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Oct. 21st, 2005 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgrey Lost and Found, Part Thirteen
Two months later in a Sunnydale in a different reality...
Giles watched from the kitchen with Buffy as Faith went about setting up the afternoon’s lesson. He and Buffy were pretending to be preparing an early supper, of course, something they could all enjoy before the two Slayers went out on patrol, but in reality they were watching. Buffy, because she was trying to learn how to do what Faith did, and Giles because he couldn’t help himself; he felt so acutely protective of Wesley and his progress that it was difficult for him to share his care and education without constantly hovering, and yet he knew there were things that Faith could offer that he could not.
Right now, Faith was unrecognisable from the woman who gave vampires that chilling smile before the staked them. She was wrinkling her nose at the man sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Okay – so, today we’re practising weapons recognition. What I’m going to do is make a big crash, okay? Really big noise. And I’m telling you now that even though it sounds scary, it isn’t because it’s just me doing…this…”
Giles winced instinctively as Faith upended a bag full of weapons onto the floor with a sound like several tin trays being hurled into a dustbin and then vigorously shaken. He tended to keep things quiet around Wesley, as did Willow and Xander. It was just their approach. Just as they handled him gently and didn’t say ‘boo’ to him when they came up behind him. Or tickle him. Faith was the wild card with her own approach to rehabilitation.
Wesley hunched up his shoulders and pulled a face at the hideous crashing noise but he smiled tentatively after a minute because Faith was crouching in front of him, grinning at him. She ruffled his hair. “See, sometimes you gotta be noisy. It’s good for the soul.”
“Giles says…”
“Giles is a librarian. You remember what that is?”
Wesley sat up straighter when he answered a question. Faith had teased him about it. She had tried to make him bend to one side or slouch and then tickled him mercilessly and he had giggled a lot but when she asked the next question he still straightened his spine and set his shoulders back. He did it now.
“Someone who cares about books. And the order they go on the shelves.”
“And you remember the notice in the library when we went there the other day?”
“It said we had to be quiet.”
“That’s why Giles thinks everything should be quiet all the time. Too much time spent in libraries.”
“I like libraries.”
“Of course you do. You’re a Watcher. They all like libraries. And tea. And wearing corduroy.” She tugged at his shirt. “Who picked this out for you?”
“I picked it.” He smiled up at her. Faith was the other person in the world who made him feel completely safe. Faith and Giles were the hundred percenters. Willow was about ninety-five percent because of the magic which sometimes made her eyes go black. Xander around the same because Wesley had seen him get drunk once, and people slurring their words worried him a little. Buffy was about ninety percent because of the arguments with Dawn; Dawn around the same because of the arguments with Buffy. But they all made him feel degrees of safe and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t make him light up with pleasure when they arrived at Giles’ door.
“You have cra-crummy Watcher taste. I’m going to get you a stud for this ear…” She tugged it. “And buy you some tight jeans and a sexy t-shirt and make you come out dancing. One of those shirts that don’t cover your tummy. Not that you have a tummy, Skinny-ribs.”
Wesley giggled again because she was tickling him where his imaginary sexy t-shirt would come. He curled up when she tickled him, all boneless and childlike. Sometimes it made Giles smile and sometimes it just made him want to weep.
“Not skinny…” He pretended to pout, looking at her from under his eyelashes.
“Are too skinny.” She picked up an axe. “You ready for today’s lesson?”
He sat up straighter, legs crossed, looking as if he were going to do yoga. He liked lessons. Loved to learn. Was so proud of each new thing he grasped. “Yes.”
“You have to go through all these weapons and put them in piles. Put the ones that look like each other in the same pile. So, where would you put this one?” She handed him the axe and he placed it carefully on his right side. “And this one?” She handed him a crossbow. He took it and compared it gravely with the axe and then put it on his left side. “And what about this one?” That was harder, as it was a sword, and so had a handle and then a sharp metallic edge, but its shape was different and after a moment’s consideration, Wesley put that in a third pile in front of his crossed legs. He looked to her for a reaction and she gave him a half-smile. “Okay, pretty smart so far, but we’ve got a lot of weapons here. What about this one?” Another sword, but shorter than the others. Wesley took it from her and compared it to the crossbow then the axe and then the sword, he held it over the sword, the handle the same but the blade shorter and after a moment’s consideration placed it tentatively between the sword and the axe.
“Now, you pick one.” As he reached across and then hesitated, looking up at her for advice, she shook her head, still smiling at him. “No, Wes, you’ve got to choose yourself. And it doesn’t matter which one you choose first because you’re going to have to put every single one into a pile.”
“All of them?” He looked at the pile wide-eyed; expression so trusting and earnest that it was very difficult to believe he would be thirty before many months were past.
“Every single one. And I’m not going to help. You have to do it yourself. And then do you know what you have to do?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you when we get there. Right now, you have to put them in piles. Do you want some tea?”
He smiled. “Yes, please.”
“You drink too much tea, you know that?”
“I like it.”
“I like sex with bikers. Don’t see me doing that every hour on the hour, do you?”
He giggled again and darted a look at where Giles might be watching them. Giles wasn’t sure how Wesley had ended him up perceiving him as the disapproving adult and Faith as the naughty friend, but he always did that, looked to see if Giles was going to tell anyone off. Faith got to her feet and ruffled his hair again. Wesley rolled his eyes at her and combed it carefully with his fingers, then leant forward to pick the next weapon, eyes alight with interest now as he compared and contrasted.
