He no longer hates the night.

A Watcher knows better than to trust darkness. A Watcher spends the hours from dusk to dawn in an agony of fear, dreading a sunrise his Slayer may never see. A Watcher waits, and weeps, and prays he will go first; and he hates the night.

No longer. With all the mastery of his once-forgotten magic he keeps her safe. What does the danger matter any more? What does a Watcher care for safety when the alternative is to hold tightly to his Slayer forever? She will never fall; she will always return. Every night she patrols, and every night he sees her safely home, before the kiss of dawn.

She refuses to let him fight at her side. At sunset they part ways. She does not want to know the things he does, the powers he invokes. He can always find her, and he watches her slay until his hunger for her overwhelms him. Then, under the stars, with gravedust branding their skin, he lays her in the grass and makes love to her, until she is wet and limp with pleasure, and she sobs his name into the blinding dark.

She is no longer young; but then, she never was. Scars ridge her neck, her wrists, the sweet spot on her inner thigh beside the curls of her sex. Even a Slayer's healing fades. The others who might once have noticed these forbidden wounds are dust and gone, by her own hand.

Watchers say, "Slayer's friend, quicker end." He never told her, but now that she fights alone he thinks she understands. The children he knew have passed: dead and dust, bones and blood. Some nights when she is late returning he finds her tending their empty graves. There were no bodies, of course.

There never are.

A Watcher cannot release his Slayer; nor she, him. When he finds her staring dry-eyed at the markers she selected, the epitaphs she wrote, the flowers she picked, he wraps his arms around her warmth. He murmurs his love into the curve of her jaw, where the flesh covering her lifeblood is thinnest. At her whispered want, he drinks from her again.

When she can no longer stand what she has become, she will ask him for the only gift he has left to give, and she will love the night next to him.

Feedback Back to Buffyverse stories
Back to The Written Realm
October 1, 2003