and other poison devils - ats gen fic
A/N: I started writing this Wes gen fic back when I'd only seen half of Lineage. I hadn't seen all of season 1, so I didn't know anything about Wes's family except what I'd heard through the fandom about the cupboard. So I took this song by Perfect Circle, which I somehow thought applied, and started weaving my own backstory to Wes's daddy!issues... and Roger's Wes!issues. I hope someone takes an interest in this and tells me what they think. All I've done recently is polish off what I found on my harddrive.
Title: and other poison devils
Fandom: AtS
Characters: the Wyndam-Pryce family
Category: gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentions of mild physical/verbal abuse of a child; character death (canon-appropriate)
Wordcount: around 3600
Disclaimer: AtS is Joss Whedon's.
/I’ll be the one to protect you from/
/your enemies and all your demons/
It was a problem that persisted throughout the boy’s childhood. He tried time and time again to peaceably resolve it; to reason with the child, as per Evelyn’s requests. Such was the folly of the doting mother. His Evelyn… She’d been a strong-willed, even stubborn woman before she’d taken ill. That hadn’t changed, after, but so much else had. If she’d been well, he knew, Evelyn would have understood the need to discipline their boy. The dangers of molly-coddling him, of catering to his every, foolish whim.
“He’s a boy, Roger. He wants to play. Children should play now and then,” she said when he brought the child home with his arm in a sling.
“He was out in the stables. With that friend of his-”
“Nigel,” Evelyn supplied.
“They were taking turns being vampires.” Roger carefully kept his voice level. Evelyn was already breathless, her voice soft and fluttering like a breeze. He couldn’t bear to upset her. “We’re lucky it wasn’t a stab wound. They were using real stakes.”
Evelyn laughed. She laughed - such a rare, welcome sound. The pounding of his heart quieted; the red tint faded, somewhat, from his gaze.
“Our little vampire hunter. Can you honestly complain, darling? He is his father’s son.”
‘He will be his father‘s death.’ Or, more likely, his m-
“There will be time for that when he’s older,” Roger said. “If he wants to play, there are plenty of games…”
Evelyn placed a hand on his. He held it gently, fingertips brushing the underside of her pale wrist.
“Chess, Roger? Badminton? He’s only six. He wants to run and jump-”
“From the rafters?” Roger grit his teeth, picturing Wesley as he’d been when their stable hand had found him. Rolling on the ground, clutching his arm to him and silently crying. He never made a sound when he wept, that child. Hadn’t since he’d woken Evelyn from a much-needed rest, one night, and Roger had scolded him for blubbering so loudly over a night terror.
‘Don’t you realize how badly your mother needs her sleep? Don’t you want her to get well? She never will at this rate, you silly boy. Do you want your mother to stay ill?”
He’d been frazzled, stricken. More than exhausted. The pain medicines hadn’t been doing their job at the time, and he’d sat at Evelyn’s bedside from sun up to sunset, praying for even unconsciousness if it eased her pain.
He’d regretted his explosion instantly, of course. But for the next week, Wesley had refused to speak. Roger was certain the boy was trying to punish him for what he’d said, so he didn’t mention it. Wesley’s silence, Roger found, was almost unbearably unnerving.
“He wants to use his imagination, dear,” Evelyn said.
Roger huffed. “Yes. Well, there’s little worry of his not doing that.”
Wesley’s imagination got him into trouble more often than not. He never jumped from a rafter - or anything else more than a foot high - again. But he did other things. When Evelyn was at her worst, Roger sent Wesley with Geoffrey to their summer home. The year before, Wesley had gotten himself lost in the woods behind the cottage, searching for “wood sprites” at night. That summer, Wesley had been forbidden to play outside, and he‘d found some spell books in the attic. He’d tried teaching himself to conjure Merlin‘s Fire, and he’d burnt a hole the size of a pin’s head in a box of old linen. Geoffrey’s replacement, Erwin, had found him and called Roger. Roger dreamt, for weeks afterward, that Wesley had burnt the house down on top of him.
He struck Wesley for the first time a month later.
The doctor had come and gone again, and this time it was Evelyn whispering consolations and prayers when she didn’t think Roger could hear. He woke, forehead pressed into the edge of the mattress, sitting half on and half off his chair. Evelyn’s hand was a nearly intangible weight on the back of his neck, her fingers stroking weak, shaky circles on his skin.
His face felt stiff and damp and his wife’s prayers were, in part, for him. The others were for Wesley - Evelyn never prayed for herself. Shame held Roger low, and he didn’t lift his head until his wife’s pained breathing had become the less ragged series of gasps that signaled sleep.
