Snippet 2

Wesley can hardly taste Lilah anymore on his lips for the stench of blood and death all around him. It's soaked through his clothes, feels like it's soaked into his skin, except he knows that was already saturated beyond the capacity to absorb more. The beast broke something in his side when it threw him and he suspects he'll be in trouble if he doesn't find medical attention for himself soon, never mind Gunn-

Who betrayed him and their friendship long before he took the baby and betrayed them all, fought beside him today like there never had been any rift, breathes now in sodden rattles and Wesley has fought beside enough and waited afterward beside enough to recognise a dead man when he-

-holds one in his arms with a desperate intensity that has no intention of letting go anytime soon, fingers twined through too-warm clothing against the erratic rise and fall of a once-strong chest that moves sickeningly beneath them if he holds too hard in the wrong places-

Gunn chose Fred and Fred chose Gunn and neither chose to want anything of him, but it's he who sits here now with Gunn's last breaths failing under his fingers, pulling his friend closer in to himself as though love could keep a heart beating and dredge drowned lungs, and the world is ending in flames around them.

And he hopes that Fred has someone there to watch the apocalypse by her side, wherever it is that she went. He has no such concerns regarding Lilah, who after all needs no such human comfort and never will - and besides, she is the one he will go to when Gunn has died in his arms; fight his way across a city aflame if he has to, to reach a bastion of evil and a girlfriend with its dark armies at her command.

He doesn't know if Lorne and Angel are alive and doesn't much care to anymore. Their chances are all passed, the earth and sky are on fire, and Angel can't fight that, Buffy can't, Lilah can't, he assuredly can't, the only choice left now is that of whose side at which to die and so he holds the broken body to him until he's not sure just when it was that the last of life left it.

He does not think that Gunn would have chosen him.