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Oct. 21st, 2005 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgrey Lost and Found, Part Ten
A month later...
The air felt thick with anticipation. Wesley had noticed it when they came back from destroying that nest of Raptoran demons which had been feeding off the homeless. A low hum in the atmosphere that had made Lorne flinch and clutch his horns and Groo observe that if this were Pylea he would expect there to be slarkanik lighting the sky very soon. Fred had explained what a thunderstorm actually was and how lightning was formed until Gunn’s eyes had started to glaze over, and he and Angel had barely troubled to hide their relief when a phone call from some of Gunn’s old crew meant they had to pick up their swords, axes, and crossbows and go straight back out again.
Although Wesley was now fully recovered (from his perspective) or still convalescent (everyone else’s perspective), Angel had insisted that he should sit this next battle out, as they needed to know if there was likely to be a colony of Raptorans in the area or if that one nest was the sum total of those particularly nasty demons currently terrorising LA.
“You hit the books, English.” Gunn patted him on the shoulder gently – Gunn not yet having got out of the habit first formed when Wesley had been shot in front of him of handling him as if he were made of cracked porcelain. “We’ll hit the vamps.”
“I wish you’d stop treating me like an invalid,” Wesley protested.
Angel had also patted him – very gently – on the shoulder. “We’re not, Wes, we’re just treating you like the resident researcher, so go – research.”
He had researched Raptorans until he could have delivered a paper on them, and learned that, amongst other very unpleasant things, they were viciously territorial, making it unlikely that there was another nest in the vicinity. Fred had gone out to buy food with Cordelia, and Lorne and Groo were reminiscing upstairs about the good old days of Pylea, which seemed to involve Lorne playing Groo most of his Aretha Franklin collection, presumably to point out all the ways in which this world was better than the one they’d left. Having personally spent most of his time on Pylea being chained up, starved, threatened with execution or having to make one soul-stripping decision after another, Wesley agreed with Lorne all the way. He was glad that they had done their bit to try to make Pylea a more equal and tolerant place but equally glad that they would never ever have to go back there.
The air crackled and Wesley felt all the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The atmosphere was electrified; sizzling with a surface tension that brought him to his feet as if he were being pulled by invisible strings. With his heart pounding automatically in response he had to remind himself that not only was the tear between his dimension and that other one sealed closed but that the Angelus and Gunn from that world were dead and dusted and could never hurt anyone in this world or any other ever again.
The nightmares were still visiting him; waking in the darkness, gasping for breath from a panic attack as he felt hands holding him down, struggling against bonds that only dug deeper into his flesh; waking to a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and a heart pounding as if it were trying to escape his chest. He had to make a conscious effort not to pacify Angel or Gunn if their mood turned dark. The first time they’d argued after he’d come back from that other world; both of them made short-tempered by stinging wounds from a fight they’d almost lost, he’d been inwardly cringing. As Gunn had turned to demand Wesley’s opinion on the best way to tackle the demons they’d just had so much trouble killing, Wesley had been unable to stop a flinch. That had at least ended the argument but the look in Gunn and Angel’s eyes as Wesley ducked away from Gunn’s hand had felt more painful than the backhand his subconscious had been expecting.
“I’m sorry...” he’d breathed; seared by their expression of shocked hurt.
“No, man, I’m sorry.” Gunn had crouched down next to him, as if he were someone who had to be approached cautiously now, like a wounded animal. “I’m not him.”
“I know. I know. It was just... I’m sorry.”
After that Angel and Gunn had tip-toed around him for three days, and been so self-consciously polite and equable to one another it was almost funny. Almost.
Left to his own devices he would have taken refuge from the nightmares in insomnia and whisky – his stand-bys of the past. But Fred had decided that the best cure for trouble sleeping was to help her with her paper on P-Dimensional Subspace; a subject he understood only very imperfectly – even after her long and quite confusing explanations – and which did indeed leave him completely exhausted and Fred beaming triumphantly as he slumped into unconsciousness.
“And people say astrophysics is all just theory and no practical use…” he had heard her murmur as she kissed his forehead goodnight. Even knowing that she loved another man and saw him as a brother did not undermine his pleasure in the realization that even if he had not won her heart he had genuinely regained her friendship.
Cordelia had insisted that what he needed to help him relax was a massage; something that had felt so good that Angel had come in to find out what on earth Cordy was doing to Wesley to make him sound like that. He had indeed fallen into a deep and dreamless rest afterwards that had carried him through until morning. Lorne had mixed him a potion, which he said would help with the nightmares, and Groo had diffidently suggested that he taught him a Pylean technique of meditation that would lower his heart rate and relax his tension. Gunn had insisted that the best cure for nightmares was to play a lot of Risk before sleeping and they had tried that out for several nights running. The methods hadn’t always worked – the nightmares had still come, although with less and less frequency as the days wore on – but the intent behind them and the kindness shown to him by the others, those had proven armour enough that even when he woke up, sweat-soaked and shaking, it took him a shorter and shorter amount of time of deep breathing and Pylean mantra intoning before he could go back to sleep.
Angel was the one who had come into his room after a particularly bad nightmare and sat on his bed for a while before saying: “What happened to you in that place – that’s not the kind of thing one just gets over in a week or a month or even a year. It’s going to stay with you. It’s going to come back when you don’t expect it and when you thought it was in the past now. The point is that it’s okay to not be over it. It’s okay to wake up screaming sometimes. The only person who expects you to just carry on as if nothing happened – is you.”
“I just want to put it behind me.” Wesley had known that Angel would be able to hear his heartbeat, and how he was still jangling like a wind-chime in a hurricane at Angel being this close to him when it was only a few minutes since he had felt Angelus pinning him to the floor.
“You will.” Angel had touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Just not…straight away.”
“They’re both dust, it’s not as if they can…”
“Yeah and the subconscious mind is full of reasoned arguments like that at four in the morning. Give it time, Wes. And I’m next door if you want someone to talk to. Trust me, after a century and a half of murder and mayhem and another century in a hell dimension, I know all about nightmares.”
He had tentatively suggested that perhaps he should move back to his own flat but had been overruled so strongly by everyone present that he hadn’t like to bring it up again. It wasn’t clear if him returning to his own home was a problem because he would at once lapse into magic-dabbling depressive patterns of behaviour or because Cordelia and Fred liked having someone to fuss over and try out their cooking on who was too polite to refuse.
