seldear | The 6th Day (of Fic-mas)

FANDOM: Angel the Series
TITLE: The Memory of Honour
AUTHOR: Sel
SUMMARY: Wesley faces a spectre of his fallen past.
RATING: R - sex scenes, swearing, darkness
CATEGORY: Wes/Faith
NOTES: I originally offered to be a spare writer for the Wes/Faith ficathon, but never finished even my original entry! *blushes* I just couldn't get it out satisfactorily. Anyway, this is for the one 'spare' I was handed, but which then turned out to be not needed since the person withdrew. I still haven't finished the one I was assigned - it's been sitting in limbo for three months. I'll get it done one of these days...

On the sixth day of Fic-mas, my LJ gave to me:
Six geese a-laying, (Angel)

The Memory Of Honour

He hadn't thought of her in a long time.

He certainly hadn't been expecting to run across her fighting vamps in one of LA's less salutary alleyways.

And she certainly wasn't expecting to see him.

Her stake slammed through the ribcage of the vampire and, as it fell to dust, her faintly smug expression changed to astonishment.

"Wes?"

"Faith." He tried to ignore the way his body locked up at the sight of her, the way he tensed at the memory of her vicious pleasure in his pain. "What are you doing out?" He almost reached for his cellphone, right then and there. A single call and she'd be back behind bars, out of the way, gone.

He'd never have to remember glass biting into his pectorals again.

She took one look at his clothing and blinked. "Well," she said lightly, "If it isn't the lawyer man come to lecture me on the evils of my ways." Dark eyes gleamed with mockery as she sauntered by him. "Running with a new crowd these days? Suits, but not saints?"

"What are you doing out?"

Faith rolled her eyes as she turned away, "A little thing called parole, Wes. Good behaviour, yadda-yadda."

"You?" He sneered, remembering the girl who'd mouthed off at him, who'd casually killed men and women, who'd mocked him, slighted him, and scorned him... "Good behaviour?" A single call would confirm or deny it; she'd be a fool to lie.

"New leaf, working for my wings, whatever you're gonna call it." She shrugged, walking away with the saunter he'd always thought of as borderline obscene. "I'm out, Wes, don't bother calling your gang at Wolfram and Hart to check - I'm out on the straight and narrow. Haven't even killed my parole officer - yet," she drawled.

Wesley strode after her and caught her arm, dragging her around. He glared into the vividly dark features of the rogue Slayer and marvelled at his temerity to touch her thus, even as he demanded, "Does he know you're out?"

She looked down at the hand closed around her biceps and raised a brow at him before she pulled away, casually, as though he were a fly to be swatted. "What do you think, Wes?"

One dark eyebrow lifted, like a bird's wing rising at his silence.

Then she turned on her heel and sauntered off into the night.

----

"She's working for Angel Investigations," Lilah told him the next afternoon, pressing her hip into the sideboard as she poured drinks for them both. "The DA approved it, based on the influx of supernatural cases occurring in the LA district - that new division they have with Officer Lockley in charge."

Wesley stretched out in the sofa, crossing his legs at the ankle and staring into space. He accepted the whiskey she poured him with a word of thanks and sipped the fiery liquid. "Is there any chance of putting her back in?"

Lilah sat down opposite him and crossed her slender legs as she leaned back. Wesley let his eyes linger on the black-encased legs for a moment, before raising his eyes to meet her knowing gaze. "There's a certain amount of debate as to whether we want her in the mix right now," she murmured. "So many things happening, one Slayer gone rogue might be what it takes to tip the balance one way or the other."

He considered that. Buffy was back in Sunnydale again, alive. Harder and bitterer than before, but while she was still under the hand of the Powers, their chiefest concern was with the Slayer. Which was probably one reason Faith had made parole.

"How is she doing at Angel Investigations?" He kept his voice level and even, with no hint of the pain that the memory of his friends - his former friends - evoked.

"Quite well," Lilah said. "However, Files and Records believes there's still a chance she might be persuaded to our way of thinking."

Wesley waited for her to finish. Lilah was going somewhere, and it had to do with him. He drank and waited for the revelation.

"You get a choice, Wesley," she purred at last, seeing he wasn't going to speak first. "You get to choose whether or not we want have her on the team here at Wolfram and Hart."

He looked at her, reading more than just her words.

