supersymmetry | [Milliways: Fred's Room]

[Milliways: Fred's Room]

It had been a while.

Fred didn't even know what that meant. Why she'd been keeping to herself so much more of late, why she'd been so oddly quiet since (and during, if she was honest with herself) Faith's wedding.

Getting out had been a relief, even if it was getting out to some place that was equally strange as this one. And this place had never stopped being strange. Even after so many months - over half a year, and she still hadn't started to regard this place as home. This room whose walls she'd never written on, the downstairs full of strange people and strange not-people... it shouldn't have been so different from home. Shouldn't have been that much stranger than the Hyperion had been when she'd arrived there. It had taken her months to start considering that place home, too. But it was different there. There she'd had a purpose, and a center, and ...

Something this place lacked.

Plenty of people found happiness here. Plenty of people she knew, people from her own world, had found something to make this place click.

And she hadn't.

All she'd found were myriad impossibilities. She felt a pang of guilt at thinking that, of counting that as a negative when she was one such impossibility and Wesley was another. But that was part of the problem. Words like death had so little meaning here. How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that back in their own world, Wesley was dead, and so was she? That latter part was a little easier, except how could it be? What was dead when the so-called proof was walking around and occasionally looking and acting just like her?

So many questions, and no answers forthcoming, not in all the months she'd spent going through every book she could get her hands on to try to explain the physics of it all.

And in all that time she'd never really talked about it, not in the kind of depth she needed to to understand. Partially because she didn't want to burden people with the difficult questions, and partially because the one person who might have given her answers wasn't someone she could bring herself to ask. Not when they both worked so hard at pretending to be normal, at ignoring the facts because the facts didn't make sense.

So if she hadn't seen Wesley much since they'd gotten back from Faith's wedding, if she'd been purposefully distant, it was no different than how willfully distant he'd been all along.

All the same, she finds herself contemplating the door, wondering if maybe tonight she should just go upstairs and knock on his door and ask some of the difficult questions after all.

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What drives a man to talk to a woman, especially after weeks have passed? Weeks when he has, quite frankly, been avoiding her, this woman he loves.

The woman he is supposed to love.

Ask Angel. Ask Lorne. Ask Gunn. Ask Spike. Even Spike would have said it. "Love Fred." Especially now. Love her unquestioningly. Love her without restraint.

Because what sane man would allow a miraculous second chance like this to slip through his fingers?

Why would he do such a thing?

But he is not here to save this chance. This ... thing they have. He did not think that was why he left his room and walked down the hallway to her door, but it was only at his first knock that he knew for sure this was not about reconciliation. Whatever this would be, it would not be about True Love. Because True Love had never really been a part of their story.

And so he knocks.

She startles, stares at the door for a moment as though wondering how she'd done that.

She shakes the thought aside -- of course he was looking for her. She'd been so distracted lately. They hadn't even really talked, if she thought about it - not in more than passing, casual words traded on their way to somewhere else, and even here there always seemed to be somewhere else. Something to get lost in, some wall to put between them.

And now there was only a door.

She stands there with her hand on the doorknob, hesitates a minute before opening it, taking the time to decide whether or not she was going to pin on a warm smile the way she always did, whether she felt it or not.

She doesn't.

But she does open the door.

"Hey." she's subdued, not withdrawn so much as just... not anything in particular.

"I was just..." some vague gesture, because she doesn't know what she was. There was nothing just about any of it. So she steps aside, holding the door open so he can enter, at a loss for anything else to do.

Wesley comes in without any of that hesitation he's always shown before.

He has no idea what she's going to say, of course. No more than he knows what he will say in reply. But he had made a decision when his hand touched her door. The choice to see this through, whatever 'this' would be. And once that had been decided, what else was there to hesitate about?

"Hello, Fred."

His greeting isn't as warm as the ones he had given her before. Ever since he first came to this place. But neither is his greeting cold. It's far from that. And he's surprised that what feeling it expresses--and there is love there, of a sort--is genuine and plainly meant.