He walked past Wesley’s door twice before stopping and stepping in. Wesley was not in bed.
/Don't fret, precious, I'm here/
/step away from the window/
/Go back to sleep…/
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Wesley’s head bobbed on his shoulders as Roger shook him.
“I- I was just-”
“Just? You were just what? Playing? You know better than that, young man. You know that magic is not to be toyed wi-”
“I wasn’t playing, Father!”
It was one of the few times the boy had ever spoken to him so, and it was enough to bring Roger back to himself slightly.
They were in his study. The windows were open and the draft had lured a frantic Roger in from the hall. He’d searched both the second and the third floors before coming downstairs. He’d been about to alert the staff that Wesley had gone missing, again…
One of his spell books was open on his desk. A dead bird lay on the windowsill. Wesley was seven years old.
Roger set Wesley down. He didn’t remove his hands from Wesley’s small shoulders. They shook, but Wesley made no sound beneath the tears streaking down his face.
Roger’s fingers curled. “What were you trying to do?” He knew, of course he knew. Wesley must have found the chest beneath the weapons cabinet in the basement, because a used pestle sat on Roger’s ink blotter. The room smelled cloyingly of the roots and herbs used in preparation to perform the resurrection spell Wesley had been about to attempt. Roger’s spell book was still open to it, lying incriminatingly at Wesley’s feet.
“I- It-”
“Spit it out, boy!”
“It’s dead, Father. I didn’t want it to be dead.” Wesley’s voice was suddenly small and soft, and Wesley’s eyes were downcast. But he might has well have shouted in Roger‘s face. Roger shuddered, an icy chill starting at the base of his skull and shivering down his spine.
“The- Wesley. Things die. Things die all the bloody-” Roger’s voice nearly failed him. He could not do this right now. “And you were going to attempt a resurrection?” he hissed, growing - rather than louder - more softly and slowly spoken with each syllable. “A resurrection on a bloody bird? Because it flew into your window… There are no words with which to articulate the stupidity of that idea! If it had gone wrong-”
The thought stole his breath. ‘Dear God, it could have gone wrong…’
Wesley found his gumption once again, and said, “It wouldn’t have gone wrong, Father! I’ve been practicing. I’ve searched all the books for-”
“You’ve what?”
He released Wesley promptly, not trusting the strength of his own grip. Wesley stared up at him through wide eyes.
“What-” What had he been practicing on? A bird was bad enough… But not as bad as a larger animal. With paws and claws and teeth.
As it sometimes did, Wesley’s nervous fear became adrenaline. His words came loud and fast, syllables stumbling over one another when his tongue couldn’t keep up with the explanations in his head. “Elliot Shaughnessy’s puppy in November. And that kitten Geoffrey found by the lake. I didn‘t measure the wormroot right for the puppy. And I didn’t use enough of the lissen seed. But I almost had it right with the kitten. Honestly, Father, I-”
Roger didn’t realize he had done it until it was done. Wesley was lying on the rug, one small hand pressed tightly to his cheek. Roger’s palm actually stung and Wesley was staring at him as though he’d never seen him before. Roger rather shared the sentiment, actually.
“Listen to me, Wesley. And listen closely,” he said, voice oddly calm under the circumstances. Roger felt like he’d run a mile and his face felt stretched thin. It took an effort to open his mouth and speak, as though a vice were attempting to hold his jaw shut. “If you ever attempt a spell you are not old enough to perform, under this roof, again, you will not be living under this roof, do you understand me?”
Wesley could only dumbly nod.
“I did not raise you to the ripe old age of seven to see you pecked to death by a bloody bird zombie. Your mother-” Roger took a breath. “You cannot perform this resurrection spell, Wesley. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. As much I’d like for things to be different, the fact is that living things die. They die and they can’t be brought back to life. They aren’t meant to be. The Watcher’s Council keeps books like this so that we will know how to stop people who use these spells. Not so that we can attempt them ourselves. Are you listening?”
Wesley nodded again.
The strength went out of Roger. “Wesley…” He sighed, slumping back onto his desktop. “Go to your room.”
Wesley was on his feet and out the door as quickly as his steps could carry him. Roger didn’t move for a long while after.
/I'll be the one to protect you from/
/your enemies and your choices, son/
/They're one in the same, I must isolate you/
/Isolate and save you from yourself …/
Wesley was nine when Evelyn died. She’d been unconscious for nearly a week before- Wesley hadn’t spoken in that entire time.