Lilah had been the bait to draw him into the law firm. He was well aware of that. And he'd gone willingly enough in the end, with nowhere else to turn. In the same way, the firm intended for him to be the bait for Faith. Bound by blood and emotion - the way they'd always been: the Unnecessary Watcher and the Unnecessary Slayer.

Wesley wondered whether the Partners intended him to come out of it alive. Faith wasn't gentle with her 'toys' - as the scars on flesh bore witness.

It would be an interesting proposition, he decided, ignoring the thrill of fear that wound itself around his spine and clenched coldly about his nerves. He would look at it as a challenge to himself - to see if he could lay to rest one demon of his past. He somehow doubted he would ever be given the chance to lay Angel and his hatred to rest, but Faith...yes, he had an opportunity now to face what she'd done to him and see the scars for himself.

In truth, she'd been the start of the road that led him to where he was today.

Wesley faced Lilah, watching her dark-honey hair swirling over the collar of the silk shirt she wore. If it had occurred to her that his seduction of Faith might involve more than mere words, then she wasn't giving any indication of it.

"Very well," he said, lifting his glass in toast. "A Slayer for Wolfram and Hart."

But he drank without smiling.

----

The easiest way to find Faith was to go hunting for demons himself.

Where the demons were, there, too, was the Slayer.

It was possible that, somewhere along the way, he might run into the rest of Angel Investigations, but he doubted it. Angel, perhaps - and that was a worrying possibility - but Faith was a lone wolf by nature. She did her best work solo, and that wouldn't change just because she was working with Wesley's old gang.

In the windy chill of the winter's night, the thought brought a pang of emotion, stinging his chest and his eyes and his palms with the regret and anger and...

They jumped him beneath the bridge by the river, two vampires stinking of smoke and blood. There'd been an oil drum burning beneath the cement arch where several homeless men usually huddled. Not anymore, Wes suspected. They'd be found in the morning, dead, frozen, and without a drop of blood in them, victim to the vampires of LA.

Wes was no victim. Oh, he'd been victim enough in the past, of his father, of the council, of Faith, of fate, of Justine, of Angel.

He was not a victim, not anymore.

These vamps were easy enough. Wesley knew well that if you weren't a match for vamps in strength and speed, then you had to have more weaponry, more contingency plans in place. It wasn't a difficult thing: vampires were led by the hunt and the chase, not given to analysis and introspection.

Still, they were making him work for their dust, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that Wesley took advantage of a momentary lapse in concentration from one, and lopped his head off. When he turned to take care of the second, he found himself facing Faith instead.

"Lilah kicked you out, Wes?"

The mockery immediately grated. "It's good to see you, too, Faith," he told her, a biting edge to his voice.

Faith grinned, well aware that she'd gotten to him - and pleased by it, damn her. "What're you doing out on the streets, Wes?" The hand with the stake gestured at the fiery drum. "These people don't need your kind. Morticians, perhaps, but not lawyers."

The dig about 'his kind' grated. "I am not a lawyer," he said, neatly flipping the wrist-sword back into its sheath while she watched.

"Uh-huh," she said, that knowing little smile still hovering about her lips. "That's why you're working at the Law Firm of Ultimate Evil and screwing Lilah Morgan."

"I am not--" This was going to get them nowhere. Wes caught himself. "I'm doing what you're doing," he said in answer to her second question. The first one - the one about Lilah - was none of her business.

Laughter pealed out through the air. "You? Patrolling?"

He spoke stiffly, suddenly very much aware that he was the Watcher 'with the stake rammed up his English Channel' and she was the Slayer who got creative on his body with fists and glass, and was only interrupted when she got to 'fire'. "Watchers are capable of patrolling, you know."

"Some Watchers are," she said. The exclusion was evident, and Wesley burned with anger.

Why had he thought he could do this? Faith was a law unto herself, and one that Wesley had never understood. She had her own reasons and her own methods, and there was nothing and nobody who could leash her unless she chose to be leashed.

"This Watcher is," he said coldly. Never mind that he was no longer a Watcher. "Now if you'll excuse me..."

The fingers that wrapped around his arm halted him cold. He still had nightmares about those hands travelling over his body.

He still had wet dreams with those hands travelling over his body.

Wesley breathed deeply and steadily, and tried not to think about how screwed up he was.

"Hold it right there," Faith said. "You're not going to go wandering around making vamp bait of yourself."

He smirked, "Actually," he said, "you're quite right. I'm not going to go wandering around making vamp bait of myself. I'm going to watch your back while you go out and make vamp bait of yourself."