"Ye-es. I was 'just' as well."

Not mocking. Only acknowledging that she seems to be in the same place as he. And, somehow, he doesn't find that surprising in the least.

Something is going to start here.

There's something in that greeting that makes her smile, genuinely if a little regretfully. People sounded different when they were just being themselves.

Usually she sounded like a rambling crazy girl, which is generally why she censored that impulse a bit. But she hated the artifice of it all, the walls they put around themselves. The ways they kept running away even when there was nowhere to run to.

It was good not to have that, if only for a moment.

"I think it's time we talked about some things." she says, her voice stronger than she'd expected it to be, more decisive, but never once unkind. "About some things we've never seemed to be able to talk about. We keep doing that -- not talking, and that seems really wrong somehow."

For a moment he feels that same old impulse to dance away from the issue. To buy time by stammering, taking refuge in a non sequitur, even making an (apparently) accidental, clumsy pratfall. But that impulse fades almost as soon as it appears.

"The lives we led. They were ... frantic. Always on the brink of disaster. It really was quite easy to avoid almost anything we wanted to."

"We could have chosen to live that way here too, I suppose."

"We could have."

But, no, he can't even pretend to say that with any conviction.

"I'm not sure we've really chosen anything." Fred says, quietly, sitting on the edge of her bed to stop herself from the distracted sort of pacing she wants to do.

"We've just sort of... accepted. Whatever this is. Whatever we were, whatever we thought we were supposed to be. And that would have been fine, except..." she pauses, shakes her head.

"Something changed. Something in between the time that I walked into my supply closet one day and never came back out. Sometime in between there were all these words that don't even mean anything. And I guess somewhere in there is a problem."

"You're hardly unique in that respect."

Wesley sighs, and sits down in a chair near her bed.

"Are we actually going to do this? Talk about these things, finally?"

"And did we really have to come to the end of the universe to have them out?"

She doesn't think she was, hence the we. She wasn't blaming him, or herself, or anything really other than circumstance.

But here they were at the end of the universe, and apparently they were going to talk about them. Finally.

She nods.

"I think we should. I think that's the point, sort of - we're at the end of the universe. The end of everything. Like a last chance, and we've just been ignoring it. Pretending it's something other than what it is."

He's silent for a time.

"There is so much of that, Fred. Not between us. Well, yes, it's been there too. But moreso, I think, in me."

"The Watchers rarely discuss it, and never with outsiders, but artiface is their true stock in trade. You're taught to craft an image of yourself for the world and make your true self disappear behind it."

"That can work for a time. If one is lucky. But I could never claim to be that. Not even when you said yes to me in the end. Because, of course, for no fault of our own, that was the end, and we were never really going to have 'us' long enough to enjoy it."

"Anyway. Yes. An end to artiface. I wonder, once it's stripped away, how much really will be left?"

"You think I don't know. About artifice. About what that means, to show the world one self because it's what they want to see."

She's a little bit angry, a little defensive.

"You think I never learned how to pretend? Maybe that just means I've been doing it too well. After Pylea I got really good at it, at pretending nothing's wrong because there just wasn't time for anything to be wrong. And it's not what you needed me for, you and Angel and Charles and the rest. There wasn't room for the girl who came back from Pylea and wrote on walls and wasn't quite all there even when she was. Nobody knows what happened back there, how I survived, the things I did to stay alive, and you know why? Because nobody asked. You never once saw me as strong enough to handle any of the really bad stuff. When in reality I think is was all of you who didn't want to face those parts of me."

There's an echo of forgotten fierceness in her words, an echo of the long-buried determined girl who'd fought for her life and won, at least up until the one time she didn't, the one time nobody would really tell her about. Sometimes she thinks they forgot that about her.

"You're right."

Quieter, almost to himself: "You're right."