He stood at Roger’s side in a somber little suit, greeting mourners at the vigil and the funeral and the wake. Until Roger looked down at him and was struck by a random memory, of Evelyn readying him for a recital in which his cousin Gabriel was to perform.
Wesley had been small at the time. Roger sometimes lost track of how much Wesley had grown, but he remembered Wesley having been small - the house had never lacked for laughter back then. Evelyn had had to tie Wesley’s tie more than twice. He’d kept bouncing about, refusing to stand still, but Evelyn hadn’t scolded him. She’d teased, and tickled his stomach, and finally squeezed him into a rather embarrassing hug - and wanting to extricate himself, Wesley had finally relented, and hadn’t fidgeted with his tie once more that evening.
Evelyn had always had a playful spirit. And she’d passed it along to Wesley. The thought of it nearly buckled Roger’s knees. He’d been so focused on Evelyn’s illness- Delaying the inevitable end, preparing for it. He hadn’t paid any mind to Wesley’s frequent requests to sit in with his mother in Roger’s stead. To play at the foot of her bed or read to her. Before her condition had worsened, Evelyn had asked to see Wesley daily. But as she’d gotten sicker, she’d begun to lose track of time. And Roger had begun to lose it with her. He suddenly realized he’d become accustomed to turning down Wesley’s requests to see his mother almost automatically. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Evelyn laughing with her son.
“Wesley,” Roger said, more harshly than was necessary. “Why don‘t you make yourself useful. Go and visit with your Aunt Agatha awhile. See if she needs anything.”
Roger was fiercely disappointed when Wesley did as he said, without complaint or question. He would gladly have taken a public display of emotion, at that moment, over Wesley’s silent obedience.
When the silence was finally broken, many months later, Roger would punish Wesley for it in a way he would never quite live down.
/I'll be the one to protect you from/
/your enemies and your choices, son/
/They're one in the same, I must isolate you/
/Isolate and save you from yourself …/
“Then what were you doing there?” Roger asked. “If not this.” Roger wiggled the spell book in front of Wesley’s face perhaps a bit too vehemently. But between scouring the property, and then the countryside, looking for his motherless son - taking a snifter of brandy here, and one there, to tame the panic - he had lost the ability to care whether he was overreacting.
“I was just- I go there sometimes. To visit… with Mother,” Wesley told him.
“Visit why?” Roger pressed.
“To talk to her!” Wesley responded with the attitude that he hadn’t really been meaning to. His face was red, and it had been so long since he’d raised his voice in Roger’s presence that it took Roger aback a moment.
But only for a moment.
“I visit your mother’s grave each Sunday. You never come along.”
“It’s different then,” Wesley insisted.
“I don’t believe you,” Roger hissed.
Wesley’s eyes widened. “But, Father-”
“I found this in the basement. On the floor. Out of its chest,” Roger read the list of evidence.
“I was cleaning the basement. Just as you told me to,” Wesley argued. “I emptied all of the chests. You asked me to find your-”
“I remember what I asked! Why was it left out?”
“I don’t know!” Wesley grew more and more upset. He was shifting from foot to foot and shaking his head. Signs of guilt, Roger assumed at once.
“You do know. You took it out,” Roger breathed, tight-chested. “You’ve been planning to use it. To use it on your mother.”
“Father!” Wesley cried.
“I told you, didn’t I? I told you what would happen if I caught you trying that again!” Roger railed at him.
Wesley‘s face went as white as a ghost. “But I haven’t tried anything!” he said, voice high and strange. “I promise you, Father! I swear-”
“You’ve promised before!” He’d promised he would never touch Roger’s spell books again. And perhaps it had been unfair to test him- To send him into the basement knowing that that book remained. But Roger had needed to know… Had had to prove his suspicions to be true or false, one way or the other.
Wesley had promised he would stay at Nigel’s one weekend - the first time he’d been away from home for more than a few hours since Evelyn’s death. And when Roger had dropped in early to check on things and pick Wesley up, Nigel’s mother had said that Wesley’d left with her husband. He’d told them they were to take him home Sunday afternoon.
Roger had whipped Wesley for lying. But Wesley had done it again and again. He’d lied about the books he’d been reading from the library, until his tutor had asked Roger what a ten-year-old boy wanted with A Historical Perspective on Necromancy. He’d lied about where he was and why he was there to Roger, to Erwin, to Nigel’s and Gabriel’s parents.
