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Shadows, Part Seven
Day had become night and the spell was still holding. Unfortunately, so was Wesley’s fever. Giles was trying to concentrate on the translation but the script kept blurring. It wasn’t enough to find the hiding place of the Cauldron of Uriel, pressing though that was, they also needed to translate the scroll so they could say the incantation. There were faint echoes of some of the words in Turkish, Aramaic, Hittite, Hebrew. All these tantalising references and none of them exactly what was needed, and meanwhile Wesley was burning bright and brittle bone twisting against imaginary demons while his friends tried to gentle and soothe him and real demons prowled outside. Wesley was so breakable. Giles was shocked by his realization of how physically fragile the man was; how wrecked and shattered and starved and lost. And it was obvious now how much he had lost. He suspected they were all a little shocked by it; Angel and Cordelia and Gunn and Fred and Lorne; the friends who had turned on him so completely now a relay team of gentle words and soothing touches.
They all kept trying to anchor him to life and reality through their voices and their touch. Fred was as slender and brittle as him, and it hurt to see her smiling at him with such encouragement while the tears ran down her face as she talked to him throughout her shift in a non-stop gabble about Pylean customs and astrophysical theories and the things she thought about sometimes but didn’t tell people because they might think she was crazy and sometimes she kind of thought she might be crazy too… crazy again, that was, having definitely been crazy the once. Bizarrely, it soothed him; her gabble of nonsensical words; they locked thin spidery fingers and he said her name in great surprise or else relief or anxiety or apology, and she told him over and over that they weren’t on Pylea any more, and she was down from her room, or that she was sorry for what she had said to him or that he was a good man and it hadn’t been him that time, with the axe, that he had been the real victim. And although a lot of what she said made no sense to Giles at all, he did not doubt for an instant that her words were making Wesley feel better.
It was exhausting, of course. An hour tending to feverish Wesley was like running a marathon in very heavy boots. He had to be called back to a good place every time his delirium carried him to somewhere bad. And there were so many bad places. Home locked under the stairs, and tied to a kitchen chair being tortured by Faith, and staring at a bomb there wasn’t time to evade, and feeling the bullet hit and then the pain which was so bad the world went misty around the edges, and the knife slicing and no pain at all just the warmth draining away and the ground coming up to meet him and everything so cold and no one coming for the whole of one dark cold endless night, and Connor, Connor, Connor; with the prophecy and the Loa and the earthquake and the fire and the father will kill the son and Holtz and Darla and the tragic roundabout spinning and spinning with apparently no means to ever make it stop.
People took their shift with Wesley and then reeled away in exhaustion but, although Tara and Dawn and Willow were hovering and wringing their hand, and clearly desperate to help, they didn’t understand his references, and they didn’t know the right things to say to make him feel better, so it had to be the LA crew, sans Groo – who was as bewildered by many of Wesley’s comments as Giles was – to do the hand holding and brow mopping.
Which suited the LA crew just fine. Giles had not been unaware of the barely concealed rivalry between those who considered that as the others had rejected Wesley he was now ‘theirs’ and those who considered that Wesley still belonged to them despite any little recent glitches in their friendship with him. He suspected they were not unhappy about Tara and Dawn’s inability to assist Wesley through the worst of the fever, but they were certainly paying for it in mental wear and tear.
He believed that he, Dawn, Anya, Willow and Tara were making some headway with the translation and research work, the scroll no longer just a few patches of translated Minithian code text amidst of incomprehension but every paragraph with at least one sentence translated and some almost completely understood. But it was certainly very difficult to concentrate with Wesley feverishly muttering in the same room and the constant murmur of anxious note-comparing going on from his carers. It didn’t help either that Dawn, Willow and Tara were all equally guilty of losing their place or the thread of their translation every time Wesley became particularly agitated. However, given that the fate of the world was depending on them all, Giles thought it was important that they all dug deep into their reserves of concentration right now and got on with what needed to be done with the minimum of fuss, conferring, and unnecessary chatter.
In the background, Xander was still hammering, Groo still assisting him, the Hukkarish still snarling, the blue light flashes finding thinner and thinner apertures through which to glimmer into their space. It was no real shock when the electricity abruptly died on them. The Hukkarish had presumably cut the cables. They had all known it was only a matter of time, but it was a little disturbing nonetheless. There was something dogged in the resigned way Xander switched on his flashlight before resuming his hammering, Angel threw another log onto the fire from the pile and Tara went around lighting candles. Lorne placed a circle of them around Wesley, making him look like the sacrificial offering in some demonic raising ritual.
“He’s so cold…” Cordelia looked up anxiously, hair disordered and the shadows under her eyes looking even worse. “Angel, he’s freezing.”
Dawn hurried forward with a book in one hand a blanket in the other. “It says that’s one of the symptoms.”
“Try this…” Tara hastily held out another mug of something herbal and hot and Cordelia took it without a glimmer of hostility this time. That was the last hot drink they were going to be able to obtain by simply switching on a kettle. From now on things were going to have to be heated over the fire.
They tried to get him to swallow some more of the potion they had made to Groo’s recipe, but Wesley flinched from the cup and their touch, shivering violently even after they wrapped him carefully in the blanket and Gunn and Angel lowered him gently back onto his makeshift bed. He seemed to have no idea where was he was or who they were now, clammy with fever and confusion. He flinched when they touched him and they flinched in their turn from the chill of his skin. He was getting colder and weaker with each passing hour and Giles was beginning to seriously doubt that he would last the night. At least there had been some kind of resistance in his feverish delirium, a railing against past events, a desperate attempt to rewrite the past, avert old dangers, right old wrongs. But now he no longer recognized them or called out to them and he seemed dangerously close to slipping into a vegetative unconsciousness. If the slowing of his heartbeat and drop in his body temperature wasn’t arrested soon, Giles was afraid that the only logical next step would indeed by coma and then death. Outside they could clearly hear the sound of the Hukkarish throwing themselves at the barricade, and snarling as they were knocked back, bluish light visible through every crack in the boarding against the windows each time it happened.
“Good way of showing us the weak points,” Xander grunted, taking out another nail from his shirt pocket and preparing to hammer some more MDF over the gaps.
As Wesley sank back into slumber again, shivering as he did so. Cordelia sat back on her heels, looking despondent while Angel took the second blanket from Dawn and wrapped it around Wesley’s shoulders.
“Man, he’s colder than you,” Gunn muttered.
Angel winced. “In people with a pulse that’s never a good sign.”
Xander cleared his throat. “Um, in the army if they have a hypothermia case they say the best way to warm someone up is with another human body. Warm body, I mean.”
“That let’s you out,” Cordelia observed to Angel.
“I’ll do it,” Fred said quietly. “I don’t mind, I mean.”
“Fred, no offence, but there’s not exactly a lot of you to go around,” Cordelia observed. “And I think it would be awkward for Wesley if he woke up and you were…”
“It has to be skin to skin,” Xander explained. “That’s the best way anyway. And I’m thinking it has to be one us guys for obvious reasons. Maybe if we draw straws?”
Gunn sighed. “We don’t need to draw straws. I know Wes best out every male in this room with a pulse so that makes it my job.”
Giles was a little ashamed of his feeling of relief, and glancing across at Xander saw that he was too. Gunn was already pulling off his jacket with a kind of dogged determination that Giles rather admired. He would have laid at least a small wager that Gunn was not someone entirely comfortable with any aspersions being cast about his heterosexuality, and insisting on signing up to be naked with another man, however selfless one’s motives, was something that could be said to raise a question mark. Pressing a hand to his aching head he bent back over the book he was reading.
Groo said, “In my culture there is no embarrassment in such an action. Would it not be better if I…?”
“You don’t know Wesley,” Gunn returned evenly. “I do and it’s not going to freak him out so much if he wakes up and finds he’s got me for a hot water bottle.”
Cordelia made a zipping motion across her mouth. “So not saying anything right now. Not asking, not speculating, not wondering if that’s why you two were always gone so long on those missions of yours…”
Angel and Lorne eased an unconscious but still shivering and feverish Wesley out of his ripped clothes while Cordelia and Fred obligingly held up a blanket behind which Gunn could change. Gunn said, “We didn’t want to tell you, Cord, but actually we were always late back because we were eating pizza in the truck and we knew if we had to share with you we’d get one slice between us if we were lucky.”
“Fine. I eat more pizza than you and Wesley put together and you’re never going to get teased about what you’re about to do in years to come.”
“Are you peeking?” he demanded.
Cordelia pointedly looked away. “Hah, like you’ve got anything down there I haven’t seen before.”
Fred looked at her reproachfully and Cordelia shrugged. “Fred, we do a job where we get burning demon blood eating its way through clothes, some flesh flashing is inevitable, but trust me, I would never poach on your turf.”
Fred cast a worried look over the blanket as if to check that Gunn’s body was as she remembered it. “You don’t like my…turf?”
“It’s very nice turf if that’s the way your…garden grows, I’m just not planning on doing any…hoeing there.”
“Who are you calling a ho’?” Gunn demanded. “Angel’s the one who couldn’t drop his boxers fast enough for Darla, and what about Wes and his two whole hours of playing hard to get with Virginia…?”
“Dear Lord, would you at least attempt to stay focused?” Giles pleaded. “I thought Buffy and Xander occasionally had the attention spans of a half-nibbled Twinkie but you people really take the biscuit.” Fred, Gunn and Cordelia all gave him looks of indignation and Giles rolled his eyes. “My apologies. Do please continue. After all, it always so helpful when attempting to do life and death research to have as a constant background the inane twitterings of a bunch of whiny Americans.”
There was an indignant pause before Cordelia said clearly to Buffy, “Would you like to point out to your Watcher that the only people he didn’t offend with that last statement were Groo, Lorne and the unconscious Brit under the blanket?”
“I appreciate you acknowledging my successful integration into American culture, Cordelia,” Anya observed.
Cordelia, who had clearly entirely forgotten Anya was there, did a double take. “Um – you’re welcome.”
“I can keep my boxers on, right?” Gunn asked of Xander and as the young man grimaced apologetically, said firmly: “Well, I don’t give a damn what they do in the Navy SEALS, in this platoon we keep our boxers on.”
Angel eased off Wesley’s t-shirt, talking to him quietly as he did so, Giles couldn’t catch every word but the vampire seemed to be solemnly explaining to Wesley what they were doing and why. Lorne said gently, “Angel, I really think the last thing on Wesley’s mind right now is fear about you and me coming onto him.”
Angel said quietly, “I don’t want him thinking I’m Angelus.”
Giles saw Buffy wince and had an unpleasant flashback to some of the grislier details in Angel’s file. A file with whose contents Wesley would also, of course, be all too familiar. There really had been no limit to Angel’s imagination in the days when he had been without a soul. As Angel carefully peeled Wesley out of his trousers while Lorne gently lowered him back onto his blanket bed, Giles tried not to think about how many people Angelus had probably stripped naked in the past; he imagined Angel was trying not to think about that too.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Angel asked Gunn.
“We’re trusting him not to be ‘up’ for this at all, Angel,” Cordelia pointed out. “Because if Wesley isn’t going to be surprised waking up next to a happy Gunn, questions will be asked.”
“And demonic seer chicks will be shoved out of a moving vehicle while aforesaid vehicle is travelling fast down a bendy road,” Gunn warned. He snatched a breath. “Okay, I can do this. If soldiers do it, it’s got to be as manly as…flame-throwering something skanky, right?”
Giles flinched at that creation of a non-existent verb but heroically forbore from comment. Willow patted him gently on the hand in silent sympathy and approval for his restraint.
“Sweetpea, if military men like to do it I’d say it’s as hetero as a seminar on interior decorating with a Barbra Streisand concert to follow,” Lorne observed, “but get on with it anyway. We can jeer and point later.”
“You’re such a comfort.” Gunn snatched a breath and then emerged from behind his blanket wearing only his boxer shorts. Although Giles quickly averted his eyes he noticed that not only Willow, Tara and Dawn, but also Buffy and Faith all sneaked a peek, and he suspected that even an amateur optometrist would have had no difficulty in measuring a significant dilation of pupils in all parties.