Giles was emailing him quite regularly from England, putting in little warnings here and there about Wesley allowing himself to become a ‘second-class citizen’ of Angel Investigations. ‘Make sure they don’t start treating you like an indentured slave’ the man had cautioned in his last email. Angel had read it over his shoulder and snorted.
“Wesley’s my faithful servant, Giles. I’m allowed to treat him like an indentured slave.” Seeing Wesley’s expression, Angel had rolled his eyes. “Joke, Wes.” His frown had followed quickly. “We don’t treat you like that, do we? Cause I remember Giles always expecting everyone to just drop everything and pick up the research books just because he said so – and not big on the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as I recall, but we don’t do that…do we?”
Wesley had been saved from answering by Cordelia striding into the office, saying: “Hit the books, Wes. Big, really big, two-headed, kind of gnarly-looking. Carries an axe with a symbol on it like this.” As she turned his hand over and drew the symbol on his palm with a felt-tip pen, she became aware of Wesley and Angel’s expressions and looked at them in confusion. “What? Were you having a coffee break or something? Did I mention that this demon was big...?” He and Angel had immediately started researching while Cordelia yelled for Gunn and Fred to come and help, and the conversation had – thankfully – been terminated.
Another crackle rippled through the Hyperion. It really did feel as if the hotel was under a cloud bank with an electrical storm building static from every stone. He marked the place in the book he was reading, checked that he was still wearing the wrist strapping which held that discreet but extremely sharp stake, slipped a knife into his other sleeve, and walked out into the lobby.
There were still the faint markings of the pentagram on the floor. A blood-coloured reminder of Angel’s loss. Wesley never looked at it without thinking of Connor and how desperately Angel had tried to get him back. Even now he still felt as if there was nothing he wouldn’t do to give Angel back his son, but there was nothing to be done. Angel had made him give him his word that he would never try to alter time or events with magic again, and there was no other method by which a dead baby could be brought back to life.
Wesley was walking towards the pentagram when the air crackled again, a sizzle that made him flinch and duck, luckily as it turned out, as that was the only thing that saved him when the grey-scaled hell beast fell out of a tear in the air twenty feet above the floor and landed already flailing its dagger-sharp tail. The tail passed over Wesley’s head by a whisker, and he stumbled backwards in disbelief. The creature turned and snarled at him, drool shining on its long thin fangs. As it lunged at him, something fell from the rip in the air above them, a solid bundle, the size of a small canoe, but wrapped entirely in stitched skins, which made the beast hesitate for a moment, before it recovered its balance and then lunged forward a second time. As it did so a human figure fell out of the same crackle of blood-stained light and landed, perfectly balanced on the soles of his feet, slicing off the creature’s head with one swish of his sword arm.
Wesley gazed up at him in disbelief. A teenage boy; slender, handsome, blue-eyed, clad in animal skins and with unkempt hair but evidently not yet old enough to need to shave. He felt instinctively that there had probably never been anything so dangerous in the hotel. Something confirmed as the boy lunged forward, grabbed him by the throat and yanked him back against him, hissing, “Is he here?”
He found himself gazing at the head of the beast whose eyes were fixed on them in death, its severed neck still leaking greenish gore onto the tiled floor. Behind him he could almost hear the rapid pounding of the boy’s heart, and could certainly feel the strength of the fingers around his neck. It reminded him of when Angel had grabbed him in their first offices – the same sensation of being held by a hungry prey animal, being entirely at its mercy. “Who?” he asked with difficulty.
“The vampire.”
“Angel?” Wesley twisted around to try to see the boy’s face again, and felt the knife sting his neck, blood begin to trickle. “You’re looking for Angel?”
The boy sniffed Wesley, adding to the feeling he was being held by an animal, then murmured in some confusion, “I know your scent. I remember your scent.” He tightened his grip. “You’re human.”
Wesley swallowed. “Yes.”
“But you serve him? You belong to him?”
“I work with him.”
“Do you fear him?”
“No.” Wesley managed to get another look at the boy and although his eyes were blue there was something in them that was very familiar. The boy smelt of blood and sweat and anger and there was a light that looked very close to insanity in his eyes; and then Wesley realized it was grief, the red rims to the eyes, the shadows beneath them; a grief so overpowering that it became a kind of madness. Then he knew. “You’re him. You’re Connor.”
The grip tightened to the point where breathing became impossible. “Don’t call me that. That was his name for me.”
Wesley thought he might pass out, but not from the constriction of his windpipe, his heart began to pound, not just in his chest, the pulse of it audible throughout his whole body, in his veins, in his brain. It hurt too much to bear. He couldn’t stand this terrible shard of hope, so agonizingly intense. He closed his eyes.
Connor shook him, releasing the grip on his throat a fraction. “Why aren’t you fighting?”
Wesley opened his eyes. “What?”
“You have a knife. I can smell the metal. Why don’t you use it?”
Wesley gazed up at him, drinking him in. He remembered the baby so clearly but he couldn’t have been certain from his appearance that this was that baby grown up, he just knew it. Every cell in his body knew it. “Because you’re his son.”
“No.” Connor abruptly pushed him away and Wesley slammed onto the floor, sliding along it. “This is the only father I’ve ever needed.”
Wesley realized he was lying next to the canoe-shaped bundle stitched into those uncured animal skins; except it was corpse-shaped and the skins were cured, it was what within them that was smelling like that. He snatched a breath. “Holtz?”
“My father.” Connor was a bleak portrait of misery and rage as he gazed at the stitched bundle.
Wesley sat up cautiously. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Connor sprang at him and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head back and holding the blade to his neck once more. “Don’t lie to me. He was your enemy. Enemy of the one you serve.”
“I’m still sorry for your loss. He kept you alive.” His head was still reeling from it. “Holtz kept you alive in Quor’toth.”
Connor pulled his head back even further so Wesley had no option but to look into his eyes. He ran the blade along the scar at Wesley’s neck. “Who did this?”
Gazing at him, Wesley realized he didn’t care if he lived or died, not because he had nothing left to live for but because although he could never give this boy back his childhood or give Angel back his first steps or his first words, he could at least die knowing that Angel still had a living son after all. “The woman who took you from me to give you to Holtz.”