“You’re so patient,” Buffy murmured as Faith came into the kitchen. “I wish I was as patient with Dawn.”
Faith shrugged. “He’s my Watcher. Least he’s going to be once I get him retrained. I’m going to enter him for the Watcher Olympics and he’s going to kick the ass of every crabby old fart Quentin Travers thinks is better than him.”
“There isn’t a Watcher Olympics, Faith,” Giles pointed out, handing her a cup of tea for herself. “Apart from that I see no flaw in your plan whatsoever.”
She looked at the cup and shook her head fondly. “Still trying to push those teabags on the unsuspecting, G-Man? You hang around outside playgrounds with free samples?”
“Constantly,” he assured her. “I’m fully intending to have a Darjeeling and Rich Tea biscuit habit formed in every first grader in town by the end of the year.”
They all craned their necks to see how Wesley was doing. He had six piles now: Axes, crossbows, long swords, short swords, daggers, and stakes. Faith had been careful to remove anything that didn’t fall into one of those categories before she started this exercise, not wanting him confused by scimitars or throwing discs; they could come later when he had gained in confidence.
“That’s my boy,” Faith murmured.
Faith and Giles shared most of Wesley’s care between them, but everyone had chipped in: Buffy, Willow, Xander, Dawn. Dawn had spent hours with him going through her old books, reading him stories, doing simple sums with him with candy or cookies: ‘Okay. How many sweets do we have? Four? I make it that too. Now you eat one. Pick any one you like. That one? What colour is that one? Yes, you do know, you’re just teasing me. Is it pink? Is it yellow? Is it sky-blue-orange with polka dots? That’s right, it’s red. No, you have to eat it and you can talk with your mouth full because Giles isn’t here to tell you that you can’t. So, how many are there left? Three. Yes! And what colour are they…?’ Giles had loved Dawn like a daughter for a very long time now; or remembered loving her as a daughter anyway; but he wasn’t sure that he ever loved her with quite the same acute intensity as when she was being so endlessly patient with Wesley.
Faith carried the two cups of tea back into the room. “I’m only drinking this to keep you company. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start eating cucumber sandwiches and having a funny accent like you and Giles.”
“Don’t have a funny accent.” Wesley said it casually as he picked up the next weapon; gaining in confidence now, especially when he had an axe then a stake and then a crossbow; things that were nothing like each other and easy to categorize. “We just talk properly.” He darted her a look from under his eyelashes as he said that to see if she was going to be angry or if it was as funny to her as he thought it was.
“Making fun of the Americans now, eh?” She tugged at his t-shirt. “Who is going to have to pay for that with a jumbo sized tickling later?”
“I’ll tell Giles,” he said, grinning at her.
“Giles won’t save you. He’s going to watch some boring film with sub-titles. It’ll be just you and me. Okay, and Xander.”
“Xander’s coming?” Wesley looked up in surprised pleasure. “Tonight?”
“Yes, if you’re good, and do all your lessons. Maybe he will and maybe he’ll bring you some of those pancakes you like.”
Wesley quickly put stakes with stakes, axes with axes and swords with swords, then looked up her a little anxiously to see if he’d done it right.
She examined his piles carefully and then nodded. “That looks okay to me. Do you know what they’re called?”
“Big sword. Not so big sword. Knife. What’s that one?”
“You tell me.” She hefted the weapons book onto his lap. “Look it up.”
He looked down at the book, opened it, and then said, “I don’t know how. I look up words with Giles. He writes them down and then I look for them in the index – which is usually at the back but sometimes at the front if you can’t find it at the back.”
“Okay. Well, you turn the pages where the pictures are. Can you find the pictures?”
Wesley turned the pages very carefully. Giles had never said anything to him about books being fragile or needing to be handled with care, but he had either picked up Giles’ anxiety about them or else it was just something inherent to Wesley; even a Wesley who was having to relearn everything from scratch. He found the illustrations at last, colour plates in the centre and examined them with interest. He sometimes forgot what he was looking up, not through a lack of concentration skills – Giles thought he had excellent concentration skills – but because everything was so fascinating to him. After five minutes of him not turning a page as he avidly read what was written under each one, Faith said, “And what are you doing right now, Wes?”
He looked up guiltily. “Looking up weapons.”
“Which weapons?”
“The ones here…” He looked between the ones in the piles and the ones on the page a little sheepishly. “Which aren’t like these.”
“So…” She gave him a little nudge and he smiled and turned the page.
“Giles let’s me take my time.”
“Giles is as bad as you are. Some of us don’t have all the time in the world. You found them yet?” As he got to the page, she put her hand across the word underneath. “So, before you look, do you remember?”
“It's a crossbow but I still don't know why it's not a crucifix bow?”
“Because it's a crossbow.”
“But you said that a piece of wood that shape was a crucifix.”
“It is. But it’s a cross, too. Tell me what a crucifix can do?”
“It scares off vampires.”
“And what don’t we do with vampires? Ever?”
“Invite them in.” Wesley looked solemn. That one had been repeated to him several times with great intensity. He knew this was an important lesson; probably the most important lesson.
“And how do we know someone is a vampire just by looking at them?”
“We don’t.”
“So, what does that mean? If the doorbell rings and there’s someone standing outside the door who we don’t recognize…?”
“We never invite them in. We ask them to wait outside and we go and find Giles or you or Buffy or Willow or Xander and tell them someone is at the door.”
She ruffled his hair again. “That’s my boy. Drink your tea, it’ll get cold. And what does that mean? Knowing that we never invite them into this house?”