Cordelia wolf-whistled and Gunn gave her a look that promised retribution later. Angel, as he moved Wesley carefully onto his side, said a warning, “Cordy…”
She shrugged shamelessly. “I’m safe. Gunn loves me like a sister.”
Lorne looked at her sideways. “Sugarplum, he staked his sister, remember?”
Gunn crouched down next to Wesley and said tentatively, “I’m just doing this to get you warned up, okay, Wes? This is definitely not a come-on. If it was a come-on there would be…well, there would be dinner and probably lots of alcohol.” He pulled back the blanket, revealing the scratches and bruises across Wesley’s back, and then lay down facing him, pulling him gingerly into his arms while Angel wrapped the blanket around both of them. Gunn gasped and shuddered. “He’s like a block of ice. I don’t think the blood is even circulating any more. Wes…?” He patted his face gently. “Wesley? We gotta get you warmer, man.” He found Wesley’s hands and began to rub them against his chest, gasping as he did so in a way that suggested it was akin to showering in ice water. “He’s so cold. I swear if I wasn’t wearing my boxers right now bits of me would be falling off.”
“Oh quit whining and snuggle up,” Cordelia observed.
Fred snorted and then put a hand across her mouth and made sympathetic eyes at her boyfriend. “Can I help?”
“We need to get the blood flowing again. Can you rub his back?”
“I’ll do it.” Angel began to make gentle circling rubbing motions across Wesley’s back through the blanket.
“Harder,” Gunn told him, then winced. “I mean – rub his back harder, not that I’m… never mind.”
“He’s covered in bruises…” Angel protested.
“Trust me,” Gunn said through gritted teeth. “He’s going to be dead if we can’t get him warm.”
“I can get more firewood,” Faith said abruptly. “Get it hotter in here.”
Giles, Angel and Buffy all said: “No” in the same breath.
“I can take them,” she insisted.
“Getting yourself ripped to pieces isn’t going to help Wesley,” Buffy told her.
“At least I’d be doing something,” the girl protested. “And if they’ve been throwing themselves against that barrier maybe they’re tired. Maybe now is the best time to take them.”
Cordelia abruptly pulled her sweater over her head, revealing a t-shirt through which her bra was clearly visible. As everyone gaped at her, she defiantly pulled the t-shirt off too, revealing a figure that had only grown even more voluptuous since her departure from Sunnydale. “Imagine I’m wearing a bikini,” she told them.
“How is that going to help the situation?” Angel enquired in some agitation, his gaze going to her breasts as if through circumstances beyond his control. Giles noticed that Groo, Gunn, Xander and Lorne were also having trouble looking elsewhere also. Willow, after a brief wide-eyed glance, was pointedly not looking interested at all, frowning in concentration over a text so that when Tara darted a glance in her direction she could be entirely reassured that Willow only had eyes for her.
Xander ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “Well, I suppose we’ll all be warmer…”
“Oh, just close your eyes then,” Cordelia retorted in exasperation, and Giles hastily averted his eyes as she firmly stepped out of her skirt. He heard the sound of clothing landing on the floor, shoes being kicked off and then Cordelia, presumably now clad only in her underwear, saying: “Step aside, Man With No Pulse.”
When Giles looked back, Cordelia was under the blanket rubbing Wesley’s back and Fred was saying plaintively, “Why can’t I do that?”
“Because you don’t have enough body surface to warm anything wider than his spinal column,” Cordelia told her. As Fred looked down at herself in disappointment, pulling out her top presumably to make extra sure she wasn’t hiding any previously unnoticed inches down there with which to refute Cordelia’s claim, Giles noticed Buffy and Faith exchanging a glance that seemed to be communicating a whole world of raised eyebrows.
Angel was tentatively removing his hand from his eyes while Fred, noticing Groo and Lorne still had their eyes averted in a gentlemanly manner, tugged on their sleeves. Anya said, “I don’t think her breasts are of unusually impressive dimensions,” and looked accusingly at Xander who quickly looked at the window he was boarding as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.
Cordelia wrapped her arms around Wesley and began to blow warm air onto the back of his neck. Gunn was rubbing his arms while Cordelia had firmly pressed herself against Wesley’s back.
Angel grimaced at the sight of them. “You didn’t…do this while I was away, did you?”
“Every night,” Cordelia told him airily.
Fred looked at her reproachfully. “You didn’t invite me.”
“The bed wasn’t big enough for a foursome.”
Xander said a little desperately, “Please, someone tell me that I’m not the only one finding this...kind of hot?”
Buffy was gazing at the sight of Cordelia and Gunn both trying to rub some warmth back into Wesley’s chilled body as if mesmerised. “Absolutely, just you…” she said without conviction.
Dawn hissed to Giles: “I’m supposed to be concentrating on research while they’re doing…that?”
“Yes,” he told her firmly.
“You all are fibbing about the threesome, aren’t you?” Fred asked Cordelia.
Cordelia rubbed Wesley’s shoulders gently. “Hey, Gunn and Wesley have three DVDs between them and a slightly singed game of Word Puzzle, with you upstairs eating tacos and Angel off being all meditatey how else were we supposed to fill the long cold winter evenings?”
“She is so lying,” Gunn said over his shoulder to Fred, in between rubbing Wesley’s chest. “If Cordy was Pinocchio, her nose would be hitting the back wall by now.”
Giles made a Herculean effort to concentrate on the scroll translation and glared hard at Dawn, Willow and Tara until they wrenched their gazes away from the scene on the floor. He could still hear the sounds of Gunn and Cordelia briskly rubbing Wesley’s skin and then presumably wrapping themselves around it to try to warm him through; their occasional little yelps and gasps as their warm skin was cringingly chilled by his own icy body making him shiver in sympathy.
Buffy and Faith had a long debate about how many Hukkarish there were outside and how long the logs would last and whether they would be easier to take now, while tired from throwing themselves at the mystical force field or in the morning when they had sunlight to sap some of their strength. Knowing that Buffy would never let a possibly self-destructive Faith do something too reckless, Giles let the debate wash over him, not surprised that it ended in Faith sighing and giving in.
All their shadows looked strange against the bare walls; Xander a figure out of mythology with his hammer raised, Buffy and Faith Wagnerian with their sword-wielding silhouettes; Groo and Angel equally unreal as tall, broad-shouldered hero shapes bearing axes and blades. Willow and Tara should have had witches’ hats, but devoid of them were reduced to scribes. Looking around their pieces of paper, Giles could see the tree sketched clearly on Tara’s notebook with a whole line of reference numbers underneath and an all important paragraph printed in three languages with painstaking precision. Dawn was working on a part of the scroll that showed a tower, and Willow had three pages of spells relating to the destruction of amulets. Giles suspected they were very close to a breakthrough. He just wasn’t sure if Wesley was going to live to see it.
All the reports seemed to suggest that a victim stood very little chance of survival if his body was not very swiftly brought out of the inevitable hypothermic state that succeeded the high fever and delirium. Looking over Willow’s shoulder at the notes she had made about the Hukkarish blood poisoning, he did believe, however, that without the eccentric – and perhaps downright desperate – intervention of Gunn and Cordelia, Wesley would probably have been dead by now of what the ancient Sumarian who had commented on it named ‘the death chill’.
Unable to restrain himself, he said, “How is he?”
“Like a block of ice,” Cordelia said through gritted teeth.
Gunn’s teeth were chattering and he rubbed Wesley’s arms briskly. “Come on, Wes, you’re English, you’re used to the cold. Fight it.”
“What if we put him in a bath of warm water?” Dawn offered. “Wouldn’t that help raise his body temperature?”
“No electricity, no hot water,” Angel explained so fast that it was clear he had already thought of the idea and discarded it. He had his arms wrapped around his body and his brown eyes were all undisguised anxiety. For a man who had so recently tried to smother Wesley with a pillow and insisted that he would never forgive him, he was certainly giving a very fair impression of someone who cared desperately that Wesley should live.
“Is that your leg?” Cordelia asked Gunn abruptly.
“Yes, it’s my leg,” he retorted in exasperation. “Xander said we had to get…between his legs warm as well as his armpits and the back of his neck.”
“Just checking.”
“Guys, I’m really not trying to pile on the pressure,” Xander put in. “But you only get one shot at this and if being embarrassed is going to stop you doing it right...”
“I’ll take the back of his neck,” Cordelia said quickly, and in fairness to her, Giles saw that she did immediately cup her hands across his neck and lay her cheek against his back, pressing her body against him, shivering as the cold went through her and then gently rubbing his neck.
Gunn winced, grimaced, and then presumably did what needed to be done, muttering, “I am never going to live this down,” as he did so.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Cordelia assured him. But her voice was gentle as she breathed: “Come on, Wes. Get with the program here. This is supposed to be the fantasy of every English guy on the planet. Now, make like a damned boarding school boy and get hot and bothered.”
“We’re trying to save his life, not turn him on,” Gunn retorted through gritted teeth. “Jesus, Wes. How can anyone who isn’t a vampire be that cold?”
“We’re not cold,” Angel protested. “We’re room temperature.” Everyone ignored him except for Buffy who gave him a sympathetic smile.
Cordelia rubbed his back vigorously. “You are not dying on me, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce,” she muttered darkly. “You are getting warm and waking up and I mean now, bucko…”
Giles wrenched his attention back to the scroll. “World ending,” he told Dawn quietly and she guiltily spun back round from looking at Wesley and Cordelia.
“I just wish there was something I could do,” Dawn admitted.
“There is,” Giles reminded her. “You can work out how to stop the man who sent those Hukkarish after Wesley in the first place.” He looked around at the others, Tara and Willow, worn out with anxiety and lack of sleep as they were, feeling his own head aching, his eyes gritty with lack of rest. “We all have to do our part. Wesley’s done his. Now we have to do ours. And this is it.”
Aloud he didn’t say what he knew they were all thinking, which was that he just fervently hoped that Wesley’s most recent battle with the Hukkarish didn’t turn out to be the last thing he ever did.
***
As the first wave of images hit, Wesley thought This must be what having a vision is like… but then the pictures and sounds were overwhelming him, a tsunami of impressions that picked him up and swirled him over and over through light and colour and burning sound into a dark still chill; as if the full weight of the North Sea was crushing him. He gasped, trying to snatch breath into starved lungs, and heard his name being said urgently, hands on his skin, steadying him, soothing him, clarity filtering between the aftershocks of the visions: Fred’s frightened ‘Wesley…?’, Angel’s urgent, commanding ‘Wes…!’ Wesley saw himself unconscious in the burning shell of Angel’s basement, heard the man calling his name as beams fell and flames flared all around him. Saw himself found, and gathered gently into anxious arms, his head turned, and, he, limp and bruised and cut and scorched. He watched himself lifted over Angel’s shoulder and carried out into safety and it was as if he had been shown the exit from this freezing chill of prescience. He could recognize their voices now.
“Wesley…?” Cordelia is going to die. She’s going to ascend and be taken over the way Angelus took over Liam and she’s going to be used by a Higher Power who wants to drive Connor insane and give birth to itself. And then she’s going to sink into a coma from which she never really awakens. Not really. I’m only going to see her for a few more hours before she is gone forever.
“English…?” Gunn is going to lose who he is so completely he believes more in Wolfram & Hart than he does in himself. He’s going to sign a piece of paper that gets Fred killed and I’m going to stab him, and he’s going to die, bleeding in an alley against overwhelming odds. The only mercy is that I won’t be there to see it because I’ll already be dead by then, having long since lost the will to live.
“Wes…?” Angel is going to sacrifice everything for the son I took from him. He’s going to lose who he is and his Shanshu and all of us.
“Wesley, are you all right? Do you know who we are?” Fred is going to die. She’s going to be hollowed out by an Old One who she will infect with her humanity, but her soul is going to be destroyed and none of us are ever going to see her again, in this world or the next.