"We were rescuing you in Pylea. We all thought that. Angel, Gunn, myself, even Lorne. Cordelia too, I suppose. We saved so many over the years, and the price you had paid to survive in that place was so high. So obviously high ... we never gave your situation a second thought. We saved you and that was all. Even when you stayed, and became one of us."

"By then, I suppose we assumed we knew your past already. Looking back on it, that was an outrageous way to treat you. But we were too busy--. Or rather, we kept ourselves too busy to have time to acknowledge that. That or any of the other things we preferred to forget."

"I'm not blaming you." she's quick to clarify. "It's not anyone's fault. Or, at least, it's not any one person's fault alone. I wasn't exactly jumping at the chance to show you anything different."

For all their unwillingness to see her as anything but sweet little Fred, there had been an equal unwillingness on her part to shatter all their illusions.

Except...

"Except I thought, for a while there, you understood what the others didn't. For a while there you seemed to see, with Professor Seidel - you were the only one willing to let me handle that one my way. But then something changed. Between us, and between everyone. Somewhere along the line ... something feels wrong, like it changed without us noticing when we should have noticed, but when I try to think about it too hard it just gets all fuzzy around the edges."

She's frustrated, months of having tried to sort things out having come to this, this sense of not quite being able to grasp something just out of reach and not having anyone to turn to for answers.

"I'm doing that thing where I don't make sense, aren't I?"

"A little bit, yes. Though I suspect that has less to do with you and more to do with the circumstances we were dealing with. When the problems with Connor began... we lost our centre."

"Myself more than anyone."

"Losing your trust, and everyone else's, thanks to my own failure to trust you. Then all of us losing our memories...."

"I think, perhaps, when we finally came together again, we had forgotten one another. Become strangers. And by the time that changed.... it was too late to put things back the way they had been."

Because what finally brought us together was your death.

Now neither of them was making sense.

Fred frowns, trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle that his words have created.

"Our memories." she repeats, a faint light dawning in her mind as she speaks.

"Something's been lost, hasn't it? I know that. I think I've always known that. Connor. That name... sometimes I almost know what it means, and then it's gone again and I don't try too hard to find it because I feel like there's something there I don't want to know."

She shakes her head, shakes aside the ghosts of half-remembered thoughts.

"No, I do want to know. There's been too much not-knowing. Too many people trying to keep me from what they think I can't handle. I'm done with that."

Wesley nods. "Connor was the son of Angel and Darla. A child born of two vampires. An impossibility, or so we thought. But, of course, there must have been other Powers involved."

"And there was a prophecy, one that led me to believe Angel would slay his own son. Rather than talk to the rest of you about it, I took it upon myself to steal Connor away, in the hope of keeping him safe."

"Unfortunately, things didn't turn out as well as I had hoped."

"Stop." she says, abruptly, holding a hand up, as if to fend off this cold recounting of events that sounded ridiculous to her own ears and yet somehow rang true.

It sounded too much like another cold recall of facts.

You are the vessel for my reincarnation. This is all that remains of Winnifred Burkle.

Wesley's dead.

"Not like this. Not... I can't listen to it like that, words that don't mean anything, that don't match up to what I know. I don't know how to react to it like this. Angel has a son... I feel like I should be surprised, but I'm not. I feel like there should be some big reaction here, some shock, some anything, but there's not. There's nothing, and it's just like everything else I've been told since I got here. It's just words."

She takes a deep breath, fixes him with a level, unwavering gaze, and wills him to understand why it can't be like this.

"I have to remember. Whatever happened, somehow I have to find a way to remember, or it'll never mean anything."

"Yes. You're right, of course."

"I could try consulting the library. Cyvus Vail was responsible for restoring our memories before. But perhaps I could find the ritual he used. Or one of the other mages here might be able to help."

"It's that simple to you, isn't it?" Fred asks, not accusing, but wondering, and more than a little sad.

"That thing you do, you just go right into all-business mode whenever things get a little unclear, or hard to handle. You start talking to me like this is a case, like I'm a case. It always comes back to that. Saving Fred. Because that's what you do."

