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She wanted his attention constantly, like a child. If he wasn't there, she wouldn't eat, sleep, drink, bathe. She wouldn't talk to the doctors who came so far to study her. After the fifth morning the staff stopped checking his ID, just let him quietly enter her room to hold her hand, comforting her through dreams that made her toss and turn like a hurricane in the small hospital bed. When she was awake, she would stare at him with wild brown eyes and clutch his hand tightly when he tried to leave. Finally they had to medicate her just to ease her desperate grip on his hands. He had bruises for days afterwards.
He didn't know why he had stayed here in Sunnydale, long after the Council has dismissed him. He didn't know why he had visited her, the girl who had betrayed him, making him look a fool in front of his peers. The girl who had ruined his career, any chance at a life he'd had. His Slayer.
Guilt, some sort of repressed guilt. Had to be. He hadn't been good enough to be her Watcher, and she had gone to the dark side to spite him and all his rules and his precious order. She'd been embraced by chaos, and then spat back into the darkness. And it had to hurt.
So he came, and he saw her, lying helpless in her hospital bed. And he stayed, and he waited.
And she woke up.
He'd been sitting by her bed, reading something by Kafka. He couldn't remember exactly what, only that he had been deeply absorbed in it that afternoon. Several nurses had come and gone; one of them, a round, motherly type, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder with a smile. "Your girlfriend will get better soon, dear," she said. He hadn't the heart to tell her that Faith wasn't his girlfriend, merely his charge. She must have forgotten that the comatose girl was only around eighteen. Either that, or Wesley looked very very young in his overly large sweater. It was February, and unseasonably cold.
He had gone back to his book, becoming absorbed in the story. And then?
The hand on his wrist made him jump. When he looked into the dark eyes of the owner of that hand, his heart began to beat like it was trying to jump out of his chest.
She looked so confused that she seemed almost innocent, like a child awakened from a nap. She was dirty from her months of lying in the same bed; her pale face looked pinched and sallow, and her body was thin beneath her hospital gown. Her skin was rough and scaly against him, her wrists like pencils.
But she was awake.
She cleared her throat, unaccustomed to speaking after her long sleep. "Wha?where am I?"
He felt absurdly choked up and awkward, like he was about to cry. "In the hospital, Faith. You were in a coma."
"And you stayed with me?" Her palm trailed down his wrist, entwining his fingers with her own.
He put his other hand on top of theirs. "Yes. I-yes."
She smiled up at him sweetly, looking nothing like the girl that he had known before. "Good."
That was when the doctors ran in, forcing Wesley out of the room.
She hadn't talked to them, not then and not until they brought Wesley back. It was the kind nurse who had brought up the connection between them, and the fact that, while Faith stayed silent and wide-eyed with them, she had actually spoken to Wes.
At first they just thought that the head wound had ruined her mind. They hadn't even expected her to wake up, and when she did she just sat there, looking around at everything with huge brown eyes that had constant yellow circles around them, like bruised flesh. She refused to move from her bed, letting out tiny growls at the nurses who tried to move her. The doctors who expected her muscles to be atrophied were quite surprised when she found the strength to send her food tray flying across the room, making a mark in the door.
When Wes came back, she quieted, curling up on her bed to sleep as he stroked her ratty hair. He called the nurses back in and they gave her a bath as he looked away, blushing. He was still English, after all. She ate only a little bit of soft food when she first woke, taking to it like a baby bird. And then she began to talk to him.
"I can barely remember what happened before. Falling off the building-I remember that. There was a knife in me..." her voice trailed off, and her hand slipped down to her side, feeling the scar that was left. She looked up at him, eyes wide. "And I remember that I hurt you."
He'd nodded, eyes on the floor. "Yes."
"Well, don't worry." She dropped to the floor, light as air on her tiptoes, then settled herself in Wesley's lap, to his extreme surprise. "I won't ever hurt you again."
And then she smiled, and it was like sunlight. And he couldn't tell her the truth-that she had been murderer who had betrayed her friends, and that she hated him.
Not that she was completely different from the way she had been. She was still bitchy to the nurses, swearing like a trucker just to watch them squirm. She hit on the doctors, but only when Wes was around, and she was talking. Eventually she began talking when he was gone as well, but he practically slept there, so little changed.
But there were times when she was a sullen presence in her dark little room, sick of being examined by doctor after doctor. She was a miracle; she was a living dead girl. Her brain should have been mush, but she was living and talking and she could still read and do math, although she had never been particularly good at either. She was also still as strong as ever, which was no surprise to Wesley and nothing but a surprise to the doctors. She was above average when it came to brute strength, and this in a girl who'd been motionless for months? She was nothing but a study to them, and she hated it. It had been her greatest fear when she lived on the streets: that someone would notice her exceptional strength and pick her up and she would be studied by scientists forever and ever.
She confided all this to Wesley while curled in his lap, her favorite place. Sometimes she would pull him onto the bed with her, spooning his body around her own. The nurses allowed it, calling them a fairy tale couple; Sleeping Beauty and the Prince Charming who had awakened her from her magical sleep.