“Sweetpea, take your time, but if you could give some indication as to whether or not we’re talking to a vegetable, it would be appreciated.” Lorne is going to lose his powers. We’re going to cost him everything he was and is. Angel’s going to ask him to take a human life and he’s never going to get over it.
Wesley gasped with cold and horror and opened his eyes, gazing into Gunn’s, who was looking at him anxiously, hands rubbing Wesley’s upper arms as if he had been doing it for some time.
“Gunn, I’m sorry I stabbed you. I had no right. It was only because of Connor that we were there in the first place and that was my fault – the way he turned out, what Angel had to do to save him…”
“Wes, you didn’t stab me.”
“Yes, I did, just not yet.” Wesley twisted around and became aware of Cordelia so close to him that they appeared to be sharing the same sleeping bag. “Skip is evil. You can’t trust him. He works for Jasmine. What we call Jasmine. She has to guard her real name. I think the real Powers abandoned us when Angel slept with Darla. She needed you to be part-demon so you could carry her. It had nothing to do with the visions. Don’t ascend. If you do we’ll never get you back. Not the real you.”
“Wesley, try to focus,” Cordelia said gently. “You’ve been very ill. You had a fever, do you remember?”
“I’ve seen the future. Holtz comes back and he isn’t what he pretends. He still only cares about vengeance. Connor’s just an instrument of Jasmine. Everything that happens happens because she needs him to father her.” He twisted his head round. “Angel, don’t go to the bluffs. Cordy won’t meet you there. Connor and Justine are waiting with a tazer. They seal you into a coffin. And I’m sorry about Connor, I’m so sorry, but please don’t do it. Don’t accept the offer from Wolfram & Hart. You’ll kill Fred if you do. You’ll kill all of us.”
“Wes, you’re not making any sense.” Angel’s brown eyes were full of concern. He looked at Gunn. “Is he warmer? Is he getting better?”
“He’s warmer,” Gunn admitted. “But I think his brain got fried then frozen, right along with the rest of him.”
Wesley looked around helplessly for some assistance. “We can change it. It doesn’t have to be the way it’s going to be. Tara changed her future. It can be done.”
There was a long pause before Wesley felt a soft hand take hold of his and he found himself gazing into Tara’s eyes. As always when he looked at her he had a sense of coming home, of recognition. He smiled as he looked at her and she smiled back; a smile that warmed him all the way through.
“They don’t understand you, but I’m trying to. What do you mean that I changed my future?”
“You cast that protection spell over Willow. When you were separated and you were worried about her getting addicted to magic. You found that spell in one of Giles’s forbidden books and you cast it.”
Tara looked up guiltily at Giles and Willow. “Yes, yes I did. But I don’t know how Wesley knows. I didn’t tell him or anyone else.”
“I saw it. That’s how I know we can change things. When you cast that spell you didn’t just protect Willow, you protected yourself. You were meant to die. When that bullet hit you it was meant to kill you outright, but when that happened it spiralled Willow into such a terrible place that she could never be who she was again, not exactly the same, and you’d bound her into the protection spell. So you couldn’t die, so the bullet didn’t kill you, and Willow is still…Willow, and never flayed anyone alive or tried to destroy the world.”
“How do you know all this?” Willow looked shocked to the core, instinctively taking Tara’s hand in hers as if the danger could still be lurking.
“I saw it,” Wesley repeated patiently. “I saw all of it. What happens to all of us. All because I took Connor.”
“No.” Angel bent over him. “There must have been individual choices made by all of us after that point. There can’t be one event that caused everything. But, Wes, are you sure you weren’t just hallucinating?”
Wesley twisted round to look for Lorne. “If I sing, can you…?”
Lorne grimaced. “Crumpet, you were barely alive a few minutes ago, I’m not sure you’re up to belting out any show tunes right now. Maybe some concentration on the whole breathing in and out side of things…?”
Hoarsely, Wesley sang: ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it seems as if they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday. Why she had to go I don’t know, she didn’t say. I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday…’
Lorne’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. He waved a hand. “Okay, stop, stop. You’re hitting me with way too much information right now. I need this reading in bitesize pieces because, let’s face it, crumbcake, it’s a doozy.”
“What did you read?” Angel demanded.
Lorne glanced up at him. “Wesley isn’t hallucinating. I don’t know if the Powers decided to get off their lazy behinds or else it’s a side-effect of…”
“Here it is!” Dawn held up a book in triumph. “I knew I’d seen a reference to it somewhere. The two people who survived the ‘death chill’ they were both revered as prophets afterwards and credited with saving people from all kinds of natural disasters. A mine owner didn’t heed the warning of one of them, and lost all his fortune and another one wouldn’t listen to a warning about his fleet of ships and lost all his money that way. One of them was put to death as a warlock, of course, but the other one lived quite well in a little cave in the woods and people used to bring him food and ask him for guidance.”
Dawn shoved the book under his nose and Wesley blinked at the sight of a woodcut of a skinny bearded weirdo in a ragged robe, carrying a long staff, having birds sitting on his shoulder and an old crone bringing him a basket of provisions. He grimaced and Dawn said hastily, “I don’t think it’s obligatory to be a hermit any more. I think you can save people from a nice condo with air conditioning and a granite countertop in your bespoke kitchen these days.”
“Really?” Wesley looked back at the account but the straggling copperplate was too difficult for him to comprehend given the amount of grit that seemed to have been ground into his eyes recently. “Granite countertop?”
“They’re very fashionable,” Willow assured him. “Though I prefer Shaker style.”
Lorne cleared his throat. “Um, Sunnydale witches and watchers-in-training. Point – magnetic north, you – so far south-south west right now.”
Cordelia said, “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Faith interrupted to say tersely, “Not wanting to tapdance on the whole Nostradamus thing right now, but there are more Hukkarish arriving. A lot more.”
The first impact of the visions was starting to recede now. He remembered them all, but they were no longer physically reverberating through his body. Wesley blinked a few more times and began to take in his surroundings. For the first time he became aware of the sensation of warm bare skin against his own, and how…close Gunn and Cordelia were.
He cleared his throat. “Um…Charles…?”
“We’re just trying to get you warm,” Gunn said rapidly. “Because you were really cold. We’re not…doing anything else.”
“How are you feeling, Wesley?” Cordelia enquired.
Wesley looked cautiously over his shoulder at her and then back at Gunn. “Not so cold,” he admitted hesitantly.
“Xander said the SAS do it,” Fred offered quickly. “Or possibly the marines. Only without the underwear.”
Wesley swallowed. “We’re wearing underwear?”
Cordelia pinged her bra strap for emphasis. “We’re barely meriting an R rating right now, Wes.”
“Good,” Wesley murmured. “I think.” He gave Gunn a pleading look as the man rubbed his arms again. “What exactly is going on?”
“You were really cold, man – like a human Popsicle. Something to do with the way the human body reacts to demon hyaena blood.”
Cordelia kept rubbing vigorously. “Can you feel your body now?”
“I can feel you feeling it.” Wesley jolted in shock. “Cordelia!”
She grinned at him over his shoulder. “Just testing.”
At the sight of her smile he made to make an indignant rebuttal and then grinned back in sheer relief. Cordelia’s was now a thousand watt smile of relief. “Hey, I only pinched your butt, Gunn was groping the business end.”
“There was no groping!” Gunn retorted.
Wesley blinked again. “My body entered the hypothermic state?”
“Damned frosty,” Gunn confirmed.
Wesley frowned. “I’m sure I read an account that said that was invariably supposed to be fatal.”
“Well, sorry to disappoint you,” Cordelia told him. “But sometimes books are just plain wrong.”
Wesley shifted a little uncomfortably, gaze going at once to Angel, unable to suppress a mute apology for past faith in unreliable texts. He had tried not to cave and start pleading for forgiveness in the past but now that he had seen the effect of his kidnap of Connor upon them all, and seen how it felt to have no further use for life, brittle pride felt unimportant by comparison with keeping them alive, somehow, and letting Angel know that he was sorry.
Angel, however, seemed to be thinking of other things entirely as he crouched down next to him. “It had to be someone with a body temperature. I would just have made you colder.” He looked so wistful as he said it that Wesley felt at once warmed by his concern and so sorry for him that it hurt. When he looked at him now he could see the Angel of the future he had glimpsed, even remember the sensation of him drinking the blood from his arm, the look of despair on his face as he tried to reason with Connor, and the grim determination of the man who Wolfram & Hart had finally succeeded in manoeuvring into their trap; the man who had gone down fighting but who had nevertheless ended up in that dark rain-drenched alleyway ready to slay the dragon. Angel looked back at him, eyes still full of concern and apology, neither of which Wesley had ever expected to see on his face where he was concerned ever again.
Buffy said in wonder: “Those two can do that for a long time, can’t they?”
“The gazing thing?” Cordelia confirmed. “I think their personal best is two minutes thirty-eight seconds but I think they could probably improve on that.” As Angel gave her a look of reproach, she held up her hands. “Buffy was the one who mentioned it.”
Tentatively, Wesley essayed: “I’m feeling much warmer now…”
Gunn grimaced. “Sorry, man. Be right…off you.”
“I’m very grateful,” Wesley hastened to assure him. “I do remember being so cold I thought I was going to… I dreamt I’d drowned in the North Sea. It felt like it.” He thought about Angel welded into that coffin and shivered, looking back at the vampire hastily to reassure himself that he was still there.
Willow said, “Wesley, are you saying Tara was meant to die?”
“I’m saying destiny can be changed,” he said hoarsely, gaze going back to Tara to reassure himself she wasn’t lying there with a bloodstain on her sweater after all. He reached for Cordelia’s hand as Gunn wriggled out from under the blanket a little self-consciously.
She took it in some surprise. “Are you feeling warmer?”
He twisted his head around to look at her. “Much. But don’t ascend.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Skip comes to you and tells you you’re needed on a higher plane. It’s all a lie. They just want to infect you with Jasmine. When you come back you won’t be you any more, just the vessel for a rogue Higher Power. It uses you up to get itself born, Cordy. That’s why Connor had to go to Quor’toth. So he’d be old enough to…” He felt too embarrassed to continue.
“Connor’s a baby, Wesley,” Fred said gently. “He’s only six months old. You got very cold, you didn’t do a Rip Van Winkel on us. And, Cordelia, are you going to stay there forever, because people might you know…talk?”
Buffy moved forward. “Time moves differently in demon dimensions. I know. I visited one. So did Angel. Fred’s right about the talking though.”
Cordelia huffed warm breath into Wesley’s hair then he felt her warmth move away from him and determinedly didn’t look around. He could still the patches of heat on his body from where Gunn and Cordelia had sandwiched him between them, saving him from hypothermic brain and body death in the process. Even amidst the swirl of the visions – like a watercolour in his mind on which a rainstorm had fallen – he had snatches of memory of them murmuring soothing things to him while their bodies pressed against his. A warmth of friendship he could still physically feel.
“You’re saying this…higher power had a purpose for Connor?”
Wesley found Angel’s gaze fixed upon him again and nodded. “Sahjahn changed the prophecy but I think Jasmine – the rogue Higher Power – she needed Connor to go there. That’s why Cordelia didn’t get a vision that would have warned you what Holtz – what I – was doing.”
“Then it wasn’t your fault,” Angel said much too quickly, much too eagerly.
Wesley shook his head. “Yes, Angel. It was still my decision. That’s exactly the point. Tara changed destiny because she made a choice. She risked dabbling with dark magic to place a powerful protection spell around Willow. It saved both of them. We still have choices. We still have free will. We can change the future even if we can’t alter the past.” He thought of the Connor he had seen in his vision, explosives strapped to his chest, saying ‘You can’t be saved by a lie’ and flinched. “We have to save him,” he said in wonder.
“Save who, Wes?” Gunn pulled on his trousers.
“Connor.” He was surprised it wasn’t obvious. “We have to save him from Holtz – from me – from what I did. We have to keep Cordelia here and when Connor comes back we have to be ready for Holtz and what he’s prepared to do even to someone who loves him just to stop Angel from getting his son back.”
