Angel fic: Watching

[seldear]

saramund, you can consider this all your fault!
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TITLE: Watching
AUTHOR: seldear
SUMMARY: Even Slayers must eventually sleep. And the Watcher watches.
RATING: PG-13
FANDOM: Angel - the series
SPOILERS: Everything to the end of the S4 episode 'Orpheus'
NOTES: First 'Angel' fanfic. Very much a 'thoughts/vignette' piece. Possibly part of a series. Let's just say that the arc culminating in 'Orpheus' is quite fascinating to me, although I'm not half as fond of the subsequent arc headed for the S4 finale.

Watching

Even Slayers must eventually sleep.

So the Watcher watches.

He looks down at the girl in the bed, dark hair streaming over the pillows, bruises under her eyes and across her face and shoulders. The welt on her cheek is vividly dark against the pale of her skin in the street-lit room, as she curls up amidst the sheets like a kitten in a blanket.

She sleeps like he feels; exhausted, fine china webbed with cracks, requiring only the most delicate of blows to shatter, beyond repair, beyond redemption. Yet she is stronger, so much stronger than that. He knows it. He's seen it.

He moves further into the room, coming to stand right beside the bed and it's silent occupant.

If the cruelty of Angelus is mythic, then the resilience of a Slayer is legendary.

And the young woman fast asleep before him embodies that resilience.

She is powerful. Slayers are.

Her body is healing but the marks remain. Although he can't see them, hidden beneath the sleeveless pyjama top and the cotton covers, he knows they're there. Bruises and scratches and abrasions and contusions, all over her body, silent witness to the battering her body took, first against the Beast, then bringing in Angelus, and finally with the effects of the drug in her blood.

Lorne may or may not forgive him for letting her shoot herself up before taking on Angel, but the choice was hers and a Slayer heals fast. It's the up-side of having a destiny that includes fighting evil and a high probability of never seeing thirty.

Besides, there are other things on Wesley's mind as he stares at the sleeping woman-child.

Physical resilience is one thing; Wesley has studied Slayers since he was old enough to understand about the vampires and demons and the people who went out and fought them in the night.

The danger of a Slayer has never been in her ability to recover from what the Darkness could throw at her. The danger of a Slayer has always been in her ability to emotional, mentally, and spiritually cope with what she encounters every night.

Wesley doesn't entirely trust Faith's coping mechanisms.

Skin crawls with the body's instinctive reaction as the jagged edge of the glass cuts through his flesh. There is fire in his lungs and throat as blood trickles into his eyes and wells up in the shallow troughs she slices into him. The face rising above his is diabolical, with all the evil of the soul reflected in the raw beauty of the features.

He shudders and draws back from the memory, snapping himself back to the dark room lit by streetlight, and the Slayer who slumbers on, unaware of the Watcher watching.

His hands have fisted, all unconscious while he remembered the pain she inflicted on him. Carefully, he tucks them under his arms. He and she have a past and it isn't one that he cares to remember.

But it isn't one he can forget, either.

There's a darkness inside her; it's been there as long as he remembers. He remembers it from that first day as she sauntered in to find him sitting in the library waiting for her. Not for her the polite distaste of Buffy and her friends. Instead, she went straight for the throat, and damned the torpedos. "New Watcher? Screw that!"

The memory still stings, but, with the perfection of hindsight that guilt and regret brings, he can see that the man he was then was no suitable Watcher for either of the two young women who'd been entrusted to his care. Especially not Faith.

He wonders; if he'd been what he is now back then, would she have gone off the rails in such a spectacular manner? Or would she have walked that blurry line without taking down so many others in her wake? Wesley isn't responsible for all the twists in her psyche, but he cannot deny there are some marked clearly with his thumbprint.

Once before, he'd failed her as her Watcher. He'd failed to provide the balance that Rupert Giles had provided Buffy Summers for three years before the Council removed him. He'd failed to see her as anything more than 'the Slayer' - a tool for the Watcher's Council, obedient to their will and whim. He'd failed to give her the guidance she'd needed to step away from the path she'd been walking.

In the end, she had walked that road all the way down past the markers of right and wrong, past the markers of guilt and shame, past the markers of despair and into Hell. And then she walked back out.

She's strong. Slayers are.

She gained his respect - whatever that was worth - when she took her punishment on the chin and went to jail for her crimes. And again, when she chose to break out simply because Angel needed her.

