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Oct. 21st, 2005 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgrey Lost and Found, Part Two
Angel walked away and left Gunn feeling sick inside and wondering why he was now having to carry the guilt for something he didn’t have any memory of doing and as far as he was concerned hadn’t done. Then he realized it wasn’t that which was making him feel guilty; it was what he had done, which was leave Wesley alone when he evidently needed them all the most; an isolation which had obviously led to…this. Whatever this was.
Thinking of the bruises all over Wesley’s body, the ribs that Groo had thought might be broken, Gunn turned to Fred. “Those bandages could be a good idea.”
She nodded. “I’ll get them.”
He caught her hand. “Fine, but you shouldn’t be the one to… Cordy and me can do it. Wes wouldn’t want you to… He wouldn’t want you seeing...”
She looked at him in dismay for a moment and then stepped back. “I’ll get them.”
Cordelia looked back at the man on the bed. “Do you understand any of this?”
“Angel thinks Wesley is a big flashing warning light. Wesley thinks whatever happened where he was isn’t going to happen here. Angel isn’t so sure.” Gunn swallowed. “I don’t want to think about it.” He really didn’t. He was like the guy with the Midwich Cuckoos right now and all he wanted to be seeing was a blank wall. Not that ‘G’; definitely not that ‘G’. It was what he’d do; in some part of his mind, he knew it; could glimpse it anyway, how the darkness would take him. Remind Wes he was the alpha male and Wes was his property; the way things had been before. Come on, English, you know you’re my man... Who’s your ruler, baby? Say it. Say my name. That was what happened when you became a vampire, all the good impulses in you got twisted into bad ones, so that protective became possessive, people changed from what you loved to what you owned; and the darkness already in you bubbled to the surface, scum rising to the top. Maybe what that other Gunn was from that other world or time was in him somewhere; buried deep. No, he wasn’t going to do this; wasn’t going to feel guilty about something someone had done who wasn’t Charles Gunn.
“If it leads to Fred and I being dead and you and Angel being soulless vampire killers, I think maybe we should think about it,” she countered.
“Angel said we… what we did to Wesley… I would never do that. I could never do that to anyone.” Gunn wondered if this was just a bad dream he could wake up from; still remembering the shocked accusation in Angel’s eyes for those first seconds when he had really believed that Gunn would do that.
Cordelia sat on the corner of the bed and gently stroked Wesley’s hair. Gunn had a sudden flashback to her being in the hospital after he’d been shot by a zombie policeman. The expression in her eyes was just the same now as then.
“Wesley Wyndam-Pryce,” she told him softly. “You really are an idiot.”
“I think that’s a given,” Gunn shrugged.
“Why didn’t he tell anyone?” She looked across at Gunn as if he could somehow answer what they had all been trying to answer without success.
“He was trying to protect us.” Fred sounded close to tears. Gunn looked around to see her in the doorway with the first aid kit in her hand. “Trying to protect Connor, trying to protect Angel, trying to protect the rest of us. So busy trying to keep us all from danger that he walked straight into it and took Connor with him.”
“No, why didn’t he tell us he was going to try to change time?” Cordelia demanded. “Hello? Demon powers here. Lorne – more demon powers. Angel – kind of invested in wanting to get his son back. Wouldn’t you think a phone call saying ‘Hi, sorry I totally screwed up all our lives and by the way I’m trying to fix it with some incredibly dangerous dark magic mojo’ might have been a good idea?”
Gunn edged a step closer to the bed. “Look, Cordy, if you think Angel’s dangerous to Wesley I’m cool with taking him to the hospital. I don’t give a damn what Angel says. He can’t keep Wes here against all our wills. Groo would help me. We could manage him between us. Get Wesley some proper medical attention.”
Cordy stroked Wesley’s hair again, gently, easing it back from the bruise on his forehead, eyes distressed as she looked up at Gunn. “And what if Angel’s right? What if he checked himself out and walked under a bus?”
Sighing, Gunn took the first aid kit from Fred and opened it. “Then I guess we try it Angel’s way, but if he…”
“We won’t let Angel hurt him.” Cordelia was still stroking his hair. “Whatever Wesley did. However badly he hurt us all, he’s paid for it. No one else gets to touch him while I’m here.”
Gunn felt reassured, not by demon powers Cordy, or landline to the Powers That Be Cordy, but by the Cordy he remembered meeting all those months ago, the one with her dumb little ladysmith axe, the one who wouldn’t give up whatever you told her. She was about as pissed with Wesley as it was possible for a human being to be, but that didn’t mean she didn’t still love him, and if she said she wasn’t going to let anyone hurt him, then that was about the best protection Wesley was going to get that didn’t involve a foxhole and a tank, and even then he wasn’t sure that the Chase protection method wouldn’t be better.
Gunn took out the iodine, poured some onto a pad of lint and handed it to Cordelia, then they were gently peeling back the duvet and both trying not to flinch at what had been done to their friend…
***
Six Days Earlier
Wesley took a deep breath and went through it again. Logically, how could he make things worse than they already were? The time surrounding his translation of the prophecy had already taken on the aspect of a nightmare. From that first terrible night of fitful dozing at his desk, to visiting the Loa, to trying to reason with Holtz, to deciding that the prophecy had to be a lie because Angel would never hurt this child, to being sledgehammered by those portents of earthquake, fire, and blood, to bludgeoning Lorne, taking Connor, looking into Angel’s trusting face and lying to him, to making that last fatal misstep that had led to him lying on the ground with the blood oozing from his slashed throat and Connor being carried into a hell dimension and inevitable death, what could he have done that would have had a more wretched result for everyone concerned? Angel had lost the baby he loved so much. Connor had lost his life anyway. And he had ended up an outcast for no reason, having achieved nothing except to earn the undying enmity of people who had loved and trusted him.
He looked at the spell again. Yes, it was dark magic; darkest of dark magic. Entirely demonic and written in a demonic tongue which he had been wrestling with for days. Time or place? Every source he looked at slurred the definition. Was this a spell that took one back to a time before a particular event or to a place where it had not yet occurred? Such a small difference that he wondered it if mattered. Were they not even one and the same? Had it not been for his encounter with that vampire Willow from a different dimension he would have thought nothing of it. But that had come about due to a wish. A wish that was in effect a spell.
However much he told himself he could not make matters worse than he already had, he needed to accept that there was an outside possibility that this time or place, that the choice he made, could have serious repercussions for people other than himself. Cordelia had almost destroyed Sunnydale with her careless wish, but she had been a teenage girl, slighted in love. He had no such excuse.
Wesley turned back to the small box for which he had paid so much money. Poisonous to one in every fifty humans, it said in every source he’d read. And if poisonous the death would be agonizing and slow. However, the geshurnik nut of the lower regions did have the property of reversing a spell; once its shell was penetrated, the inner core of the nut was effectively an antidote to magic. If a human swallowed it, the nut would lodge in the gut and within a few days the acids of the stomach would eat through to the core and release the antidote. Or the poison. Depending on whether or not one turned out to be the unlucky one in fifty. However, if he swallowed the nut, in five or six days the spell would be reversed. He should be pulled back to this time, and presumably place – the spell was not too clear about that – and the effects of the spell would be undone. He could effectively make a reconnaissance mission of his own spell, try it out, see how making that other choice had worked out for everyone, and then – if his suspicions were confirmed and this other route was better – he could cast the spell a second time, without swallowing the geshurnik antidote and let this second way take its course. Within a fortnight then, it might be possible to undo what he had done permanently, to still be one of the family in the Hyperion and for Angel to still have the baby son he loved. Certainly there was a risk but Wesley was in no doubt that he no right not to take the risk, given how completely he had ballsed everything up before.
He had killed the baby he was trying to protect. That was the truth of the matter. All that effort and agonizing to save something so fragile and so precious, and then he had been tricked like a rank amateur and the baby snatched from him, dragged into Quortoth, the darkest of the dark worlds. Everything ruined because of his stupidity and incompetence in believing a false prophecy; all those lives wrecked, including his own.
He owed Angel the child that he had stolen from him. He had arrogantly assumed that he knew best, that he could keep Connor safe when no one else could, and he had been wrong. The baby was better off taking his chances with Angel and the outside possibility that he might revert to Angelus – which, as the prophecy was false anyway, was seeming less and less likely.