“Connor comes back?” Angel gazed at him as if he hardly dared to believe it. “You saw that? You’re sure.”
“Yes.” Wesley looked back at him, still haunted by it all, what Connor had become, all his anger and misery and conflict; all the deceptions practised upon him; the mangling of his mind. “Otherwise the price you have to pay to save him is so high it costs us everything, Angel.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Angel insisted. “Not even for Connor. Not sacrifice all of the rest of you.”
“Wolfram & Hart didn’t tell you what the price would be,” Wesley said gently. “Only that they had a means to save him. Lilah…” At once he was hit by a kaleidoscope of memories and emotions; so much grief for a woman who was still alive and with whom, in this reality, he had never shared as much as a kiss. “I think she was trying to help. She vanished after… I couldn’t save her.”
“Lilah?” Cordelia echoed in disbelief as she pulled her t-shirt over her head. “Save her from what? And why the hell would you want to?”
“Because we were… She and I, we were meant to… I couldn’t save her. I thought I had but – it was my idea to take away Angel’s soul. I was trying to destroy the Beast and…”
“I killed her.” Angel looked bleak.
“No.” Wesley couldn’t stop his gaze going to Cordelia, needing to check that she really was the woman he loved, not that being who had ruined all their lives.
“I killed her?” Cordelia demanded in disbelief, breaking off from buttoning up her skirt.
“Cordy would never…!” Fred broke off. “It wasn’t for her shoes, was it?”
“It wasn’t Cordelia. It was Jasmine. She just used Cordelia as a disguise.”
“It’s complicated,” Lorne explained. “Beyond complicated, in fact. If I hadn’t read it for myself I’d said it was just delirium, plain and simple, but it’s real. But avertable, like Wesley says. We can still pick a No Entry sign on all those dead ends and take another path.”
“But not now.” Giles sounded as if he had been holding onto his patience for quite some time. “Right now we have an imminent end of the world situation to deal with, remember?”
“You’re saying Connor’s still alive?” Angel asked Wesley.
He nodded. “Yes, Angel. And he comes back. Or he did. I think when Tara changed the timeline everything else shifted a little. But I think he’ll still arrive, sooner or later.”
“So, having a world for him to arrive in would probably be a good idea then?” Buffy observed. “Presuming Angel only has the one mystical miracle kid and would probably quite like to be around to see this one pull a prodigal?”
“Thank you,” Giles said warmly to Buffy. “I’m glad there is one other person in the room capable of sticking to the point.”
Willow said faintly, “I’m still stuck back at thinking about Tara dying.”
Xander said, “And I’m the only person wondering if Wesley saw the lottery numbers or who won the World Series, presumably?”
“That’s just you again,” Dawn assured him.
“I knew it.”
“If anyone’s interested there are about twenty five Hukkarish outside now.” Faith turned to Lorne. “Just how much mojo is this sanctorum spell packing? Are we talking heavy duty or only everyday use?”
“I’d say nine out of ten mystical karaoke bar owners who expressed a preference would choose it as their anti-violence spell of choice but I wouldn’t necessarily like to put it up against say a herd of stampeding Loresh demons when Jupiter’s in the ascendant.”
Faith blinked. “Was there an answer in there somewhere?”
“It’s moderate to heavy wear, but I don’t think it’s going to hold forever.”
Faith returned Lorne’s gaze and then nodded quietly. “You know what I did to Wesley.”
He grimaced. “I always did. Unfortunate side effect of hearing him sing ‘We are the Champions’ – very badly, I might add. You did quite the number on him.”
“Yes, I did,” she answered him unflinchingly, but her hand curled into a fist.
Lorne turned to look at Angel. “Not quite as much of a number as you did though when you acted as if it mattered more to you to give comfort to the person who’d tortured him than to see if he was okay.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Angel protested at once. “Faith was salvageable. Wesley knew why I did what he did. He helped me. He agreed with me.”
“Yes, he did, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make him feel like he’d been sliced open with a whole lot more broken glass when you appeared not to give a rat’s ass about what had been done to him.”
“This is ancient history,” Buffy put in. “It has nothing to do with the imminent end of the world situation.”
“It has to do with Angel’s person to person skills leaving a lot to be desired. I mean I’ve heard him sing, I’ve read him, I know Angel loves Wesley as much as he has ever loved any other living thing; I even know that when he’s standing at the edge of the world with the apocalypse he created lapping around his ankles, knowing his time left not being dust can now be measured in seconds that Wesley is the person he’s thinking of, but he doesn’t exactly communicate that well.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
As Wesley said it, Lorne turned to him in exasperation. “Crumpet…”
Wesley held up a hand. “I know now. I saw everything, Lorne. I know Angel ran into a burning building to save me. I know he kept a vigil by my bedside. I know he’s the one who stopped the zombie policemen. I know he came to the hospital after I was shot and Cordelia wouldn’t let me see him. I know, when he was under the sea hallucinating through hunger that he didn’t imagine me dead or tortured, he thought of me happy and one of the family. I know everything he ever did and ever would have done to me and because of me. He was right to save Faith. He did the right thing. He saved a champion and got her back on the right track. There aren’t that many around that we can afford to lose any of those.”
Faith said hoarsely: “Did you see what I did?”
“Yes.” Wesley gazed at her and it was odd not to feel that twist inside any more when he looked at her, that fear suppressed and anger controlled. His mind was full of images of her telling Angelus to let him go, her expression when he tried to make her angry, watching her lying on that bed in the Hyperion knowing she was going to die and it was his fault and her choice and he was sorrier than he could ever admit aloud; wondering what it would have been like to really be her Watcher; wondering how much he was to blame for the fact she was now dying. “You did a lot of good, Faith. You saved Angel and you helped me and you risked your life for both of us and then you went to Sunnydale and did a lot of good there too.”
“If so much good was done after I died, does that mean that by not dying I may have…?”
Willow wouldn’t let her finish, planting a kiss on Tara’s mouth to silence her. “It would never have been a good thing.”
“Never,” Dawn said passionately.
“It wasn’t,” Wesley assured her. “It was a terrible thing that had terrible consequences, and Willow never got over it. And the world you changed was one in which we all died.” He looked from Cordelia to Fred to Gunn to Angel. “All of us except for Lorne, and he was dead inside.”
Angel walked to the door and then walked back. “Because of me?”
“No,” Wesley insisted. “Because of what I did, because I took Connor…”
Angel shook his head. “Wes, that blood they were feeding me. I wasn’t in my right mind. You remember what I was like when Darla… when you had to pull me off that guy…? I was angry all the time and so hungry. If I’d been in my right mind I would never have reacted like that.”
Quietly Wesley quoted: “‘Love can be a terrible thing’.”
Tara squeezed his hand. “Wesley, it’s everything. You can’t live without love.”
“Yes, you can.” He looked up at her. “I did it for years. No one died.”
Cordelia grabbed him so fast and so hard that he flinched; then he was staring at her open mouthed and wide eyed as she shook him roughly by the shoulders while gazing grimly into his eyes. “Don’t ever say that. Don’t you ever pretend that we weren’t the best thing that ever happened to you, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. And don’t you even think about running out on us again.”
“I wasn’t…” he gasped feebly.
She shook him again until the blood rushed in his ears and Gunn grabbed her hand. “Cordy – stop it, you’re going to make him throw up.”
“Tell him I’m right or I’ll hurt both of you.”
Gunn took one look at Cordelia’s face and said hastily to Wesley: “She’s right. No idea what she’s talking about but, trust me, she couldn’t be righter.”
“Cordelia!” Angel said sharply.
Cordelia looked at him angrily over his shoulder. “What?”
“Stop it.”
Cordelia gazed into Wesley’s eyes. “Don’t ever shut us out again. Do you hear me? Don’t run out on us. Don’t kidnap babies without running it past me first. In fact don’t do anything without running it past me first. Understood?” She let him go and he gulped some air.
Fred murmured to Gunn: “It was in the other world that Cordelia went all evil, right?”
“Other realities mean nothing,” Cordelia assured her, gaze still fixed on Wesley. “Or else Willow would be gay, I’d be a great actress, Angel would be a loony-tune, and Wesley would be shacked up with your boyfriend. Oh, wait…” She glanced across at Willow and then Angel. “And I am a great actress.”
Fred looked between Gunn and Wesley in confusion and Gunn said hastily: “I slept on the couch!” As she kept looking at him he added: “Okay, except for that one time. And nothing happened, I swear.”
“Charles…” Wesley wrenched his gaze away from Cordelia to glare at him. “Would you like to shut up some time soon?”
Angel looked between them sternly. “What one time?”
“Wesley threw up on the couch,” Gunn insisted. “I was too drunk to drive. There was no other option.”
“You promised you’d never tell anyone!” Wesley wailed.
Gunn shrugged helplessly. “Cordelia made me! She used her evil demon powers!”
Angel said furiously: “You took advantage of Wesley when he was drunk?”
“No! We shared a bed because there was nowhere else to sleep, that’s all! And what the hell is it to you anyway? You tried to smother him with a pillow - and it isn’t me people are always assuming Wesley’s putting out for anyway!”
Faith said quietly: “Does anyone except me even care that we’re surrounded by slavering demonic beasts?”
Xander shushed her with a wave of his hand, still watching Angel in fascination. “Hush. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Angel demanded.
“You know what it means. Half our clients think you and Wes are an item.”
“That’s funny because all the clients I’ve dealt with assumed you and Wes were an item. Which if you’re in the habit of sleeping in his bed probably isn’t that much of a shock.”
“Oh and like I don’t know where he was sleeping before you got him blown up!”
“I did not ‘get him blown up’. I saved him!”
Wesley said hastily to Fred: “I’ve never slept with Gunn, I swear. Or Angel.”
She patted his arm gently and whispered: “No one would think anything bad of you if you did, you know. Well – except if it was Charles, because then I’d have to kill you.”
“We didn’t,” Wesley assured her quickly. “And even if we had done it would have been before we met you. And when we were drunk. Definitely very drunk. If we had – which we didn’t.”
Anya turned to Xander. “Did you or did you not have sex with Spike while he was staying in your unpleasant basement?”
“I’m taking the fifth,” Xander told her levelly. “I will also be taking a large drink if you ever ask me that again.”
Giles said quietly to Buffy: “Just so you know, if anyone even thinks about asking me about Ethan there will be bloodshed.”
“Is this a side-effect of the amulet?” Buffy demanded. “Or did all the male IQs just drop sharply? Am I the only one who heard Faith mentioning slavering Hukkarish?”
“Sure we heard it, Buff,” Xander explained. “But frankly when Angel and Gunn are having a bitch-fight over Wesley, who’s listening?”
Dawn said quietly: “I think I’ve found it.”
It took a moment for the hubbub of voices to die down and for everyone to realize what she’d said. Giles turned to her. “What?”
Dawn held up the book. “I think I’ve found the place where the monks hid the cauldron that we need to destroy the amulet.”
The scramble to look at the book she was holding was almost comical, although Angel firmly put a hand on Wesley’s shoulder when he attempted to get up.
Dawn grabbed the scroll and the book and sank down on her knees next to Wesley, holding out the scroll so he could see the illustration of all the demons and then raising the book she had been reading to show him the same illustration.
Wesley’s face broke into a wide smile. “Dawn, you’ve found it. It’s the same place.” Seeing her expression, he added a little more uncertainly: “Where is it?”
“Well…it’s conveniently close,” she offered.
Giles crouched down next to his fellow Watcher. “It turns out that the Cauldron of Uriel is hidden in the Hellmouth, Wesley. The one under the High School. The one that, according to these very clear directions, should absolutely never be opened as it will unleash from its depths all manner of terrible beasts.”
Wesley groaned and closed his eyes as Dawn patted him gently on the shoulder and said: “Because it turns out that demon monks – sometimes really suck.”