“That vampires can’t ever come here or hurt any of us as long as we’re in the house.” Wesley smiled when he said that. That was his safety blanket. The one they always gave back to him after telling him about how dangerous vampires were and how they could hurt him and how careful he had to be and why Buffy and Faith had to go out every night and fight them – that as long as he was in this house they could never come inside and hurt him or anyone else who was in the house with him.
“So – what’s this weapon called?”
“Crossbow.”
She took her hand off the lettering. “You know how to spell that?”
“Yes.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s easy.”
“Okay, smarty pants, because you’re going to have to do that soon. What’s this one called? If you don’t remember, look for the picture.”
Wesley did so and then said triumphantly: “Axe.”
“That’s right. And this one?”
“It’s a stake you kill vampires with, not a steak you eat.”
“And you know how to spell one from the other?”
Wesley nodded. “A stake you kill vampires with has a-k-e because it makes vampires achey when you kill them.” He grinned at her triumphantly, teasing her and knowing it.
“That’s one of Dawn’s isn’t it? How many dumb little sayings is she going to make you learn?”
“Giles has sayings too but he calls them mnemonics. He says it comes from mnemonikos, which is Greek, which comes from mnemon for mindful, which comes from mnasthai, to remember. We wrote mnemonikos in Greek.” He smiled at her triumphantly and Giles also smiled faintly at the memory of that lesson, Wesley’s fascination with those other alphabets, the different shapes the words made upon the page.
Faith gazed at him levelly. “I love Giles, I swear, but if you spend too much time with him you are never going to get laid. Okay.” Faith reached behind her and handed him a marker pen and a stack of scrap paper. “You need to write down what’s in each pile and then put the piece of paper on top of the pile.”
“Just the names of the weapons or how many there are as well?”
“Names and numbers, Watcher boy.
He smiled because that was a bit more difficult and he liked things that were a challenge. He wrote very neatly, copying exactly from the book and had a good visual eye for script, Giles had already noticed that; copperplate or cuneiform, if he was copying he could copy both equally well.
“So, what else did you do with Giles today?” Faith leaned against the couch from her position on the floor, drinking her tea as she watched him writing the labels for each pile.
“Copying passages. There was one about a cult of vampires with two swords, and one about some demons who pass on an aspect of themselves if they bleed on you. And another one.” He frowned, trying to remember. “Oh yes, one about different dimensions. Did you know there were hell dimensions?” He looked up from his writing.
“I heard about that.”
“Can we fall into them? If we were just going to the shops to buy something? Could we just trip and be in a hell dimension?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “It’s difficult to get to one of those places. You can’t do it by accident.”
His face cleared and Giles thought that, once again, Faith the impetuous instinctive teacher had headed off a nightmare that he, the anxious father figure, might have unconsciously caused. It was very difficult to try to tutor a fragile newly-seared-clean mind about the world in which they lived without laying up pockets of dark matter; nightmarish ideas and images to haunt him through his already sometimes tangled dreams.
Wesley frowned over his counting. “What comes after twenty-seven?”
“What comes after seven?”
“Eight.”
“So, why do you think it would be any different if there’s a twenty in front of it?”
Wesley thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “Oh. That makes sense.”
“Most things do.” She grinned at him. “Except for our lives.”
He reached behind him and held up the disreputable-looking soft toy rabbit the sweet but eccentric Fred from the other dimension had given him. “Feigenbaum controls the chaos.”
Faith leaned forward to pluck the rabbit from his fingers and regarded it critically. “Well, I don’t think he’s controlling it as well as he should be.”
Wesley glanced up at her from his calculations. “We haven’t fallen into a hell dimension, have we? You should thank him for that.”
“Thank you, Feigenbaum. You’re doing a bang-up job.” Faith solemnly shook his paw and then rolled her eyes. “What am I doing? You are not going to turn me as sappy as Xander.”
“Will you read to me?”
Wesley loved to be read to. Even though he was learning to read again himself at great speed and seemed to be able to learn several languages at once, there was something about being read to that made him happier than any book he read himself.
Faith narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t do the bedtime story thing. That’s Giles and Xander’s job.”
“Yes, you do.” Wesley frowned in confusion. “You’ve read to me lots of…”
Faith scuttled across the room to clamp a hand across his mouth, repeating firmly: “I don’t do the bedtime story thing.”
He gazed at her for a moment and then as she took her hand away said gravely, “So – lying then?”
“Damned right.” She thumped him gently on the arm. “That’s one of the things we always lie about. I am not being nailed for the sappy stuff.”
“If you read to me now it wouldn’t be bedtime and so it wouldn’t be sappy, would it?” he suggested.
“Don’t get cute with me.” She gave him Feigenbaum and checked his work with the weapons. “Okay. You got the names right. You got the numbers right. You are a good Watcher.”
He smiled at the praise, even half-joking praise like that, positively lit up because Faith had told him he was good.
She reached up and stroked his hair back, then took a comb out of her back pocket and with a few deft strokes tidied the hair she had earlier disordered. “I need to get you a better haircut. And we have got to do something about these garage sale clothes.” She looked into his eyes. “And you are a good Watcher, Wes. And by the time Giles and I have finished training you, you’re going to be the best Watcher ever in the history of Watcherdom.”