Wesley snatched another breath. He was scared, he had to admit it. This was exactly the kind of spell that he had spent his whole life being told no sane man would dabble in. When one was tossing the talons of a sea eagle into the cauldron, not to mention the blood of a phoenix and the feathers of a creature never found in this world, adding the scales of rare snakes and the eyes of a demon that had presumably not wanted to give them up without a fight; when even the dark shamans from whom one obtained the spell and its ingredients made protective passes around themselves to keep you and your spell separate from them, well, there were probably a few clues right there that this wasn’t the best idea you’d ever had. Unfortunately when the last idea you’d had had been as spectacularly ill conceived as his plan to steal Connor and ‘save’ him, even a plan as bad as this one became a step up.
Breathing deeply, Wesley picked up the geshurnik and tossed it into his mouth. It wasn’t easy to swallow and he had to wash it down with the tumbler of whisky he’d poured earlier. He noticed that his fingers trembled on the glass he downed it. Then he prepared his cauldron and began to toss in the ingredients, reciting his Ashkalavan spell as he did so. The mist became purple and then green, he said the word that was either time or place, slashed his arm to let the blood flow, there was a flash of white light, and then everything went dark, and then it was dawn and he didn’t know if he’d passed out or time had just sped a little.
With his heart in his mouth, he picked up his coat, pulled it on with fingers that still trembled, and then walked outside and began to make his way to the Hyperion.
A few things were possibly subtly different, but he couldn’t remember which car had been parked where three weeks before when he had made his decision; or what colour was the front door of the apartment building across the way. There were no great changes, nothing to reassure him that something had actually happened. He drove through traffic that looked the same as any other early morning traffic. Perhaps he was driving not to a hotel where the kidnap had not yet taken place but to one where he would be killed as soon as he put his head through the door. Thinking of his constant feeling of guilt and crushing failure, all that betrayal and torment for no reason, to no end except to kill the innocent he had been trying to protect, he wondered if he even cared. Either he would find himself in a world where he had not yet sinned or where he would be punished for his sin; he almost didn’t care which it turned out to be.
He parked outside the Hyperion, snatched another deep breath as if he thought it would be his last, and then opened the front doors. There was no Cordelia behind the front desk. That was possibly a hopeful sign as he had heard she was back from her trip by now so perhaps he was arriving at a time while she was still absent. Or perhaps he was just desperate to believe that his mistake was fixable; that there was still something that could be done that didn’t involve taking a handful of pills and a bottle of whisky and going to sleep forever.
The sound of the baby crying made his heart turn over with joy. It was a wail of misery reverberating throughout the entire hotel, an infant sounding lost, lonely, and afraid, but for him it was the most wonderful sound in the world. Connor was alive. He had undone what he’d done. The spell had worked.
“Wes…?”
He turned to see Angel standing by the front desk drinking a beaker of blood. At once he remembered the vampire screaming hatred at him, pressing the pillow over his mouth, and his heartbeat increased. But he managed to go forward as if nothing was different.
“Angel. How are you?”
Right now the vampire would either be wondering why on earth he was so tense this morning or thinking that he did at least have courage in coming here, to a place where he had been told he would return on pain of death.
“Pretty good. Yourself?” No threat. No violence. Just an expression of curiosity on Angel’s face.
“Fine.” Wesley realized he hadn’t checked to see if the scar was still there. He put a hand up to his throat and felt the contours of it. Did that mean the spell hadn’t worked or he was simply a traveller in this time line? Of course, he was a traveller, otherwise he would know nothing of the past events and would make the same mistake forever.
“Didn’t expect to see you in today.” Angel put down his beaker of blood and began to walk towards him.
Wesley’s heart began to pound faster, still not sure if this was the Angel who had tried to kill him on their last meeting or the one who was his friend; the one who trusted him so much he’d let him take his baby son home with him.
“Well, you know… research…” Wesley kept searching Angel’s face for clues, but the man was curiously impassive; unreadable. As he opened his mouth to say something else, the crying abruptly stopped. Too abruptly. He looked up the stairs anxiously. “Do you think he’s okay…?”
Angel put his head on one side, still advancing, still examining Wesley with an odd light in his eyes. “Gunn…?”
“Connor.” Wesley turned and found that Angel was suddenly very close to him indeed. He could hear the creak of his leather coat, see the strange light in the brown eyes gazing intently into his.
Angel’s expression changed; thoughtful, fascinated, almost amused. “Connor?”
Wesley faltered. “Isn’t that…? The baby crying…?”
Angel shook his head. “No, Wesley.”
I’m dead, Wesley thought with an odd calm to his acceptance. I’m alone in the hotel with the vampire whose child I killed; the vampire who warned me what he would do to me if he ever saw me again.
“Is that…?”
Wesley turned around and saw Gunn coming down the stairs, wiping his mouth. His eyes widened as he saw Wesley. “It is. Well, English, how the hell are you?”
“I’m…fine.” Wesley looked between Angel and Gunn and wondered why they were smiling. Gunn had pulled Angel off him in the hospital; had clearly only let Angel into his room because he’d assumed that Angel would forgive him. And certainly he had turned his back on Wesley very emphatically since then but Wesley had not thought he would be a party to any plan of Angel’s to murder him. “Yourself…?”
“Never better,” Gunn assured him, walking over to where Wesley was standing; no, not walking, swaggering; a roll to his step that Wesley had never seen before; athletic and poised at the same time; like he was high on life and could tango with it until dusk.
Angel put his head on one side and it reminded Wesley uncomfortably of some bird of prey sighting something furry a long way beneath it. “You’re not him, are you, Wes?”
“Not…who…?” Wesley had no idea what he was talking about; just a feeling that he should be backing for the doors and that he would never reach them. Gunn was his best chance here. If Angel sprang, started choking the life out of him, Gunn was his only hope of not dying.
Angel smiled, and it went nowhere near his eyes. “The sweet trusting little Wesley I know and love.”
“One way to find out,” said Gunn and then grabbed Wesley by the arms and yanked him back hard against his body.
As Wesley struggled in confusion, Gunn said, “Hush, Wes. No reason to be scared. Well, okay maybe a few reasons…”
“What are you doing?” Wesley demanded.
“Just…enjoying your company.”
Angel had plucked the phone from the front desk and something about the way he moved was ringing all kinds of warning bells. Angel didn’t move with that careless grace; not usually, tapdancing his way around the place, practically purring with the pleasure of his own speed and fitness; like he was revelling in being a…vampire. Angel stabbed a button on the phone to speed-dial someone and then smiled at Wesley. “Be with you in a minute, Wes.”
As Wesley tried to pull loose from Gunn’s grip he found he couldn’t shift the man’s fingers. There were digging tightly into his arms, while Gunn, bizarrely had his mouth next to Wesley’s ear. Wesley jolted with shock as the man licked his earlobe, and Gunn pulled him back tighter against him. With a sense of complete disbelief, Wesley felt something hard rubbed leisurely against his ass.
“Giles…!” Angel spoke as if the Watcher was his favourite person on earth. “How are you, old boy? Still Watching that Slayer of yours? And she pays for Watching, doesn’t she? And I mean from all angles… Tsk, tsk, no need for that kind of language. One quick question and then I’m out of your hair. The Watcher you stole from me – my favourite pet – is he still with you? Oh, don’t worry. I won’t try coming after him. I know you’ve got him locked up where the big bad boogie man can’t make him squeal any more. Bet you’re making sure the bed bugs don’t bite, too. Squirms really well, doesn’t he? And tight…oh boy, gotta love a virgin with a schoolgirl crush – I’ve had two of them so far and I can’t decide if Buffy or Wesley was the most delicious…” Angel held the phone away from his ear and shrugged at Gunn. “He hung up. How rude.”
Not time then, Wesley thought dully. The spell had taken him to a place where events had happened differently; where he had presumably not stolen Connor but something else had taken place which had led to… Angel losing his soul, and Gunn… Wesley looked up at the man who held him and realized there was nothing in those brown eyes of the man he knew, the friend he had loved; these were the coldest eyes he’d ever seen.
“Looks like we’ve got a replacement for the toy Giles took away from us.” Gunn smiled a smile as cold as heartbreak.
“Well, be fair, Gunn, we did break that particular toy, and now all the kings horses and all the kings men can’t put poor ickle Wesley together again. Too busy screaming and rocking and trying to get the nasty bad pictures of the nasty bad vampires out of his pure clean dumb little mind.” Angel danced back across the room, as if he were hearing music in his head or playing a game of invisible hopscotch. “Poor Wes. He always had a problem with reality.” Angel peered at Wesley closely. “What about you, Wesley Number Two? You look like a Watcher who knows all about reality.” Angel put his hand between Wesley’s legs and squeezed.