***
Day had become night and the spell was still holding. Unfortunately, so was Wesley’s fever. Giles was trying to concentrate on the translation but the script kept blurring. It wasn’t enough to find the hiding place of the Cauldron of Uriel, pressing though that was, they also needed to translate the scroll so they could say the incantation. There were faint echoes of some of the words in Turkish, Aramaic, Hittite, Hebrew. All these tantalising references and none of them exactly what was needed, and meanwhile Wesley was burning bright and brittle bone twisting against imaginary demons while his friends tried to gentle and soothe him and real demons prowled outside. Wesley was so breakable. Giles was shocked by his realization of how physically fragile the man was; how wrecked and shattered and starved and lost. And it was obvious now how much he had lost. He suspected they were all a little shocked by it; Angel and Cordelia and Gunn and Fred and Lorne; the friends who had turned on him so completely now a relay team of gentle words and soothing touches.
They all kept trying to anchor him to life and reality through their voices and their touch. Fred was as slender and brittle as him, and it hurt to see her smiling at him with such encouragement while the tears ran down her face as she talked to him throughout her shift in a non-stop gabble about Pylean customs and astrophysical theories and the things she thought about sometimes but didn’t tell people because they might think she was crazy and sometimes she kind of thought she might be crazy too… crazy again, that was, having definitely been crazy the once. Bizarrely, it soothed him; her gabble of nonsensical words; they locked thin spidery fingers and he said her name in great surprise or else relief or anxiety or apology, and she told him over and over that they weren’t on Pylea any more, and she was down from her room, or that she was sorry for what she had said to him or that he was a good man and it hadn’t been him that time, with the axe, that he had been the real victim. And although a lot of what she said made no sense to Giles at all, he did not doubt for an instant that her words were making Wesley feel better.
It was exhausting, of course. An hour tending to feverish Wesley was like running a marathon in very heavy boots. He had to be called back to a good place every time his delirium carried him to somewhere bad. And there were so many bad places. Home locked under the stairs, and tied to a kitchen chair being tortured by Faith, and staring at a bomb there wasn’t time to evade, and feeling the bullet hit and then the pain which was so bad the world went misty around the edges, and the knife slicing and no pain at all just the warmth draining away and the ground coming up to meet him and everything so cold and no one coming for the whole of one dark cold endless night, and Connor, Connor, Connor; with the prophecy and the Loa and the earthquake and the fire and the father will kill the son and Holtz and Darla and the tragic roundabout spinning and spinning with apparently no means to ever make it stop.
People took their shift with Wesley and then reeled away in exhaustion but, although Tara and Dawn and Willow were hovering and wringing their hand, and clearly desperate to help, they didn’t understand his references, and they didn’t know the right things to say to make him feel better, so it had to be the LA crew, sans Groo – who was as bewildered by many of Wesley’s comments as Giles was – to do the hand holding and brow mopping.
Which suited the LA crew just fine. Giles had not been unaware of the barely concealed rivalry between those who considered that as the others had rejected Wesley he was now ‘theirs’ and those who considered that Wesley still belonged to them despite any little recent glitches in their friendship with him. He suspected they were not unhappy about Tara and Dawn’s inability to assist Wesley through the worst of the fever, but they were certainly paying for it in mental wear and tear.
He believed that he, Dawn, Anya, Willow and Tara were making some headway with the translation and research work, the scroll no longer just a few patches of translated Minithian code text amidst of incomprehension but every paragraph with at least one sentence translated and some almost completely understood. But it was certainly very difficult to concentrate with Wesley feverishly muttering in the same room and the constant murmur of anxious note-comparing going on from his carers. It didn’t help either that Dawn, Willow and Tara were all equally guilty of losing their place or the thread of their translation every time Wesley became particularly agitated. However, given that the fate of the world was depending on them all, Giles thought it was important that they all dug deep into their reserves of concentration right now and got on with what needed to be done with the minimum of fuss, conferring, and unnecessary chatter.
In the background, Xander was still hammering, Groo still assisting him, the Hukkarish still snarling, the blue light flashes finding thinner and thinner apertures through which to glimmer into their space. It was no real shock when the electricity abruptly died on them. The Hukkarish had presumably cut the cables. They had all known it was only a matter of time, but it was a little disturbing nonetheless. There was something dogged in the resigned way Xander switched on his flashlight before resuming his hammering, Angel threw another log onto the fire from the pile and Tara went around lighting candles. Lorne placed a circle of them around Wesley, making him look like the sacrificial offering in some demonic raising ritual.
“He’s so cold…” Cordelia looked up anxiously, hair disordered and the shadows under her eyes looking even worse. “Angel, he’s freezing.”
Dawn hurried forward with a book in one hand a blanket in the other. “It says that’s one of the symptoms.”
“Try this…” Tara hastily held out another mug of something herbal and hot and Cordelia took it without a glimmer of hostility this time. That was the last hot drink they were going to be able to obtain by simply switching on a kettle. From now on things were going to have to be heated over the fire.
They tried to get him to swallow some more of the potion they had made to Groo’s recipe, but Wesley flinched from the cup and their touch, shivering violently even after they wrapped him carefully in the blanket and Gunn and Angel lowered him gently back onto his makeshift bed. He seemed to have no idea where was he was or who they were now, clammy with fever and confusion. He flinched when they touched him and they flinched in their turn from the chill of his skin. He was getting colder and weaker with each passing hour and Giles was beginning to seriously doubt that he would last the night. At least there had been some kind of resistance in his feverish delirium, a railing against past events, a desperate attempt to rewrite the past, avert old dangers, right old wrongs. But now he no longer recognized them or called out to them and he seemed dangerously close to slipping into a vegetative unconsciousness. If the slowing of his heartbeat and drop in his body temperature wasn’t arrested soon, Giles was afraid that the only logical next step would indeed by coma and then death. Outside they could clearly hear the sound of the Hukkarish throwing themselves at the barricade, and snarling as they were knocked back, bluish light visible through every crack in the boarding against the windows each time it happened.
“Good way of showing us the weak points,” Xander grunted, taking out another nail from his shirt pocket and preparing to hammer some more MDF over the gaps.
As Wesley sank back into slumber again, shivering as he did so. Cordelia sat back on her heels, looking despondent while Angel took the second blanket from Dawn and wrapped it around Wesley’s shoulders.
“Man, he’s colder than you,” Gunn muttered.
Angel winced. “In people with a pulse that’s never a good sign.”
Xander cleared his throat. “Um, in the army if they have a hypothermia case they say the best way to warm someone up is with another human body. Warm body, I mean.”
“That let’s you out,” Cordelia observed to Angel.
“I’ll do it,” Fred said quietly. “I don’t mind, I mean.”
“Fred, no offence, but there’s not exactly a lot of you to go around,” Cordelia observed. “And I think it would be awkward for Wesley if he woke up and you were…”
“It has to be skin to skin,” Xander explained. “That’s the best way anyway. And I’m thinking it has to be one us guys for obvious reasons. Maybe if we draw straws?”
Gunn sighed. “We don’t need to draw straws. I know Wes best out every male in this room with a pulse so that makes it my job.”
Giles was a little ashamed of his feeling of relief, and glancing across at Xander saw that he was too. Gunn was already pulling off his jacket with a kind of dogged determination that Giles rather admired. He would have laid at least a small wager that Gunn was not someone entirely comfortable with any aspersions being cast about his heterosexuality, and insisting on signing up to be naked with another man, however selfless one’s motives, was something that could be said to raise a question mark. Pressing a hand to his aching head he bent back over the book he was reading.
Groo said, “In my culture there is no embarrassment in such an action. Would it not be better if I…?”
“You don’t know Wesley,” Gunn returned evenly. “I do and it’s not going to freak him out so much if he wakes up and finds he’s got me for a hot water bottle.”
Cordelia made a zipping motion across her mouth. “So not saying anything right now. Not asking, not speculating, not wondering if that’s why you two were always gone so long on those missions of yours…”
Angel and Lorne eased an unconscious but still shivering and feverish Wesley out of his ripped clothes while Cordelia and Fred obligingly held up a blanket behind which Gunn could change. Gunn said, “We didn’t want to tell you, Cord, but actually we were always late back because we were eating pizza in the truck and we knew if we had to share with you we’d get one slice between us if we were lucky.”
“Fine. I eat more pizza than you and Wesley put together and you’re never going to get teased about what you’re about to do in years to come.”
“Are you peeking?” he demanded.
Cordelia pointedly looked away. “Hah, like you’ve got anything down there I haven’t seen before.”
Fred looked at her reproachfully and Cordelia shrugged. “Fred, we do a job where we get burning demon blood eating its way through clothes, some flesh flashing is inevitable, but trust me, I would never poach on your turf.”
Fred cast a worried look over the blanket as if to check that Gunn’s body was as she remembered it. “You don’t like my…turf?”
“It’s very nice turf if that’s the way your…garden grows, I’m just not planning on doing any…hoeing there.”
“Who are you calling a ho’?” Gunn demanded. “Angel’s the one who couldn’t drop his boxers fast enough for Darla, and what about Wes and his two whole hours of playing hard to get with Virginia…?”
“Dear Lord, would you at least attempt to stay focused?” Giles pleaded. “I thought Buffy and Xander occasionally had the attention spans of a half-nibbled Twinkie but you people really take the biscuit.” Fred, Gunn and Cordelia all gave him looks of indignation and Giles rolled his eyes. “My apologies. Do please continue. After all, it always so helpful when attempting to do life and death research to have as a constant background the inane twitterings of a bunch of whiny Americans.”
There was an indignant pause before Cordelia said clearly to Buffy, “Would you like to point out to your Watcher that the only people he didn’t offend with that last statement were Groo, Lorne and the unconscious Brit under the blanket?”
“I appreciate you acknowledging my successful integration into American culture, Cordelia,” Anya observed.
Cordelia, who had clearly entirely forgotten Anya was there, did a double take. “Um – you’re welcome.”
“I can keep my boxers on, right?” Gunn asked of Xander and as the young man grimaced apologetically, said firmly: “Well, I don’t give a damn what they do in the Navy SEALS, in this platoon we keep our boxers on.”
Angel eased off Wesley’s t-shirt, talking to him quietly as he did so, Giles couldn’t catch every word but the vampire seemed to be solemnly explaining to Wesley what they were doing and why. Lorne said gently, “Angel, I really think the last thing on Wesley’s mind right now is fear about you and me coming onto him.”
Angel said quietly, “I don’t want him thinking I’m Angelus.”
Giles saw Buffy wince and had an unpleasant flashback to some of the grislier details in Angel’s file. A file with whose contents Wesley would also, of course, be all too familiar. There really had been no limit to Angel’s imagination in the days when he had been without a soul. As Angel carefully peeled Wesley out of his trousers while Lorne gently lowered him back onto his blanket bed, Giles tried not to think about how many people Angelus had probably stripped naked in the past; he imagined Angel was trying not to think about that too.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Angel asked Gunn.
“We’re trusting him not to be ‘up’ for this at all, Angel,” Cordelia pointed out. “Because if Wesley isn’t going to be surprised waking up next to a happy Gunn, questions will be asked.”
“And demonic seer chicks will be shoved out of a moving vehicle while aforesaid vehicle is travelling fast down a bendy road,” Gunn warned. He snatched a breath. “Okay, I can do this. If soldiers do it, it’s got to be as manly as…flame-throwering something skanky, right?”
Giles flinched at that creation of a non-existent verb but heroically forbore from comment. Willow patted him gently on the hand in silent sympathy and approval for his restraint.
“Sweetpea, if military men like to do it I’d say it’s as hetero as a seminar on interior decorating with a Barbra Streisand concert to follow,” Lorne observed, “but get on with it anyway. We can jeer and point later.”
“You’re such a comfort.” Gunn snatched a breath and then emerged from behind his blanket wearing only his boxer shorts. Although Giles quickly averted his eyes he noticed that not only Willow, Tara and Dawn, but also Buffy and Faith all sneaked a peek, and he suspected that even an amateur optometrist would have had no difficulty in measuring a significant dilation of pupils in all parties.