They knew about her past, of course. Sunnydale Police came the day after she woke up, but she hadn't been speaking then. When they came back the psyche doctors assured them that any homicidal instinct was gone, that she was a completely different person than she had been before. They had her on meds, and she was calmer than she had ever been. But she told Wesley that they made her feel like a zombie, and they took her off them and put her on something else.
Buffy showed up, too, cold-eyes and steely-voiced, demanding to see Faith. She called Wes an idiot, a weak fool who was letting Faith get away with murder again. "She's just playing with you, the way she played with me. And in the end, you'll end up dead."
He refused to believe her, instead having security escort away the threat to his Slayer. He just couldn't reconcile Buffy's view of the girl who used to exist with the girl who existed now. Faith was a changed person, and she'd said so many times that she wanted to get her life back together. She was even beginning to remember parts of her life before the coma.
She cried sometimes, after nightmares. She would be tossing and turning in bed and he would awaken her with a kiss to the forehead or, if he was bold, to the lips. She would always awaken with a moan, then drag him into bed with her. He would hold her in his arms as tears ran down her face, soaking into her hospital gown. She called him her Prince Charming.
Eventually she had to go home, and Wesley took her to his tiny apartment. Her only baggage was one tiny suitcase supplied by the hospital and a bottle of pills, both of which Wesley carried.
"Home sweet home," Faith said with a small smile. She was dressed in boy's jeans and a button-down shirt that Wes had brought to the hospital. They would have to buy her clothes eventually, but Faith assured him that she still had clothes at her old apartment...assuming it hadn't been rented out again when they Mayor died.
Wes smiled back at her. The apartment was small, because so far he was living off money in his bank account. He would have to get a job soon enough, possibly at a library. He had the education for it but God, did it make him feel like Giles...
Faith had plopped down on the couch, turning on his small tv. She looked at him with bright eyes, patting the cushion next to her with a wink. He smiled and sat next to her, and she pulled his arm around her and sighed. "Well, this is comfy. Just like home. Well-not my home. A good home." She looked at him, their faces level with each other, and he blushed at the intensity of her gaze. "I've been waiting to get you alone, Wes."
And then she kissed him. And it was long, and wet, and deep, and for a second he felt like Sleeping Beauty. Like he had just woke up.
They settled into pattern remarkably easy. Wes still had trouble forgetting that Faith was only eighteen, but the one time he had brought it up, she growled "Forget about it" with dark eyes, then returned to her Cheerios. She also didn't like the concept of him getting a job; it left her alone in the apartment for too long. But it was unavoidable, and he started working at Sunnydale Library every Tuesday and Thursday.
The time apart only seemed to make her more desperate for him. She was constantly touching him, stroking him, whispering "love you love you love you love you..." into his ear. He was unused to affection like hers, unused to love. He'd been in love before, but never so much as this.
He loved her.
And for a time they were a fairy tale couple. They woke up, they kissed, they made breakfast, they spent the day thinking about each other.
But with Sleeping Beauty, the poisoned needle always comes back to haunt...
"Babe, you wanna look through the closet for my book?" Faith called from the living room.
Wes smiled, on his knees in front if their bedroom closet. Their closet. The city had kept all of Faith's things from the gift-apartment from the Mayor, and over time they had gotten almost all of Faith's things back. The closet was where she kept things she wanted hidden, including the journal her court-appointed therapist required her to write in daily.
He was cleaning it out, throwing out his clothes that were too small or too worn, or merely not fitting someone of his position. He'd gotten a job at university, teaching a class on demon mythology. The dean had confirmed it just that week.
Wes sorted through the pile of clothes on the closet floor with a sigh. Faith, while much more organized than before, was still a messy teenage girl, and she tended to pile her dirty clothes on the floor rather than put them in the hamper. He sighed, but it was a happy sigh, and rather than lecture her for it, he grabbed the hamper and started throwing clothes into it. Bra, jeans, underwear...
As he threw in a crumpled flannel, something hard fell into his lap. It was heavy, and cold, even through the fabric of his pants. It was a knife, and as he gingerly picked it up with his fingertips, he noted that it was coated red with blood.
A warm breath in his ear made him jump. "What? Did you think you could fix me, Wes?" Faith's voice was softly mocking in his ear. "Not how it works, baby."
Wes' eyes closed, and he felt tears warming the insides of his eyelids. Faith's hands were on his shoulders, and one slipped down into his lap to take the knife from him. He didn't protest, just leaned his head back against her shoulder with a choked sigh. She laughed and kissed his throat, leaving a love bite. "That's my Prince Charming, huh? Always there to wake me up..."
And he wished that he could wake up, because this had to be a nightmare. But he couldn't.
elusional i believed i could cure it all for you dear coax or trick or drive or drag the demons
from you make it right for you sleeping beauty truly thought i could heal you
far beyond a visible sign of your awakening failing miserably to rescue sleeping beauty
drunk on ego truly thought i could make it right if i kissed you one more time to help you face the
nightmare but you're far too poisoned for me such a fool to think that i could wake you from your
slumber that i could actually heal you
sleeping beauty poisoned and hopeless
far beyond a visible sign of your awakening failing miserably to find a way to comfort you
far beyond a visible sign of you awakening and hiding from some poisoned memory
poisoned and hopeless sleeping beauty