They argued for a while, until he pointed out that they were wasting time. By that stage, she was a vibrating column of anger - an anger that she took out on the next set of vamps. Wesley managed one; she took out six others without breaking a sweat. She was impressive in rage - as Wesley had cause to remember.

However, not once did she take that rage and turn it against him. The lethal grace of her was solely focused on the kill, and more than once he found himself admiring her as she finished off the vamps and demons they encountered.

Silently, Wesley admitted that there was a certain thrill in his blood to be out here, fighting the vampires and demons himself, using his knowledge of their weaknesses to best effect, watching a Slayer's back. For this he had been taught and trained; in this he had failed once before.

He did not fail now.

----

It was past midnight as he tossed a handful of salt and dried herbs onto the severed head of a Karshath demon. The salt and herbs would stop it from rising again, and by morning the body would be an inexplicable, gelatinous mess on the alley sidewalk.

They'd fought, he'd taught, she'd listened.

They'd worked together as a Slayer-Watcher pairing should, and the satisfaction of their partnership was euphoric.

So when she climbed behind him on the chopper and pressed herself against his back with her fingers flexing knowingly on his thighs, Wesley drove them back through the thick blue night to his place instead of the Hyperion.

"You the sacrificial Watcher, Wes?" Faith asked as he climbed off the bike, and the timbre of her voice ached in his balls.

He smiled, thinly, and was pleased to see the hunger in her eyes. "Are you the angry god, Faith?"

There was nothing good or right about this, any more than there had been anything good or right in screwing Lilah until she screamed. Wesley didn't care. Such measures were no longer his - not since they'd stripped him of his wings and cast him from heaven.

They screwed like they were waging war, every bite and scrape a battle, every gasp and groan a victory. Faith met him thrust for thrust, her fingernails digging into his shoulders, his fingers digging into the soft pale flesh of her waist as he bucked beneath her. His moans were buried in her shoulder, and her keens of satisfaction whispered over his skull as she shuddered and he shuddered and the battlefield fell silent with the panting aftermath of their conflict.

He took her nipple between his teeth as she tried to crawl from the bed, and laved it with his tongue, gentleness and violence in the caress. Her finger ran around his lips as she pushed him away, her touch firm but not harsh. "You're a fucking animal, Wes," she told him, using the obscenity as both an expostulation and an adjective. "If I'd known you were this good in bed, I wouldn't have bothered with blunt and sharp." Her smile was feral, and edged with cruelty. "We could have gone straight for slow," she breathed into his ear.

He turned his head enough to look at her, to catch sight of the pretty, pouting mouth and wonder if he had it in him to go it all over again.

Instead, he climbed from the bed and pulled on a pair of pyjama bottoms he'd tossed over a chair that morning and he went into the bathroom, disdaining her. He could almost feel the wave of anger-rage-hatred-desire-frustration from her, and smiled in the mirror as he pulled on the pyjama shirt and began brushing his teeth.

When she leaned against the doorjamb, she was dressed again, and everything in her expression was under control.

But the dark eyes burned into Wesley's as he met her gaze in the mirror.

He spat and rinsed out his mouth, and when he looked up, she was standing close behind him, but her eyes were no longer on his face. As he turned, he felt the gentle trace of her finger across his scar - his parting gift from Justine, rich and red and brightly ugly on his too-pale skin.

Wesley flinched from her touch. He would fuck and screw and cheat and lie without qualm, but the memory of honour and its betrayal and loss... That was sacred and not for her divining.

"Don't get familiar, Faith," he told her, cuttingly, turning his back on her as he adjusted his collar. He could feel the liquid lava of her gaze on him, and knew that if he turned around or met her eyes in the mirror, there'd be an unnerving hatred in her gaze.

He didn't turn around.

Not even when her hand grabbed his collar and yanked his pyjama top half off his back with the fierce strength of a Slayer and the fierce passion of a woman, and her tongue snaked its way from the middle of his back up his spinal column to his nape, where she bit him, hard enough to leave marks, gentle enough to be sensual.

And just that swiftly, he was erect all over again.

Her words whispered across his shoulder blades, acid-etching his flesh with goosebumps, before she turned away. And even after the door closed, the harshness of her mockery remained.

"Sure thing, Wes."

* fin *
five gold rings! (SG-1)
Four calling birds, (HP)
three french hens, (Firefly)
two turtle doves, (SG-1)
and a partridge in a pear tree! (JL)