Cordelia wolf-whistled and Gunn gave her a look that promised retribution later. Angel, as he moved Wesley carefully onto his side, said a warning, “Cordy…”
She shrugged shamelessly. “I’m safe. Gunn loves me like a sister.”
Lorne looked at her sideways. “Sugarplum, he staked his sister, remember?”
Gunn crouched down next to Wesley and said tentatively, “I’m just doing this to get you warned up, okay, Wes? This is definitely not a come-on. If it was a come-on there would be…well, there would be dinner and probably lots of alcohol.” He pulled back the blanket, revealing the scratches and bruises across Wesley’s back, and then lay down facing him, pulling him gingerly into his arms while Angel wrapped the blanket around both of them. Gunn gasped and shuddered. “He’s like a block of ice. I don’t think the blood is even circulating any more. Wes…?” He patted his face gently. “Wesley? We gotta get you warmer, man.” He found Wesley’s hands and began to rub them against his chest, gasping as he did so in a way that suggested it was akin to showering in ice water. “He’s so cold. I swear if I wasn’t wearing my boxers right now bits of me would be falling off.”
“Oh quit whining and snuggle up,” Cordelia observed.
Fred snorted and then put a hand across her mouth and made sympathetic eyes at her boyfriend. “Can I help?”
“We need to get the blood flowing again. Can you rub his back?”
“I’ll do it.” Angel began to make gentle circling rubbing motions across Wesley’s back through the blanket.
“Harder,” Gunn told him, then winced. “I mean – rub his back harder, not that I’m… never mind.”
“He’s covered in bruises…” Angel protested.
“Trust me,” Gunn said through gritted teeth. “He’s going to be dead if we can’t get him warm.”
“I can get more firewood,” Faith said abruptly. “Get it hotter in here.”
Giles, Angel and Buffy all said: “No” in the same breath.
“I can take them,” she insisted.
“Getting yourself ripped to pieces isn’t going to help Wesley,” Buffy told her.
“At least I’d be doing something,” the girl protested. “And if they’ve been throwing themselves against that barrier maybe they’re tired. Maybe now is the best time to take them.”
Cordelia abruptly pulled her sweater over her head, revealing a t-shirt through which her bra was clearly visible. As everyone gaped at her, she defiantly pulled the t-shirt off too, revealing a figure that had only grown even more voluptuous since her departure from Sunnydale. “Imagine I’m wearing a bikini,” she told them.
“How is that going to help the situation?” Angel enquired in some agitation, his gaze going to her breasts as if through circumstances beyond his control. Giles noticed that Groo, Gunn, Xander and Lorne were also having trouble looking elsewhere also. Willow, after a brief wide-eyed glance, was pointedly not looking interested at all, frowning in concentration over a text so that when Tara darted a glance in her direction she could be entirely reassured that Willow only had eyes for her.
Xander ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “Well, I suppose we’ll all be warmer…”
“Oh, just close your eyes then,” Cordelia retorted in exasperation, and Giles hastily averted his eyes as she firmly stepped out of her skirt. He heard the sound of clothing landing on the floor, shoes being kicked off and then Cordelia, presumably now clad only in her underwear, saying: “Step aside, Man With No Pulse.”
When Giles looked back, Cordelia was under the blanket rubbing Wesley’s back and Fred was saying plaintively, “Why can’t I do that?”
“Because you don’t have enough body surface to warm anything wider than his spinal column,” Cordelia told her. As Fred looked down at herself in disappointment, pulling out her top presumably to make extra sure she wasn’t hiding any previously unnoticed inches down there with which to refute Cordelia’s claim, Giles noticed Buffy and Faith exchanging a glance that seemed to be communicating a whole world of raised eyebrows.
Angel was tentatively removing his hand from his eyes while Fred, noticing Groo and Lorne still had their eyes averted in a gentlemanly manner, tugged on their sleeves. Anya said, “I don’t think her breasts are of unusually impressive dimensions,” and looked accusingly at Xander who quickly looked at the window he was boarding as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.
Cordelia wrapped her arms around Wesley and began to blow warm air onto the back of his neck. Gunn was rubbing his arms while Cordelia had firmly pressed herself against Wesley’s back.
Angel grimaced at the sight of them. “You didn’t…do this while I was away, did you?”
“Every night,” Cordelia told him airily.
Fred looked at her reproachfully. “You didn’t invite me.”
“The bed wasn’t big enough for a foursome.”
Xander said a little desperately, “Please, someone tell me that I’m not the only one finding this...kind of hot?”
Buffy was gazing at the sight of Cordelia and Gunn both trying to rub some warmth back into Wesley’s chilled body as if mesmerised. “Absolutely, just you…” she said without conviction.
Dawn hissed to Giles: “I’m supposed to be concentrating on research while they’re doing…that?”
“Yes,” he told her firmly.
“You all are fibbing about the threesome, aren’t you?” Fred asked Cordelia.
Cordelia rubbed Wesley’s shoulders gently. “Hey, Gunn and Wesley have three DVDs between them and a slightly singed game of Word Puzzle, with you upstairs eating tacos and Angel off being all meditatey how else were we supposed to fill the long cold winter evenings?”
“She is so lying,” Gunn said over his shoulder to Fred, in between rubbing Wesley’s chest. “If Cordy was Pinocchio, her nose would be hitting the back wall by now.”
Giles made a Herculean effort to concentrate on the scroll translation and glared hard at Dawn, Willow and Tara until they wrenched their gazes away from the scene on the floor. He could still hear the sounds of Gunn and Cordelia briskly rubbing Wesley’s skin and then presumably wrapping themselves around it to try to warm him through; their occasional little yelps and gasps as their warm skin was cringingly chilled by his own icy body making him shiver in sympathy.
Buffy and Faith had a long debate about how many Hukkarish there were outside and how long the logs would last and whether they would be easier to take now, while tired from throwing themselves at the mystical force field or in the morning when they had sunlight to sap some of their strength. Knowing that Buffy would never let a possibly self-destructive Faith do something too reckless, Giles let the debate wash over him, not surprised that it ended in Faith sighing and giving in.
All their shadows looked strange against the bare walls; Xander a figure out of mythology with his hammer raised, Buffy and Faith Wagnerian with their sword-wielding silhouettes; Groo and Angel equally unreal as tall, broad-shouldered hero shapes bearing axes and blades. Willow and Tara should have had witches’ hats, but devoid of them were reduced to scribes. Looking around their pieces of paper, Giles could see the tree sketched clearly on Tara’s notebook with a whole line of reference numbers underneath and an all important paragraph printed in three languages with painstaking precision. Dawn was working on a part of the scroll that showed a tower, and Willow had three pages of spells relating to the destruction of amulets. Giles suspected they were very close to a breakthrough. He just wasn’t sure if Wesley was going to live to see it.
All the reports seemed to suggest that a victim stood very little chance of survival if his body was not very swiftly brought out of the inevitable hypothermic state that succeeded the high fever and delirium. Looking over Willow’s shoulder at the notes she had made about the Hukkarish blood poisoning, he did believe, however, that without the eccentric – and perhaps downright desperate – intervention of Gunn and Cordelia, Wesley would probably have been dead by now of what the ancient Sumarian who had commented on it named ‘the death chill’.
Unable to restrain himself, he said, “How is he?”
“Like a block of ice,” Cordelia said through gritted teeth.
Gunn’s teeth were chattering and he rubbed Wesley’s arms briskly. “Come on, Wes, you’re English, you’re used to the cold. Fight it.”
“What if we put him in a bath of warm water?” Dawn offered. “Wouldn’t that help raise his body temperature?”
“No electricity, no hot water,” Angel explained so fast that it was clear he had already thought of the idea and discarded it. He had his arms wrapped around his body and his brown eyes were all undisguised anxiety. For a man who had so recently tried to smother Wesley with a pillow and insisted that he would never forgive him, he was certainly giving a very fair impression of someone who cared desperately that Wesley should live.
“Is that your leg?” Cordelia asked Gunn abruptly.
“Yes, it’s my leg,” he retorted in exasperation. “Xander said we had to get…between his legs warm as well as his armpits and the back of his neck.”
“Just checking.”
“Guys, I’m really not trying to pile on the pressure,” Xander put in. “But you only get one shot at this and if being embarrassed is going to stop you doing it right...”
“I’ll take the back of his neck,” Cordelia said quickly, and in fairness to her, Giles saw that she did immediately cup her hands across his neck and lay her cheek against his back, pressing her body against him, shivering as the cold went through her and then gently rubbing his neck.
Gunn winced, grimaced, and then presumably did what needed to be done, muttering, “I am never going to live this down,” as he did so.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Cordelia assured him. But her voice was gentle as she breathed: “Come on, Wes. Get with the program here. This is supposed to be the fantasy of every English guy on the planet. Now, make like a damned boarding school boy and get hot and bothered.”
“We’re trying to save his life, not turn him on,” Gunn retorted through gritted teeth. “Jesus, Wes. How can anyone who isn’t a vampire be that cold?”
“We’re not cold,” Angel protested. “We’re room temperature.” Everyone ignored him except for Buffy who gave him a sympathetic smile.
Cordelia rubbed his back vigorously. “You are not dying on me, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce,” she muttered darkly. “You are getting warm and waking up and I mean now, bucko…”
Giles wrenched his attention back to the scroll. “World ending,” he told Dawn quietly and she guiltily spun back round from looking at Wesley and Cordelia.
“I just wish there was something I could do,” Dawn admitted.
“There is,” Giles reminded her. “You can work out how to stop the man who sent those Hukkarish after Wesley in the first place.” He looked around at the others, Tara and Willow, worn out with anxiety and lack of sleep as they were, feeling his own head aching, his eyes gritty with lack of rest. “We all have to do our part. Wesley’s done his. Now we have to do ours. And this is it.”
Aloud he didn’t say what he knew they were all thinking, which was that he just fervently hoped that Wesley’s most recent battle with the Hukkarish didn’t turn out to be the last thing he ever did.
***
As the first wave of images hit, Wesley thought This must be what having a vision is like… but then the pictures and sounds were overwhelming him, a tsunami of impressions that picked him up and swirled him over and over through light and colour and burning sound into a dark still chill; as if the full weight of the North Sea was crushing him. He gasped, trying to snatch breath into starved lungs, and heard his name being said urgently, hands on his skin, steadying him, soothing him, clarity filtering between the aftershocks of the visions: Fred’s frightened ‘Wesley…?’, Angel’s urgent, commanding ‘Wes…!’ Wesley saw himself unconscious in the burning shell of Angel’s basement, heard the man calling his name as beams fell and flames flared all around him. Saw himself found, and gathered gently into anxious arms, his head turned, and, he, limp and bruised and cut and scorched. He watched himself lifted over Angel’s shoulder and carried out into safety and it was as if he had been shown the exit from this freezing chill of prescience. He could recognize their voices now.
“Wesley…?” Cordelia is going to die. She’s going to ascend and be taken over the way Angelus took over Liam and she’s going to be used by a Higher Power who wants to drive Connor insane and give birth to itself. And then she’s going to sink into a coma from which she never really awakens. Not really. I’m only going to see her for a few more hours before she is gone forever.
“English…?” Gunn is going to lose who he is so completely he believes more in Wolfram & Hart than he does in himself. He’s going to sign a piece of paper that gets Fred killed and I’m going to stab him, and he’s going to die, bleeding in an alley against overwhelming odds. The only mercy is that I won’t be there to see it because I’ll already be dead by then, having long since lost the will to live.
“Wes…?” Angel is going to sacrifice everything for the son I took from him. He’s going to lose who he is and his Shanshu and all of us.
“Wesley, are you all right? Do you know who we are?” Fred is going to die. She’s going to be hollowed out by an Old One who she will infect with her humanity, but her soul is going to be destroyed and none of us are ever going to see her again, in this world or the next.
