The change was less disconcerting every time, but, now that she was beginning to guess the rules, Faith's stomach clenched up as the 'motion' began and didn't let go until she found herself in an unfamiliar hotel room. Fortunately for the vampire, they appeared in the en suite bathroom, because, looking out into the main room, it was filled with sunlight.
A key scraped into the lock and Faith and Wes both left the relative darkness, the slayer curious, her companion wary. The figure who entered the room was bespectacled and besuited, a Wes from an earlier time. Nah, Faith corrected herself, this wasn't a Wes, this was Wesley Double-Barrelled Watchers' Council, a little rumpled around the edges but more in an 'I must get changed instantly and send my suit to the dry-cleaners' sort of way than the 'frankly, I don't give a damn' air that Wes carried now.
"So what're you afraid of this time, Wesley?" Angelus drawled from behind the pair as the figure emptied out his pockets, taking out amongst other things a strip of foil-wrapped tablets.
"What makes you think I'm afraid?" Wes retorted.
"Oh," Angelus replied. "Just the big stinky cloud of fear all around you. We lost our sense of touch, moron, not our sense of smell."
Double-Barrelled picked up the travel alarm beside the bed and held it about a foot from his face, as if he were having difficulty focusing before he eventually managed to make out the time.
"You drunk here, Wes?" the slayer asked, surprised.
"Mild concussion and rather more painkillers than were strictly necessary."
Double-Barrelled shrugged out of his jacket and, despite its dishevelled state and his own, he still hung it carefully over the back of the wooden chair that sat in front of the room's dresser before he loosened his tie, folded it neatly in half and then placed it in a drawer.
"When is this, Wes?" Faith queried. "After Balthazar?"
"No," Wes replied, "After graduation. They kept me in hospital overnight for observation and released me the next morning. I'm just about to ring my father and give him the good news about the ascension being prevented..." The watcher cast a sympathetic glance in the slayer's direction. "Or at least from our point of view it was good news... I suppose you might have felt differently."
Faith looked away. "I'm guessing that about now I wasn't feeling much of anything."
Wes didn't let it go. "We don't choose who we care about, Faith, and even knowing the worst about them doesn't make it any easier to let go."
Faith spun on her heel, ready to tell the watcher that he didn't have a clue what he was talking about, when for the first time she caught a glimpse of the hollowness behind his eyes and closed her mouth.
"Oh, boo hoo! Tell me you two aren't going to start a club," Angelus half-shouted from his confinement in the bathroom, but his taunting didn't last too long. Curiosity saw to that.
Double-Barrelled had already dialled and whether by some trick of the drug or of how the moment was fixed in Wes's memory all three of them could hear his father's voice when Wyndam-Pryce Senior answered the device's summons.
"Roger Wyndam-Pryce." The voice was clipped and perfunctory.
"Father, I—"
"Really, Wesley, I rather expected to hear from you before now."
"I was only discharged twenty minutes ago," Double-Barrelled tried to reason.
"A fact which no doubt made the hospital staff sigh in relief," his father commented bitterly. "Your whining was such a matter of note that even the nurses Quentin is paying to keep an eye on your rogue slayer heard about it in the basement."
Double-barrelled took a deep breath and tried again. "I apologise for the tardiness of my report, Father, but, really, I didn't feel that a public call box was the ideal way to let you know that we managed to prevent the mayor's ascension."
"I already know what happened, and, since one of your slayers went on a homicidal spree before the other one put her into a coma and disavowed any connection to the council, I'm afraid that you can be given no credit in the affair."
Double-Barrelled's voice dropped to nearly a whisper. "I played my part in the battle."
"Quite... You should have had no part in that episode. As soon as the girl left the council, your involvement ended."
"About that, Father... I was th—thinking I could visit for a week or two while I wait to see what my next assignment is—" the younger version of the watcher proposed, but was cut off before he could get any further.
"You have no new assignment, Wesley. Quentin and I discussed it. He was inclined to put you back to work in the archives, but, when I pointed out that that would put you right in the central offices where you would be a constant reminder of our family's disgrace, he relented."
"Father?" Double-Barrelled asked, obviously having some trouble believing that, with everything that had gone wrong, his own father would intervene to make things worse.
"Are you really such a half-wit that I'm to be forced to spell it out for you? You aren't about to cause me further embarrassment at the council."
"Well, maybe, I could contact some of my old lecturers... I could—"
"Don't be ridiculous," the elder Wyndam-Pryce interjected. "You know how many boys from council families attend Oxford. There is no door in England that would be open to you. Far better for all of us if you stay where you are until at least some of the shame of your tenure has faded."