He’d picked a fight - picked a fight - with a little boy at school for stomping on a ladybug. He’d bloodied the boy’s nose, and as the boy had been two years and a head taller than himself, he’d come home with a black eye and broken fingers.
Wesley’s headmaster had spoken to Roger about it, in a kindly voice that sought Roger’s compassion rather than Wesley’s repentence. He’d suggested a doctor, a therapist - he’d said - that could speak with Wesley about his mother and his issues with death.
Roger had taken the advice like a fist to the nose. He would have no more doctors coming to his family, telling him what was healthy and what was not - what was sickness and what was choice.
He would end this nonsense, Roger thought. He would end it right here.
He took Wesley by the elbow, and they were halfway down the hall before Wesley thought about where they were going.
He stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Father, what are you going to do?”
Roger stared down at him with as cold and level an expression as he could muster. Becoming emotional would not do. The first time he had done so, in regards to this situation, he had struck Wesley - and these last weeks he had let the problem grow and grow, hoping to suddenly realize he was wrong. That Wesley hadn’t been sneaking out to his mother’s grave, plotting something stupid and deadly and wrong, this entire time. “I’m not going to do anything,” he said simply. “You are going to learn to abide by my wishes. And by the dictates of good common sense. You’re going to give up this ridiculous fixation with death and-”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“-and grieve like a normal child. And heal like a normal child would do.”
“Father, please.” Roger had begun to drag Wesley, and Wesley struggled. The nearer they got to the back door, the more Wesley’s struggles increased.
But Roger didn’t reach for the door. He stopped them in front of the cupboard in the hall, where Evelyn had kept her painting supplies - before she’d become too ill to make it down to the sunroom and paint as she preferred to do.
Roger flung open the cupboard door. Wesley stared at it, uncomprehending.
“Get in there,” Roger commanded.
Wesley blinked. “I- What-”
“Into the cupboard. Get in. Get in and stay in until you are ready to tell me the truth about what you’ve been doing at the cemetery. Stay in until you’re ready to start telling the truth, once and for all.”
Wesley tried to pull away, a final time. “Father. No…”
“Stay in where I don’t have to worry where you’ve gotten off to, and think about what’s happened.”
“Father!”
Roger all but wrestled Wesley into the small space and closed the cupboard door. Wesley beat wildly against it with his fists, babbling about the darkness and Mother and being sorry - and repeating the same damned denials again and again, until Roger had to promise to give him a thrashing to quiet him down.
Roger stood in the hallway for an indeterminable amount of time, listening to Wesley’s sobs slowly fade into nothing more than ragged breaths and the occasional whimper. As he did, Roger’s panic began to fade as well. The adrenaline rush - that had carried him from the moment he’d walked into Wesley’s room, to find it empty, until now - ebbed. And all that was left was a sort of hollow comfort, sickening but undeniable, at the click of the cupboard’s lock and a shudder that traveled Roger’s form from head to toe.
Go back just sleep
Go back just sleep
Go back just sleep
Go back just sleep
Roger’s often wondered what might have happened had he approached that evening in a different manner. Or had at least ended it differently. Had he pulled Wesley from the cupboard, some indefinite time later, and discussed the issue - discussed it as he should have done in the very beginning- Perhaps he could have made a difference.
Instead he had found himself in Evelyn’s room, fully intending to head back downstairs and release Wesley. But exhaustion and worry had taken their toll and he had dozed off, at Evelyn’s bedside, just as he had done so many times while she was alive. Memory had returned with the first rays of sun that fell on his face through the open curtains, and he had raced for the cupboard at a speed that could very well have ended in a broken neck.
But the damage had already been done. Perhaps it had been finished doing long before the first cupboard incident - Roger knows he was never the parent Wesley’s mother had been.
He was not playful. He was not compassionate. He didn’t expect little boys to play. Or fear. Or hurt, or lie. He’d expected them to get ill or injured and die, just as his Evelyn had, and leave him somehow even more alone and in despair than she had done.
So he’d tried not letting Wesley be a little boy. And all he’d accomplished was to prohibit Wesley from being his little boy. And mold him into a man who had died overseas - as far from Roger as he could possibly get - fighting alongside a soulled vampire in a battle he couldn‘t possibly win.
‘It’s dead, Father. I didn’t want it to be dead.’
Roger makes the trek to the cemetery daily. He visits Evelyn, too ashamed to speak, and then Wesley, pouring out words that should have been loosed long before his son’s death. Sometimes he takes that old book with him, just tracing its broken spine and its stained, aged cover. And wants to believe, despite all his mistakes, that Wesley knew how his father loved him - more than it made sense to love a living thing.