Connor bent his head and licked the scar curiously. There was nothing salacious about it, this time, nothing like Angelus working his tongue between the tender edges of the wound to suck the blood from it, so corrupted and so cruel; it was more like being examined by something wild. Something pure. Wesley closed his eyes and Connor licked the wound again and then sniffed him closely. “Is that why I know your scent?”
“I used to hold you. We all did. Cordelia used to feed you. Lorne used to sing you lullabies. I…I never held you very well.”
Connor’s fingers were still tight in his hair. “Use the knife.”
“No.” Wesley let it slip down his sleeve and tossed it away, sliding it across the floor until it hit the stairs with a dull ring.
Connor yanked his head back again and Wesley gazed into his eyes. They were like Darla’s, clear and blue, but the grief in them, that was all Angel. He had never seen anything as beautiful in his life. He was a condemned man’s last sunset, last sunrise, rain after a ten year drought, the first light after an eternity in darkness.
“Why do you look at me like that?” Connor demanded angrily.
Wesley could feel the hysteria bubbling in his chest. He couldn’t help smiling, that silly grin that would probably get him killed. “You’re Connor. You’re alive.” The laughter couldn’t be repressed, a spasm through his body. “You’re alive.”
Connor frowned at him. “Are you insane? Is that why you serve a demon?”
“Angel has a soul. I work for him because he does good.” He kept drinking him in. Angel’s son. Connor. Not dead. Not dead because of him. Alive because of Holtz. Back from Quor’toth. He couldn’t stop the laughter bubbling up again. “It’s true then. You don’t get half a miracle. Life really is funny and beautiful, after all.”
“If you serve a demon you’re no better than a demon yourself,” Connor told him fiercely. “I should kill you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Wesley admitted.
“Then fight me!” Connor grabbed Wesley’s wrist and yanked back the sleeve to reveal the stake in its strapping. “Why do you carry this if you serve a vampire?”
“We also kill vampires – and demons. We just don’t kill good demons or vampires with a soul – like your father.”
“Don’t call him that!”
“Why are you here, Connor?” Wesley asked him gently.
“Don’t call me that!”
Wesley took the vicious jolting from Connor’s angry shake without a protest. He honestly didn’t care. Connor could bounce him off the walls if he wanted to as long as he stayed alive and in one piece. “I don’t know what else to call you. I don’t know what Holtz named you. I only know what Angel named you, when he lured everyone away so we could take you to the hospital and get you checked up. When Gunn bought you a pushchair. Do you remember any of it? The lullabies Lorne used to sing to you? A normal child wouldn’t be able to, of course, but you were always special.”
“You’re nothing more than a dream.” Connor looked around the hotel as if he feared it was a trap. “All of you are just a dream I once had.” But when he inhaled Wesley’s scent again, it was with a hint of longing. “And I’m not special. I’m cursed.”
“You’re a miracle.” Wesley was still drinking him in. “That’s how you survived. That’s how you came back. Those creatures that attacked Fred, they were running away from you, weren’t they? Like that beast there…” He nodded at the headless corpse still oozing green blood onto the floor. “Because you’re like Angel. You kill monsters and demons to protect those who can’t defend themselves.”
Connor slammed him down onto the floor and knelt on him, putting the tip of his blade to his throat. “You can defend yourself, demon-lover. Now, do it, or I’ll slit you open and let you bleed.”
“Been there, done that,” Wesley told him hoarsely. “Do you want to die because of your grief? Because Holtz is dead? Or did you come here to look for your father? To find the family you lost?”
“He’s not my father.” Connor pushed the blade under Wesley’s jaw. “You’re not my family.”
“Wesley!”
He had closed his eyes as the blade began to cut into his skin, but now he opened them to see Angel and Gunn coming into the lobby, weapons raised. “It’s Connor!” he shouted. “Angel, it’s Connor.”
He saw Angel stagger, looking as if someone had just run a blade straight through him, and Wesley recognized it so well, that agonizing shiver of hope, but then he took another step. “Stop doing that to Wesley.”
“He could stop me himself,” Connor hissed angrily. “But he won’t do it.” He glared into Wesley’s eyes. “Kill me or I’ll cut your head off.”
“Then you’ll have to cut my head off.” Wesley felt curiously calm. Connor was as unpredictable as a wolf with its paw in a gin trap. The boy crackled with the same intensity as the hell dimension from which he had escaped. He suspected he was steeped in it; drenched in the darkness of that dark world; but inside him he knew there was the core of something good and perfect and pure – like the soul inside Angel that was his true heart, buried in him so deeply even the demon couldn’t touch it.
“Why don’t you do it?” Connor slammed his head down onto the floor.
“Because you’re Angel’s son.” Wesley kept gazing up at him. “And you’re here because you want back the family you lost. The family I stole you from.”
“I’m here to bury my father,” Connor hissed.
“You could have buried him on Quor’toth. You’re here because Angel’s here.”
“I’m here to kill him.”
“No.” Wesley still felt calm despite the blood trickling down his throat. “You’re not a killer.”
“Connor…” Angel was approaching cautiously. “Wesley’s human. Like Holtz. Like you.” Connor spun around and fired a stake at Angel who knocked it out of the way on reflex. As Gunn ran forward with his axe, raised, Angel grabbed him by the shoulder. “He’s my son.”
“Then tell him to get the hell away from Wesley.”
Wesley had to repress another giggle that was trying to bubble up as he looked up at Angel. “He’s alive, Angel. Connor’s alive.”
“Let’s try to keep everyone like that.” Angel stepped forward cautiously. “Connor, you don’t want to do this.”
“You have no idea what I want!” the boy shouted angrily.
“You want to lay Holtz to rest somewhere where it’s green and quiet.”
That knocked the breath out of the boy more effectively than a punch. He gasped and then slowly got to his feet, still standing over Wesley who made no move to get up. Connor looked at Angel with extraordinary dignity. “He wanted to be burned, so his ashes could find their way back to England.”
“We can do that for him.” Angel was still approaching cautiously, despite Gunn trying to pull him back.
“I will kill you,” Connor warned him. “Your slave is right. I kill demons like you.”