He positively beamed at that and then looked uncertain and anxious in case it wasn’t true. Faith put her arms around him and pulled him in against her and just for a second Giles saw the bleak misery wash across her face because the man she had known in the past – got drunk with and shared confidences with and gone on patrol with – was gone forever; but there was this other Wesley here now and there was a fierce tenderness upon her face when she held him that was unlike any other expression he had ever seen flicker across her mobile countenance. She rubbed his back gently – none of them could bear to touch him anything but gently, too mentally scarred still by what they had brought back from the Hyperion, all those wounds he hadn’t even noticed any more because what he had witnessed had been so terrible even razor blades and cigarettes held against his skin were nothing by comparison.
He loved to be held but he didn’t know how to ask to be held, which was why Faith, of all people, she who was the most uncomfortable person Giles had ever met with physical or emotional intimacy, the girl brought up in a trailer by a drunken mother and a succession of white trash boyfriends whom Giles very much feared had probably molested her on more than one occasion, had been forced to re-educate herself as someone who touched others. She was now someone who ruffled Wesley’s hair and hugged him and rubbed his back and held him when those strange inexplicable nightmares came back to haunt him. He had panic attacks sometimes and didn’t know why. But he never screamed or did anything audible to alert them. He would just go rigid and shake. Faith had developed something uncannily like a sixth sense where they were concerned. They could be talking in the kitchen having left him happily looking at books or interesting artefacts when she would suddenly sprint to where he was. By the time Giles and the others followed her in confusion, Wesley would be in her arms with her rocking him and rubbing his back and telling him that he was safe, he was absolutely safe and she was never ever going to let anything bad happen to him. Giles didn’t know if he was the brother she had admitted she had spent her childhood wishing for or the child she would probably never have, but whatever else Wesley was now, he was certainly her Achilles heel and her burden and without a doubt her most precious possession.
She eased him back away from her gently, rubbing his upper arms with light reassuring strokes. “Do you want me to read to you now?”
He lit up. “Now? Really?” He glanced out of the window. “Even though it’s still light?”
“Couch looks comfy enough. Be a while until Xander gets here, and Buffy and Giles haven’t finished making supper yet. What do you want to read?”
He darted across to his bookcase; the one that had looked so incongruous to Giles at first in the middle of his familiar home but which he now just accepted as part of the new order of things; that mixture of picture books and Dorling Kindersley guides and then first readers and now worn paperbacks and old hardbacks. Wesley plucked a book from it and held it up so Faith could see it.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, could you be any sappier? I can’t read a girls’ book.”
“Xander reads me girls’ books.”
“Well, Xander is way girlier than me. And you’re going to grow up girlier than him at this rate.”
Giles wondered if she’d noticed herself doing that; talking as if Wesley were a child. He supposed she meant grown up mentally, which was the process they were nurturing and observing at the moment in many ways, teaching him how to read and write and do arithmetic.
Wesley never cared what Faith said to him. He was sensitive and easy to crush in many ways; Giles spent a lot of time picking his words with care so as to keep his fragile self-esteem buoyant, but with Faith that didn’t seem to apply. Wesley knew she loved him. He knew it completely and he knew it apparently with every molecule in his being. She could tell him he looked like day old camel dung and he’d still know it was a joke. So, now he just beamed at her, even though if Giles had said the same thing in far more tactful words Wesley would have been upset or hurt or angry or sulky. “Nothing wrong with being girly.” Wesley pushed the book at her. “Slayers are girly.”
“No, we’re girls. Not girly. Girly is wanting someone to read A Little Princess to you for the twenty-seventh-millionth time.” But she was doing it, miraculously enough, she was settling herself on the couch so he could settle next to her, and she was opening the book at the first page and holding it out so he could read it with her and check that she wasn’t missing anything out. And she would show him the pictures and ask him questions throughout to make sure he was understanding everything – which he was now; not surprising really. Willow had explained it by saying Wesley was like a computer hard-drive that had been reformatted. Everything had been wiped but the memory and hard drive capacity were the same as they’d always been. Wesley still had a swift agile hungry mind; he just didn’t have his accumulation of nearly three decades of experience to draw upon.
Xander kept trying to find a silver lining, saying that Wesley would be able to read every Agatha Christie again and not know who the murderer was, and Giles was trying to make himself think that way as well, all those things that were new to him and exciting and fresh and fascinating. Otherwise he would have to break down and cry about what had been done to this brilliant young man more than his customary once a week.
He felt a gentle pressure on his arm and turned around to see Buffy there. She said gently, “He really is happy, Giles.”
“I know.” He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “It’s just… Those poor women…and all that knowledge… All that suffering, for nothing, to no purpose at all – the corpses of his friends used to make such a mockery of everything they must have held so dear.”
“That’s why it’s good he doesn’t remember,” she said softly. “It’s good that all he knows is this.” She spread out her hands to encapsulate the house, the people that he knew now, his life.
Giles knew she mourned Angel still. That she had fits of heartbroken weeping in the middle of the night, but she didn’t regret that Angelus was dead; she might be selfish, she had said, one night, but not so selfish that she wanted Angel to have to wake up to the memory of killing his own child, of raping Cordelia and Fred to death. Angel would never have to deal with any of that. Angel’s last moment upon this earth had been spent in a state of perfect happiness, knowing that his son was going to grow up to be a hero, and that all of his friends loved him absolutely. Everything from them on had been Angelus. But that didn’t mean she didn’t miss him, every single day. Giles was relieved, all the same, that it had not been him and Faith who had fired the bolts that turned Angelus to dust.