“Sweetpea, take your time, but if you could give some indication as to whether or not we’re talking to a vegetable, it would be appreciated.” Lorne is going to lose his powers. We’re going to cost him everything he was and is. Angel’s going to ask him to take a human life and he’s never going to get over it.
Wesley gasped with cold and horror and opened his eyes, gazing into Gunn’s, who was looking at him anxiously, hands rubbing Wesley’s upper arms as if he had been doing it for some time.
“Gunn, I’m sorry I stabbed you. I had no right. It was only because of Connor that we were there in the first place and that was my fault – the way he turned out, what Angel had to do to save him…”
“Wes, you didn’t stab me.”
“Yes, I did, just not yet.” Wesley twisted around and became aware of Cordelia so close to him that they appeared to be sharing the same sleeping bag. “Skip is evil. You can’t trust him. He works for Jasmine. What we call Jasmine. She has to guard her real name. I think the real Powers abandoned us when Angel slept with Darla. She needed you to be part-demon so you could carry her. It had nothing to do with the visions. Don’t ascend. If you do we’ll never get you back. Not the real you.”
“Wesley, try to focus,” Cordelia said gently. “You’ve been very ill. You had a fever, do you remember?”
“I’ve seen the future. Holtz comes back and he isn’t what he pretends. He still only cares about vengeance. Connor’s just an instrument of Jasmine. Everything that happens happens because she needs him to father her.” He twisted his head round. “Angel, don’t go to the bluffs. Cordy won’t meet you there. Connor and Justine are waiting with a tazer. They seal you into a coffin. And I’m sorry about Connor, I’m so sorry, but please don’t do it. Don’t accept the offer from Wolfram & Hart. You’ll kill Fred if you do. You’ll kill all of us.”
“Wes, you’re not making any sense.” Angel’s brown eyes were full of concern. He looked at Gunn. “Is he warmer? Is he getting better?”
“He’s warmer,” Gunn admitted. “But I think his brain got fried then frozen, right along with the rest of him.”
Wesley looked around helplessly for some assistance. “We can change it. It doesn’t have to be the way it’s going to be. Tara changed her future. It can be done.”
There was a long pause before Wesley felt a soft hand take hold of his and he found himself gazing into Tara’s eyes. As always when he looked at her he had a sense of coming home, of recognition. He smiled as he looked at her and she smiled back; a smile that warmed him all the way through.
“They don’t understand you, but I’m trying to. What do you mean that I changed my future?”
“You cast that protection spell over Willow. When you were separated and you were worried about her getting addicted to magic. You found that spell in one of Giles’s forbidden books and you cast it.”
Tara looked up guiltily at Giles and Willow. “Yes, yes I did. But I don’t know how Wesley knows. I didn’t tell him or anyone else.”
“I saw it. That’s how I know we can change things. When you cast that spell you didn’t just protect Willow, you protected yourself. You were meant to die. When that bullet hit you it was meant to kill you outright, but when that happened it spiralled Willow into such a terrible place that she could never be who she was again, not exactly the same, and you’d bound her into the protection spell. So you couldn’t die, so the bullet didn’t kill you, and Willow is still…Willow, and never flayed anyone alive or tried to destroy the world.”
“How do you know all this?” Willow looked shocked to the core, instinctively taking Tara’s hand in hers as if the danger could still be lurking.
“I saw it,” Wesley repeated patiently. “I saw all of it. What happens to all of us. All because I took Connor.”
“No.” Angel bent over him. “There must have been individual choices made by all of us after that point. There can’t be one event that caused everything. But, Wes, are you sure you weren’t just hallucinating?”
Wesley twisted round to look for Lorne. “If I sing, can you…?”
Lorne grimaced. “Crumpet, you were barely alive a few minutes ago, I’m not sure you’re up to belting out any show tunes right now. Maybe some concentration on the whole breathing in and out side of things…?”
Hoarsely, Wesley sang: ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it seems as if they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday. Why she had to go I don’t know, she didn’t say. I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday…’
Lorne’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. He waved a hand. “Okay, stop, stop. You’re hitting me with way too much information right now. I need this reading in bitesize pieces because, let’s face it, crumbcake, it’s a doozy.”
“What did you read?” Angel demanded.
Lorne glanced up at him. “Wesley isn’t hallucinating. I don’t know if the Powers decided to get off their lazy behinds or else it’s a side-effect of…”
“Here it is!” Dawn held up a book in triumph. “I knew I’d seen a reference to it somewhere. The two people who survived the ‘death chill’ they were both revered as prophets afterwards and credited with saving people from all kinds of natural disasters. A mine owner didn’t heed the warning of one of them, and lost all his fortune and another one wouldn’t listen to a warning about his fleet of ships and lost all his money that way. One of them was put to death as a warlock, of course, but the other one lived quite well in a little cave in the woods and people used to bring him food and ask him for guidance.”
Dawn shoved the book under his nose and Wesley blinked at the sight of a woodcut of a skinny bearded weirdo in a ragged robe, carrying a long staff, having birds sitting on his shoulder and an old crone bringing him a basket of provisions. He grimaced and Dawn said hastily, “I don’t think it’s obligatory to be a hermit any more. I think you can save people from a nice condo with air conditioning and a granite countertop in your bespoke kitchen these days.”
“Really?” Wesley looked back at the account but the straggling copperplate was too difficult for him to comprehend given the amount of grit that seemed to have been ground into his eyes recently. “Granite countertop?”
“They’re very fashionable,” Willow assured him. “Though I prefer Shaker style.”
Lorne cleared his throat. “Um, Sunnydale witches and watchers-in-training. Point – magnetic north, you – so far south-south west right now.”
Cordelia said, “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Faith interrupted to say tersely, “Not wanting to tapdance on the whole Nostradamus thing right now, but there are more Hukkarish arriving. A lot more.”
The first impact of the visions was starting to recede now. He remembered them all, but they were no longer physically reverberating through his body. Wesley blinked a few more times and began to take in his surroundings. For the first time he became aware of the sensation of warm bare skin against his own, and how…close Gunn and Cordelia were.
He cleared his throat. “Um…Charles…?”
“We’re just trying to get you warm,” Gunn said rapidly. “Because you were really cold. We’re not…doing anything else.”
“How are you feeling, Wesley?” Cordelia enquired.
Wesley looked cautiously over his shoulder at her and then back at Gunn. “Not so cold,” he admitted hesitantly.
“Xander said the SAS do it,” Fred offered quickly. “Or possibly the marines. Only without the underwear.”
Wesley swallowed. “We’re wearing underwear?”
Cordelia pinged her bra strap for emphasis. “We’re barely meriting an R rating right now, Wes.”
“Good,” Wesley murmured. “I think.” He gave Gunn a pleading look as the man rubbed his arms again. “What exactly is going on?”
“You were really cold, man – like a human Popsicle. Something to do with the way the human body reacts to demon hyaena blood.”
Cordelia kept rubbing vigorously. “Can you feel your body now?”
“I can feel you feeling it.” Wesley jolted in shock. “Cordelia!”
She grinned at him over his shoulder. “Just testing.”
At the sight of her smile he made to make an indignant rebuttal and then grinned back in sheer relief. Cordelia’s was now a thousand watt smile of relief. “Hey, I only pinched your butt, Gunn was groping the business end.”
“There was no groping!” Gunn retorted.
Wesley blinked again. “My body entered the hypothermic state?”
“Damned frosty,” Gunn confirmed.
Wesley frowned. “I’m sure I read an account that said that was invariably supposed to be fatal.”
“Well, sorry to disappoint you,” Cordelia told him. “But sometimes books are just plain wrong.”
Wesley shifted a little uncomfortably, gaze going at once to Angel, unable to suppress a mute apology for past faith in unreliable texts. He had tried not to cave and start pleading for forgiveness in the past but now that he had seen the effect of his kidnap of Connor upon them all, and seen how it felt to have no further use for life, brittle pride felt unimportant by comparison with keeping them alive, somehow, and letting Angel know that he was sorry.
Angel, however, seemed to be thinking of other things entirely as he crouched down next to him. “It had to be someone with a body temperature. I would just have made you colder.” He looked so wistful as he said it that Wesley felt at once warmed by his concern and so sorry for him that it hurt. When he looked at him now he could see the Angel of the future he had glimpsed, even remember the sensation of him drinking the blood from his arm, the look of despair on his face as he tried to reason with Connor, and the grim determination of the man who Wolfram & Hart had finally succeeded in manoeuvring into their trap; the man who had gone down fighting but who had nevertheless ended up in that dark rain-drenched alleyway ready to slay the dragon. Angel looked back at him, eyes still full of concern and apology, neither of which Wesley had ever expected to see on his face where he was concerned ever again.
Buffy said in wonder: “Those two can do that for a long time, can’t they?”
“The gazing thing?” Cordelia confirmed. “I think their personal best is two minutes thirty-eight seconds but I think they could probably improve on that.” As Angel gave her a look of reproach, she held up her hands. “Buffy was the one who mentioned it.”
Tentatively, Wesley essayed: “I’m feeling much warmer now…”
Gunn grimaced. “Sorry, man. Be right…off you.”
“I’m very grateful,” Wesley hastened to assure him. “I do remember being so cold I thought I was going to… I dreamt I’d drowned in the North Sea. It felt like it.” He thought about Angel welded into that coffin and shivered, looking back at the vampire hastily to reassure himself that he was still there.
Willow said, “Wesley, are you saying Tara was meant to die?”
“I’m saying destiny can be changed,” he said hoarsely, gaze going back to Tara to reassure himself she wasn’t lying there with a bloodstain on her sweater after all. He reached for Cordelia’s hand as Gunn wriggled out from under the blanket a little self-consciously.
She took it in some surprise. “Are you feeling warmer?”
He twisted his head around to look at her. “Much. But don’t ascend.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Skip comes to you and tells you you’re needed on a higher plane. It’s all a lie. They just want to infect you with Jasmine. When you come back you won’t be you any more, just the vessel for a rogue Higher Power. It uses you up to get itself born, Cordy. That’s why Connor had to go to Quor’toth. So he’d be old enough to…” He felt too embarrassed to continue.
“Connor’s a baby, Wesley,” Fred said gently. “He’s only six months old. You got very cold, you didn’t do a Rip Van Winkel on us. And, Cordelia, are you going to stay there forever, because people might you know…talk?”
Buffy moved forward. “Time moves differently in demon dimensions. I know. I visited one. So did Angel. Fred’s right about the talking though.”
Cordelia huffed warm breath into Wesley’s hair then he felt her warmth move away from him and determinedly didn’t look around. He could still the patches of heat on his body from where Gunn and Cordelia had sandwiched him between them, saving him from hypothermic brain and body death in the process. Even amidst the swirl of the visions – like a watercolour in his mind on which a rainstorm had fallen – he had snatches of memory of them murmuring soothing things to him while their bodies pressed against his. A warmth of friendship he could still physically feel.
“You’re saying this…higher power had a purpose for Connor?”
Wesley found Angel’s gaze fixed upon him again and nodded. “Sahjahn changed the prophecy but I think Jasmine – the rogue Higher Power – she needed Connor to go there. That’s why Cordelia didn’t get a vision that would have warned you what Holtz – what I – was doing.”
“Then it wasn’t your fault,” Angel said much too quickly, much too eagerly.
Wesley shook his head. “Yes, Angel. It was still my decision. That’s exactly the point. Tara changed destiny because she made a choice. She risked dabbling with dark magic to place a powerful protection spell around Willow. It saved both of them. We still have choices. We still have free will. We can change the future even if we can’t alter the past.” He thought of the Connor he had seen in his vision, explosives strapped to his chest, saying ‘You can’t be saved by a lie’ and flinched. “We have to save him,” he said in wonder.
“Save who, Wes?” Gunn pulled on his trousers.
“Connor.” He was surprised it wasn’t obvious. “We have to save him from Holtz – from me – from what I did. We have to keep Cordelia here and when Connor comes back we have to be ready for Holtz and what he’s prepared to do even to someone who loves him just to stop Angel from getting his son back.”