“He’s not my slave, he’s my friend.” Angel held up his hands. “And he’s human, Connor, so let him go.”
Connor abruptly sank down to sit astride his captive and held the knife to Wesley’s scar. “Will you kill me if I slash his throat?”
“No.” Wesley gazed up at him. “No one here will kill you, whatever you do.”
“Speak for yourself,” Gunn said between his teeth.
Connor bent and inhaled Wesley’s scent again and Wesley saw the tears glint briefly in the boy’s eyes. “You sound like him but you don’t smell like him. You smell like my dreams.” He licked the blood from Wesley’s neck carefully. “You taste of salt and sorrow. Is that what he does? The one you call my father? Does he drink from you?”
“No.” Wesley gazed up at him unblinkingly. “He drinks pigs’ blood. He never drinks from us.”
Connor yanked up Wesley’s sleeve. “You’re lying. I can see his teethmarks on you.”
“Not his. Another vampire. Who did drink from me.”
Connor gazed intently into Wesley’s eyes. “How did it feel? When the beast was drinking from you?”
“Quiet. Cold. There was less pain than I expected but it felt as if the tide was going out for the last time. I always thought I could hear the sea but I think it was just the way my heartbeat sounded in my ears as it slowed. Afterwards, my veins ached for days. It hurt when they bit me twice in the same place but the first time, I hardly felt it.”
“Connor…” Angel advanced another cautious pace.
Connor glanced up at the vampire. “I’ll kill him if you try to touch me.” As that froze Angel and Gunn in their tracks he glared at Wesley. “Why don’t you try to fight?”
“I’ve hurt you enough for one lifetime.” Wesley still felt curiously calm. It wasn’t unpleasant, really. He was comfortable enough on his back to warrant a very dirty joke if he couldn’t keep the hysteria bubbling up again, and Connor wasn’t heavy, and, for all his threats to kill him, he was sitting on him quite considerately. It certainly didn’t hurt the way it had when Faith had slammed her wiry dangerous body down onto his lap in a way that had bruised his testicles for a week.
“When did you hurt me?” Connor demanded.
Wesley looked into his eyes. “When I stole you from the father who loved you and let Justine take you from me and give you to Holtz.”
“You want to die,” the boy hissed.
“No. I just hate the way lies taste on my tongue.”
“Wes…” Angel grimaced.
“What’s all the hub-bub about, my demon-killing munchkins? Did you – oh holy hostage situation, Batman… Who’s Stig of the Dump and what’s his beef with Wesley?”
Wesley looked up curiously to see Lorne and Groo standing at the foot of the stairs. That was good. That would mean if Connor made a dash for it, Groo might be able to at least delay him getting through the doors to the garden.
“We brought tacos and fish sticks and Dodger dogs. Cordelia said you’d never be able to finish it all but I know how you all get when you’ve been killing demons and… Why is that boy sitting on top of Wesley?”
Wesley turned his head the other way to see Fred and Cordelia coming in the front door, their hands full of bags of food. Connor sniffed the air, looking nervously from the women to Groo and Lorne. His eyes narrowed as he focused on Lorne. “Filthy demon.”
“Hey…” Lorne looked affronted. “That’s rich coming from Jungle Boy, stranger to soap and water, to someone who’s just flossed for the second time today.”
Wesley felt another giggle in danger of bubbling up. He gestured vaguely with his fingers. “Connor meet Lorne and Groo. Cordelia and Fred meet Connor. He’s just dropped in from Quor’toth for afternoon tea.”
“Keep it together, Wes,” Angel warned.
“Connor…?” Cordelia ran forward, dropping the food heedlessly. Wesley saw the boy’s head snap round as he caught the scent of it.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
Connor slammed him down onto the floor again. “I will kill you.”
“Take it easy, Junior,” Gunn said shortly. “No one here is doing you any harm, least of all Wes. ‘Cept if you stick that knife in him again in which case we may have to rethink that ‘no hurting Angel’s long lost kid’ policy.”
“But he’s…” Fred stumbled as she came forward. “Connor was a baby. He can’t be Connor. He’s…not a baby.”
“Time passes differently in some hell dimensions,” Wesley explained, still feeling oddly comfortable on the floor with Connor’s bony knees digging into his ribcage. “For instance when Angel was sent to hell for what was a hundred years in that dimension it was only a matter of months in Sunnydale. In Quor’toth time evidently moved at a much faster rate than here.”
“Don’t you ever stop talking?” Connor demanded, holding the knife to his throat again. “I could cut out your tongue.”
“Don’t do that,” Angel said hastily. “Connor, please let Wesley go. He’s not a demon and…”
“But I am.” Cordelia stepped forward, voice calm. “Part demon anyway. So is Groo. And Lorne’s all demon. Wesley, Fred and Gunn are human, and Angel’s a vampire. But it doesn’t matter if someone is a demon or human, it just matters what they do, what they are. And we’re all good here. All of us.”
“Do you know what I am?” Connor demanded angrily. “I’m the son of two demons. That makes me a monster.”
“No, Connor,” said Cordelia gently. “It makes you a miracle. It also makes you anything you want to be. Just like the rest of us. The only ones who don’t have a choice are those who don’t have a soul. And you do.”
Connor sprang at her so fast that no one could react in time; knife already plunging towards her heart when Cordelia caught his wrist and held it, the blade a fraction from her skin. For a moment they struggled and then Cordelia began to glow, a light enveloping her and gradually engulfing Connor as well.
Angel had sprung forward to help her but as the light flared, he was held back. Wesley felt strong hands grab him under the arms and pull him to his feet; holding him up as he swayed. He knew vaguely that it was Gunn holding him and he was safe, but he was too distracted to give either of those ideas his full attention. He flinched as the light from Cordelia became dazzling and saw everyone else ducking his or her head. And then the light faded and the knife fell to the floor with a clatter and then somehow Connor was in Cordelia’s arms sobbing, and she was rocking him gently, stroking his hair and telling him that everything was okay now, it really was.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she whispered to him soothingly. “Let it all go. All that world. You don’t need it any more. You’re home now, Connor. You’re finally back where you’re supposed to be.” She looked over his head at Wesley and smiled at him and then at Angel who looked pretty close to tears of relief himself. “Back home with us.”