Bringing up his knee hard and fast was instinctive, as was slamming his head back with everything he had; trying to break Gunn’s nose and Angel’s balls simultaneously. But his head made contact with nothing and although Angel crumpled and staggered for a moment, he straightened up within seconds. Gunn yanked Wesley’s head back hard by the hair, almost breaking his neck. “Naughty, naughty, Wes. You’re going to have to be punished for that later.”
Angel rubbed his groin and grimaced. “Oh boy, yes. Daddy’s going to have to put you over his knee and spank you really hard for that.” He came in fast, pressing his body against Wesley’s, forcing Wesley’s jeans-covered ass back against Gunn’s cock, and then cupped Wesley through his jeans and groped him.
“Get off me,” Wesley snapped.
“Sorry, Wes, no can do,” said Angel with mock regret. “On account of us needing to take you downstairs, strip you naked, and make you scream for mercy.”
Cold with horror, Wesley could not restrain a shudder. “What happened to Connor?”
“Connor?” Angel licked a finger with relish. “He tasted just like chicken.”
As they dragged him towards the basement stairs, Wesley found his mind was jamming like a stuck record, repeating over and over again that perhaps after all there was something worse than his reality, after all.
***
Outside in the corridor, Angel noticed the plastic bag Groo was still holding so awkwardly and nodded at it. “Was that with Wesley?”
“Yes. I have not looked inside it.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Angel took it from him; not too bothered about showing good manners right now. Wesley being back in the hotel was making him feel as if ants were walking over his skin. He had trusted him completely, believed in their friendship absolutely. And Wesley had looked him right in the eye and told him he was taking Connor home for the night while all the time he was planning to give him to Holtz. Actually, no, Gunn and Fred had told him that wasn’t what had happened. Wesley had been planning to take Connor away to a place where Angel could never find him; to steal his son and Angel’s time with his son; all because of a stupid prophecy that was a lie anyway. Holtz had just set up an ambush and Wesley had been dumb enough to stroll straight into it. What really bothered him the most was that perhaps for the first time in his life he had really tried to be there for Wesley. He’d seen how rough he looked, made a point of telling him he appreciated all the work he was putting in, told him he was a good friend…
It choked him up too much to think about it. That was when the anger just built to a point where it could only be alleviated by going up there and holding that pillow over Wesley’s face again, and this time keeping it there until the job was done.
With a huge effort, Angel made himself go downstairs instead. He looked in the bag and saw the padded envelope, not sealed, but with Giles’ name and address scrawled across it in what it gave him a jolt to recognize was his own handwriting. A second jolt to realize it was written in blood. He sniffed it. Wesley’s blood. He looked inside the envelope and there was a videocassette. Stuffing tape back into envelope and envelope back into bag, he said briefly to Fred, “I’m going out.”
She said, “I called Lorne. He was meeting with a client but I thought he should come back so he’s coming back.”
He was feeling in a mood where he didn’t want anyone doing anything without triple checking it with him but he bit it down, recognising he was being unreasonable, and just nodded. “Good.”
“He’ll be here soon.” Fred sounded wistful and Angel noted without a pang the way Lorne had evidently become the guy the others looked to for comfort and commonsense now that Wesley was an outcast and Angel was… He wondered what they called it in their heads: ‘grieving’ in Fred’s case, he suspected; ‘batshit’ possibly in Gunn’s.
“Good.” He opened the door to the basement, remembered in time that he couldn’t actually go out and do this himself, and sighed. “I’ll wait until he gets here. I need him to do something for me. Tell him I’ll be downstairs.”
Lorne arrived in a flutter of agitation and raw silk; too flustered to even tie his cravat properly, hurrying down to the basement in a way that seriously risked scuffing his shoes. “Angelcakes, is it true…? Is Wesley…?”
“Upstairs. Asleep. Or unconscious. Hard to tell which.”
“Fredikins said he looked really bad. Does he need a doctor?”
“I don’t know. Gunn and Cordelia are seeing to it. I need you to do something for me.”
Lorne was already reaching for his cellphone. “Get him a mystic to help with the healing process? I know just the one and he owes me for…”
“No.” Angel took out his wallet and handed the contents to Lorne. “I need one of those little TV sets with a VCR. Colour if possible.”
“They’re all colour now, cupcake. And can I ask why?”
Angel regarded him levelly. “You can ask.”
It took Lorne a moment to get it and then he nodded. “Oh, I see. We’re in brood mode. Won’t that be a nice change for everyone.”
“He stole my son.”
Lorne took a step back at the quiet savagery of Angel’s words. “And bludgeoned me unconscious, which, trust me, I’m not going to be forgetting any time soon. And no one is denying your right to be miserable, vindictive or generally unpleasant, sweetpea, I’m just saying there are other people in this hotel who are suffering as well; people who also loved Connor, people who also feel betrayed by what Wesley did. You could think about sparing a thought for…”
“I don’t have any thoughts to spare.” Angel turned away. “Now get me that TV set, will you? And some honey.”
Lorne frowned. “Sorry, I think one of us skipped a track…?”
“I need a jar of honey. The good stuff. Royal jelly. And some Canterbury Bells.”
“The kind you ring?”
“The kind that’s a herb. Ask in Meg’s Magicals. Also some Colt’s-foot, Maiden-hair, Hyssop and liquorice.”
“If you have a sore throat, pumpkin, I know a better remedy than that Culpepper’s Herbal schtick.”
“Good. Bring it with the things I just asked you to buy.”
Lorne backed up. “You don’t have a sore throat, do you?”
Angel just looked at him balefully. “And you’re still here because?”
“I’m not your paid lackey? Just your semi invited houseguest?” Seeing Angel’s expression, Lorne headed up the stairs. “And I’m lackeying…”
It was an hour before Lorne returned which was an hour later than Angel wanted him to be and an hour earlier than he had realistically expected him to be.
“…Take it down there to the dungeon. Don’t worry about the dragon. He only tries to burn you alive if he’s slept with you first…”
Well, that was another thing Lorne was going to get old waiting for Angel to feel guilty about. Setting Darla on fire was up there with smothering Wesley with a pillow on his ‘Don’t give a damn and I’d do it again’ list.
Angel watched the two delivery men struggle down the stairs with the TV and realized that Lorne had managed to stretch his wallet to something a lot more impressive than the 14” screen he’d been expecting. He watched them set it up on the stand and then edge out of the basement without saying a word to them. He felt as if he were having to hold himself away from humanity right now, as if he were dangerous and might bite. There was the evidence all over Wesley upstairs of what he was capable of; right now it felt like there was thin ice beneath his feet and any minute it might crack. He knew he ought to get the man out of the hotel before the urge to kill him became too overpowering to ignore or else not killing Wesley spilled out into him killing someone else.
“Ex-display,” Lorne indicated the monster screen proudly. “And it has a scratch and a burn on the casing. Doesn’t affect the picture, though, which is flat, wide, and crystal clear. Couldn’t let our fearless leader settle for some squintasonic. Especially if it’s a sign that you’re trying to rejoin the human race.”
“It isn’t.” Angel saw the hurt on the demon’s face and sighed. “Thanks, Lorne. It’s a great TV set. Much better than I could have got for the price.”
Lorne nodded. “Well, that was almost civil.” He held up a bag that clinked and rustled. “Want me to mix this up for you? I bought molasses too and a few other things that I guarantee will take the spike out of any throat germ.”
“More like…severe bruising. In the back of the throat.”
Lorne went a little greener. “It’s for Wesley.”
“Yes.”
Lorne sat down on the stairs. “He told you what they did to him?”
Angel snorted. “Wesley doesn’t tell me anything, remember? Wesley does his own thing because it’s for everyone’s good – even when it isn’t – and gets to screw up in his own uniquely damaging way. But I know Angelus, and going by the pretty artwork on Wesley’s ass it seems as if he trained up Vampire Gunn to be a real chip off the old block.”
Lorne sighed and got to his feet, looking sick and weary. “I’ll make up any potion you like if you think it’ll do any good. Try not to make it a waste of my time though, honeybuns.”
“What do you mean?” Angel frowned.