Giles thought about Wesley’s life, and this time made himself do as Xander did and not weep for what was gone but think about what it must be like for him to have so many new books to read and new things to learn and to be surrounded by people who loved him as much as they all did. Even more than they had done before, if he were honest, because in the past Wesley had been someone who presented a version of himself to them that had been likeable enough certainly and had won their genuine affection and respect, but now what they got was undisguised and innocent and trusted them all absolutely, and they loved him unconditionally with varying degrees of Faith’s passionate protective adoration.
Giles drew in a deep breath. “I wonder if he’d like a dog? I’ve found several references to dogs being sensitive to certain dangerous demon species that might pass for human with the right glamour. And for tracking, a dog could be invaluable.”
“And puppies are cute and Wesley would love it.” Buffy lit up. “The only problem would be that you’d have Xander, Willow and Dawn as permanent house guests too.”
Giles managed a proper smile this time. “There are worse fates. We could discuss it with Xander and the others, perhaps, when Faith takes Wesley to the library tomorrow. Try to pick a breed that would be suitable for Slayer duties and…amenable to…”
“Being spoilt rotten?”
“That too.”
Buffy said quietly, “He’s going to be okay, Giles. He’s not going to be who he was before, but he’s going to be someone who’s happy and relatively sane and who is safe with us. How many people can you say that about? I’m the girl with the prophetic dreams, remember? And I know in my heart that Wesley is going to be okay.”
Giles looked across at where Faith had her arm around him, Wesley bent over so that even though he was so much taller than her, he could rest his head on her chest; her fingers idly tousling his hair. He wondered if it was some kind of residual fear that made Wesley need to hear a heartbeat, and which made him so aware of heartbeats and pulses and the warmth of skin. Sometimes he was even soothed by the ticking of a watch. Giles had found it odd at first, disconcerting, to have someone who, whatever he was mentally was also a grown man, needed to press so closely against him and listen to his heartbeat, but he was used to it now. They all were; would absently hold out their wrists for him to feel the pulse or listen to the tick of their watches; would arrange themselves on the sofa so that he could hear their heartbeat easily. Wesley was listening to Faith’s heartbeat as he read the book, gaze darting along the print at a much swifter rate than even the last time they had read this story together.
He was learning at such a rate and was being taught with so much kindness – mistakes were being made, Giles had no doubt of that as they were all beginners in many ways but he hoped that their good intentions would outweigh any number of tactical stumbles – that it was not difficult to imagine that in a few years time Wesley would be to all outward appearances a perfectly ‘normal’ thirty-something. Someone who could be told the truth about what had happened to him in the past. It occurred to him that when that time came, they would all probably – in between congratulating themselves and Wesley upon this achievement – feel a pang of regret for these early days of stumbling along the path of discovery together.
At present each day seemed a little newer because so many things were exciting to Wesley. Old books Giles had almost forgotten about suddenly a source of another’s enthusiasm. He had almost forgotten how wonderful old leather smelt, how clever it was, the way a book was bound, the stitching and the glue, and the smell of the paper. All things Wesley revelled in, so excited by the different textures and scents of them. And food. All those foodstuffs they never really thought about that Wesley found so fascinating: the sticky and sweet and icy and spicy. The way different languages were written, what a pretty shape an ampersand made upon the page, how exciting it was to look at a cylinder seal and know someone must have truly been alive all those centuries ago to make these actual markings. Electricity and steam engines and fossils and popcorn and okapis. All those kings and queens and what had become of them. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Dinosaurs and sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. The difference between fantasy and reality and how some things that pretended to be real were illusions and some things that looked too fantastical to be real were entirely three-dimensional. It was all exciting to Wesley, and it was impossible to stand on the brink of someone else’s excitement and not be a little affected by it also. So, they were already a little less jaded than they’d been before, more emotionally open with each other because they could be nothing else with Wesley, minds stimulated by more than just the ever-present daily battle with the forces of darkness. Thinking of things he might want to see, places he might like to visit, books he might want to read, food he might want to taste; thinking of new ways to explain things, new ways of looking; rediscovering music and art and literature and natural history and ancient history and even sunsets and sunrises because the sun had been rising every day before but it was different somehow when one decided to drive Wesley up to a viewpoint so he could watch it come up. Or when he discovered pictures or descriptions of places one or more of you had always intended to visit to which that there was now an excuse to go because it would be so wonderful for Wesley to see the pyramids, to see the Grand Canyon, to visit the ocean so he could watch the sun sinking into the sea.
They had taken on this mind-wrecked body-ravaged refugee from a tragedy and he had made their lives better. Giles realized that quite suddenly; that it wasn’t just that Wesley would one day be okay, was indeed already okay, was excited and stimulated and fascinated by the world around him and knew himself to be safe and loved and of vital importance to every single person that ever crossed the threshold to the small kingdom that was his home; but that they were all different because of him. Faith had a purpose she had never had before; not just the slave to a mythic destiny but the protector of this fascinating human being who certainly loved her as no one else ever had or perhaps ever would. And Giles felt as if some part of him – a small part but there nevertheless – that had been left unfulfilled by helping Buffy in her work when she was never going to be interested in the whys and wherefores of the research, only the results – was being satisfied every day with these quiet lessons with Wesley. And Dawn had started to sit in on some of them, asking very humbly if they would mind if she also copied out the passages in cuneiform and Aramaic and listened to the explanations of how the different languages had evolved. Just in case she went insane and decided to become a Watcher herself some day. There was a spring in Xander’s step Giles hadn’t seen before as well; frustrated parenting instincts finally getting an outlet with someone that didn’t feel smothered by his attention, and because Xander had never really had enough love, and Wesley undoubtedly loved him. The world had too often reflected back to Xander that he was unimportant; not the one chosen, not the one necessary. What Wesley reflected back to Xander was that he was a good man who made someone who had been horribly traumatized smile with relief when he saw him, and who felt better when he was around and missed him when he left.