***
A month later...
The air felt thick with anticipation. Wesley had noticed it when they came back from destroying that nest of Raptoran demons which had been feeding off the homeless. A low hum in the atmosphere that had made Lorne flinch and clutch his horns and Groo observe that if this were Pylea he would expect there to be slarkanik lighting the sky very soon. Fred had explained what a thunderstorm actually was and how lightning was formed until Gunn’s eyes had started to glaze over, and he and Angel had barely troubled to hide their relief when a phone call from some of Gunn’s old crew meant they had to pick up their swords, axes, and crossbows and go straight back out again.
Although Wesley was now fully recovered (from his perspective) or still convalescent (everyone else’s perspective), Angel had insisted that he should sit this next battle out, as they needed to know if there was likely to be a colony of Raptorans in the area or if that one nest was the sum total of those particularly nasty demons currently terrorising LA.
“You hit the books, English.” Gunn patted him on the shoulder gently – Gunn not yet having got out of the habit first formed when Wesley had been shot in front of him of handling him as if he were made of cracked porcelain. “We’ll hit the vamps.”
“I wish you’d stop treating me like an invalid,” Wesley protested.
Angel had also patted him – very gently – on the shoulder. “We’re not, Wes, we’re just treating you like the resident researcher, so go – research.”
He had researched Raptorans until he could have delivered a paper on them, and learned that, amongst other very unpleasant things, they were viciously territorial, making it unlikely that there was another nest in the vicinity. Fred had gone out to buy food with Cordelia, and Lorne and Groo were reminiscing upstairs about the good old days of Pylea, which seemed to involve Lorne playing Groo most of his Aretha Franklin collection, presumably to point out all the ways in which this world was better than the one they’d left. Having personally spent most of his time on Pylea being chained up, starved, threatened with execution or having to make one soul-stripping decision after another, Wesley agreed with Lorne all the way. He was glad that they had done their bit to try to make Pylea a more equal and tolerant place but equally glad that they would never ever have to go back there.
The air crackled and Wesley felt all the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The atmosphere was electrified; sizzling with a surface tension that brought him to his feet as if he were being pulled by invisible strings. With his heart pounding automatically in response he had to remind himself that not only was the tear between his dimension and that other one sealed closed but that the Angelus and Gunn from that world were dead and dusted and could never hurt anyone in this world or any other ever again.
The nightmares were still visiting him; waking in the darkness, gasping for breath from a panic attack as he felt hands holding him down, struggling against bonds that only dug deeper into his flesh; waking to a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and a heart pounding as if it were trying to escape his chest. He had to make a conscious effort not to pacify Angel or Gunn if their mood turned dark. The first time they’d argued after he’d come back from that other world; both of them made short-tempered by stinging wounds from a fight they’d almost lost, he’d been inwardly cringing. As Gunn had turned to demand Wesley’s opinion on the best way to tackle the demons they’d just had so much trouble killing, Wesley had been unable to stop a flinch. That had at least ended the argument but the look in Gunn and Angel’s eyes as Wesley ducked away from Gunn’s hand had felt more painful than the backhand his subconscious had been expecting.
“I’m sorry...” he’d breathed; seared by their expression of shocked hurt.
“No, man, I’m sorry.” Gunn had crouched down next to him, as if he were someone who had to be approached cautiously now, like a wounded animal. “I’m not him.”
“I know. I know. It was just... I’m sorry.”
After that Angel and Gunn had tip-toed around him for three days, and been so self-consciously polite and equable to one another it was almost funny. Almost.
Left to his own devices he would have taken refuge from the nightmares in insomnia and whisky – his stand-bys of the past. But Fred had decided that the best cure for trouble sleeping was to help her with her paper on P-Dimensional Subspace; a subject he understood only very imperfectly – even after her long and quite confusing explanations – and which did indeed leave him completely exhausted and Fred beaming triumphantly as he slumped into unconsciousness.
“And people say astrophysics is all just theory and no practical use…” he had heard her murmur as she kissed his forehead goodnight. Even knowing that she loved another man and saw him as a brother did not undermine his pleasure in the realization that even if he had not won her heart he had genuinely regained her friendship.
Cordelia had insisted that what he needed to help him relax was a massage; something that had felt so good that Angel had come in to find out what on earth Cordy was doing to Wesley to make him sound like that. He had indeed fallen into a deep and dreamless rest afterwards that had carried him through until morning. Lorne had mixed him a potion, which he said would help with the nightmares, and Groo had diffidently suggested that he taught him a Pylean technique of meditation that would lower his heart rate and relax his tension. Gunn had insisted that the best cure for nightmares was to play a lot of Risk before sleeping and they had tried that out for several nights running. The methods hadn’t always worked – the nightmares had still come, although with less and less frequency as the days wore on – but the intent behind them and the kindness shown to him by the others, those had proven armour enough that even when he woke up, sweat-soaked and shaking, it took him a shorter and shorter amount of time of deep breathing and Pylean mantra intoning before he could go back to sleep.
Angel was the one who had come into his room after a particularly bad nightmare and sat on his bed for a while before saying: “What happened to you in that place – that’s not the kind of thing one just gets over in a week or a month or even a year. It’s going to stay with you. It’s going to come back when you don’t expect it and when you thought it was in the past now. The point is that it’s okay to not be over it. It’s okay to wake up screaming sometimes. The only person who expects you to just carry on as if nothing happened – is you.”
“I just want to put it behind me.” Wesley had known that Angel would be able to hear his heartbeat, and how he was still jangling like a wind-chime in a hurricane at Angel being this close to him when it was only a few minutes since he had felt Angelus pinning him to the floor.
“You will.” Angel had touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Just not…straight away.”
“They’re both dust, it’s not as if they can…”
“Yeah and the subconscious mind is full of reasoned arguments like that at four in the morning. Give it time, Wes. And I’m next door if you want someone to talk to. Trust me, after a century and a half of murder and mayhem and another century in a hell dimension, I know all about nightmares.”
He had tentatively suggested that perhaps he should move back to his own flat but had been overruled so strongly by everyone present that he hadn’t like to bring it up again. It wasn’t clear if him returning to his own home was a problem because he would at once lapse into magic-dabbling depressive patterns of behaviour or because Cordelia and Fred liked having someone to fuss over and try out their cooking on who was too polite to refuse.