“I know you still want to kill him. It’s pretty much what your aura is wearing for a hat, right now. But, trust me, it won’t make you feel any better, and if you cross that line the people who follow you now won’t be able to follow you afterwards. Think about that when you’re thinking about the transitory pleasure it would give you to feel Wesley dying. Not to mention the fact that misguided, idiotic, arrogant and stupid as it was of him to do what he did, he didn’t do it for any other reason than to save your son’s life, and he got his throat cut and lost the friendship of everyone that mattered to him trying to do it.”
“I don’t need a lecture, Lorne,” Angel warned him.
“Glad to hear it. Just get that this is a deal breaker. No one is saying you don’t have a reason to be pissed with Wesley but champions don’t smother people in hospital beds who can’t call for help or have the strength to fight back, Angel. At least, they don’t get to do it twice and still call themselves champions.”
Then Lorne was gone and Angel was left unsure whether he wanted to put his fist through the TV to make a point about how much he did not appreciate being told what to do or just so he wouldn’t have to watch what was on this videocassette.
“Knock knock…”
Angel was still staring at the screen, even though the tape had finished and there was just the crackle of sound, the hiss of those white lines. He looked up with an effort to see Lorne standing at the top of his staircase.
“Can I come in?” Lorne asked.
Angel nodded. “Of course.”
“No, I don’t mean, will you let me, I mean is that tape over, finished, not paused so I’m going to see a part of it or still in any way running?”
“It’s finished.” Angel switched off the TV set, then realize that Lorne was still looking extra green. “You saw Wesley.”
“Yes. I also saw Cordelia and Gunn after they’d finished trying to patch up Wesley. Gunn’s trying to drink his way into amnesia, Cordy’s crying in her room. He needs a doctor, Angel. Some honey and lemon and a Band Aid are not going to fix this.”
“He doesn’t want a doctor seeing him like this.”
“Not really the point, Your Broodiness.”
“I know Angelus. If he wanted Wesley dead, he’d be dead, which means he wanted him alive, which means he was careful not to…do anything that meant he had to find someone else to play with. Wes isn’t going to die from what was done to him whereas he’d probably rather die than have a stranger examining him right now.”
“Well, not wanting to diss your soulless alter ego’s efficiency as a precision sadist, but Wesley’s looking way too Camille for comfort, and I care rather less about what Wesley wants right now than what’s going to stop him haemorrhaging to death from internal bleeding. He needs a doctor and he needed one ooh…about six days ago, which was probably around the time when the first of his ribs got cracked.”
Angel had a brief unwanted memory of how much a cracked rib hurt; of how much everything else hurt every time that rib was touched, of how a vampire always knew where the broken bones were, the extra painful places that could be pressed a little harder to make the victim writhe and scream.
“There’s someone I know who’ll come because he owes me and he owes me big. I’m not saying he’s a warm and fuzzy guy…”
“You mean a dark mystic?” Angel glared at him. “You want to bring a dark mystic into my hotel?”
“I want Wesley to stop coughing up blood and Cordelia and Gunn would really like that too. Dark mystics aren’t party people, I admit, but the one I know is good at what he does, and he can fix the worst of it.”
There was a pause as Angel saw it all, Wesley walking out of the hotel with Connor in his arms, telling Angel that it was just for one night, that the local hospital was so close…ironic really, if it had been another five minutes away they wouldn’t be having this conversation because Wesley would never have survived the ambulance journey; that was how close he had come to not having to be holding this conversation right now.
Lorne seemed to be reaching for the last of his patience. “You watched the tape?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know he didn’t spend the last six days playing Scrabble so will you please let me call a doctor?”
Angel shrugged, trying to make this concession seem a little bit less like him giving in, or as if he gave a damn. “Fine, send for the mystic. It’s no skin off my back.”
Lorne turned away and made the call in a language even Angel didn’t know, something sibilant and softly spoken. “He’s on his way.” He steeled himself to look at the television screen. “The tape…? Was it…?”
“I can see why Wesley didn’t want Giles to have to watch it. I expect they made a copy though so Giles will probably still get one. I gather he got a copy of all the others.”
“Other tapes?”
“The Fred tape. The Cordy tape. The first Wesley tape. They’re proud of their work. Like to share it. Angelus would have done the same in this dimension, if they’d had videotape in his day.”
Lorne gestured towards the TV set. “Does it change anything? I mean…?”
Angel faced him levelly. “Nothing’s changed. I need Wesley to tell me what it was that the other Wesley did differently from him. I need to make sure it doesn’t happen here. Wesley is going to have to break the habit of a lifetime and actually talk to me, using whole words.”
Lorne sighed. “Not exactly the habit of a lifetime, cupcake. It was the only thing he ever kept from you.”
“It was the one thing that really mattered.”
Lorne looked into his eyes. “Perhaps that was why he kept it from you.”
The dark mystic came almost as soon as Lorne called him. Angel stayed in his office, wrapped in a brood blanket of anger and resentment as the man was ushered past. The mystic was wearing purple robes and had odd sigils smeared onto his forehead, straight-backed and almost floating as he ignored Gunn, Cordelia and Fred – who were waiting in the lobby – to drift eerily up the stairs to the room in which Angel had so unceremoniously dumped his patient. Lorne went with him. Angel guessed Wesley had to be sleeping or unconscious because although he listened for it there was no protest as the incantation sounded; Angel did recognize some of those words – the mystical equivalent of a general anaesthetic. Then there was the unpleasant odour or magic in the air, sharp as coin warmed against skin, metallic as fresh blood. He wondered if that was how bones smelt when they knitted; a body groaning with the effort, as it was forced to heal itself too fast. Angel presumed the dark mystic knew that Wesley didn’t have enough left in him to heal everything; after six days of torture and starvation, Wesley had been free-falling without a parachute, nothing in reserve. There was no other time but now when Angel wouldn’t have been in that bedroom, demanding that Lorne’s creepy shaman did this right, telling him what would happen to him if he screwed up, because Wesley was fragile and human and precious to the people in this place…
Angel turned away from that thought, hating himself for the part of him that was relieved Lorne had sent for the mystic, feeling as if he were betraying Connor with even a spasm of concern for the man upstairs. The grief had become too much to bear recently. He wanted to help others, although it took more energy than he sometimes thought he still possessed to overcome the deadening exhaustion of his sorrow and do something else except grieve, but the anger, the anger he could sustain. The anger helped. It was the flashfire he needed sometimes, to get through the day. He could stoke it like any other blaze, feed off it for another hour that wasn’t just about grief.
Foul-smelling green smoke drifted out of the room and down into the lobby, a neutral place between the mystic upstairs and Angel in his office, Gunn waved the tendrils away absently, Fred coughing without ever taking her gaze off the stairs. Groo was gazing at Cordelia tenderly while she looked like the warrior she had become, staring steadfastly up those stairs as if steeling herself for another battle. Angel wondered if he was the battle she was thinking she was going to have to fight.
Then the mystic floated back out again, still without acknowledging any of them, and the hotel was left with the afterburn of his spellcasting, a smell like singed flesh in the air. Lorne came down the stairs slowly, taking the Sea Breeze Gunn wordlessly handed him and downing it in one gulp before he met their eyes. “Thank you.”
“Is he okay?” Cordelia pressed.
Lorne grimaced. “Well, dark magic has its own rules. He can only fix what Wesley has the resources to mend, and, frankly, Wesley – not so much with the resources right now. My dark mystic friend felt it was in the best interests of the patient’s long-term recovery, to deal with the serious stuff and leave the surface stuff to heal naturally. Unfortunately there’s a whole lot of surface stuff, and those resources he had to use to fix the broken bones and the internal bleeding mean that Wes is pretty much running on fumes right now. He’s going to need a lot of TLC and he’s not going to be getting out of that room any time soon. We’re talking weeks, cupcakes, maybe months.”
“But he’s going to be okay, right?” Gunn pressed. “He’s not going to be coughing up blood any more?”
“His ribs are mended. They’re still bruised, but they’ll heal by themselves, and nothing’s broken any more. Well, nothing physical. As to the inside of Wesley’s head – I don’t even want to take a guess.”
“What can we do?” Fred asked.
