__A Kiss in Gethsemane__
By Greyangel
Wesley felt the muscles in his back tense as the door rattled suddenly, robbing the silence for a moment, before succumbing once again. He took another frozen log and cast it onto the fire, watching specks of orange shoot delightfully out from beneath the smouldering wood. His temporary companion still hadn't moved from his seat on the other side of the one-room cabin.
Angel blinked, but still didn't move. He felt the wind pick up outside. He felt his body temperature decreasing rapidly as the breath of the snow crept through his flesh. His vampiric ears heard every inch of the silence that stretched between him and the object of his hatred, the man who sat so stoically on the opposite side of the room.
Without the want or need to look over his shoulder, Wesley knew Angel hadn't moved an inch. Wes squinted his eyes at the lacklustre flames and restrained the frustrated sigh that threatened to break free…
Some people never learned. After time, one could forgive if not forget the sins of the past. But twice Angel's son had come to him as a son would to a human father who'd raised him from his birth. Twice Angel had taken his son in, and believed what he'd heard, without question or contestation.
And again, Angel had found himself on ice. Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice…
Moving slightly in his chair, Wesley maintained his emotionless expression. Twice, yes. But the first time Angel had been the only one to feel the full effect of Connor's rage and plotting. This time Wesley had factored in, thanks to the new business deal the miracle teen had struck with a certain law firm.
Wesley winced, and took a giant flying leap off that train of thought. After a moment listening to the pounding of the silence around him, he let his thoughts ran rampant over the events that led to their entrapment in the tiny cabin, surrounded by a veritable desert of snow.
“Where did you think he was taking you?” Angel's voice was brutal and almost deafening to Wesley's ears, as it all but bludgeoned the quiet surrounds.
Wes lifted his head. He let the question rest on the unused air for a moment before replying softly: “to you, actually.”
“What were you after, a fight? Did you want to face me?”
“Get off your high horse.” Wesley said, looking up at him. He realised his outburst after a moment, and his head sank once again. “I wanted nothing to do with you.”
“Then why--”
“Because I heard you were in trouble.” Wesley interrupted.
Angel's glare remained. “You wanted to be a hero? Come to my rescue? You must have known that wouldn't prove anything.”
“For someone who's been alive for several centuries you have a tendency to be entirely daft, did you realise that?”
The comment took Angel off guard for a moment. Wesley's tone of voice and stance was entirely new to him, and he struggled to find any shred of similarity in this man and the one he'd watched walk out of the hotel room carrying his baby son.
After a moments pause, Wes regrouped and decided to try the more mature angle. “As far removed as I may be, I understand the need for a hero in this world,” he said gently, looking back to the fire, “and of all the burdens to fall to mankind, or to me, it was the one we would be least able to fulfil.”
Angel heard the words as if through headphones, knowing that that every syllable spoken, ever rambling statement was meant for his ears alone. Wesley noticed his expression and grew angered for a moment.
“So you see, I wanted to rescue you for my own reasons. Come chasing after you, to make sure I wouldn't have to end up the sad bastard caught playing the hero. I was thinking about myself all along.” He pulled himself out of his chair. “So you can go back to your happy delusions, now. Angel's world makes sense again.”
He was out the door before the vampire could utter a sound.
At first Angel considered pursuit, but decided against it. The door clattered as wind caught it, and Angel caught a glimpse out into the ongoing twilight of their surrounds. He wondered suddenly if they day had gone by – the sun never rose here, at least not in the winter months.
Time passed with no signal of pause, and after several hours, a blast of wind shrank the fire to a flicker of golden embers. Lifted from his reverie, Angel glanced to the black gap in the cabin wall, the very same hole his only companion had disappeared through hours before…
*
Wesley choked on the ice in his mouth and rolled onto his stomach, dribbling the snow onto the floor. He blinked the moisture from his eyes, letting them adjust to the light of the fire. After the shapes had merged together he made out the small fireplace and the figure in the chair beside him.
Angel noticed Wesley's movement and observed him for a moment. He'd rolled onto his back again, and was breathing clear relief to be free of the elements. His chest rose and fell to it's own erratic beat, and his eyes had closed once again as he took in the heat from the newly rebuilt fire.
Still feeling the effects of the cold, but lacking the strength to move closer to the fire, he took shallow breaths and tried desperately to recall where he was. Finally remembering his outburst, and his hours on the snow, he coughed abruptly and winced at the pain in his chest.