And Willow’s fascination with magic had been – not curtailed really, just moderated a little – by Wesley’s equal interest in it. It was as if answering his questions about the way magic worked, explaining to him the way magic demanded balance, how dangerous it could be, how one always had to be aware that one was dealing with a natural force, as potentially powerful as a lightning strike, had made her realize it also in a way she had never done before. She did smaller spells now and seemed to think long and hard about whether each one was necessary, what it would take from her, the surrounding environment, if it would in any way cause another small imbalance to the cosmos. She had promised him they could do some very small spells together but only if he promised her faithfully that he would never do any spells without her or Giles with him. He was a quick study and repeated it back to her so often – how dangerous it was, what damage it could do, why one must always be very careful and never use magic frivolously – that she seemed to recognize and understand those truths in a way she never truly had before. Giles had noticed she had started meeting Tara for coffee again and that when he saw Tara in the street now she was smiling a lot more often; a reconciliation something that seemed to be very much on the cards.
Their good deed to a friend they had barely seen for a few years had turned into something that had benefited all of them; even Buffy smiled more now, could not go from being gentle and quiet and patient with Wesley to being intolerant and uncaring with her sister, while Dawn seemed less inclined to mope these days, never lacking a focus or diversion because Wesley would always enjoy another lesson or to be read to or to try a science experiment or painting or clay modelling or anything at all that Dawn might want to do. Having someone who was never too busy to play with her and was always happy to see her had done wonders for Dawn’s feeling of being unwanted. Giles had to admit, if only in the privacy of his own head, that it had done a great deal to alter his feeling of being redundant as well. None of them had ever been so needed as they were by this extremely fragile fellow human being, and yet taking care of Wesley rarely felt like a chore and so often seemed to repay their time and trouble tenfold.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” Buffy asked tentatively. “That Wesley is going to be okay? You know I wouldn’t say it unless I truly believed it.”
Giles smiled at her and this time there was no need for subterfuge or eye avoidance. “I believe you, Buffy. And I think you’re absolutely right.” He looked back into the sitting room where Faith was just turning the page, Wesley listening to her heartbeat as he followed the story with rapt attention, her fingers still gently disarranging his hair. “I think he’s going to be okay too. Perhaps better than okay.” And perhaps all of us are going to be better than okay because of Wesley too. Or perhaps Feigenbaum really is the Master of Chaos and we owe it all to a lop-eared stuffed bunny rabbit. But either way, I think that out of that terrible tragedy, that pointlessly cruel loss of valuable life, something rather important is taking place. I believe that every one of us values every hour of every day in a way we never did before and I think I know now that the world is a wonderful, impossible, terrible and fascinating place and we should never take it or our place in it for granted.
He would tell Buffy some or all of what he was thinking later, the way he always did with her eventually. But for now he just felt lighter, not just his heart, but as if some leaden weight upon his soul, that had perhaps been there since Jenny’s death, had finally been lifted. Although all he said aloud was, “Oh look, there’s Xander coming. I think he’s brought pancakes.”
The End
Two months later in a Sunnydale in a different reality...
Giles watched from the kitchen with Buffy as Faith went about setting up the afternoon’s lesson. He and Buffy were pretending to be preparing an early supper, of course, something they could all enjoy before the two Slayers went out on patrol, but in reality they were watching. Buffy, because she was trying to learn how to do what Faith did, and Giles because he couldn’t help himself; he felt so acutely protective of Wesley and his progress that it was difficult for him to share his care and education without constantly hovering, and yet he knew there were things that Faith could offer that he could not.
Right now, Faith was unrecognisable from the woman who gave vampires that chilling smile before the staked them. She was wrinkling her nose at the man sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Okay – so, today we’re practising weapons recognition. What I’m going to do is make a big crash, okay? Really big noise. And I’m telling you now that even though it sounds scary, it isn’t because it’s just me doing…this…”
Giles winced instinctively as Faith upended a bag full of weapons onto the floor with a sound like several tin trays being hurled into a dustbin and then vigorously shaken. He tended to keep things quiet around Wesley, as did Willow and Xander. It was just their approach. Just as they handled him gently and didn’t say ‘boo’ to him when they came up behind him. Or tickle him. Faith was the wild card with her own approach to rehabilitation.
Wesley hunched up his shoulders and pulled a face at the hideous crashing noise but he smiled tentatively after a minute because Faith was crouching in front of him, grinning at him. She ruffled his hair. “See, sometimes you gotta be noisy. It’s good for the soul.”
“Giles says…”
“Giles is a librarian. You remember what that is?”
Wesley sat up straighter when he answered a question. Faith had teased him about it. She had tried to make him bend to one side or slouch and then tickled him mercilessly and he had giggled a lot but when she asked the next question he still straightened his spine and set his shoulders back. He did it now.
“Someone who cares about books. And the order they go on the shelves.”
“And you remember the notice in the library when we went there the other day?”
“It said we had to be quiet.”
“That’s why Giles thinks everything should be quiet all the time. Too much time spent in libraries.”
“I like libraries.”
“Of course you do. You’re a Watcher. They all like libraries. And tea. And wearing corduroy.” She tugged at his shirt. “Who picked this out for you?”