Lorne shrugged. “Whatever you want, sweet thing. Wes is going to be sleeping off that mystical surgery for an hour or so, and then I’m going to take him some medicine. There’s nothing the rest of you need to do except calm your shattered nerves with a nice alcoholic drink…”
Angel walked away and left Gunn feeling sick inside and wondering why he was now having to carry the guilt for something he didn’t have any memory of doing and as far as he was concerned hadn’t done. Then he realized it wasn’t that which was making him feel guilty; it was what he had done, which was leave Wesley alone when he evidently needed them all the most; an isolation which had obviously led to…this. Whatever this was.
Thinking of the bruises all over Wesley’s body, the ribs that Groo had thought might be broken, Gunn turned to Fred. “Those bandages could be a good idea.”
She nodded. “I’ll get them.”
He caught her hand. “Fine, but you shouldn’t be the one to… Cordy and me can do it. Wes wouldn’t want you to… He wouldn’t want you seeing...”
She looked at him in dismay for a moment and then stepped back. “I’ll get them.”
Cordelia looked back at the man on the bed. “Do you understand any of this?”
“Angel thinks Wesley is a big flashing warning light. Wesley thinks whatever happened where he was isn’t going to happen here. Angel isn’t so sure.” Gunn swallowed. “I don’t want to think about it.” He really didn’t. He was like the guy with the Midwich Cuckoos right now and all he wanted to be seeing was a blank wall. Not that ‘G’; definitely not that ‘G’. It was what he’d do; in some part of his mind, he knew it; could glimpse it anyway, how the darkness would take him. Remind Wes he was the alpha male and Wes was his property; the way things had been before. Come on, English, you know you’re my man... Who’s your ruler, baby? Say it. Say my name. That was what happened when you became a vampire, all the good impulses in you got twisted into bad ones, so that protective became possessive, people changed from what you loved to what you owned; and the darkness already in you bubbled to the surface, scum rising to the top. Maybe what that other Gunn was from that other world or time was in him somewhere; buried deep. No, he wasn’t going to do this; wasn’t going to feel guilty about something someone had done who wasn’t Charles Gunn.
“If it leads to Fred and I being dead and you and Angel being soulless vampire killers, I think maybe we should think about it,” she countered.
“Angel said we… what we did to Wesley… I would never do that. I could never do that to anyone.” Gunn wondered if this was just a bad dream he could wake up from; still remembering the shocked accusation in Angel’s eyes for those first seconds when he had really believed that Gunn would do that.
Cordelia sat on the corner of the bed and gently stroked Wesley’s hair. Gunn had a sudden flashback to her being in the hospital after he’d been shot by a zombie policeman. The expression in her eyes was just the same now as then.
“Wesley Wyndam-Pryce,” she told him softly. “You really are an idiot.”
“I think that’s a given,” Gunn shrugged.
“Why didn’t he tell anyone?” She looked across at Gunn as if he could somehow answer what they had all been trying to answer without success.
“He was trying to protect us.” Fred sounded close to tears. Gunn looked around to see her in the doorway with the first aid kit in her hand. “Trying to protect Connor, trying to protect Angel, trying to protect the rest of us. So busy trying to keep us all from danger that he walked straight into it and took Connor with him.”
“No, why didn’t he tell us he was going to try to change time?” Cordelia demanded. “Hello? Demon powers here. Lorne – more demon powers. Angel – kind of invested in wanting to get his son back. Wouldn’t you think a phone call saying ‘Hi, sorry I totally screwed up all our lives and by the way I’m trying to fix it with some incredibly dangerous dark magic mojo’ might have been a good idea?”
Gunn edged a step closer to the bed. “Look, Cordy, if you think Angel’s dangerous to Wesley I’m cool with taking him to the hospital. I don’t give a damn what Angel says. He can’t keep Wes here against all our wills. Groo would help me. We could manage him between us. Get Wesley some proper medical attention.”
Cordy stroked Wesley’s hair again, gently, easing it back from the bruise on his forehead, eyes distressed as she looked up at Gunn. “And what if Angel’s right? What if he checked himself out and walked under a bus?”
Sighing, Gunn took the first aid kit from Fred and opened it. “Then I guess we try it Angel’s way, but if he…”
“We won’t let Angel hurt him.” Cordelia was still stroking his hair. “Whatever Wesley did. However badly he hurt us all, he’s paid for it. No one else gets to touch him while I’m here.”
Gunn felt reassured, not by demon powers Cordy, or landline to the Powers That Be Cordy, but by the Cordy he remembered meeting all those months ago, the one with her dumb little ladysmith axe, the one who wouldn’t give up whatever you told her. She was about as pissed with Wesley as it was possible for a human being to be, but that didn’t mean she didn’t still love him, and if she said she wasn’t going to let anyone hurt him, then that was about the best protection Wesley was going to get that didn’t involve a foxhole and a tank, and even then he wasn’t sure that the Chase protection method wouldn’t be better.
Gunn took out the iodine, poured some onto a pad of lint and handed it to Cordelia, then they were gently peeling back the duvet and both trying not to flinch at what had been done to their friend…
***
Six Days Earlier
Wesley took a deep breath and went through it again. Logically, how could he make things worse than they already were? The time surrounding his translation of the prophecy had already taken on the aspect of a nightmare. From that first terrible night of fitful dozing at his desk, to visiting the Loa, to trying to reason with Holtz, to deciding that the prophecy had to be a lie because Angel would never hurt this child, to being sledgehammered by those portents of earthquake, fire, and blood, to bludgeoning Lorne, taking Connor, looking into Angel’s trusting face and lying to him, to making that last fatal misstep that had led to him lying on the ground with the blood oozing from his slashed throat and Connor being carried into a hell dimension and inevitable death, what could he have done that would have had a more wretched result for everyone concerned? Angel had lost the baby he loved so much. Connor had lost his life anyway. And he had ended up an outcast for no reason, having achieved nothing except to earn the undying enmity of people who had loved and trusted him.
He looked at the spell again. Yes, it was dark magic; darkest of dark magic. Entirely demonic and written in a demonic tongue which he had been wrestling with for days. Time or place? Every source he looked at slurred the definition. Was this a spell that took one back to a time before a particular event or to a place where it had not yet occurred? Such a small difference that he wondered it if mattered. Were they not even one and the same? Had it not been for his encounter with that vampire Willow from a different dimension he would have thought nothing of it. But that had come about due to a wish. A wish that was in effect a spell.
However much he told himself he could not make matters worse than he already had, he needed to accept that there was an outside possibility that this time or place, that the choice he made, could have serious repercussions for people other than himself. Cordelia had almost destroyed Sunnydale with her careless wish, but she had been a teenage girl, slighted in love. He had no such excuse.
Wesley turned back to the small box for which he had paid so much money. Poisonous to one in every fifty humans, it said in every source he’d read. And if poisonous the death would be agonizing and slow. However, the geshurnik nut of the lower regions did have the property of reversing a spell; once its shell was penetrated, the inner core of the nut was effectively an antidote to magic. If a human swallowed it, the nut would lodge in the gut and within a few days the acids of the stomach would eat through to the core and release the antidote. Or the poison. Depending on whether or not one turned out to be the unlucky one in fifty. However, if he swallowed the nut, in five or six days the spell would be reversed. He should be pulled back to this time, and presumably place – the spell was not too clear about that – and the effects of the spell would be undone. He could effectively make a reconnaissance mission of his own spell, try it out, see how making that other choice had worked out for everyone, and then – if his suspicions were confirmed and this other route was better – he could cast the spell a second time, without swallowing the geshurnik antidote and let this second way take its course. Within a fortnight then, it might be possible to undo what he had done permanently, to still be one of the family in the Hyperion and for Angel to still have the baby son he loved. Certainly there was a risk but Wesley was in no doubt that he no right not to take the risk, given how completely he had ballsed everything up before.
He had killed the baby he was trying to protect. That was the truth of the matter. All that effort and agonizing to save something so fragile and so precious, and then he had been tricked like a rank amateur and the baby snatched from him, dragged into Quortoth, the darkest of the dark worlds. Everything ruined because of his stupidity and incompetence in believing a false prophecy; all those lives wrecked, including his own.
He owed Angel the child that he had stolen from him. He had arrogantly assumed that he knew best, that he could keep Connor safe when no one else could, and he had been wrong. The baby was better off taking his chances with Angel and the outside possibility that he might revert to Angelus – which, as the prophecy was false anyway, was seeming less and less likely.