Giles was emailing him quite regularly from England, putting in little warnings here and there about Wesley allowing himself to become a ‘second-class citizen’ of Angel Investigations. ‘Make sure they don’t start treating you like an indentured slave’ the man had cautioned in his last email. Angel had read it over his shoulder and snorted.
“Wesley’s my faithful servant, Giles. I’m allowed to treat him like an indentured slave.” Seeing Wesley’s expression, Angel had rolled his eyes. “Joke, Wes.” His frown had followed quickly. “We don’t treat you like that, do we? Cause I remember Giles always expecting everyone to just drop everything and pick up the research books just because he said so – and not big on the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as I recall, but we don’t do that…do we?”
Wesley had been saved from answering by Cordelia striding into the office, saying: “Hit the books, Wes. Big, really big, two-headed, kind of gnarly-looking. Carries an axe with a symbol on it like this.” As she turned his hand over and drew the symbol on his palm with a felt-tip pen, she became aware of Wesley and Angel’s expressions and looked at them in confusion. “What? Were you having a coffee break or something? Did I mention that this demon was big...?” He and Angel had immediately started researching while Cordelia yelled for Gunn and Fred to come and help, and the conversation had – thankfully – been terminated.
Another crackle rippled through the Hyperion. It really did feel as if the hotel was under a cloud bank with an electrical storm building static from every stone. He marked the place in the book he was reading, checked that he was still wearing the wrist strapping which held that discreet but extremely sharp stake, slipped a knife into his other sleeve, and walked out into the lobby.
There were still the faint markings of the pentagram on the floor. A blood-coloured reminder of Angel’s loss. Wesley never looked at it without thinking of Connor and how desperately Angel had tried to get him back. Even now he still felt as if there was nothing he wouldn’t do to give Angel back his son, but there was nothing to be done. Angel had made him give him his word that he would never try to alter time or events with magic again, and there was no other method by which a dead baby could be brought back to life.
Wesley was walking towards the pentagram when the air crackled again, a sizzle that made him flinch and duck, luckily as it turned out, as that was the only thing that saved him when the grey-scaled hell beast fell out of a tear in the air twenty feet above the floor and landed already flailing its dagger-sharp tail. The tail passed over Wesley’s head by a whisker, and he stumbled backwards in disbelief. The creature turned and snarled at him, drool shining on its long thin fangs. As it lunged at him, something fell from the rip in the air above them, a solid bundle, the size of a small canoe, but wrapped entirely in stitched skins, which made the beast hesitate for a moment, before it recovered its balance and then lunged forward a second time. As it did so a human figure fell out of the same crackle of blood-stained light and landed, perfectly balanced on the soles of his feet, slicing off the creature’s head with one swish of his sword arm.
Wesley gazed up at him in disbelief. A teenage boy; slender, handsome, blue-eyed, clad in animal skins and with unkempt hair but evidently not yet old enough to need to shave. He felt instinctively that there had probably never been anything so dangerous in the hotel. Something confirmed as the boy lunged forward, grabbed him by the throat and yanked him back against him, hissing, “Is he here?”
He found himself gazing at the head of the beast whose eyes were fixed on them in death, its severed neck still leaking greenish gore onto the tiled floor. Behind him he could almost hear the rapid pounding of the boy’s heart, and could certainly feel the strength of the fingers around his neck. It reminded him of when Angel had grabbed him in their first offices – the same sensation of being held by a hungry prey animal, being entirely at its mercy. “Who?” he asked with difficulty.
“The vampire.”
“Angel?” Wesley twisted around to try to see the boy’s face again, and felt the knife sting his neck, blood begin to trickle. “You’re looking for Angel?”
The boy sniffed Wesley, adding to the feeling he was being held by an animal, then murmured in some confusion, “I know your scent. I remember your scent.” He tightened his grip. “You’re human.”
Wesley swallowed. “Yes.”
“But you serve him? You belong to him?”
“I work with him.”
“Do you fear him?”
“No.” Wesley managed to get another look at the boy and although his eyes were blue there was something in them that was very familiar. The boy smelt of blood and sweat and anger and there was a light that looked very close to insanity in his eyes; and then Wesley realized it was grief, the red rims to the eyes, the shadows beneath them; a grief so overpowering that it became a kind of madness. Then he knew. “You’re him. You’re Connor.”
The grip tightened to the point where breathing became impossible. “Don’t call me that. That was his name for me.”
Wesley thought he might pass out, but not from the constriction of his windpipe, his heart began to pound, not just in his chest, the pulse of it audible throughout his whole body, in his veins, in his brain. It hurt too much to bear. He couldn’t stand this terrible shard of hope, so agonizingly intense. He closed his eyes.
Connor shook him, releasing the grip on his throat a fraction. “Why aren’t you fighting?”
Wesley opened his eyes. “What?”
“You have a knife. I can smell the metal. Why don’t you use it?”
Wesley gazed up at him, drinking him in. He remembered the baby so clearly but he couldn’t have been certain from his appearance that this was that baby grown up, he just knew it. Every cell in his body knew it. “Because you’re his son.”
“No.” Connor abruptly pushed him away and Wesley slammed onto the floor, sliding along it. “This is the only father I’ve ever needed.”
Wesley realized he was lying next to the canoe-shaped bundle stitched into those uncured animal skins; except it was corpse-shaped and the skins were cured, it was what within them that was smelling like that. He snatched a breath. “Holtz?”
“My father.” Connor was a bleak portrait of misery and rage as he gazed at the stitched bundle.
Wesley sat up cautiously. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Connor sprang at him and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head back and holding the blade to his neck once more. “Don’t lie to me. He was your enemy. Enemy of the one you serve.”
“I’m still sorry for your loss. He kept you alive.” His head was still reeling from it. “Holtz kept you alive in Quor’toth.”
Connor pulled his head back even further so Wesley had no option but to look into his eyes. He ran the blade along the scar at Wesley’s neck. “Who did this?”
Gazing at him, Wesley realized he didn’t care if he lived or died, not because he had nothing left to live for but because although he could never give this boy back his childhood or give Angel back his first steps or his first words, he could at least die knowing that Angel still had a living son after all. “The woman who took you from me to give you to Holtz.”
