Author’s Note: Written between “Sleep Tight” and “Forgiving”…so long ago Jossed. *g*

Oh, my darling Fred…

Perhaps if I wasn’t so keenly aware of how desperately I’ve failed you all, I would show myself. Perhaps even explain why there is a scar across my throat that wasn’t there the last time you saw me, a scar that seems to be long-healed. Or why my voice is broken now, though the rest of me remains whole…at least in body.

I hear you calling me, you and Gunn. Ah, Fred, if you only knew how that sound was a cut even deeper than the one which brought me to this point. Because I cannot answer it.

You’ll never understand what I have done. In truth, even I didn’t understand it, though I thought I did. All I know is I have made a grievous error–Holtz has Connor and I dare not imagine what horrors he has planned for the child of his enemy. I deserve to be damned for how easily he played me.

The prophecy…perhaps I have prevented the prophecy but to what purpose? And at what cost?

I did not lie when I told Holtz you all are my family. Or rather were–I disinherited myself when I tried to take fate into my own hands. A choice I made unwisely in a moment of despair compounded by fear. Despair that I had lost you, Fred, my love, and fear of what my own hand revealed to me concerning Angel’s child.

Had my eyes but been opened sooner, I would have known there was no reason to despair. That I had lost you for one lifetime, but…now I see that one lifetime is all of your heart that Gunn could hope to possess. For he is mortal and we, beloved, are not. I sense that potential in you now, just as a stranger once sensed it in me. That man, hoping to weaken me with the knowledge, gave it to me premature. I will not commit the same sin, keeping instead to the code of honor that most Immortals live by, to grant those who will one day fight among us a few precious years of ignorance lest they seek death or grow careless and find it too soon.

I suppose it is just as well that I followed my father’s path in hopes of finally finding a way to please him–to have become a Watcher of Immortals, like my mother was, would have made this transition all the more difficult. It was sufficiently burdensome that I knew enough to truly understand the meaning of the secret spilled to me.

Perhaps it is just punishment, though, for the crime I committed against you all that the death I always knew would resurrect me Immortal was given to me in the one fashion that would always leave a scar.

Oh, to hell with irony–why did it have to be the throat?

Angel will never forgive what I have done, and I can ask no more of the rest of you. Someday, no doubt many lifetimes from now, I will have to face him and account for it. But I have cut myself off from my family forever.

I have lost you forever.

I only wish…perhaps none of this would have come to pass if I had only realized…

I could have waited one lifetime.