Fic: Misguided Men (Wesley, Roger Wyndam-Pryce)
Title: Misguided Men
Author: Hotspur
Characters: Wesley and Roger Wyndam-Pryce.
This is a companion piece to and inspired by quoshara's fic Guided Missiles.
Misguided Men
"And you call this -" Roger Wyndam-Pryce sneered at the piece of paper in front of him "- satisfactory?"
Wesley stared at his father. "Er..." he began, and cursed everything about himself, from the fact he apparently had the spine of a jellyfish, to the entire bloody Council he was associated with, who had decided that it was essential to any Watcher's training that they be put in a room with an inexperienced Potential and a starved vampire.
Or, in this case, three.
Three vampires, a thirteen-year-old girl who had suddenly realised that potential wasn't fact, and Wesley the human chocolate teapot. Useless as all fuck.
But they had won. They had won, damn it, didn't that count for anything? Didn't it count for anything that they were alive and relatively unharmed, that he had been the one to dispose of two of the demons?
Apparently not.
"Wesley," his father said, sounding strained, "have you understood nothing? It is not your place to defend the Slayer. It is your duty, your utterly sacred duty, to watch her! Must you prove in all areas how completely I have failed to inculcate even the slightest knowledge of our task into your inferior mind? What was it? Did you think that somehow trying to play the hero would demonstrate that you had gained some kind of..." he looked Wesley up and down, sighed, and continued, "adequacy?"
Wesley opened his mouth in outrage, and closed it again, wincing. What his father had said was right. It always was. But how had he been supposed to react? How was he supposed to know that Suzanne would go to pieces, not because she had never faced a vampire before, which would have been understandable, but because she had killed?
"I wasn't playing the hero," he muttered and his father made a small, dismissive noise.
"Be that as it may. She was obviously not ready. You should have let events take their course."
Wesley nodded, obediently.
"Go on, get out," said his father tiredly. "I have to find a way of making your behaviour seem vaguely acceptable. Dear God, Wesley, can't you do anything in a way that doesn't involve my covering for you?"
And suddenly, a little bit of backbone was there, enough to stiffen him into a kind of childish defiance, enough to meet his father's scornful eyes, and find an answer.
"Apparently not," he said with equal coldness.
Because Suzanne was alive. She might have the worst marking in any Potential's history, she might now be discarded, but she was alive.
He never knew that the paperwork from the day's training was not, as his father had promised, rewritten to disguise his actions, but put into a separate file, one that already contained a single piece of paper from nearly thirty years before, with the same red-inked words on it.
Watch him carefully.
Author: Hotspur
Characters: Wesley and Roger Wyndam-Pryce.
This is a companion piece to and inspired by quoshara's fic Guided Missiles.
Misguided Men
"And you call this -" Roger Wyndam-Pryce sneered at the piece of paper in front of him "- satisfactory?"
Wesley stared at his father. "Er..." he began, and cursed everything about himself, from the fact he apparently had the spine of a jellyfish, to the entire bloody Council he was associated with, who had decided that it was essential to any Watcher's training that they be put in a room with an inexperienced Potential and a starved vampire.
Or, in this case, three.
Three vampires, a thirteen-year-old girl who had suddenly realised that potential wasn't fact, and Wesley the human chocolate teapot. Useless as all fuck.
But they had won. They had won, damn it, didn't that count for anything? Didn't it count for anything that they were alive and relatively unharmed, that he had been the one to dispose of two of the demons?
Apparently not.
"Wesley," his father said, sounding strained, "have you understood nothing? It is not your place to defend the Slayer. It is your duty, your utterly sacred duty, to watch her! Must you prove in all areas how completely I have failed to inculcate even the slightest knowledge of our task into your inferior mind? What was it? Did you think that somehow trying to play the hero would demonstrate that you had gained some kind of..." he looked Wesley up and down, sighed, and continued, "adequacy?"
Wesley opened his mouth in outrage, and closed it again, wincing. What his father had said was right. It always was. But how had he been supposed to react? How was he supposed to know that Suzanne would go to pieces, not because she had never faced a vampire before, which would have been understandable, but because she had killed?
"I wasn't playing the hero," he muttered and his father made a small, dismissive noise.
"Be that as it may. She was obviously not ready. You should have let events take their course."
Wesley nodded, obediently.
"Go on, get out," said his father tiredly. "I have to find a way of making your behaviour seem vaguely acceptable. Dear God, Wesley, can't you do anything in a way that doesn't involve my covering for you?"
And suddenly, a little bit of backbone was there, enough to stiffen him into a kind of childish defiance, enough to meet his father's scornful eyes, and find an answer.
"Apparently not," he said with equal coldness.
Because Suzanne was alive. She might have the worst marking in any Potential's history, she might now be discarded, but she was alive.
He never knew that the paperwork from the day's training was not, as his father had promised, rewritten to disguise his actions, but put into a separate file, one that already contained a single piece of paper from nearly thirty years before, with the same red-inked words on it.
Watch him carefully.