"It's...." he goes silent. And then:

"I am sorry, Fred. I did try, for a while, to be like we were before. Please believe me, I did try. But it was a lie. This 'all-business mode'--. It's all I have left to give."

"Watching you.... leave. Those memories--."

Wesley shakes his head.

"They're too strong. Too... vivid. I can't pretend they simply aren't there."

I said goodbye to you. Held you in my arms, and said goodbye...

His words bring a little sinking feeling, like this is going wrong somehow, like something important's being lost before it ever had a chance to be found.

She's not surprised, but this hurts.

"So, what? What are you saying? 'Like we were before' -- what before? We never got a chance to find out. There wasn't any time, before..."

Unwilling tears prick at the corners of her eyes, but she blinks them away, refusing to be the fragile little girl this time.

"I don't want the lie any more than you do. I think we both know that. I think we've known that for longer than either of us cares to admit. But I don't think that's all your're saying, is it?"

"I'm not sure entirely what I'm saying."

"That's not dodging your question," he adds quickly. "It's just... being in this place has changed more things than I realized when I first came here. Things I'm still trying to grasp myself."

"You and Illyria.... Both of you here..."

"I think I kinda noticed that." Fred says, a note of anger creeping into her voice.

"She's the one who told me you died, Wesley. Nobody else would do that. Nobody else would even tell me that I died. Except I didn't. That's the point you're all missing. I'm not dead, but everyone just wants me to accept that in some future that I haven't lived yet, I'm going to be. And I'm supposed to understand words like dead when the so-called dead man is walking around and talking and breathing and whatever else it is you do when you're avoiding me!"

It's not fair, she knows it's not fair to blame him, that none of this is fair. But she wants to know what he's getting at, wants him to stop being evasive and distant and just communicate with her and she doesn't know any other way to get them to that point without a little yelling.

He never expected to get angry. He never did. But there it is.

"Yes, we expect you to accept it! Because we had to, and then find some way to live with it!"

"Find some way to deal with the pain, to deal with your loss, and the realisation that that empty space within me would never be filled again!"

"So, yes, I 'expect' you to accept it!"

Wesley is surprised to find himself standing. And he has no idea how he could possibly have said what he just did. He can only stand there now, horrified.

But, try as he might, he can't convince himself what he said isn't true.

She just stands there, gaping at him in openmouthed horror until a little squeak escapes her in the absence of words and she covers her mouth to keep from saying something that would destroy whatever remained of what they had.

But they'd never really had it.

She realizes that, and just stares at him in shocked, saddened silence until her mouth catches up with her brain and she finds the words to say so.

And what she finds herself saying surprises her.

"I'm sorry."

The words strike her as hollow, devoid of the feeling she'd have said them with if she were less shocked, less angry, less hurt. She thinks he blames her for it a little, and more than that, she thinks he's probably right. Curiosity was her downfall -- wasn't that what Illyria had told her once?

"I didn't mean to... this isn't how I pictured this conversation going. Here we are yelling at each other and I'm not even sure how we got to that from where we started."

The words themselves were peaceful enough, but there's a hard edge under them, anger held in check only because she doesn't want to end whatever's ending like this.

"....No."

"No, you shouldn't--. You shouldn't apologize."

"You--. You're--."

Your death was--will be--far too painful, far too horrible for you to apologize.

"...You shouldn't."

"I should never have said that."

Somehow this retraction hurts more than when he was yelling at her. Because it's a return to the lie, it's them finding more ways to turn away from each other, to keep the peace that held it all together.

"Maybe you should have said it a long time ago."

She doesn't look away, doesn't waver in this, won't let herself retreat back into something more comfortable but less true.

"Maybe I should have asked. We just fell into this... whatever this is, whatever we were, without ever stopping to ask whether or not it was a good idea."

He's silent again, for a longer time now, watching her watch him.

"Are you sure you want--?"

Silence.

No. Admit the truth. To yourself and to her.

"You have to do this. We both do."

