The Defense
By The Shadower
Chaper Five
Disclaimer: See previous chapters.
AN: Sorry it's taken me so long to update. Life is crap and then you die, but I haven't died yet so I'm stuck dealing with the crap.
Feedback: Greatly appreciated, as it's the fuel that keeps me writing.
Archiving: I'd be deeply honored. Please tell me where so I can visit it.
"Despair, Emptiness,
See the hatred wasted on yourself
Face down, Taste the dust
Getting harder every day
Just to find a reason not to end it all yourself"
Slayer, "Cast Down"
A single gunshot.
In the end, that had been all it took.
Sometimes, on nights like these, when he's so drunk he can barely think straight, Wesley wonders how. He supposes that perhaps it is his training as a Watcher coming back to haunt him. Because, in the academy, they taught him always to ask how. How and where and who and what, but never why. Never why.
It was better, for them, to be served by those who could not question.
And so, until tonight, Wesley has not even thought to ask why he did it.
He's asked how, of course, how a single gunshot could do the job when no force could even begin to, before. He hadn't found an answer.
Until tonight.
Because tonight, drunk off his ass and having, only a few days before laid eyes on Angel for the first time in years, tonight, when he'd taken steps to save a young woman who'd tortured him back in the days when he was still trying to find himself…
Tonight, he's asked why.
The answers he's gotten back are all unsatisfactory: He'd been doing his job, he'd been ordered to, he'd been taking revenge for Fred.
But he'd thought nothing of going outside his job and turning his back on his orders tonight.
And he'd acknowledged long ago that Illyria could not have been held responsible for Fred's death.
In the end, the answer was simple and insane:
He couldn't bare to have someone else he loved taken from him, whether by the government, by the forces of darkness, or, he thinks with a mirthless smile, by a mystical parasite that had once been a god.
And so, when the time came, he'd killed her himself rather than risk her being taken by others.
He can still see the shock in her eyes, the betrayal, and he knows that must have been what killed her.
Knowing she'd been betrayed by her guide, by the only human she'd ever trusted or cared about.
And so Wesley takes another drink, hoping to wipe from memory the woman he'd know as Illyria.
Faith clutched her injured stomach, trying to force her legs forward. It couldn't be much farther, she'd been running for hours.
She stumbled over something lying in her path, and fell onto her face. She groaned softly, unsure if she would be able to get up again, when suddenly a smell hit her nostrils. A pungent stench of rotting garbage.
She managed to roll onto her back, and found that a large dog was sniffing her leg. When she moved, it jerked back away from her and let loose a string of ear-splitting yips.
A smile came to her lips. She had to be in the right place, now. On the fringes of her vision she could see several other large shapes, which she assumed to be more dogs, surrounding her. The smell was stronger than it had been before, and she was now fairly confident that she was in a junkyard.
She'd come to the one place Angel would never think to look for her.
Her smile widened when a familiar, brown-haired head came into view.
"Hey," she whispered.
His eyes held mild surprise, but displayed no great shock.
"Hey. The last time I saw you, I wasn't exactly the person to come to in a crisis."
Faith snorted.
"Fuck, that was eight years ago. Things are different now. The worlds in shambles, there're a lot of people who'd like to know where you live, and I need a place where I can be sure Angel won't find me."
He paused, looking at her uncertainly. She barked out a harsh sound that might, by some stretch, qualify as a laugh.
"C'mon, Lindsey, please, for old time's sake."
He smirked at that, but picked her up and began walking, she presumed to take her inside. As he carried her, he asked, "How'd YOU find me, anyway?"
"A guy in the joint told me. You might know him. Vampire, all soulful as of about six years ago, goes by the name of Spike?"
AN: Hey, Imzadi! I finally got Lindsey in! Thanks for your diligent reviewing. Thanks also to Night Essence and The Asylum, your reviews were greatly appreciated. Sorry there's no Spike or Angel in this chapter, but I hope to remedy that next time. Now, I heard somewhere that only three out of every hundred readers review. Are you special?