“Connor comes back?” Angel gazed at him as if he hardly dared to believe it. “You saw that? You’re sure.”
“Yes.” Wesley looked back at him, still haunted by it all, what Connor had become, all his anger and misery and conflict; all the deceptions practised upon him; the mangling of his mind. “Otherwise the price you have to pay to save him is so high it costs us everything, Angel.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Angel insisted. “Not even for Connor. Not sacrifice all of the rest of you.”
“Wolfram & Hart didn’t tell you what the price would be,” Wesley said gently. “Only that they had a means to save him. Lilah…” At once he was hit by a kaleidoscope of memories and emotions; so much grief for a woman who was still alive and with whom, in this reality, he had never shared as much as a kiss. “I think she was trying to help. She vanished after… I couldn’t save her.”
“Lilah?” Cordelia echoed in disbelief as she pulled her t-shirt over her head. “Save her from what? And why the hell would you want to?”
“Because we were… She and I, we were meant to… I couldn’t save her. I thought I had but – it was my idea to take away Angel’s soul. I was trying to destroy the Beast and…”
“I killed her.” Angel looked bleak.
“No.” Wesley couldn’t stop his gaze going to Cordelia, needing to check that she really was the woman he loved, not that being who had ruined all their lives.
“I killed her?” Cordelia demanded in disbelief, breaking off from buttoning up her skirt.
“Cordy would never…!” Fred broke off. “It wasn’t for her shoes, was it?”
“It wasn’t Cordelia. It was Jasmine. She just used Cordelia as a disguise.”
“It’s complicated,” Lorne explained. “Beyond complicated, in fact. If I hadn’t read it for myself I’d said it was just delirium, plain and simple, but it’s real. But avertable, like Wesley says. We can still pick a No Entry sign on all those dead ends and take another path.”
“But not now.” Giles sounded as if he had been holding onto his patience for quite some time. “Right now we have an imminent end of the world situation to deal with, remember?”
“You’re saying Connor’s still alive?” Angel asked Wesley.
He nodded. “Yes, Angel. And he comes back. Or he did. I think when Tara changed the timeline everything else shifted a little. But I think he’ll still arrive, sooner or later.”
“So, having a world for him to arrive in would probably be a good idea then?” Buffy observed. “Presuming Angel only has the one mystical miracle kid and would probably quite like to be around to see this one pull a prodigal?”
“Thank you,” Giles said warmly to Buffy. “I’m glad there is one other person in the room capable of sticking to the point.”
Willow said faintly, “I’m still stuck back at thinking about Tara dying.”
Xander said, “And I’m the only person wondering if Wesley saw the lottery numbers or who won the World Series, presumably?”
“That’s just you again,” Dawn assured him.
“I knew it.”
“If anyone’s interested there are about twenty five Hukkarish outside now.” Faith turned to Lorne. “Just how much mojo is this sanctorum spell packing? Are we talking heavy duty or only everyday use?”
“I’d say nine out of ten mystical karaoke bar owners who expressed a preference would choose it as their anti-violence spell of choice but I wouldn’t necessarily like to put it up against say a herd of stampeding Loresh demons when Jupiter’s in the ascendant.”
Faith blinked. “Was there an answer in there somewhere?”
“It’s moderate to heavy wear, but I don’t think it’s going to hold forever.”
Faith returned Lorne’s gaze and then nodded quietly. “You know what I did to Wesley.”
He grimaced. “I always did. Unfortunate side effect of hearing him sing ‘We are the Champions’ – very badly, I might add. You did quite the number on him.”
“Yes, I did,” she answered him unflinchingly, but her hand curled into a fist.
Lorne turned to look at Angel. “Not quite as much of a number as you did though when you acted as if it mattered more to you to give comfort to the person who’d tortured him than to see if he was okay.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Angel protested at once. “Faith was salvageable. Wesley knew why I did what he did. He helped me. He agreed with me.”
“Yes, he did, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make him feel like he’d been sliced open with a whole lot more broken glass when you appeared not to give a rat’s ass about what had been done to him.”
“This is ancient history,” Buffy put in. “It has nothing to do with the imminent end of the world situation.”
“It has to do with Angel’s person to person skills leaving a lot to be desired. I mean I’ve heard him sing, I’ve read him, I know Angel loves Wesley as much as he has ever loved any other living thing; I even know that when he’s standing at the edge of the world with the apocalypse he created lapping around his ankles, knowing his time left not being dust can now be measured in seconds that Wesley is the person he’s thinking of, but he doesn’t exactly communicate that well.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
As Wesley said it, Lorne turned to him in exasperation. “Crumpet…”
Wesley held up a hand. “I know now. I saw everything, Lorne. I know Angel ran into a burning building to save me. I know he kept a vigil by my bedside. I know he’s the one who stopped the zombie policemen. I know he came to the hospital after I was shot and Cordelia wouldn’t let me see him. I know, when he was under the sea hallucinating through hunger that he didn’t imagine me dead or tortured, he thought of me happy and one of the family. I know everything he ever did and ever would have done to me and because of me. He was right to save Faith. He did the right thing. He saved a champion and got her back on the right track. There aren’t that many around that we can afford to lose any of those.”
Faith said hoarsely: “Did you see what I did?”
“Yes.” Wesley gazed at her and it was odd not to feel that twist inside any more when he looked at her, that fear suppressed and anger controlled. His mind was full of images of her telling Angelus to let him go, her expression when he tried to make her angry, watching her lying on that bed in the Hyperion knowing she was going to die and it was his fault and her choice and he was sorrier than he could ever admit aloud; wondering what it would have been like to really be her Watcher; wondering how much he was to blame for the fact she was now dying. “You did a lot of good, Faith. You saved Angel and you helped me and you risked your life for both of us and then you went to Sunnydale and did a lot of good there too.”
“If so much good was done after I died, does that mean that by not dying I may have…?”
Willow wouldn’t let her finish, planting a kiss on Tara’s mouth to silence her. “It would never have been a good thing.”
“Never,” Dawn said passionately.
“It wasn’t,” Wesley assured her. “It was a terrible thing that had terrible consequences, and Willow never got over it. And the world you changed was one in which we all died.” He looked from Cordelia to Fred to Gunn to Angel. “All of us except for Lorne, and he was dead inside.”
Angel walked to the door and then walked back. “Because of me?”
“No,” Wesley insisted. “Because of what I did, because I took Connor…”
Angel shook his head. “Wes, that blood they were feeding me. I wasn’t in my right mind. You remember what I was like when Darla… when you had to pull me off that guy…? I was angry all the time and so hungry. If I’d been in my right mind I would never have reacted like that.”
Quietly Wesley quoted: “‘Love can be a terrible thing’.”
Tara squeezed his hand. “Wesley, it’s everything. You can’t live without love.”
“Yes, you can.” He looked up at her. “I did it for years. No one died.”
Cordelia grabbed him so fast and so hard that he flinched; then he was staring at her open mouthed and wide eyed as she shook him roughly by the shoulders while gazing grimly into his eyes. “Don’t ever say that. Don’t you ever pretend that we weren’t the best thing that ever happened to you, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. And don’t you even think about running out on us again.”
“I wasn’t…” he gasped feebly.
She shook him again until the blood rushed in his ears and Gunn grabbed her hand. “Cordy – stop it, you’re going to make him throw up.”
“Tell him I’m right or I’ll hurt both of you.”
Gunn took one look at Cordelia’s face and said hastily to Wesley: “She’s right. No idea what she’s talking about but, trust me, she couldn’t be righter.”
“Cordelia!” Angel said sharply.
Cordelia looked at him angrily over his shoulder. “What?”
“Stop it.”
Cordelia gazed into Wesley’s eyes. “Don’t ever shut us out again. Do you hear me? Don’t run out on us. Don’t kidnap babies without running it past me first. In fact don’t do anything without running it past me first. Understood?” She let him go and he gulped some air.
Fred murmured to Gunn: “It was in the other world that Cordelia went all evil, right?”
“Other realities mean nothing,” Cordelia assured her, gaze still fixed on Wesley. “Or else Willow would be gay, I’d be a great actress, Angel would be a loony-tune, and Wesley would be shacked up with your boyfriend. Oh, wait…” She glanced across at Willow and then Angel. “And I am a great actress.”
Fred looked between Gunn and Wesley in confusion and Gunn said hastily: “I slept on the couch!” As she kept looking at him he added: “Okay, except for that one time. And nothing happened, I swear.”
“Charles…” Wesley wrenched his gaze away from Cordelia to glare at him. “Would you like to shut up some time soon?”
Angel looked between them sternly. “What one time?”
“Wesley threw up on the couch,” Gunn insisted. “I was too drunk to drive. There was no other option.”
“You promised you’d never tell anyone!” Wesley wailed.
Gunn shrugged helplessly. “Cordelia made me! She used her evil demon powers!”
Angel said furiously: “You took advantage of Wesley when he was drunk?”
“No! We shared a bed because there was nowhere else to sleep, that’s all! And what the hell is it to you anyway? You tried to smother him with a pillow - and it isn’t me people are always assuming Wesley’s putting out for anyway!”
Faith said quietly: “Does anyone except me even care that we’re surrounded by slavering demonic beasts?”
Xander shushed her with a wave of his hand, still watching Angel in fascination. “Hush. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Angel demanded.
“You know what it means. Half our clients think you and Wes are an item.”
“That’s funny because all the clients I’ve dealt with assumed you and Wes were an item. Which if you’re in the habit of sleeping in his bed probably isn’t that much of a shock.”
“Oh and like I don’t know where he was sleeping before you got him blown up!”
“I did not ‘get him blown up’. I saved him!”
Wesley said hastily to Fred: “I’ve never slept with Gunn, I swear. Or Angel.”
She patted his arm gently and whispered: “No one would think anything bad of you if you did, you know. Well – except if it was Charles, because then I’d have to kill you.”
“We didn’t,” Wesley assured her quickly. “And even if we had done it would have been before we met you. And when we were drunk. Definitely very drunk. If we had – which we didn’t.”
Anya turned to Xander. “Did you or did you not have sex with Spike while he was staying in your unpleasant basement?”
“I’m taking the fifth,” Xander told her levelly. “I will also be taking a large drink if you ever ask me that again.”
Giles said quietly to Buffy: “Just so you know, if anyone even thinks about asking me about Ethan there will be bloodshed.”
“Is this a side-effect of the amulet?” Buffy demanded. “Or did all the male IQs just drop sharply? Am I the only one who heard Faith mentioning slavering Hukkarish?”
“Sure we heard it, Buff,” Xander explained. “But frankly when Angel and Gunn are having a bitch-fight over Wesley, who’s listening?”
Dawn said quietly: “I think I’ve found it.”
It took a moment for the hubbub of voices to die down and for everyone to realize what she’d said. Giles turned to her. “What?”
Dawn held up the book. “I think I’ve found the place where the monks hid the cauldron that we need to destroy the amulet.”
The scramble to look at the book she was holding was almost comical, although Angel firmly put a hand on Wesley’s shoulder when he attempted to get up.
Dawn grabbed the scroll and the book and sank down on her knees next to Wesley, holding out the scroll so he could see the illustration of all the demons and then raising the book she had been reading to show him the same illustration.
Wesley’s face broke into a wide smile. “Dawn, you’ve found it. It’s the same place.” Seeing her expression, he added a little more uncertainly: “Where is it?”
“Well…it’s conveniently close,” she offered.
Giles crouched down next to his fellow Watcher. “It turns out that the Cauldron of Uriel is hidden in the Hellmouth, Wesley. The one under the High School. The one that, according to these very clear directions, should absolutely never be opened as it will unleash from its depths all manner of terrible beasts.”
Wesley groaned and closed his eyes as Dawn patted him gently on the shoulder and said: “Because it turns out that demon monks – sometimes really suck.”
***
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I also love the Little Wes thing, though, so just know that I eagerly await the next part of whichever you feel like working on.
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Basically commenting just to reiterate the "yay!" and the "omg, can't wait for the next part".