fandomhighdorms | The Roof, Wednesday Afternoon

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The Roof, Wednesday Afternoon

Wesley hadn't ~~handwavily~~ gotten back to Fandom until late last night, and he was still in something of a funk about everything that had happened.

Fired. Again.

The last time he'd been fired, he'd been sent here as punishment. Now he'd been fired from the job he'd intended to take on after graduation, and he... hadn't applied to university. Hadn't even thought of it very much, to be honest; the idea of going away to university now after having worked on the Hellmouth and gone to school at Fandom and worked for Angel for two years, dealing with all the crises that emerged along the way (the mayor's Ascension, Panem, the rock, the disappearances and memory alterations, Faith...) was... a bit preposterous, really. But now he had nothing to do but possibly see if his father might take him back in, and, well. Wesley didn't really much want to do that at all.

So. Here he stood. Brooding. Because that would solve the problem.

At least he wasn't drinking?

[[open roof of broodiness, la.]]

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Gabrielle didn't brood, so that wasn't why she came up to the roof; she'd just wanted some fresh air, and the particular view of the island that you got from up here. If you wanted to get hypothetically metaphysical about it, it was entirely possible that she'd ended up on the roof because of the brooding, because somehow or other she always ended up getting drawn to broody people.

"Hello, Wesley," she said lightly, wrapping her ~~still eyesearingly yellow~~ shawl around her shoulders as she came to stand nearby.

Just flaunt that chipperness, Gabs. Flaaaunt it.

"What? Oh -- hello," said the very distracted ex-Watcher and ex-paranormal investigator with whom she was sharing the roof. "Ah. How are you?"

It was probably not the friendliest he'd ever sounded.

It's imperative for the narrative to digress for a moment, and contemplate the epic leather-clad broodiness that would probably eat the world whole if Angel and Xena ever ended up in the same place at the same time.

Okay, terrifying moment over.

"All right." Gabrielle actually turned to get a look at him now and finally got a sense of his mood. (Without looking, she was inured to broody-vibes by now.) "You don't look like you could say the same. Is something wrong?"

~~...Good god. The world might implode. Possibly violently.~~

"Oh," Wesley said, aiming for casualness and failing horribly. "Just, ah, work... matters. Things at home. Nothing, er, terribly pressing."

And yet the brooding, it was immense.

But not driving Gabrielle off! That was a plus. OR WAS IT?

"And here you are, looking awfully unhappy for not having any pressing matters on your mind," she said, delicately as she could. "That seems like a shame."

Wesley blushed faintly. "Right," he said. "Well, that is, it's nothing I mean to trouble you with. Just, ah. An unfortunate circumstance."

A failure, like he was always a failure, he thought to himself, but didn't say.

"Unfortunate circumstances aren't unimportant ones. Besides, who says it's any trouble to me?" Gabrielle asked. "Give me some credit here."

She turned to take a seat on the ledge, everything about her posture clearly indicating that she was happy to get comfortable and listen for a while if she had to.

"If it's something you want to talk about, I'm here."

Finally Wesley relented a little, some of the tension sliding out of his shoulders. "It's just, ah. My employer back home. He's, er. Discharged me."

...wow, it sounded stupid when he said it like that.

"I'm sorry," Gabrielle said immediately, because any questions could wait until after she'd expressed her sympathy. "From a job you wanted to do? Did he have any good reason?"

"Yes, it's... really the, ah, the only job I can see myself doing," Wesley admitted, running a hand through his hair. "He'd been... acting erratically, and my colleagues and I were trying to get him to, ah, see sense. He responded by discharging all of us."

And fuck you too, Angel.

Gabrielle had been hearing similar rumblings about Julius Caesar's behavior lately, courtesy of Xena and a couple of sources back home. It did not make her feel any better about the crucifixion vision.

. . . luckily he wasn't in any capacity her employer.

"That doesn't sound like a good sign," she observed. "Something like that happened to Xena once, but it turned out the Furies were trying to drive her mad."

"'Mad' might not be terribly far from the truth," Wesley admitted, taking a seat on the ground against the ledge. "He's had a hard time lately, with, ah, a former flame of his returning. She was mystically resurrected and apparently she'd been... appearing in his dreams, that sort of thing." Still with him, Gabs? "With everything going on, he's just been... entirely unlike himself."