Wesley snatched another breath. He was scared, he had to admit it. This was exactly the kind of spell that he had spent his whole life being told no sane man would dabble in. When one was tossing the talons of a sea eagle into the cauldron, not to mention the blood of a phoenix and the feathers of a creature never found in this world, adding the scales of rare snakes and the eyes of a demon that had presumably not wanted to give them up without a fight; when even the dark shamans from whom one obtained the spell and its ingredients made protective passes around themselves to keep you and your spell separate from them, well, there were probably a few clues right there that this wasn’t the best idea you’d ever had. Unfortunately when the last idea you’d had had been as spectacularly ill conceived as his plan to steal Connor and ‘save’ him, even a plan as bad as this one became a step up.
Breathing deeply, Wesley picked up the geshurnik and tossed it into his mouth. It wasn’t easy to swallow and he had to wash it down with the tumbler of whisky he’d poured earlier. He noticed that his fingers trembled on the glass he downed it. Then he prepared his cauldron and began to toss in the ingredients, reciting his Ashkalavan spell as he did so. The mist became purple and then green, he said the word that was either time or place, slashed his arm to let the blood flow, there was a flash of white light, and then everything went dark, and then it was dawn and he didn’t know if he’d passed out or time had just sped a little.
With his heart in his mouth, he picked up his coat, pulled it on with fingers that still trembled, and then walked outside and began to make his way to the Hyperion.
A few things were possibly subtly different, but he couldn’t remember which car had been parked where three weeks before when he had made his decision; or what colour was the front door of the apartment building across the way. There were no great changes, nothing to reassure him that something had actually happened. He drove through traffic that looked the same as any other early morning traffic. Perhaps he was driving not to a hotel where the kidnap had not yet taken place but to one where he would be killed as soon as he put his head through the door. Thinking of his constant feeling of guilt and crushing failure, all that betrayal and torment for no reason, to no end except to kill the innocent he had been trying to protect, he wondered if he even cared. Either he would find himself in a world where he had not yet sinned or where he would be punished for his sin; he almost didn’t care which it turned out to be.
He parked outside the Hyperion, snatched another deep breath as if he thought it would be his last, and then opened the front doors. There was no Cordelia behind the front desk. That was possibly a hopeful sign as he had heard she was back from her trip by now so perhaps he was arriving at a time while she was still absent. Or perhaps he was just desperate to believe that his mistake was fixable; that there was still something that could be done that didn’t involve taking a handful of pills and a bottle of whisky and going to sleep forever.
The sound of the baby crying made his heart turn over with joy. It was a wail of misery reverberating throughout the entire hotel, an infant sounding lost, lonely, and afraid, but for him it was the most wonderful sound in the world. Connor was alive. He had undone what he’d done. The spell had worked.
“Wes…?”
He turned to see Angel standing by the front desk drinking a beaker of blood. At once he remembered the vampire screaming hatred at him, pressing the pillow over his mouth, and his heartbeat increased. But he managed to go forward as if nothing was different.
“Angel. How are you?”
Right now the vampire would either be wondering why on earth he was so tense this morning or thinking that he did at least have courage in coming here, to a place where he had been told he would return on pain of death.
“Pretty good. Yourself?” No threat. No violence. Just an expression of curiosity on Angel’s face.
“Fine.” Wesley realized he hadn’t checked to see if the scar was still there. He put a hand up to his throat and felt the contours of it. Did that mean the spell hadn’t worked or he was simply a traveller in this time line? Of course, he was a traveller, otherwise he would know nothing of the past events and would make the same mistake forever.
“Didn’t expect to see you in today.” Angel put down his beaker of blood and began to walk towards him.
Wesley’s heart began to pound faster, still not sure if this was the Angel who had tried to kill him on their last meeting or the one who was his friend; the one who trusted him so much he’d let him take his baby son home with him.
“Well, you know… research…” Wesley kept searching Angel’s face for clues, but the man was curiously impassive; unreadable. As he opened his mouth to say something else, the crying abruptly stopped. Too abruptly. He looked up the stairs anxiously. “Do you think he’s okay…?”
Angel put his head on one side, still advancing, still examining Wesley with an odd light in his eyes. “Gunn…?”
“Connor.” Wesley turned and found that Angel was suddenly very close to him indeed. He could hear the creak of his leather coat, see the strange light in the brown eyes gazing intently into his.
Angel’s expression changed; thoughtful, fascinated, almost amused. “Connor?”
Wesley faltered. “Isn’t that…? The baby crying…?”
Angel shook his head. “No, Wesley.”
I’m dead, Wesley thought with an odd calm to his acceptance. I’m alone in the hotel with the vampire whose child I killed; the vampire who warned me what he would do to me if he ever saw me again.
“Is that…?”
Wesley turned around and saw Gunn coming down the stairs, wiping his mouth. His eyes widened as he saw Wesley. “It is. Well, English, how the hell are you?”
“I’m…fine.” Wesley looked between Angel and Gunn and wondered why they were smiling. Gunn had pulled Angel off him in the hospital; had clearly only let Angel into his room because he’d assumed that Angel would forgive him. And certainly he had turned his back on Wesley very emphatically since then but Wesley had not thought he would be a party to any plan of Angel’s to murder him. “Yourself…?”
“Never better,” Gunn assured him, walking over to where Wesley was standing; no, not walking, swaggering; a roll to his step that Wesley had never seen before; athletic and poised at the same time; like he was high on life and could tango with it until dusk.
Angel put his head on one side and it reminded Wesley uncomfortably of some bird of prey sighting something furry a long way beneath it. “You’re not him, are you, Wes?”
“Not…who…?” Wesley had no idea what he was talking about; just a feeling that he should be backing for the doors and that he would never reach them. Gunn was his best chance here. If Angel sprang, started choking the life out of him, Gunn was his only hope of not dying.
Angel smiled, and it went nowhere near his eyes. “The sweet trusting little Wesley I know and love.”
“One way to find out,” said Gunn and then grabbed Wesley by the arms and yanked him back hard against his body.
As Wesley struggled in confusion, Gunn said, “Hush, Wes. No reason to be scared. Well, okay maybe a few reasons…”
“What are you doing?” Wesley demanded.
“Just…enjoying your company.”
Angel had plucked the phone from the front desk and something about the way he moved was ringing all kinds of warning bells. Angel didn’t move with that careless grace; not usually, tapdancing his way around the place, practically purring with the pleasure of his own speed and fitness; like he was revelling in being a…vampire. Angel stabbed a button on the phone to speed-dial someone and then smiled at Wesley. “Be with you in a minute, Wes.”
As Wesley tried to pull loose from Gunn’s grip he found he couldn’t shift the man’s fingers. There were digging tightly into his arms, while Gunn, bizarrely had his mouth next to Wesley’s ear. Wesley jolted with shock as the man licked his earlobe, and Gunn pulled him back tighter against him. With a sense of complete disbelief, Wesley felt something hard rubbed leisurely against his ass.
“Giles…!” Angel spoke as if the Watcher was his favourite person on earth. “How are you, old boy? Still Watching that Slayer of yours? And she pays for Watching, doesn’t she? And I mean from all angles… Tsk, tsk, no need for that kind of language. One quick question and then I’m out of your hair. The Watcher you stole from me – my favourite pet – is he still with you? Oh, don’t worry. I won’t try coming after him. I know you’ve got him locked up where the big bad boogie man can’t make him squeal any more. Bet you’re making sure the bed bugs don’t bite, too. Squirms really well, doesn’t he? And tight…oh boy, gotta love a virgin with a schoolgirl crush – I’ve had two of them so far and I can’t decide if Buffy or Wesley was the most delicious…” Angel held the phone away from his ear and shrugged at Gunn. “He hung up. How rude.”
Not time then, Wesley thought dully. The spell had taken him to a place where events had happened differently; where he had presumably not stolen Connor but something else had taken place which had led to… Angel losing his soul, and Gunn… Wesley looked up at the man who held him and realized there was nothing in those brown eyes of the man he knew, the friend he had loved; these were the coldest eyes he’d ever seen.
“Looks like we’ve got a replacement for the toy Giles took away from us.” Gunn smiled a smile as cold as heartbreak.
“Well, be fair, Gunn, we did break that particular toy, and now all the kings horses and all the kings men can’t put poor ickle Wesley together again. Too busy screaming and rocking and trying to get the nasty bad pictures of the nasty bad vampires out of his pure clean dumb little mind.” Angel danced back across the room, as if he were hearing music in his head or playing a game of invisible hopscotch. “Poor Wes. He always had a problem with reality.” Angel peered at Wesley closely. “What about you, Wesley Number Two? You look like a Watcher who knows all about reality.” Angel put his hand between Wesley’s legs and squeezed.