But Wesley got his imagination from his mother. And Roger can speak and speak at the consecrated soil that hides his son’s bones, but he can’t convince himself that the words can make a difference.
[ end. ]
Title: and other poison devils
Fandom: AtS
Characters: the Wyndam-Pryce family
Category: gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentions of mild physical/verbal abuse of a child; character death (canon-appropriate)
Wordcount: around 3600
Disclaimer: AtS is Joss Whedon's.
/I’ll be the one to protect you from/
/your enemies and all your demons/
It was a problem that persisted throughout the boy’s childhood. He tried time and time again to peaceably resolve it; to reason with the child, as per Evelyn’s requests. Such was the folly of the doting mother. His Evelyn… She’d been a strong-willed, even stubborn woman before she’d taken ill. That hadn’t changed, after, but so much else had. If she’d been well, he knew, Evelyn would have understood the need to discipline their boy. The dangers of molly-coddling him, of catering to his every, foolish whim.
“He’s a boy, Roger. He wants to play. Children should play now and then,” she said when he brought the child home with his arm in a sling.
“He was out in the stables. With that friend of his-”
“Nigel,” Evelyn supplied.
“They were taking turns being vampires.” Roger carefully kept his voice level. Evelyn was already breathless, her voice soft and fluttering like a breeze. He couldn’t bear to upset her. “We’re lucky it wasn’t a stab wound. They were using real stakes.”
Evelyn laughed. She laughed - such a rare, welcome sound. The pounding of his heart quieted; the red tint faded, somewhat, from his gaze.
“Our little vampire hunter. Can you honestly complain, darling? He is his father’s son.”
‘He will be his father‘s death.’ Or, more likely, his m-
“There will be time for that when he’s older,” Roger said. “If he wants to play, there are plenty of games…”
Evelyn placed a hand on his. He held it gently, fingertips brushing the underside of her pale wrist.
“Chess, Roger? Badminton? He’s only six. He wants to run and jump-”
“From the rafters?” Roger grit his teeth, picturing Wesley as he’d been when their stable hand had found him. Rolling on the ground, clutching his arm to him and silently crying. He never made a sound when he wept, that child. Hadn’t since he’d woken Evelyn from a much-needed rest, one night, and Roger had scolded him for blubbering so loudly over a night terror.
‘Don’t you realize how badly your mother needs her sleep? Don’t you want her to get well? She never will at this rate, you silly boy. Do you want your mother to stay ill?”
He’d been frazzled, stricken. More than exhausted. The pain medicines hadn’t been doing their job at the time, and he’d sat at Evelyn’s bedside from sun up to sunset, praying for even unconsciousness if it eased her pain.
He’d regretted his explosion instantly, of course. But for the next week, Wesley had refused to speak. Roger was certain the boy was trying to punish him for what he’d said, so he didn’t mention it. Wesley’s silence, Roger found, was almost unbearably unnerving.
“He wants to use his imagination, dear,” Evelyn said.
Roger huffed. “Yes. Well, there’s little worry of his not doing that.”
Wesley’s imagination got him into trouble more often than not. He never jumped from a rafter - or anything else more than a foot high - again. But he did other things. When Evelyn was at her worst, Roger sent Wesley with Geoffrey to their summer home. The year before, Wesley had gotten himself lost in the woods behind the cottage, searching for “wood sprites” at night. That summer, Wesley had been forbidden to play outside, and he‘d found some spell books in the attic. He’d tried teaching himself to conjure Merlin‘s Fire, and he’d burnt a hole the size of a pin’s head in a box of old linen. Geoffrey’s replacement, Erwin, had found him and called Roger. Roger dreamt, for weeks afterward, that Wesley had burnt the house down on top of him.
He struck Wesley for the first time a month later.
The doctor had come and gone again, and this time it was Evelyn whispering consolations and prayers when she didn’t think Roger could hear. He woke, forehead pressed into the edge of the mattress, sitting half on and half off his chair. Evelyn’s hand was a nearly intangible weight on the back of his neck, her fingers stroking weak, shaky circles on his skin.
His face felt stiff and damp and his wife’s prayers were, in part, for him. The others were for Wesley - Evelyn never prayed for herself. Shame held Roger low, and he didn’t lift his head until his wife’s pained breathing had become the less ragged series of gasps that signaled sleep.
He walked past Wesley’s door twice before stopping and stepping in. Wesley was not in bed.