Please, as unusual developments went, this was less convoluted than some of Gabrielle's ~~ridiculous episode plots~~ experiences.

"That makes sense." Gabrielle cupped her chin in her hand and tapped a finger against her cheek. "That he'd be acting strangely under the circumstances, I mean. Someone coming back from the dead like that -- it's never easy to take. How do you deal with that, especially after coming to terms with them being gone? And you find yourself wondering: why now? Why is this happening at all? You'd think it would be a joyous thing, but it can just seem so cruel instead, and then you find yourself wondering why you aren't happier about it . . ."

It was different with Xena. Xena kept dying and coming back, but she never stayed dead long enough for Gabrielle to get over her being gone before she came back. She was just that stubborn.

Callisto, on the other hand. Or -- no, she didn't even want to think about what might happen if Perdicas came back that way.

Tara wandered up to the roof after class. She sometimes liked watching the ocean from up there.

She glanced over to Wesley, half reading his body language as stay-away, half wanting to help with whatever was wrong. In the end, she offered a tiny smile.

"Hi," she said. "You, uh, you missed Rio."

"Well, in his case, this was a woman -- a vampire, really -- who spent over a century torturing innocents alongside him," Wesley offered. Realizing how that sounded, he hastily added, "That is -- it's rather a long story. But he's good now."

Or was, anyway. Now it was kind of a toss-up.

"So -- she was resurrected by an organization that's infamously... well, evil, and which my employer has had increasingly hostile dealings with in the past, and it became apparent that she'd been brought back largely to upset him. Which, er. Succeeded."

"I did," Wesley agreed, pausing his moping for long enough to turn around away from the side of the roof. "Did you, ah, enjoy yourself?"

Sorry if he didn't sound super enthusiastic, Tara. It came with the broody territory.

"Kind of," Tara offered. "It, um ... the city's kind of big for me. And noisy. But the beach was pretty."

She shrugged a little. "What did you do instead?"

"Long history of bad deeds, life of atonement now? Sounds like my best friend," Gabrielle assured him with a quick smile.

The being-good-now, also, could be a toss-up, depending. Except for the 'over a century' part, but as many evil things as Xena had done in that nebulous period of time that was all 'ten winters ago' it could have been a century's worth of evil carried out extremely efficiently.

She frowned, though, considering the implications. "Obviously it did. It's the part where he fired you all that I don't quite get."

Normally when things like this happened to her (frequently enough that normally was entirely applicable) Xena found some convenient place to leave Gabrielle to keep her busy and then went off and did extremely questionable things.

"Oh, just some work back home," he said, trying to sound casual and not mopey. Not so successful. "Nothing especially thrilling. But, ah. The beach, that sounds nice. Was the weather all right, at least?"

...clearly Xena and Angel needed to be best friends. Or at least brood on the same roof sometime.

"I can't say I'm entirely certain of what he was hoping to accomplish either," Wesley said wryly. "I suppose I must've... pushed too hard."

Because clearly, Cordelia and Gunn and Angel himself were entirely devoid of blame.

"Yeah," Tara nodded. "It was a little cloudy a couple times, but mostly ... yeah. Nice and warm. I even got a little bit of a tan under the sunblock."

She looked him over. "Sorry the work ... um, it sounds like it kind of sucked."

Wesley gave a little half-shrug. "I'm likely exaggerating the severity," he offered. Sure, Wes, go right to self-deprecation. Do that. "It's just been, well. Unpleasant."

And here he seemed so chipper!

No, Wesley. No. The brooding would END THE WORLD.

. . . the leather would be kind of hot, though.

"You can't blame yourself for that," Gabrielle told him. "You only tried because you were concerned."

See how she automatically assumed the best intentions there? It was a thing she did.

Xena and Angelus, then?

"Yes, but not very well," Wesley reminded her lightly. "It was my responsibility to -- help guide him, and I failed."

Wes, let's bring the issues down to about a two, okay?

Bring the issues, Wes. BRING THEM.

"You can't shoulder all the blame for his choices, though," Gabrielle pointed out gently. "We do what we can, but people --" vampires, whatever, not like she could judge on that point after her brief stint with the Bacchae -- "have free will for a reason. To take that away from them would diminish both us and them."

Sure, there had been that time she'd hit Xena over the head with a rake for going into "KILL 'EM ALL!" mode, but that was before she went nonviolent.

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The Roof, Wednesday Afternoon

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