Bringing up his knee hard and fast was instinctive, as was slamming his head back with everything he had; trying to break Gunn’s nose and Angel’s balls simultaneously. But his head made contact with nothing and although Angel crumpled and staggered for a moment, he straightened up within seconds. Gunn yanked Wesley’s head back hard by the hair, almost breaking his neck. “Naughty, naughty, Wes. You’re going to have to be punished for that later.”
Angel rubbed his groin and grimaced. “Oh boy, yes. Daddy’s going to have to put you over his knee and spank you really hard for that.” He came in fast, pressing his body against Wesley’s, forcing Wesley’s jeans-covered ass back against Gunn’s cock, and then cupped Wesley through his jeans and groped him.
“Get off me,” Wesley snapped.
“Sorry, Wes, no can do,” said Angel with mock regret. “On account of us needing to take you downstairs, strip you naked, and make you scream for mercy.”
Cold with horror, Wesley could not restrain a shudder. “What happened to Connor?”
“Connor?” Angel licked a finger with relish. “He tasted just like chicken.”
As they dragged him towards the basement stairs, Wesley found his mind was jamming like a stuck record, repeating over and over again that perhaps after all there was something worse than his reality, after all.
***
Outside in the corridor, Angel noticed the plastic bag Groo was still holding so awkwardly and nodded at it. “Was that with Wesley?”
“Yes. I have not looked inside it.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Angel took it from him; not too bothered about showing good manners right now. Wesley being back in the hotel was making him feel as if ants were walking over his skin. He had trusted him completely, believed in their friendship absolutely. And Wesley had looked him right in the eye and told him he was taking Connor home for the night while all the time he was planning to give him to Holtz. Actually, no, Gunn and Fred had told him that wasn’t what had happened. Wesley had been planning to take Connor away to a place where Angel could never find him; to steal his son and Angel’s time with his son; all because of a stupid prophecy that was a lie anyway. Holtz had just set up an ambush and Wesley had been dumb enough to stroll straight into it. What really bothered him the most was that perhaps for the first time in his life he had really tried to be there for Wesley. He’d seen how rough he looked, made a point of telling him he appreciated all the work he was putting in, told him he was a good friend…
It choked him up too much to think about it. That was when the anger just built to a point where it could only be alleviated by going up there and holding that pillow over Wesley’s face again, and this time keeping it there until the job was done.
With a huge effort, Angel made himself go downstairs instead. He looked in the bag and saw the padded envelope, not sealed, but with Giles’ name and address scrawled across it in what it gave him a jolt to recognize was his own handwriting. A second jolt to realize it was written in blood. He sniffed it. Wesley’s blood. He looked inside the envelope and there was a videocassette. Stuffing tape back into envelope and envelope back into bag, he said briefly to Fred, “I’m going out.”
She said, “I called Lorne. He was meeting with a client but I thought he should come back so he’s coming back.”
He was feeling in a mood where he didn’t want anyone doing anything without triple checking it with him but he bit it down, recognising he was being unreasonable, and just nodded. “Good.”
“He’ll be here soon.” Fred sounded wistful and Angel noted without a pang the way Lorne had evidently become the guy the others looked to for comfort and commonsense now that Wesley was an outcast and Angel was… He wondered what they called it in their heads: ‘grieving’ in Fred’s case, he suspected; ‘batshit’ possibly in Gunn’s.
“Good.” He opened the door to the basement, remembered in time that he couldn’t actually go out and do this himself, and sighed. “I’ll wait until he gets here. I need him to do something for me. Tell him I’ll be downstairs.”
Lorne arrived in a flutter of agitation and raw silk; too flustered to even tie his cravat properly, hurrying down to the basement in a way that seriously risked scuffing his shoes. “Angelcakes, is it true…? Is Wesley…?”
“Upstairs. Asleep. Or unconscious. Hard to tell which.”
“Fredikins said he looked really bad. Does he need a doctor?”
“I don’t know. Gunn and Cordelia are seeing to it. I need you to do something for me.”
Lorne was already reaching for his cellphone. “Get him a mystic to help with the healing process? I know just the one and he owes me for…”
“No.” Angel took out his wallet and handed the contents to Lorne. “I need one of those little TV sets with a VCR. Colour if possible.”
“They’re all colour now, cupcake. And can I ask why?”
Angel regarded him levelly. “You can ask.”
It took Lorne a moment to get it and then he nodded. “Oh, I see. We’re in brood mode. Won’t that be a nice change for everyone.”
“He stole my son.”
Lorne took a step back at the quiet savagery of Angel’s words. “And bludgeoned me unconscious, which, trust me, I’m not going to be forgetting any time soon. And no one is denying your right to be miserable, vindictive or generally unpleasant, sweetpea, I’m just saying there are other people in this hotel who are suffering as well; people who also loved Connor, people who also feel betrayed by what Wesley did. You could think about sparing a thought for…”
“I don’t have any thoughts to spare.” Angel turned away. “Now get me that TV set, will you? And some honey.”
Lorne frowned. “Sorry, I think one of us skipped a track…?”
“I need a jar of honey. The good stuff. Royal jelly. And some Canterbury Bells.”
“The kind you ring?”
“The kind that’s a herb. Ask in Meg’s Magicals. Also some Colt’s-foot, Maiden-hair, Hyssop and liquorice.”
“If you have a sore throat, pumpkin, I know a better remedy than that Culpepper’s Herbal schtick.”
“Good. Bring it with the things I just asked you to buy.”
Lorne backed up. “You don’t have a sore throat, do you?”
Angel just looked at him balefully. “And you’re still here because?”
“I’m not your paid lackey? Just your semi invited houseguest?” Seeing Angel’s expression, Lorne headed up the stairs. “And I’m lackeying…”
It was an hour before Lorne returned which was an hour later than Angel wanted him to be and an hour earlier than he had realistically expected him to be.
“…Take it down there to the dungeon. Don’t worry about the dragon. He only tries to burn you alive if he’s slept with you first…”
Well, that was another thing Lorne was going to get old waiting for Angel to feel guilty about. Setting Darla on fire was up there with smothering Wesley with a pillow on his ‘Don’t give a damn and I’d do it again’ list.
Angel watched the two delivery men struggle down the stairs with the TV and realized that Lorne had managed to stretch his wallet to something a lot more impressive than the 14” screen he’d been expecting. He watched them set it up on the stand and then edge out of the basement without saying a word to them. He felt as if he were having to hold himself away from humanity right now, as if he were dangerous and might bite. There was the evidence all over Wesley upstairs of what he was capable of; right now it felt like there was thin ice beneath his feet and any minute it might crack. He knew he ought to get the man out of the hotel before the urge to kill him became too overpowering to ignore or else not killing Wesley spilled out into him killing someone else.
“Ex-display,” Lorne indicated the monster screen proudly. “And it has a scratch and a burn on the casing. Doesn’t affect the picture, though, which is flat, wide, and crystal clear. Couldn’t let our fearless leader settle for some squintasonic. Especially if it’s a sign that you’re trying to rejoin the human race.”
“It isn’t.” Angel saw the hurt on the demon’s face and sighed. “Thanks, Lorne. It’s a great TV set. Much better than I could have got for the price.”
Lorne nodded. “Well, that was almost civil.” He held up a bag that clinked and rustled. “Want me to mix this up for you? I bought molasses too and a few other things that I guarantee will take the spike out of any throat germ.”
“More like…severe bruising. In the back of the throat.”
Lorne went a little greener. “It’s for Wesley.”
“Yes.”
Lorne sat down on the stairs. “He told you what they did to him?”
Angel snorted. “Wesley doesn’t tell me anything, remember? Wesley does his own thing because it’s for everyone’s good – even when it isn’t – and gets to screw up in his own uniquely damaging way. But I know Angelus, and going by the pretty artwork on Wesley’s ass it seems as if he trained up Vampire Gunn to be a real chip off the old block.”
Lorne sighed and got to his feet, looking sick and weary. “I’ll make up any potion you like if you think it’ll do any good. Try not to make it a waste of my time though, honeybuns.”
“What do you mean?” Angel frowned.