It's almost posed as a question. But not quite.

She nods, a little sadly.

"I don't think it's a question of what I want. I don't think we get what we want, not like this, anyway. Not the way we've been."

This isn't easy, but there's a note of certainty in her voice that hasn't been there in ages.

"We make the best choices we can. I chose when I walked back into the Hyperion that day, and again when I walked into Wolfram and Hart. At some point it stops being about what you want."

One last choice to make.

He can't help thinking it. But try as he might, he can't bring himself actually to say it, at least now that the flash of anger has passed.

"No. Not the way I wanted it either. But I couldn't bring myself to admit that until tonight."

He doesn't have to say it. She knows, she's always known more than anyone gives her credit for.

But this time she thinks she has to say it. That there needs to be clarity here where there hasn't been all along.

"So. I guess, this feels like..." as much as she wants to say it, the words keep tripping her up.

"You and I. Are we... not us any more? Together, I mean?"

As gently as he can:

"Have we ever been?"

"Really?"

Saying it seems to scar his soul anew.

She can't quite look at him. In the end she can't let him see how much this hurts her, and doesn't want to know how much her silent acknowledgment, the tiniest shake of her head as she drops her eyes to stare down at her hands, will hurt him.

No.

They'd never really been able to reach each other through the walls they'd kept in place. Whatever spark was there -- and it still was there, whatever genuine feeling had drawn her to him -- had been smothered by the weight of all that had been left unsaid.

There's a part of her that wonders, still. That asks a silent question.

(Would you have loved me?)

But a bigger part of her is saying no. That whatever might have been, couldn't be.

Through no fault of their own, the answer was still no.

He feels it too, of course. The longing ache of 'might have been'.

But it was much too late for different paths. It had been too late before he had ever come to this place.

They hadn't even been able to make it a convincing illusion, which seemed especially unfair to them. But, as more than one person here had reminded him, Milliways had never claimed to be Utopia.

"So what will you do now?" he asks quietly.

Because he has no idea what he will do.

And there never was a "we."

She shrugs.

"What I always do. Whatever I can. This doesn't change... it's not like I'm going anywhere."

Not yet, anyway. One day that door would open, but she didn't think it would do so before she was ready. Whatever ready meant, whether she would be walking out to freedom or to... something else.

"I'm still here. And there are still a lot of things I need to find out. Those lost memories, whether or not there's a way for me to get out of here without undoing things that've already been done. Lots of things. Lots of work to be done."

And now who is turning away from attachments by throwing herself into her work?

Well, after all, wasn't it their similarities that had made people think they belonged together? Ignoring the real possibility that those similiarities had not been enough to carry a relationship.

But that was all useless speculation now.

"Well. Perhaps I should go."

"I... okay. Maybe that's best." she says, quietly.

She feels like she missed the mark somehow, that she failed to communicate what she meant underneath the words. That she was still here. Whatever else they weren't, there was still room for them to find out what they were.

As much as she hates to see him just leave like that, it's something of a relief that she has that way out, that she can just let him go, and that's okay. That she can have time to sort this through alone.

"Goodnight, Wesley." she says, with genuine warmth underneath the sadness. It didn't say half of what she wanted to, but maybe it said enough.

He stops, his hand on the door, and turns to smile at her, though his eyes remain filled with the sadness of lost opportunities that were never truly theirs.

"Goodnight, Fred."

And there is warmth there too. Of friendship only? Perhaps, but like hers, genuine, and maybe for that reason, more meaningful than groundless dreams of something more.

She stares at the door for a while after he's gone, and the mad thought occurs to her that maybe if she stares at it long enough he'll come back and they can try that conversation again and this time it'll end the way it was supposed to.

Because that can't be how it was supposed to go.

Can it?

She's still wondering when she gets up to turn off the light, and when she falls asleep counting digits of Pi (never anything so ordinary as sheep) she thinks maybe that it's going to have to join the list of problems she'll never be able to answer.

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[Milliways: Fred's Room]

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