"I understand, Father." The younger man replied in a dispirited tone. "I'll write to Mother and let her know my address when I get settled."
"Goodbye, Wesley," his father replied, cutting the connection before his son even had a chance to reciprocate.
As if in slow motion, the young man replaced the receiver and then slumped onto the bed as if his bones had melted.
Faith couldn't believe what she had just seen. She had no one, hadn't had anyone for a long time now, but this was different.
"And I thought home was meant to be the place where they had to take you in," Angelus crooned from his shady refuge. "You must have been a hell of a disappointment for him to disown you like that... You would have thought he might at least let you have your closet back so he knew you were being properly punished."
"I let him down," Wes answered, sounding not entirely dissimilar from the man who had just hung up the phone.
"Bullshit!" Faith answered. "You were set up to fail, Wes. They sent you because they knew your first loyalty was to them. They knew they could keep you under control where they couldn't with Giles. You'd never even been in a fight with a vampire. They sent a bookworm, knowing that you wouldn't be able to control Buffy, never mind me. You were meant to be the rebound watcher. They sent us you so that we could hate you, so that you would rub us up the wrong way, so we could blame you for Giles getting replaced. Then, when we screwed you into the ground, they'd send us the real replacement and we'd be so glad to see the back of you that we'd welcome him with open arms. You were just the dupe they sent to make the switch easier."
"And I thought your only assets were the ones sticking out at the front," Angelus crowed, "but maybe prison's made you all philosophical. Maybe if you go back to jail and keep working real hard you'll even get your GED in a year or two."
"Smart enough to fool you, dumb ass," the slayer retorted, "or did you forget why you're here?"
Wes looked as if he wanted to protest that the council wouldn't, but in his heart he knew that they would. Slayers were expendable and so were individual watchers, just so long as the organisation lived on. It wasn't something that had crossed his mind before now. He'd been so proud when he'd been chosen to become the girls' watcher that he'd never even wondered why they hadn't chosen someone with more field experience.
Thankfully, before he had to think it through too much they were soaked in darkness.
There were streetlights but, if anything, they somehow seemed only to make the pools between them even darker. A skittering noise made Faith's eyes drop toward the sidewalk and a pair of dice rolled across in front of her. She walked around the group of old bums huddled in their ragged overcoats.
"Even odds, one over," one of them called. "Press on the big six! Boxcar's out. Whistle while you're walkin', boys! You're trawlin' a graveyard. Throw the bones!" None of it made any sense to the slayer but she wasn't about to ask Angelus for a history lesson and she was glad when Wes took the position next to her once they were clear of the craps game, leaving the vampire to tag along at the back. There were plenty of vehicles on the street, even though the only place that seemed to be open was a blues club, but Faith hadn't seen any of the models except in movies.
"Trippy," she remarked.
"Early twenties by the cars," Angelus answered. "What is this? Chicago?"
"Well, if you don't know," Wesley responded dryly, lifting an arm to point it in the direction of a bench on the other side of the street. "I hardly find it likely that we'll be able to enlighten you."
Angelus stopped dead in his tracks, when he saw where the watcher pointed. His alter ego had cleaned up a bit, at least. He wore a suit and tie and his hair was neatly slicked back, but he gazed vacantly into the night, obviously in full-on brood mode. "Oh, no, I remember this... I remember this place." He half-turned on his heel, throwing his hands up in the air, almost as if he could ward off the scene or disown it. "I gotta get out of here."
"Why?" Faith asked, amusement animating her features as she made her way toward the souled vampire "You freakin' out?"
Angelus might have replied, but at that moment there was a screech of rubber as a car rounded the corner into the far end of the street, moving too fast, and he knew it was too late to get away. "It's coming... again." He spat out the last word in a tone that implied that playing this scene once had been more than enough for him.
"What's coming?" Wes asked curiously.
"I can't do it again," Angelus protested. "I won't." Suddenly Broody Angel bolted off the bench right in front of the oncoming car.
"Angel, get out of the road!" As soon as Faith called out, she knew it wouldn't make any difference. The rules said he wouldn't hear, but there were some things you just couldn't help yourself from doing, like the way you blink when there's a sudden loud noise.
Broody Angel ducked slightly in his dash across the road, scooping up a pale, fluffy puppy from almost under the automobile's wheels.
Angelus winced, watching in disgust as a pretty young flapper girl came running out of the club. "Ah, no!"
The girl ran straight over to Broody Angel, smiling happily at the sight of the cuddly canine.