Something felt strange, but he couldn't figure out what it was. It took him a few moments to realise he was wearing Angel's clothes. He looked up, surprised, at the vampire in the seat beside him, draped in his own saturated attire.
Using what little strength he had left, he pulled himself into a sitting position. He opened his mouth to speak, but felt the words drain from him. Once again he saw a glimpse of the man inside the vampire.
“You found your way back.” Angel said suddenly.
Wesley lowered his brow, unsure of how to respond to this. Passing his hands over the smooth, and blissfully dry black shirt he now wore, he had no way of speaking the words or asking the questions he wished to.
“She made the deal with Connor.” From the chair, Angel spoke and drove the silence away once again. “You were left here for me. So that I could watch you die.”
Unable to draw a response from his pain stricken body, Wesley winced and forced down the anger and the bile that arose in him at the mention of Lilah. “How generous of her.” He finally managed.
Angel looked him directly in the eye at this statement, an unreadable expression on his face.
Desperate to change the subject, Wesley looked to the small pile of wood by the fireplace. “The fire wood will not last us more than two days,” he paused, watching Angel's expression, “I won't survive long after…”
“I know.” Angel said softly, caught in his own disturbing thoughts.
Wesley shifted himself closer to the fire, his arms wrapped around his own torso in a vain attempt to keep warm.
Tired of the silence and the constant discomfort, Wesley looked questioningly to the vampire. “Why am I alive, Angel?”
At first there was no response. Angel, his eyes focused on the fireplace, tried to answer even to himself the question that puzzled him still.
“What can I say?” Angel said, trying to maintain his adversity, “I like my blood warm.”
Wesley's brow lowered. “Don't even try to play that game here, Angel.”
“And what game is that Wesley? You know what? I don't care. Your own stubborn stupidity nearly got you killed.”
“So you came to my rescue. My hero.”
Angel ignored the sarcasm, instead opting for the solace of the flames. He tried to drown out all thoughts of his companion and the situation he found himself trapped in. Unable to, he grunted in frustration and turned back to the man on the floor.
“Was it worth it?”
Wesley looked up, confused.
“Sitting where you are now. Screwing Lilah. Drowning in your own misery. All that to play the hero? Tell me. Did you have a thing for Justine, or were you just moved by Holtz's righteous cause?”
Casting all thoughts of pain aside, Wesley pulled himself to his feet, a rage in his eyes that Angel hadn't seen before.
“You really are clueless, aren't you? You— !” Wesley placed his hands on his head, frustrated and sick to his stomach, with no outlet for the emotions that threatened to take him over. He let out a cry of anger before pacing to the other side of the room.
“You can sit there and pass judgement over me for something I didn't even do. Yes. I went to see Holtz. To try and convince him to stop.” Wesley closed his eyes. “I was never taking Connor to Holtz, Angel. Justine attacked me on my way to the car.”
Angel wasn't sure what to say… the anger in him that he'd tried to shut out had returned, along with such true sorrow at hearing Wesley's accounting of what had happened.
“Justine and Holtz never saw you as anything more than a vampire. I defended you, for God's sake. Time and time again. Against Justine, against Holtz… against everybody…” Wesley looked lost, caught in a whirlwind of emotion and uncertainty.
Angel looked away. “You were stealing my son. And you expected me to, what? Forgive you? Welcome you back with open arms?”
“I had my throat cut trying to protect your son, Angel. I made my mistakes, but as I recall, I'm not the only one who's been down that road.”
“Don't you dare bring that into this. Play the cards you're dealt, Wesley.” Angel spat, furious that his stint with Darla was still an issue.
They stood divided, glaring at each other with nothing left to say that could be formed into real words.
For a brief moment, Wes closed his eyes and tried to understand what he was hearing. That Angel could loathe him so greatly for his betrayal, and forget in an instant every moment in which he'd done the same.
“Things could have been different,” Wesley admitted softly. “I could have come to see you about it. But how was I to know if you were still in control? Would you ever have forgiven yourself if you'd eaten your own son?”
Angel tried desperately to keep the emotion from showing on his face.
“I couldn't stand by and watch that. I could never watch you destroyed that way.”