/Don't fret, precious, I'm here/
/step away from the window/
/Go back to sleep…/
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Wesley’s head bobbed on his shoulders as Roger shook him.
“I- I was just-”
“Just? You were just what? Playing? You know better than that, young man. You know that magic is not to be toyed wi-”
“I wasn’t playing, Father!”
It was one of the few times the boy had ever spoken to him so, and it was enough to bring Roger back to himself slightly.
They were in his study. The windows were open and the draft had lured a frantic Roger in from the hall. He’d searched both the second and the third floors before coming downstairs. He’d been about to alert the staff that Wesley had gone missing, again…
One of his spell books was open on his desk. A dead bird lay on the windowsill. Wesley was seven years old.
Roger set Wesley down. He didn’t remove his hands from Wesley’s small shoulders. They shook, but Wesley made no sound beneath the tears streaking down his face.
Roger’s fingers curled. “What were you trying to do?” He knew, of course he knew. Wesley must have found the chest beneath the weapons cabinet in the basement, because a used pestle sat on Roger’s ink blotter. The room smelled cloyingly of the roots and herbs used in preparation to perform the resurrection spell Wesley had been about to attempt. Roger’s spell book was still open to it, lying incriminatingly at Wesley’s feet.
“I- It-”
“Spit it out, boy!”
“It’s dead, Father. I didn’t want it to be dead.” Wesley’s voice was suddenly small and soft, and Wesley’s eyes were downcast. But he might has well have shouted in Roger‘s face. Roger shuddered, an icy chill starting at the base of his skull and shivering down his spine.
“The- Wesley. Things die. Things die all the bloody-” Roger’s voice nearly failed him. He could not do this right now. “And you were going to attempt a resurrection?” he hissed, growing - rather than louder - more softly and slowly spoken with each syllable. “A resurrection on a bloody bird? Because it flew into your window… There are no words with which to articulate the stupidity of that idea! If it had gone wrong-”
The thought stole his breath. ‘Dear God, it could have gone wrong…’
Wesley found his gumption once again, and said, “It wouldn’t have gone wrong, Father! I’ve been practicing. I’ve searched all the books for-”
“You’ve what?”
He released Wesley promptly, not trusting the strength of his own grip. Wesley stared up at him through wide eyes.
“What-” What had he been practicing on? A bird was bad enough… But not as bad as a larger animal. With paws and claws and teeth.
As it sometimes did, Wesley’s nervous fear became adrenaline. His words came loud and fast, syllables stumbling over one another when his tongue couldn’t keep up with the explanations in his head. “Elliot Shaughnessy’s puppy in November. And that kitten Geoffrey found by the lake. I didn‘t measure the wormroot right for the puppy. And I didn’t use enough of the lissen seed. But I almost had it right with the kitten. Honestly, Father, I-”
Roger didn’t realize he had done it until it was done. Wesley was lying on the rug, one small hand pressed tightly to his cheek. Roger’s palm actually stung and Wesley was staring at him as though he’d never seen him before. Roger rather shared the sentiment, actually.
“Listen to me, Wesley. And listen closely,” he said, voice oddly calm under the circumstances. Roger felt like he’d run a mile and his face felt stretched thin. It took an effort to open his mouth and speak, as though a vice were attempting to hold his jaw shut. “If you ever attempt a spell you are not old enough to perform, under this roof, again, you will not be living under this roof, do you understand me?”
Wesley could only dumbly nod.
“I did not raise you to the ripe old age of seven to see you pecked to death by a bloody bird zombie. Your mother-” Roger took a breath. “You cannot perform this resurrection spell, Wesley. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. As much I’d like for things to be different, the fact is that living things die. They die and they can’t be brought back to life. They aren’t meant to be. The Watcher’s Council keeps books like this so that we will know how to stop people who use these spells. Not so that we can attempt them ourselves. Are you listening?”
Wesley nodded again.
The strength went out of Roger. “Wesley…” He sighed, slumping back onto his desktop. “Go to your room.”
Wesley was on his feet and out the door as quickly as his steps could carry him. Roger didn’t move for a long while after.
/I'll be the one to protect you from/
/your enemies and your choices, son/
/They're one in the same, I must isolate you/
/Isolate and save you from yourself …/
Wesley was nine when Evelyn died. She’d been unconscious for nearly a week before- Wesley hadn’t spoken in that entire time.
He stood at Roger’s side in a somber little suit, greeting mourners at the vigil and the funeral and the wake. Until Roger looked down at him and was struck by a random memory, of Evelyn readying him for a recital in which his cousin Gabriel was to perform.