Faith laughed at the irony. "Dude! You just rescued a puppy." Super Evil Vampire Dude's idea of hell seemed ridiculously trivial.
The girl lifted the cute little morsel from Broody Angel's hands, with a smile that combined gratitude, genuine happiness and a blatant invitation. "Oh, my stars! You saved him, mister," she exclaimed with a distinct twang.
Broody Angel just stared at the girl as if somewhere over the previous twenty or so years he'd actually forgotten how to speak to anyone.
"I'm in hell," Angelus ranted. "This is hell and I'm in it."
"Oh... gee, big fella, how can I thank you?" the flapper girl asked.
"We haven't fed on a human in decades," Angelus shouted at his counterpart. "She's begging for it, you moron!"
Broody Angel appeared to have other ideas. "Get lost."
"Beg pardon?" the young girl asked, obviously unable to believe that she'd heard him correctly. I mean a guy who risked his life to save a puppy wouldn't talk to a woman like that.
"Take a hike, Betty. Scram," he added just to make the message doubly clear.
The girl recoiled a few teetering steps on her heels before she yelled back. "Well, pound snow, you mook!" She gave Broody Angel a last evil glare before she walked back into the club, still carrying the tiny, fluffy canine.
Angelus all but growled his frustration as the easy prey disappeared.
Faith smiled back at him. "We're reliving Angel's good deeds. You are in hell... Wicked."
Wesley also looked to find the situation amusing, even if his enjoyment had a bittersweet edge. "Our friend does seem to be providing the comic relief portion of the evening's entertainment... And yet," he said as the world began to spin again, "I still feel that he might have the better part of the deal."
Fred looked up from her books, checking the monitor that showed Gunn and Angelus in the hotel basement. Gunn stood a good six feet clear of the cell bars that separated him and the vampire, keeping the tranquiliser rifle ever ready.
She opened another book and began reading.
"I don't know why you're bothering," Connor commented, his voice echoing in the empty hallway as he stepped out of the shadows by the kitchen doors and made his way to the reception counter.
"It's obvious what Wes and Faith wanted. They did their part. Now we have to do ours," the scholar replied.
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning we re-ensoul Angel," Fred insisted.
"Impossible," his son argued. "We've been over this... No jar, no soul. No soul, no Angel."
"It's not that simple, Connor. I've been doing some research—"
"It is simple! Angelus is all that's left. First he slaughtered Lilah, now he's killed Faith and Wesley."
"Faith and Wesley are still alive," Fred reminded him. "We don't know what's going to happen to them... but if they do die then that's all the more reason we have to do what they wanted."
"You're lying to yourselves!" the teenager spat out in exasperation. "You all think that I'm taking this personally so that you don't have to, but inside you know I'm right. We need to put Angelus down."
"I don't think so," announced a cheerful voice. Willow stood just inside the hotel's main doors, smiling at both of them when they looked her way. "I think you need a witch."
Wes looked around the - was it a room? Did caravans have rooms? - but then, there was too much clutter for this to be a caravan, at least in the sense that they were generally known in England. There, caravan parks were very much regarded as places to get away to, a weekend home for some, somewhere cheap to get away with a bunch of friends, perhaps, for the student crowd, not that in his student days he'd ever been popular enough to be asked along, and he also suspected that, since then, cheaper flights had probably made that idea nearly obsolete. After all, why drive half way across the country and cram into a caravan in the Lake District when you could get a flight to Paris or Amsterdam for thirty pounds? Just the same, a caravan was, in his mind, a cheap way to get away for a while.
This was a trailer, that most American of concepts. This wasn't in some grassy field next to the sea. Judging by the streetlights visible over the roofs of other similar trailers and the general level of light pollution, this was a plot of waste ground that was in the process of being swallowed up by an expanding city. This was permanent. This was what you had to get away from.
It was also cramped enough that Wes felt compelled to squeeze into one of the benches either side of the fold-down table at the far end of the living space, with its pair of glasses and its empty generic bourbon bottle. Just because he could stand with everything above his eyebrows sticking through the roof, didn't mean he felt comfortable doing it. Faith slid in next to him, her smile now slightly forced, and Angelus sat sideways on the bench opposite, his long legs extending far beyond the end of the seat.
The trailer's door was opened from the outside and a younger Faith entered, her wet hair tied back into a ponytail. Her previous memory had shown a girl in every sense of the word. This Faith didn't yet have the curves that she would later develop. Her hips were still girlishly slim, but she'd definitely got past the training bra stage. Her face was devoid of make-up. She could have been fourteen. More likely, she was eleven.