Connor bent his head and licked the scar curiously. There was nothing salacious about it, this time, nothing like Angelus working his tongue between the tender edges of the wound to suck the blood from it, so corrupted and so cruel; it was more like being examined by something wild. Something pure. Wesley closed his eyes and Connor licked the wound again and then sniffed him closely. “Is that why I know your scent?”
“I used to hold you. We all did. Cordelia used to feed you. Lorne used to sing you lullabies. I…I never held you very well.”
Connor’s fingers were still tight in his hair. “Use the knife.”
“No.” Wesley let it slip down his sleeve and tossed it away, sliding it across the floor until it hit the stairs with a dull ring.
Connor yanked his head back again and Wesley gazed into his eyes. They were like Darla’s, clear and blue, but the grief in them, that was all Angel. He had never seen anything as beautiful in his life. He was a condemned man’s last sunset, last sunrise, rain after a ten year drought, the first light after an eternity in darkness.
“Why do you look at me like that?” Connor demanded angrily.
Wesley could feel the hysteria bubbling in his chest. He couldn’t help smiling, that silly grin that would probably get him killed. “You’re Connor. You’re alive.” The laughter couldn’t be repressed, a spasm through his body. “You’re alive.”
Connor frowned at him. “Are you insane? Is that why you serve a demon?”
“Angel has a soul. I work for him because he does good.” He kept drinking him in. Angel’s son. Connor. Not dead. Not dead because of him. Alive because of Holtz. Back from Quor’toth. He couldn’t stop the laughter bubbling up again. “It’s true then. You don’t get half a miracle. Life really is funny and beautiful, after all.”
“If you serve a demon you’re no better than a demon yourself,” Connor told him fiercely. “I should kill you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Wesley admitted.
“Then fight me!” Connor grabbed Wesley’s wrist and yanked back the sleeve to reveal the stake in its strapping. “Why do you carry this if you serve a vampire?”
“We also kill vampires – and demons. We just don’t kill good demons or vampires with a soul – like your father.”
“Don’t call him that!”
“Why are you here, Connor?” Wesley asked him gently.
“Don’t call me that!”
Wesley took the vicious jolting from Connor’s angry shake without a protest. He honestly didn’t care. Connor could bounce him off the walls if he wanted to as long as he stayed alive and in one piece. “I don’t know what else to call you. I don’t know what Holtz named you. I only know what Angel named you, when he lured everyone away so we could take you to the hospital and get you checked up. When Gunn bought you a pushchair. Do you remember any of it? The lullabies Lorne used to sing to you? A normal child wouldn’t be able to, of course, but you were always special.”
“You’re nothing more than a dream.” Connor looked around the hotel as if he feared it was a trap. “All of you are just a dream I once had.” But when he inhaled Wesley’s scent again, it was with a hint of longing. “And I’m not special. I’m cursed.”
“You’re a miracle.” Wesley was still drinking him in. “That’s how you survived. That’s how you came back. Those creatures that attacked Fred, they were running away from you, weren’t they? Like that beast there…” He nodded at the headless corpse still oozing green blood onto the floor. “Because you’re like Angel. You kill monsters and demons to protect those who can’t defend themselves.”
Connor slammed him down onto the floor and knelt on him, putting the tip of his blade to his throat. “You can defend yourself, demon-lover. Now, do it, or I’ll slit you open and let you bleed.”
“Been there, done that,” Wesley told him hoarsely. “Do you want to die because of your grief? Because Holtz is dead? Or did you come here to look for your father? To find the family you lost?”
“He’s not my father.” Connor pushed the blade under Wesley’s jaw. “You’re not my family.”
“Wesley!”
He had closed his eyes as the blade began to cut into his skin, but now he opened them to see Angel and Gunn coming into the lobby, weapons raised. “It’s Connor!” he shouted. “Angel, it’s Connor.”
He saw Angel stagger, looking as if someone had just run a blade straight through him, and Wesley recognized it so well, that agonizing shiver of hope, but then he took another step. “Stop doing that to Wesley.”
“He could stop me himself,” Connor hissed angrily. “But he won’t do it.” He glared into Wesley’s eyes. “Kill me or I’ll cut your head off.”
“Then you’ll have to cut my head off.” Wesley felt curiously calm. Connor was as unpredictable as a wolf with its paw in a gin trap. The boy crackled with the same intensity as the hell dimension from which he had escaped. He suspected he was steeped in it; drenched in the darkness of that dark world; but inside him he knew there was the core of something good and perfect and pure – like the soul inside Angel that was his true heart, buried in him so deeply even the demon couldn’t touch it.
“Why don’t you do it?” Connor slammed his head down onto the floor.
“Because you’re Angel’s son.” Wesley kept gazing up at him. “And you’re here because you want back the family you lost. The family I stole you from.”
“I’m here to bury my father,” Connor hissed.
“You could have buried him on Quor’toth. You’re here because Angel’s here.”
“I’m here to kill him.”
“No.” Wesley still felt calm despite the blood trickling down his throat. “You’re not a killer.”
“Connor…” Angel was approaching cautiously. “Wesley’s human. Like Holtz. Like you.” Connor spun around and fired a stake at Angel who knocked it out of the way on reflex. As Gunn ran forward with his axe, raised, Angel grabbed him by the shoulder. “He’s my son.”
“Then tell him to get the hell away from Wesley.”
Wesley had to repress another giggle that was trying to bubble up as he looked up at Angel. “He’s alive, Angel. Connor’s alive.”
“Let’s try to keep everyone like that.” Angel stepped forward cautiously. “Connor, you don’t want to do this.”
“You have no idea what I want!” the boy shouted angrily.
“You want to lay Holtz to rest somewhere where it’s green and quiet.”
That knocked the breath out of the boy more effectively than a punch. He gasped and then slowly got to his feet, still standing over Wesley who made no move to get up. Connor looked at Angel with extraordinary dignity. “He wanted to be burned, so his ashes could find their way back to England.”
“We can do that for him.” Angel was still approaching cautiously, despite Gunn trying to pull him back.
“I will kill you,” Connor warned him. “Your slave is right. I kill demons like you.”
