Title: Something Broken
Author: Mandy C
Email: amanda@beingdrowned.com
Summary: Wesley examines his would-be savior.
Spoilers: Through the end of both series.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Joss Whedon. There isn't a plot, so pretty much nothing belongs to me except the words...and, frankly, that's not saying much. :P
Notes: All praise to Sam, the most insanely tolerant beta ever. For the Escape from LA ficathon. Here's the original challenge:
Pairing: (if there is one): Wes/Willow, angsty, but not dark.
One or more restrictions: No characters bashing, no slash. (unless it's mention of Canon Willow pairings). No non-B/A, if you choose to bring them up at all.
Four requirements:
1) Preferably set Post-NFA where he's survived, but his breakdowns in S5 or the beginning of S4 are also good.
2) In or going to New England or anywhere in Europe.
3) Willow having control over her magic, (Evil!Willow is too dark)
4) Semi- happy or least Hopeful ending.

Wesley closed his eyes, letting the late afternoon set over him. The air had been crisp and cool all week, and it hadn't rained in -- too long, he thought, for England.

A familiar voice broke the silence. "How are you feeling?"

He knew intellectually that she was barely whispering, but her voice seemed to ring out in the quiet hills. He felt her come up next to him, felt the wool of his sleeve scratch his skin as she brushed against him.

He thought it was probably good that he was beginning to notice discomfort again.

"Better," he said. The wind picked up, carrying the cold air through his porous sweater and his porous skin. He put his hands in his pockets, staving off the cold from at least one part of his body. Wesley had always been a practical man: he would fix the things he could.

Willow's eyes were on him. Reluctantly, Wesley turned his face toward hers and waited for her questions to continue. Every day, she asked the same questions. Every day, he gave the same responses.

He would tell her something different if anything had changed.

"I know you dreamed about her last night," Willow said gently. Her brown eyes locked on his -- eyes that were dark and warm and too much like the pair he wouldn't see again.

He turned away from them to gaze over the grey skies and pale grass of the barren landscape. Wondered if this place had ever truly been his home. "That's not an uncommon occurrence," he remarked.

"You said you were getting better." He didn't need to look at her to know the concern in her eyes. "You were screaming, Wesley."

Wesley just shook his head, brushing off the statement. His dream --

how could you have forgotten me so quickly wesley you said you loved me you'd always loved me then you said you would die for me so why are you still alive

- had left him with too many uncomfortable questions of his own. And this, the most obvious, the one thing always on his mind: "Why are you here, Willow?" he asked. "We hardly know each other." The question he meant to ask -- Why do you think you can save me? -- wouldn't make it across his tongue. Wesley had a childish fear that if he spoke those words out loud, there would be no chance of making them true.

She shrugged. "I needed a vacation, and you need someone to keep you company." She smiled at him, and attempted levity. "I guess Giles figured we had a lot in common."

"I suppose we do, at that." Wesley knew, for example, that Willow counted her losses before she went to sleep. He knew this not because she'd ever told him, but because he saw how heavily it weighed on her in the mornings. In the mornings, he and Willow were mirror images of grief.

"I made some tea," Willow said hopefully, in a way that reminded him of the awkward, eager teenager he'd known so briefly, all those years ago.

All those lifetimes ago.

That there was little of that girl left was another thing they had in common: both of them had changed so much over the past few years as to be nearly unrecognizable, even to themselves.

When Wesley had stabbed his best friend in the gut, he had not recognized himself.

He nodded slowly, then placed his hand on the small of her back. "Tea would be lovely," he said, and he nearly meant it.

The house was small, and Wesley didn't know to whom it belonged, or anything about it at all, actually. He didn't particularly care, so he had never asked.

When he had first entered the house, three or four weeks ago, he had immediately wished that this had been the background of his childhood. Here was a place that could have been a home, a place where fresh flowers would be laid out on the table every afternoon, a place where the kitchen would always be warm from the heat of the oven.

There were no stairs in the small house. To Wesley, this might have been the most important thing.

Willow pulled the floral-patterned cozy off of the teapot and poured the liquid into two ragged-looking cups. She added milk and sugar to Wesley's cup, in spite of his frequent half-hearted protests that the tea must be added to the milk, and not the other way around.

She took her tea black. He remembered hearing from someone -- Giles, maybe, in one of his infrequent but always dire phone calls -- that at her darkest point, Willow's hair had turned black.

At the time, Wesley had been unable to reconcile Giles' vision of a witch empowered by her own fury with his own memory of a sweet-natured redhead who was always so content to play sidekick to those more powerful than herself.

Wesley still had a hard time envisioning it. There was a quietness about her now, and at times he sensed the power lying latent in her bones -- but nothing to suggest the horrors of her all-too-recent past.

He wondered how much Willow knew about the horrors in his own past.

Enough, he was sure. He was also certain that she would absolve him all his sins if she were able, and that knowledge alone removes some of their weight.

She smiled at him over her teacup, and though Wesley couldn't lift the corners of his mouth quite far enough to smile back, he thought she knew what he meant.

Willow placed her empty cup back on the table with a bit too much force, and another crack, deeper than the others, spread along the delicate china. "Oops," she said, making a face. "I barely touched it."

He examined her mutely, then finished his own tea. He caressed the handle for a moment, tracing the scratches and chips in its smooth surface. Wesley remembered a tea set he had kept with him for years, remembered Fred drinking coffee out of the teacups. Once he'd caught Angel using one to heat up some blood in the microwave. When they had been friends -- and that was a loss Wesley mourned deeply -- Charles had always refused to use the tea set, because it was "girly," it was "British."

All of them, ashes.

Wesley closed his eyes and threw his cup at the wall, where it shattered into a thousand jagged, delicate pieces.

He heard Willow exhale slowly, and then her voice -- quiet and full of something like satisfaction -- permeated the stillness. "Maybe you are getting better," she said.

There was a smile on her face, he knew, a smile that was pleasant and concerned. A smile that might become as dear to him as the ones he had lost, if he allowed it.

Wesley opened his eyes.