Wesley had been small at the time. Roger sometimes lost track of how much Wesley had grown, but he remembered Wesley having been small - the house had never lacked for laughter back then. Evelyn had had to tie Wesley’s tie more than twice. He’d kept bouncing about, refusing to stand still, but Evelyn hadn’t scolded him. She’d teased, and tickled his stomach, and finally squeezed him into a rather embarrassing hug - and wanting to extricate himself, Wesley had finally relented, and hadn’t fidgeted with his tie once more that evening.
Evelyn had always had a playful spirit. And she’d passed it along to Wesley. The thought of it nearly buckled Roger’s knees. He’d been so focused on Evelyn’s illness- Delaying the inevitable end, preparing for it. He hadn’t paid any mind to Wesley’s frequent requests to sit in with his mother in Roger’s stead. To play at the foot of her bed or read to her. Before her condition had worsened, Evelyn had asked to see Wesley daily. But as she’d gotten sicker, she’d begun to lose track of time. And Roger had begun to lose it with her. He suddenly realized he’d become accustomed to turning down Wesley’s requests to see his mother almost automatically. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Evelyn laughing with her son.
“Wesley,” Roger said, more harshly than was necessary. “Why don‘t you make yourself useful. Go and visit with your Aunt Agatha awhile. See if she needs anything.”
Roger was fiercely disappointed when Wesley did as he said, without complaint or question. He would gladly have taken a public display of emotion, at that moment, over Wesley’s silent obedience.
When the silence was finally broken, many months later, Roger would punish Wesley for it in a way he would never quite live down.
/I'll be the one to protect you from/
/your enemies and your choices, son/
/They're one in the same, I must isolate you/
/Isolate and save you from yourself …/
“Then what were you doing there?” Roger asked. “If not this.” Roger wiggled the spell book in front of Wesley’s face perhaps a bit too vehemently. But between scouring the property, and then the countryside, looking for his motherless son - taking a snifter of brandy here, and one there, to tame the panic - he had lost the ability to care whether he was overreacting.
“I was just- I go there sometimes. To visit… with Mother,” Wesley told him.
“Visit why?” Roger pressed.
“To talk to her!” Wesley responded with the attitude that he hadn’t really been meaning to. His face was red, and it had been so long since he’d raised his voice in Roger’s presence that it took Roger aback a moment.
But only for a moment.
“I visit your mother’s grave each Sunday. You never come along.”
“It’s different then,” Wesley insisted.
“I don’t believe you,” Roger hissed.
Wesley’s eyes widened. “But, Father-”
“I found this in the basement. On the floor. Out of its chest,” Roger read the list of evidence.
“I was cleaning the basement. Just as you told me to,” Wesley argued. “I emptied all of the chests. You asked me to find your-”
“I remember what I asked! Why was it left out?”
“I don’t know!” Wesley grew more and more upset. He was shifting from foot to foot and shaking his head. Signs of guilt, Roger assumed at once.
“You do know. You took it out,” Roger breathed, tight-chested. “You’ve been planning to use it. To use it on your mother.”
“Father!” Wesley cried.
“I told you, didn’t I? I told you what would happen if I caught you trying that again!” Roger railed at him.
Wesley‘s face went as white as a ghost. “But I haven’t tried anything!” he said, voice high and strange. “I promise you, Father! I swear-”
“You’ve promised before!” He’d promised he would never touch Roger’s spell books again. And perhaps it had been unfair to test him- To send him into the basement knowing that that book remained. But Roger had needed to know… Had had to prove his suspicions to be true or false, one way or the other.
Wesley had promised he would stay at Nigel’s one weekend - the first time he’d been away from home for more than a few hours since Evelyn’s death. And when Roger had dropped in early to check on things and pick Wesley up, Nigel’s mother had said that Wesley’d left with her husband. He’d told them they were to take him home Sunday afternoon.
Roger had whipped Wesley for lying. But Wesley had done it again and again. He’d lied about the books he’d been reading from the library, until his tutor had asked Roger what a ten-year-old boy wanted with A Historical Perspective on Necromancy. He’d lied about where he was and why he was there to Roger, to Erwin, to Nigel’s and Gabriel’s parents.
He’d picked a fight - picked a fight - with a little boy at school for stomping on a ladybug. He’d bloodied the boy’s nose, and as the boy had been two years and a head taller than himself, he’d come home with a black eye and broken fingers.