“He’s not my slave, he’s my friend.” Angel held up his hands. “And he’s human, Connor, so let him go.”
Connor abruptly sank down to sit astride his captive and held the knife to Wesley’s scar. “Will you kill me if I slash his throat?”
“No.” Wesley gazed up at him. “No one here will kill you, whatever you do.”
“Speak for yourself,” Gunn said between his teeth.
Connor bent and inhaled Wesley’s scent again and Wesley saw the tears glint briefly in the boy’s eyes. “You sound like him but you don’t smell like him. You smell like my dreams.” He licked the blood from Wesley’s neck carefully. “You taste of salt and sorrow. Is that what he does? The one you call my father? Does he drink from you?”
“No.” Wesley gazed up at him unblinkingly. “He drinks pigs’ blood. He never drinks from us.”
Connor yanked up Wesley’s sleeve. “You’re lying. I can see his teethmarks on you.”
“Not his. Another vampire. Who did drink from me.”
Connor gazed intently into Wesley’s eyes. “How did it feel? When the beast was drinking from you?”
“Quiet. Cold. There was less pain than I expected but it felt as if the tide was going out for the last time. I always thought I could hear the sea but I think it was just the way my heartbeat sounded in my ears as it slowed. Afterwards, my veins ached for days. It hurt when they bit me twice in the same place but the first time, I hardly felt it.”
“Connor…” Angel advanced another cautious pace.
Connor glanced up at the vampire. “I’ll kill him if you try to touch me.” As that froze Angel and Gunn in their tracks he glared at Wesley. “Why don’t you try to fight?”
“I’ve hurt you enough for one lifetime.” Wesley still felt curiously calm. It wasn’t unpleasant, really. He was comfortable enough on his back to warrant a very dirty joke if he couldn’t keep the hysteria bubbling up again, and Connor wasn’t heavy, and, for all his threats to kill him, he was sitting on him quite considerately. It certainly didn’t hurt the way it had when Faith had slammed her wiry dangerous body down onto his lap in a way that had bruised his testicles for a week.
“When did you hurt me?” Connor demanded.
Wesley looked into his eyes. “When I stole you from the father who loved you and let Justine take you from me and give you to Holtz.”
“You want to die,” the boy hissed.
“No. I just hate the way lies taste on my tongue.”
“Wes…” Angel grimaced.
“What’s all the hub-bub about, my demon-killing munchkins? Did you – oh holy hostage situation, Batman… Who’s Stig of the Dump and what’s his beef with Wesley?”
Wesley looked up curiously to see Lorne and Groo standing at the foot of the stairs. That was good. That would mean if Connor made a dash for it, Groo might be able to at least delay him getting through the doors to the garden.
“We brought tacos and fish sticks and Dodger dogs. Cordelia said you’d never be able to finish it all but I know how you all get when you’ve been killing demons and… Why is that boy sitting on top of Wesley?”
Wesley turned his head the other way to see Fred and Cordelia coming in the front door, their hands full of bags of food. Connor sniffed the air, looking nervously from the women to Groo and Lorne. His eyes narrowed as he focused on Lorne. “Filthy demon.”
“Hey…” Lorne looked affronted. “That’s rich coming from Jungle Boy, stranger to soap and water, to someone who’s just flossed for the second time today.”
Wesley felt another giggle in danger of bubbling up. He gestured vaguely with his fingers. “Connor meet Lorne and Groo. Cordelia and Fred meet Connor. He’s just dropped in from Quor’toth for afternoon tea.”
“Keep it together, Wes,” Angel warned.
“Connor…?” Cordelia ran forward, dropping the food heedlessly. Wesley saw the boy’s head snap round as he caught the scent of it.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
Connor slammed him down onto the floor again. “I will kill you.”
“Take it easy, Junior,” Gunn said shortly. “No one here is doing you any harm, least of all Wes. ‘Cept if you stick that knife in him again in which case we may have to rethink that ‘no hurting Angel’s long lost kid’ policy.”
“But he’s…” Fred stumbled as she came forward. “Connor was a baby. He can’t be Connor. He’s…not a baby.”
“Time passes differently in some hell dimensions,” Wesley explained, still feeling oddly comfortable on the floor with Connor’s bony knees digging into his ribcage. “For instance when Angel was sent to hell for what was a hundred years in that dimension it was only a matter of months in Sunnydale. In Quor’toth time evidently moved at a much faster rate than here.”
“Don’t you ever stop talking?” Connor demanded, holding the knife to his throat again. “I could cut out your tongue.”
“Don’t do that,” Angel said hastily. “Connor, please let Wesley go. He’s not a demon and…”
“But I am.” Cordelia stepped forward, voice calm. “Part demon anyway. So is Groo. And Lorne’s all demon. Wesley, Fred and Gunn are human, and Angel’s a vampire. But it doesn’t matter if someone is a demon or human, it just matters what they do, what they are. And we’re all good here. All of us.”
“Do you know what I am?” Connor demanded angrily. “I’m the son of two demons. That makes me a monster.”
“No, Connor,” said Cordelia gently. “It makes you a miracle. It also makes you anything you want to be. Just like the rest of us. The only ones who don’t have a choice are those who don’t have a soul. And you do.”
Connor sprang at her so fast that no one could react in time; knife already plunging towards her heart when Cordelia caught his wrist and held it, the blade a fraction from her skin. For a moment they struggled and then Cordelia began to glow, a light enveloping her and gradually engulfing Connor as well.
Angel had sprung forward to help her but as the light flared, he was held back. Wesley felt strong hands grab him under the arms and pull him to his feet; holding him up as he swayed. He knew vaguely that it was Gunn holding him and he was safe, but he was too distracted to give either of those ideas his full attention. He flinched as the light from Cordelia became dazzling and saw everyone else ducking his or her head. And then the light faded and the knife fell to the floor with a clatter and then somehow Connor was in Cordelia’s arms sobbing, and she was rocking him gently, stroking his hair and telling him that everything was okay now, it really was.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she whispered to him soothingly. “Let it all go. All that world. You don’t need it any more. You’re home now, Connor. You’re finally back where you’re supposed to be.” She looked over his head at Wesley and smiled at him and then at Angel who looked pretty close to tears of relief himself. “Back home with us.”
***