He flashes through the day's memories, and presses a mental 'pause' button as his memory brings back the musky scent of the back room, the dim light, the faux velvet. His hand, fisted around the knife hilt, feels the faint resistance of bone and muscle against the blade as he twists it in the shoulder of the junkie. His ears hear her disbelief as she crouches over the fallen woman and tells him he's lost it. And the coldly righteous anger rushes through his veins again, intoxicating as any opiate, standard or mystical.

The conversation plays through his head, revulsion twisting in him, a serpentine dance of his own guilt, bitter in the belly and acid on his conscience.

Dancing in and out of his memory are the words he said to her earlier; the goads he used to call up the bitter, vicious woman-child he remembered - the brutal, violent woman she'd been before the guilt caught up to her. That woman was needed to take Angelus down as the hollow, weary jail escapee could not.

He'd played the Watcher then, shaping the Slayer to the needs of the mission, an armsmaster choosing the appropriate weapon for the opponent. The manipulation had come naturally, slipping easily over him like a fitted glove over his fingers. And inside the fine silk, he'd found his steel.

Necessities aside, he hates what he said to her earlier. In spite of his bodily reaction to the memory of torture and pain, in spite of whatever need there was for the hardness within her to be brought to the surface, in spite of his own need to expel the thoughts that have been knocking around his head since the last time he saw her, he hates what came out of his mouth.

It was necessary, but it was brutal, and there had been no certainty that she wouldn't shatter under the pressure. He cast everything in her face, everything he knew about her past and present that could possibly cut her, sting her, remind her of where she came and how far she'd fallen.

And then, afterwards, she went down into her own personal Hell with the Orpheus seething through her veins.

Wesley regrets that. He had hours to regret it. From the moment he picked up her body, cradling it in his arms and waiting for Gunn to turn up, he'd regretted the words he'd used. They'd been the truth, yes; but twisted to his own ends. Perverted and warped to make her what he thought she needed to be to face Angelus.

He was taught that a Watcher should stand between his Slayer and the darkness in her soul - pulling her back from the edge, an anchor in her life. The first time he met Faith, he hauled too hard on the chain between them and it snapped as she pulled away into evil. This time...this time, he pulled her towards the darkness and she was the one to pull away.

And, in the end, Faith was right. She hadn't needed to be as amoral or vicious as the vampire she was hunting. She'd taken Angelus down by stealth instead of strength.

Still, Wesley has no doubt that his words didn't make the hell of Orpheus any easier for Faith to stomach. He has no doubt his own needful cruelty to her blotted out one more part of his soul, brought him one step closer to the beasts he fights within and without. For once, he fell, and she resisted; and for his fall, she paid the price.

Still, she is resilient. Slayers are.

A creak down the hallway brings his attention back to the present. He turns his head to look at the closed door, shut silently behind him as he entered, but no more sounds reach his ears.

He ponders going out to see what is there - if anything, but he doesn't. The hotel is old, after all. It shifts in the night, moving restlessly, like Faith, sleeping in the bed before him.

She doesn't wake, although her body shifts, unconsciously seeking a more comfortable position. Wesley is made aware that he is an intruder in her sanctuary, however benign. But he is watching. He is watching the Slayer sleep.

She sleeps and he watches. He wonders.

Wesley is no fool, although there are many who would disagree. She did what she did - the jailbreak, the fighting, the pain, the drugs - for Angel and no-one else. Not for Gunn's respect or Connor's admiration, certainly not for he-who-was-once-her-Watcher.

But, having allowed her that much freedom, that much choice; having chosen to work with her and allowed her free rein; there is a measure of trust between them. A measure of hard-won respect. The next time they have to work together, as Slayer and Watcher, or just fighter and fighter, trust will come easier and the hard words may not be necessary.

He prays that the next time they meet, such antagonism will not be necessary.

If there is a next time.

He lets his thoughts drift to that, the whimsical, wishful side of him choosing to wander down that path of future possibilities. Not quite friends, but not enemies, neither; with common ties binding them together and common bitterness dragging them apart.

The awkward questions have not yet been asked regarding what she'll do now that Angel is back and things are normal again. Although Willow hasn't said much, he has an inkling that Faith will head back to Sunnydale for the fight there. Of course, he can 'inkle' until all the vampires are gone, but this Slayer will do what she wants to do - and damn the torpedos.

She shifts again, dark curls clinging to warm flesh, and warm flesh dragging against soft cotton.

She fought the demons - internal and external - and she won. At what price, who can yet say? But for her sake, for everything she's been through and everything he's been though, Wesley hopes that the price will come easy this time.

Certainly, the toll on her body is being renewed in somnolence.

She's strong. A Slayer. Resilient.

But even Slayers must sleep.

So the Watcher watches.

* fin *