Wesley’s headmaster had spoken to Roger about it, in a kindly voice that sought Roger’s compassion rather than Wesley’s repentence. He’d suggested a doctor, a therapist - he’d said - that could speak with Wesley about his mother and his issues with death.
Roger had taken the advice like a fist to the nose. He would have no more doctors coming to his family, telling him what was healthy and what was not - what was sickness and what was choice.
He would end this nonsense, Roger thought. He would end it right here.
He took Wesley by the elbow, and they were halfway down the hall before Wesley thought about where they were going.
He stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Father, what are you going to do?”
Roger stared down at him with as cold and level an expression as he could muster. Becoming emotional would not do. The first time he had done so, in regards to this situation, he had struck Wesley - and these last weeks he had let the problem grow and grow, hoping to suddenly realize he was wrong. That Wesley hadn’t been sneaking out to his mother’s grave, plotting something stupid and deadly and wrong, this entire time. “I’m not going to do anything,” he said simply. “You are going to learn to abide by my wishes. And by the dictates of good common sense. You’re going to give up this ridiculous fixation with death and-”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“-and grieve like a normal child. And heal like a normal child would do.”
“Father, please.” Roger had begun to drag Wesley, and Wesley struggled. The nearer they got to the back door, the more Wesley’s struggles increased.
But Roger didn’t reach for the door. He stopped them in front of the cupboard in the hall, where Evelyn had kept her painting supplies - before she’d become too ill to make it down to the sunroom and paint as she preferred to do.
Roger flung open the cupboard door. Wesley stared at it, uncomprehending.
“Get in there,” Roger commanded.
Wesley blinked. “I- What-”
“Into the cupboard. Get in. Get in and stay in until you are ready to tell me the truth about what you’ve been doing at the cemetery. Stay in until you’re ready to start telling the truth, once and for all.”
Wesley tried to pull away, a final time. “Father. No…”
“Stay in where I don’t have to worry where you’ve gotten off to, and think about what’s happened.”
“Father!”
Roger all but wrestled Wesley into the small space and closed the cupboard door. Wesley beat wildly against it with his fists, babbling about the darkness and Mother and being sorry - and repeating the same damned denials again and again, until Roger had to promise to give him a thrashing to quiet him down.
Roger stood in the hallway for an indeterminable amount of time, listening to Wesley’s sobs slowly fade into nothing more than ragged breaths and the occasional whimper. As he did, Roger’s panic began to fade as well. The adrenaline rush - that had carried him from the moment he’d walked into Wesley’s room, to find it empty, until now - ebbed. And all that was left was a sort of hollow comfort, sickening but undeniable, at the click of the cupboard’s lock and a shudder that traveled Roger’s form from head to toe.
Go back just sleep
Go back just sleep
Go back just sleep
Go back just sleep
Roger’s often wondered what might have happened had he approached that evening in a different manner. Or had at least ended it differently. Had he pulled Wesley from the cupboard, some indefinite time later, and discussed the issue - discussed it as he should have done in the very beginning- Perhaps he could have made a difference.
Instead he had found himself in Evelyn’s room, fully intending to head back downstairs and release Wesley. But exhaustion and worry had taken their toll and he had dozed off, at Evelyn’s bedside, just as he had done so many times while she was alive. Memory had returned with the first rays of sun that fell on his face through the open curtains, and he had raced for the cupboard at a speed that could very well have ended in a broken neck.
But the damage had already been done. Perhaps it had been finished doing long before the first cupboard incident - Roger knows he was never the parent Wesley’s mother had been.
He was not playful. He was not compassionate. He didn’t expect little boys to play. Or fear. Or hurt, or lie. He’d expected them to get ill or injured and die, just as his Evelyn had, and leave him somehow even more alone and in despair than she had done.
So he’d tried not letting Wesley be a little boy. And all he’d accomplished was to prohibit Wesley from being his little boy. And mold him into a man who had died overseas - as far from Roger as he could possibly get - fighting alongside a soulled vampire in a battle he couldn‘t possibly win.
‘It’s dead, Father. I didn’t want it to be dead.’
Roger makes the trek to the cemetery daily. He visits Evelyn, too ashamed to speak, and then Wesley, pouring out words that should have been loosed long before his son’s death. Sometimes he takes that old book with him, just tracing its broken spine and its stained, aged cover. And wants to believe, despite all his mistakes, that Wesley knew how his father loved him - more than it made sense to love a living thing.
But Wesley got his imagination from his mother. And Roger can speak and speak at the consecrated soil that hides his son’s bones, but he can’t convince himself that the words can make a difference.
[ end. ]