“I know you still want to kill him. It’s pretty much what your aura is wearing for a hat, right now. But, trust me, it won’t make you feel any better, and if you cross that line the people who follow you now won’t be able to follow you afterwards. Think about that when you’re thinking about the transitory pleasure it would give you to feel Wesley dying. Not to mention the fact that misguided, idiotic, arrogant and stupid as it was of him to do what he did, he didn’t do it for any other reason than to save your son’s life, and he got his throat cut and lost the friendship of everyone that mattered to him trying to do it.”
“I don’t need a lecture, Lorne,” Angel warned him.
“Glad to hear it. Just get that this is a deal breaker. No one is saying you don’t have a reason to be pissed with Wesley but champions don’t smother people in hospital beds who can’t call for help or have the strength to fight back, Angel. At least, they don’t get to do it twice and still call themselves champions.”
Then Lorne was gone and Angel was left unsure whether he wanted to put his fist through the TV to make a point about how much he did not appreciate being told what to do or just so he wouldn’t have to watch what was on this videocassette.
“Knock knock…”
Angel was still staring at the screen, even though the tape had finished and there was just the crackle of sound, the hiss of those white lines. He looked up with an effort to see Lorne standing at the top of his staircase.
“Can I come in?” Lorne asked.
Angel nodded. “Of course.”
“No, I don’t mean, will you let me, I mean is that tape over, finished, not paused so I’m going to see a part of it or still in any way running?”
“It’s finished.” Angel switched off the TV set, then realize that Lorne was still looking extra green. “You saw Wesley.”
“Yes. I also saw Cordelia and Gunn after they’d finished trying to patch up Wesley. Gunn’s trying to drink his way into amnesia, Cordy’s crying in her room. He needs a doctor, Angel. Some honey and lemon and a Band Aid are not going to fix this.”
“He doesn’t want a doctor seeing him like this.”
“Not really the point, Your Broodiness.”
“I know Angelus. If he wanted Wesley dead, he’d be dead, which means he wanted him alive, which means he was careful not to…do anything that meant he had to find someone else to play with. Wes isn’t going to die from what was done to him whereas he’d probably rather die than have a stranger examining him right now.”
“Well, not wanting to diss your soulless alter ego’s efficiency as a precision sadist, but Wesley’s looking way too Camille for comfort, and I care rather less about what Wesley wants right now than what’s going to stop him haemorrhaging to death from internal bleeding. He needs a doctor and he needed one ooh…about six days ago, which was probably around the time when the first of his ribs got cracked.”
Angel had a brief unwanted memory of how much a cracked rib hurt; of how much everything else hurt every time that rib was touched, of how a vampire always knew where the broken bones were, the extra painful places that could be pressed a little harder to make the victim writhe and scream.
“There’s someone I know who’ll come because he owes me and he owes me big. I’m not saying he’s a warm and fuzzy guy…”
“You mean a dark mystic?” Angel glared at him. “You want to bring a dark mystic into my hotel?”
“I want Wesley to stop coughing up blood and Cordelia and Gunn would really like that too. Dark mystics aren’t party people, I admit, but the one I know is good at what he does, and he can fix the worst of it.”
There was a pause as Angel saw it all, Wesley walking out of the hotel with Connor in his arms, telling Angel that it was just for one night, that the local hospital was so close…ironic really, if it had been another five minutes away they wouldn’t be having this conversation because Wesley would never have survived the ambulance journey; that was how close he had come to not having to be holding this conversation right now.
Lorne seemed to be reaching for the last of his patience. “You watched the tape?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know he didn’t spend the last six days playing Scrabble so will you please let me call a doctor?”
Angel shrugged, trying to make this concession seem a little bit less like him giving in, or as if he gave a damn. “Fine, send for the mystic. It’s no skin off my back.”
Lorne turned away and made the call in a language even Angel didn’t know, something sibilant and softly spoken. “He’s on his way.” He steeled himself to look at the television screen. “The tape…? Was it…?”
“I can see why Wesley didn’t want Giles to have to watch it. I expect they made a copy though so Giles will probably still get one. I gather he got a copy of all the others.”
“Other tapes?”
“The Fred tape. The Cordy tape. The first Wesley tape. They’re proud of their work. Like to share it. Angelus would have done the same in this dimension, if they’d had videotape in his day.”
Lorne gestured towards the TV set. “Does it change anything? I mean…?”
Angel faced him levelly. “Nothing’s changed. I need Wesley to tell me what it was that the other Wesley did differently from him. I need to make sure it doesn’t happen here. Wesley is going to have to break the habit of a lifetime and actually talk to me, using whole words.”
Lorne sighed. “Not exactly the habit of a lifetime, cupcake. It was the only thing he ever kept from you.”
“It was the one thing that really mattered.”
Lorne looked into his eyes. “Perhaps that was why he kept it from you.”
The dark mystic came almost as soon as Lorne called him. Angel stayed in his office, wrapped in a brood blanket of anger and resentment as the man was ushered past. The mystic was wearing purple robes and had odd sigils smeared onto his forehead, straight-backed and almost floating as he ignored Gunn, Cordelia and Fred – who were waiting in the lobby – to drift eerily up the stairs to the room in which Angel had so unceremoniously dumped his patient. Lorne went with him. Angel guessed Wesley had to be sleeping or unconscious because although he listened for it there was no protest as the incantation sounded; Angel did recognize some of those words – the mystical equivalent of a general anaesthetic. Then there was the unpleasant odour or magic in the air, sharp as coin warmed against skin, metallic as fresh blood. He wondered if that was how bones smelt when they knitted; a body groaning with the effort, as it was forced to heal itself too fast. Angel presumed the dark mystic knew that Wesley didn’t have enough left in him to heal everything; after six days of torture and starvation, Wesley had been free-falling without a parachute, nothing in reserve. There was no other time but now when Angel wouldn’t have been in that bedroom, demanding that Lorne’s creepy shaman did this right, telling him what would happen to him if he screwed up, because Wesley was fragile and human and precious to the people in this place…
Angel turned away from that thought, hating himself for the part of him that was relieved Lorne had sent for the mystic, feeling as if he were betraying Connor with even a spasm of concern for the man upstairs. The grief had become too much to bear recently. He wanted to help others, although it took more energy than he sometimes thought he still possessed to overcome the deadening exhaustion of his sorrow and do something else except grieve, but the anger, the anger he could sustain. The anger helped. It was the flashfire he needed sometimes, to get through the day. He could stoke it like any other blaze, feed off it for another hour that wasn’t just about grief.
Foul-smelling green smoke drifted out of the room and down into the lobby, a neutral place between the mystic upstairs and Angel in his office, Gunn waved the tendrils away absently, Fred coughing without ever taking her gaze off the stairs. Groo was gazing at Cordelia tenderly while she looked like the warrior she had become, staring steadfastly up those stairs as if steeling herself for another battle. Angel wondered if he was the battle she was thinking she was going to have to fight.
Then the mystic floated back out again, still without acknowledging any of them, and the hotel was left with the afterburn of his spellcasting, a smell like singed flesh in the air. Lorne came down the stairs slowly, taking the Sea Breeze Gunn wordlessly handed him and downing it in one gulp before he met their eyes. “Thank you.”
“Is he okay?” Cordelia pressed.
Lorne grimaced. “Well, dark magic has its own rules. He can only fix what Wesley has the resources to mend, and, frankly, Wesley – not so much with the resources right now. My dark mystic friend felt it was in the best interests of the patient’s long-term recovery, to deal with the serious stuff and leave the surface stuff to heal naturally. Unfortunately there’s a whole lot of surface stuff, and those resources he had to use to fix the broken bones and the internal bleeding mean that Wes is pretty much running on fumes right now. He’s going to need a lot of TLC and he’s not going to be getting out of that room any time soon. We’re talking weeks, cupcakes, maybe months.”
“But he’s going to be okay, right?” Gunn pressed. “He’s not going to be coughing up blood any more?”
“His ribs are mended. They’re still bruised, but they’ll heal by themselves, and nothing’s broken any more. Well, nothing physical. As to the inside of Wesley’s head – I don’t even want to take a guess.”
“What can we do?” Fred asked.
Lorne shrugged. “Whatever you want, sweet thing. Wes is going to be sleeping off that mystical surgery for an hour or so, and then I’m going to take him some medicine. There’s nothing the rest of you need to do except calm your shattered nerves with a nice alcoholic drink…”