“I picked it.” He smiled up at her. Faith was the other person in the world who made him feel completely safe. Faith and Giles were the hundred percenters. Willow was about ninety-five percent because of the magic which sometimes made her eyes go black. Xander around the same because Wesley had seen him get drunk once, and people slurring their words worried him a little. Buffy was about ninety percent because of the arguments with Dawn; Dawn around the same because of the arguments with Buffy. But they all made him feel degrees of safe and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t make him light up with pleasure when they arrived at Giles’ door.
“You have cra-crummy Watcher taste. I’m going to get you a stud for this ear…” She tugged it. “And buy you some tight jeans and a sexy t-shirt and make you come out dancing. One of those shirts that don’t cover your tummy. Not that you have a tummy, Skinny-ribs.”
Wesley giggled again because she was tickling him where his imaginary sexy t-shirt would come. He curled up when she tickled him, all boneless and childlike. Sometimes it made Giles smile and sometimes it just made him want to weep.
“Not skinny…” He pretended to pout, looking at her from under his eyelashes.
“Are too skinny.” She picked up an axe. “You ready for today’s lesson?”
He sat up straighter, legs crossed, looking as if he were going to do yoga. He liked lessons. Loved to learn. Was so proud of each new thing he grasped. “Yes.”
“You have to go through all these weapons and put them in piles. Put the ones that look like each other in the same pile. So, where would you put this one?” She handed him the axe and he placed it carefully on his right side. “And this one?” She handed him a crossbow. He took it and compared it gravely with the axe and then put it on his left side. “And what about this one?” That was harder, as it was a sword, and so had a handle and then a sharp metallic edge, but its shape was different and after a moment’s consideration, Wesley put that in a third pile in front of his crossed legs. He looked to her for a reaction and she gave him a half-smile. “Okay, pretty smart so far, but we’ve got a lot of weapons here. What about this one?” Another sword, but shorter than the others. Wesley took it from her and compared it to the crossbow then the axe and then the sword, he held it over the sword, the handle the same but the blade shorter and after a moment’s consideration placed it tentatively between the sword and the axe.
“Now, you pick one.” As he reached across and then hesitated, looking up at her for advice, she shook her head, still smiling at him. “No, Wes, you’ve got to choose yourself. And it doesn’t matter which one you choose first because you’re going to have to put every single one into a pile.”
“All of them?” He looked at the pile wide-eyed; expression so trusting and earnest that it was very difficult to believe he would be thirty before many months were past.
“Every single one. And I’m not going to help. You have to do it yourself. And then do you know what you have to do?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you when we get there. Right now, you have to put them in piles. Do you want some tea?”
He smiled. “Yes, please.”
“You drink too much tea, you know that?”
“I like it.”
“I like sex with bikers. Don’t see me doing that every hour on the hour, do you?”
He giggled again and darted a look at where Giles might be watching them. Giles wasn’t sure how Wesley had ended him up perceiving him as the disapproving adult and Faith as the naughty friend, but he always did that, looked to see if Giles was going to tell anyone off. Faith got to her feet and ruffled his hair again. Wesley rolled his eyes at her and combed it carefully with his fingers, then leant forward to pick the next weapon, eyes alight with interest now as he compared and contrasted.
“You’re so patient,” Buffy murmured as Faith came into the kitchen. “I wish I was as patient with Dawn.”
Faith shrugged. “He’s my Watcher. Least he’s going to be once I get him retrained. I’m going to enter him for the Watcher Olympics and he’s going to kick the ass of every crabby old fart Quentin Travers thinks is better than him.”
“There isn’t a Watcher Olympics, Faith,” Giles pointed out, handing her a cup of tea for herself. “Apart from that I see no flaw in your plan whatsoever.”
She looked at the cup and shook her head fondly. “Still trying to push those teabags on the unsuspecting, G-Man? You hang around outside playgrounds with free samples?”
“Constantly,” he assured her. “I’m fully intending to have a Darjeeling and Rich Tea biscuit habit formed in every first grader in town by the end of the year.”
They all craned their necks to see how Wesley was doing. He had six piles now: Axes, crossbows, long swords, short swords, daggers, and stakes. Faith had been careful to remove anything that didn’t fall into one of those categories before she started this exercise, not wanting him confused by scimitars or throwing discs; they could come later when he had gained in confidence.
“That’s my boy,” Faith murmured.
Faith and Giles shared most of Wesley’s care between them, but everyone had chipped in: Buffy, Willow, Xander, Dawn. Dawn had spent hours with him going through her old books, reading him stories, doing simple sums with him with candy or cookies: ‘Okay. How many sweets do we have? Four? I make it that too. Now you eat one. Pick any one you like. That one? What colour is that one? Yes, you do know, you’re just teasing me. Is it pink? Is it yellow? Is it sky-blue-orange with polka dots? That’s right, it’s red. No, you have to eat it and you can talk with your mouth full because Giles isn’t here to tell you that you can’t. So, how many are there left? Three. Yes! And what colour are they…?’ Giles had loved Dawn like a daughter for a very long time now; or remembered loving her as a daughter anyway; but he wasn’t sure that he ever loved her with quite the same acute intensity as when she was being so endlessly patient with Wesley.
Faith carried the two cups of tea back into the room. “I’m only drinking this to keep you company. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start eating cucumber sandwiches and having a funny accent like you and Giles.”
“Don’t have a funny accent.” Wesley said it casually as he picked up the next weapon; gaining in confidence now, especially when he had an axe then a stake and then a crossbow; things that were nothing like each other and easy to categorize. “We just talk properly.” He darted her a look from under his eyelashes as he said that to see if she was going to be angry or if it was as funny to her as he thought it was.