“But you can watch me destroyed this way? By my own son, who…” Angel laughed humourlessly and pointed to the door, “…who wants to kill me, by the way. If you hadn't noticed. My own son. My flesh and blood. Welded me in to a damn box and dropped me into the ocean. But that wasn't enough, see, he also had to throw me onto a damned glacier in the middle of the Atlantic with the man who stole him in the first place.”
A cold look passed over Wesley's face.
“In what world could you have been my friend, Wesley? You took my own son out of my arms and walked out the door with him… H-how? Why?”
“Because you would have killed him Angel!” Wesley cried.
“No! No – we found out what was causing that, and we fixed it. It was going to be all right, Wesley. It was going to be fine, and then…”
Wesley lowered his head, tears threatening to well in his eyes. “I didn't know...”
“You didn't ask.”
“You didn't bloody tell me!” Wesley cried, tears streaming down his face. “I was trying to save him, Angel. The prophecy was sound – in all translations. It was confirmed by the Loa, it was real.”
“But it wasn't real. Sahjan wrote the whole damned thing himself. It was never real.”
Wesley was sobbing now, unable to control himself. “I watched my world crumble in seconds, Angel. I watched my friends vanish into the darkness, and I watched the closest thing I've ever had to family, the only…” he screwed his face up both in pain and anger. “I watched you - killing me in a hospital bed.”
Angel was speechless, captivated by the pain and anger unravelling in the man that was now crouched in pain against the opposite wall.
“And now there's nothing left,” Wesley managed through choked tears, “I didn't walk out that door because I wanted to die… I walked out because I was ready to…”
Wesley laughed amidst the tears, but it was an empty laugh. “And since I'm bound to die here anyway, and I have nothing left to lose, I may as well enjoy myself.”
“The cold is starting to affect your mind.” Angel pulled himself out of the rickety chair and helped the weak man back to the fireplace.
“Maybe,” Wesley accepted.
Angel observed the man for a moment, unsure of what to say or do next. He felt a tightening in his chest as he realised what would eventually happen, and so sat down in front of the fire.
“I would have died for you, you know,” Wesley mumbled as he flopped ungraciously to the floor. “I would have given up everything.”
Angel's brow furrowed, and he wondered how seriously he could take what he heard.
“But that's what love does to men. Turns them into demons without a whisper as to why…”
Angel winced, feeling his own tears emerge. The fire had almost extinguished once again, and the ongoing darkness – usually so comforting – was now nearly maddening to him. Everything seemed to come crashing down around him, and the wind picked up outside as the snowstorm raged on.
“I could never forgive you,” Angel said, recalling his words in the hospital.
“Doesn't change a thing.”
Again, the vampire cast a confused expression in the direction of his companion.
“The garden is under the snow,” Wes mumbled, his head falling to one side, “yet for all the promise of death and ice, he still could not let die his beloved Iscariot…”
At his ramblings, Angel finally let his tears go, and wept openly for the first time in years… crying for what he'd become, and what he was -- everything he'd done, all the terrible crimes and all the faces that haunted him which had been forgotten for the self-righteous need to leave one man unforgiven…
*
It took less half a day for the firewood to burn out, leaving the cabin set to chill in the ongoing snowstorm. In the dark, Angel cradled the younger man against his chest, feeling the heat from his body draining away with every minute. Wesley's eyes remained shut, and he mumbled every few moments, nearly indistinguishable phrases of forgiveness and peace.
Angel listened to the half-words with a dead look in his eyes, and only the thought of his son on his mind. That a man he'd loved so dearly once, and now again, would by lying in his arms, near death, find some kind of peace … while his own flesh and blood destroyed such life. It was impossible to fathom. Yet here he lay, arms around the beloved friend he thought he'd lost forever.
The mumbling stopped, and Angel looked down to his companion. Leaning in, Angel kissed him gently, as if by his lips he could withdraw the cold from the man's body.
He restricted the urge to shake him and yell his name. Wake him up from whatever badly timed slumber he may have fallen into. This was life and death here, they had no time for sleep…
A cold wind washed over him, despite the closed door. He felt himself shaking from the fear realisation brought with it.
“Forgive me,” Angel whimpered into the deafening silence, cradling the body against him. Tears swelled, and he felt himself suddenly reduced to a child in the dark.
“Oh, please…” he sobbed gently,
“forgive me…”
* * *