sincerely sorry. Sorry that I never expressed my approval for your making a joke out of the Watcher's Council, getting fired by your own Slayer, teaming up with a notorious vampire, and, at long last, winning promotion to the head of special projects at Evil, Incorporated."

Wesley curled a hand around his glass, tightening his grip as his Roger went on. At the end of this last speech, the tumbler slipped of his grasp. Wesley reached to set it right, when his hand caught the bottle of Scotch. It tilted, spun, and shattered on the floor.

They both looked down for a moment without speaking. The liquid leaked out, but neither made a move to pick up the mess. "Good bottle," Roger finally said. "Priceless carpet."

"Fortunately, I can afford it." Wesley reached for his wallet, hand still shaking. "Wages of sin." He slapped a business card down on the table in front of Roger, and enunciated, carefully, every word of the next sentence. "Why don't you send the bill to my office?" He stood, trying to calm his trembling muscles as he watched his father read the words: WOLFRAM & HART; Los Angeles Branch Office; Director, Occult Division; Wesley Wyndam-Pryce.

Roger looked quietly over the card for a moment, then raised his eyes to Wesley's and intoned one word: "Death."

"I'm sorry." Wesley ran a hand through his hair, "You've lost me now."

"The wages of sin is death. According to Saint Paul, who was supposed to know about such things." He shook his head. "In your case, I begin to believe it. No father relishes the idea of outliving his children. I hate to think of I you /I as the last of the Wyndam-Pryces. But surely, son, if you stay on your current path, I can hardly believe that you are long for this world. I had always hoped you might take the opportunity to pass the family name before you found your way to a reckless grave. But. . ." He stood, bent Wesley's card in half and flicked it, without looking, toward the garbage can. "If you're going to put my name on filth like this, perhaps it's just as well."

"Oh, don't worry Father." Wesley stepped toward Roger and spoke through clenched teeth. "With luck you'll outlive mother. And now there are any number of lovely teenage slayers available. Maybe one of them can give you another son. I'm sure you could raise a fine warrior out of that breeding stock."

What happened next should not have surprised Wesley. It was not the first time he had seen his father's hand raised in anger. It wasn't the second or the third, or even the fiftieth. But Wesley was a grown man, and Roger was old. And so Wesley didn't expect the back of Roger's hand to fly at him so suddenly and with such force. Or that he should find himself gripping his jaw in pain, and tasting the blood that leaked from his lip.

"Don't speak to me of things," Roger repeated, "That you can never understand."

TBC