"Mmmm-hmmm! Isn't that a fresh and juicy little morsel? Don't you just want to bend her over this table and fuck her till she bleeds?" Angelus asked Wes, though he continued before the watcher got a chance to answer, ignoring Faith's less than friendly hand gesture. "I mean, that's the attraction with Fred, isn't it? That schoolgirl body that doesn't want to grow up? But the twig just doesn't have enough up front for my taste. This one's already got bigger bazookas." He lifted both hands in a cupping motion. "Round and firm like a pair of peaches. Just how I like 'em. Makes this one look all overripe and bruised... Of course, that one would end up bruised as well if I could get my hands on her."
Wes gave the vampire a look of disdain. "I know you probably find this hard to believe but those of us with souls fall in love with a person, not a body."
Angelus gave a snort. "Keep kidding yourself, Watcher Boy. We'll believe you were screwing Lilah for her scintillating personality."
Wes's voice was level and calm as he replied. "I never said I was in love with Lilah."
The girl practically tip-toed into the room and dropped a plastic bag into the sink with damp squish before she began to carefully open and close various cupboard doors and finally a small fridge under one of the counters. A rumbling sound from her stomach gave away the likely object of her search.
Wes could see enough to guess that the only cabinet that had anything in it was the one where the alcohol was kept. Likewise, the fridge held only condiments and beer.
Having exhausted these possibilities, Adolescent Faith seemed to scan the room, but, whatever it was she was looking for, it can't have been there. She made her way to the end of the trailer nearest the entrance where two doors were set at right angles to each other. The one in the side wall, Wes guessed, was whatever passed for a bathroom, the walled off section it led into too narrow for a bed. Adolescent Faith slowly opened the door in the end wall. She had to swing it wide to get enough room to make her way down the side of the small double bed that was revealed.
Angelus grinned predatorily and followed the girl into the room, effectively blocking the view for the others.
Wes couldn't move without walking through Faith and, though he knew he could, something made him not want to. It could have been the way that Faith hadn't told Angelus, "Screw you!" in some more witty and colourful way or maybe the way she fixed her attention on the plastic of the table's surface, picking at dried on sauce stains that she couldn't move with an illusory fingernail.
Instead, he asked her, his voice little more than a whisper. "Do you want to tell me what happens in there?"
Faith shrugged. "No biggie... More or less what tall, dark and soulless seems to be expecting. Mom was passed out drunk. There was no money in her purse. I thought the guy was passed out, too, but I guess he was faking because he grabbed me when I was in the middle of going through his pockets."
"I'm sorry, I was just hungry." The young girl sounded panicked, her voice rising almost to a scream. "Mom would have paid you back... Look, keep it!"
The whole trailer shook.
"That's him ramming my face into the closet doors," Faith explained, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. "Keep me spaced out enough that I don't scream... Not that anyone would interfere 'round here. Mom used to yell and throw shit all the time when she was drunk anyway, so they'd know better."
Within seconds the trailer began to rock from side to side in time with some loud grunts and Wes couldn't purge the image of the young girl, her face pressed against the doors of the built-in wardrobes while some drunken lout ripped her clothes off and pounded into her from behind.
He couldn't speak for Faith but he had had enough. "Move," he told the slayer. "We're leaving."
As they made their way to the exit, Angelus turned and gave Faith a gloating smile. "You know, I always figured you for a tooth and nail kinda girl, not the silent tears."
They wound their way through makeshift alleys between the theoretically mobile homes until Wes could no longer pick out which of the many trailers they had been in. He really wanted to take Faith in his arms and hold her but, given their present circumstances, that was impossible, and Faith probably wouldn't have allowed it in any case. He also wanted to puke his guts up, just at the idea of what was happening a few hundred yards away and the fact that he could do nothing to stop it. God only knows how it felt for her.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry you had to go through that," he said, trying to offer comfort in the form of words instead.
"It— Well, it was the first time, but it wasn't exactly the last," Faith tried to shrug it off.
"Your mother stayed with him? After that?" Wes asked.
Faith gave a laugh with no real humour in it. "After Dad died Mom ended up a drunk. She had good days, mostly when she was broke, when she might just have a couple of beers at home... but most afternoons she'd end up in a bar and she didn't know how to say no if someone else was buying. I never saw that guy before that night or after. I don't even know his name. But, then, you always knew I was a great big 'ho, right?"
"I—" Wes struggled to find the words to say what he wanted to say. "It's never that simple," was the best he could manage.
The world began to shift again and Wes really hoped that this time they would get another of Angelus's memories. He wasn't sure he could cope with any more of Faith's.
