Sands of Time, Grains of Salt
by Suz

RATING: FRT [A] [GF]

SUMMARY: His watcher duties and her need for less grief and more violence.

SPOILERS: The Season Finale "Not Fade Away".

PAIRING: Wes/Illyria, Wes/Fred

DISCLAIMER: Characters, set-up, scene's and everything else belong to joss whedon, mutant enemy and the various writers, producers and anyone else involved. not being used to turn a profit, but for my own entertainment purposes only.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was written for my own comfort.

In their final hours he will not accept a lie to live out the perfect day because Illyria is not who he wants to be with. He loves Fred and that is who he would have been with if she was still alive, but he knows she is gone. He knows she is dead and there is no way that it can be possible and to accept a lie would be to accept his own fate and he cannot do that. He is not ready to forgoe all of his beliefs instilled by his Watcher status so he spends his last day taking care of Illyria even though she knows she is not the one he wants to be with.

She feels grief for him. She doesn't understand it. She has a strong need for more violence. This shell she is wearing...she is experiencing her feelings as he lay dying in her arms. She knows in a matter of moments it will all be over for him and she asks him if he would accept a lie this time. Giving in he accepts the lie for comfort in his final moments of life and with his last breath he gets to look upon the woman's face he's loved since the moment he saw her--he thinks maybe even before and tell her that he loves her one last time.

Peace is offered to him as she peers down at him through her own tears and whisperes, "I love you." And tells him that soon this will all be over and he will be with her, where she is and they can be happy. For one breif shining moment there is happiness illuminated in his eyes as he believes in the lie once more and slips away in her arms. His final moments done; a hero dies in battle without compromise. He has done what he knew he needed to do and was granted that final moment of peace he deserves.

A rage surges up like a darkened twisted black well and courses through her viens. Illyria is aching inside and she doesn't quite understand. She is alone now. Her battle is solitary and she feels the need for more violence. She feels a strong thick need to rip heads off, dismember bodies and make them devour their own flesh so they might see how she feels, rendered helpless, powerless and stripped of everything she once bore in her own world before she was ressurrected and brought to life through the power of this shell to walk in this world which she cannot understand nor comprehend fully.

Look at them. Cockroaches scurrying about scared and filled with the foul stench of humanity. I once crunched them beneath my toes when I ruled the world. I was the God-King of my time. People bowed down to me and I ruled the world with all of my power.

Powerless. She has nothing left, stripped bare and left vulernable and open to the shells feelings, thoughts and memories. She is trapped like a caged wild animal that once used to roam about where she wanted to go freely and a thick coat of fear pierces her. Illyria hates what she has been reduced to. This is not her. She is not supposed to be here. She wishes she had never been ressurrected. Yet she feels a strange need to learn to walk in this world she finds herself suffocating and trapped in.

Her anger is there thick and bitter on her tongue like grains of salt and sand being rubbed in an open gash across what would have been the shells heart had she of survived. But she couldn't survive. She couldn't leave this shell, she was a prisoner and as much as she kicked, screamed and tormented--she would forever remain binded to this body, this carcass that she carried around that now held her prisoner. And yet she fumed. She felt bitter covered in thick blackness at Wesley's demise.

He left her and it infuriates her further. It makes her want to spit a vile and dangerous venomous spray at the face and eyes of anyone who dare cross her path. The tilt of her head, the stance of her small body, the hardness that is set in her eyes, is the fist that is slaming through another head, destorying another life. Demon. It once used to cower at her feet anyway. It was useless and she rid the world of it because it killed Wesley.

And yet she has grief for this man that she cannot control and the violence it just keeps coming and coming. She wishes to do its bidding. She wishes to bow to its every whim because with this grief alone she cannot stomach. It makes her want to vomit and spew, the knot twisted in her gutt, the knot she knows belongs to the shell, belongs to Winifred Burkle the life she took. The life that he loved.

Illyria's wish was granted.

© June 2004

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