“Making fun of the Americans now, eh?” She tugged at his t-shirt. “Who is going to have to pay for that with a jumbo sized tickling later?”
“I’ll tell Giles,” he said, grinning at her.
“Giles won’t save you. He’s going to watch some boring film with sub-titles. It’ll be just you and me. Okay, and Xander.”
“Xander’s coming?” Wesley looked up in surprised pleasure. “Tonight?”
“Yes, if you’re good, and do all your lessons. Maybe he will and maybe he’ll bring you some of those pancakes you like.”
Wesley quickly put stakes with stakes, axes with axes and swords with swords, then looked up her a little anxiously to see if he’d done it right.
She examined his piles carefully and then nodded. “That looks okay to me. Do you know what they’re called?”
“Big sword. Not so big sword. Knife. What’s that one?”
“You tell me.” She hefted the weapons book onto his lap. “Look it up.”
He looked down at the book, opened it, and then said, “I don’t know how. I look up words with Giles. He writes them down and then I look for them in the index – which is usually at the back but sometimes at the front if you can’t find it at the back.”
“Okay. Well, you turn the pages where the pictures are. Can you find the pictures?”
Wesley turned the pages very carefully. Giles had never said anything to him about books being fragile or needing to be handled with care, but he had either picked up Giles’ anxiety about them or else it was just something inherent to Wesley; even a Wesley who was having to relearn everything from scratch. He found the illustrations at last, colour plates in the centre and examined them with interest. He sometimes forgot what he was looking up, not through a lack of concentration skills – Giles thought he had excellent concentration skills – but because everything was so fascinating to him. After five minutes of him not turning a page as he avidly read what was written under each one, Faith said, “And what are you doing right now, Wes?”
He looked up guiltily. “Looking up weapons.”
“Which weapons?”
“The ones here…” He looked between the ones in the piles and the ones on the page a little sheepishly. “Which aren’t like these.”
“So…” She gave him a little nudge and he smiled and turned the page.
“Giles let’s me take my time.”
“Giles is as bad as you are. Some of us don’t have all the time in the world. You found them yet?” As he got to the page, she put her hand across the word underneath. “So, before you look, do you remember?”
“It's a crossbow but I still don't know why it's not a crucifix bow?”
“Because it's a crossbow.”
“But you said that a piece of wood that shape was a crucifix.”
“It is. But it’s a cross, too. Tell me what a crucifix can do?”
“It scares off vampires.”
“And what don’t we do with vampires? Ever?”
“Invite them in.” Wesley looked solemn. That one had been repeated to him several times with great intensity. He knew this was an important lesson; probably the most important lesson.
“And how do we know someone is a vampire just by looking at them?”
“We don’t.”
“So, what does that mean? If the doorbell rings and there’s someone standing outside the door who we don’t recognize…?”
“We never invite them in. We ask them to wait outside and we go and find Giles or you or Buffy or Willow or Xander and tell them someone is at the door.”
She ruffled his hair again. “That’s my boy. Drink your tea, it’ll get cold. And what does that mean? Knowing that we never invite them into this house?”
“That vampires can’t ever come here or hurt any of us as long as we’re in the house.” Wesley smiled when he said that. That was his safety blanket. The one they always gave back to him after telling him about how dangerous vampires were and how they could hurt him and how careful he had to be and why Buffy and Faith had to go out every night and fight them – that as long as he was in this house they could never come inside and hurt him or anyone else who was in the house with him.
“So – what’s this weapon called?”
“Crossbow.”
She took her hand off the lettering. “You know how to spell that?”
“Yes.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s easy.”
“Okay, smarty pants, because you’re going to have to do that soon. What’s this one called? If you don’t remember, look for the picture.”
Wesley did so and then said triumphantly: “Axe.”
“That’s right. And this one?”
“It’s a stake you kill vampires with, not a steak you eat.”
“And you know how to spell one from the other?”
Wesley nodded. “A stake you kill vampires with has a-k-e because it makes vampires achey when you kill them.” He grinned at her triumphantly, teasing her and knowing it.
“That’s one of Dawn’s isn’t it? How many dumb little sayings is she going to make you learn?”
“Giles has sayings too but he calls them mnemonics. He says it comes from mnemonikos, which is Greek, which comes from mnemon for mindful, which comes from mnasthai, to remember. We wrote mnemonikos in Greek.” He smiled at her triumphantly and Giles also smiled faintly at the memory of that lesson, Wesley’s fascination with those other alphabets, the different shapes the words made upon the page.
Faith gazed at him levelly. “I love Giles, I swear, but if you spend too much time with him you are never going to get laid. Okay.” Faith reached behind her and handed him a marker pen and a stack of scrap paper. “You need to write down what’s in each pile and then put the piece of paper on top of the pile.”
“Just the names of the weapons or how many there are as well?”
“Names and numbers, Watcher boy.
He smiled because that was a bit more difficult and he liked things that were a challenge. He wrote very neatly, copying exactly from the book and had a good visual eye for script, Giles had already noticed that; copperplate or cuneiform, if he was copying he could copy both equally well.
“So, what else did you do with Giles today?” Faith leaned against the couch from her position on the floor, drinking her tea as she watched him writing the labels for each pile.
“Copying passages. There was one about a cult of vampires with two swords, and one about some demons who pass on an aspect of themselves if they bleed on you. And another one.” He frowned, trying to remember. “Oh yes, one about different dimensions. Did you know there were hell dimensions?” He looked up from his writing.
“I heard about that.”
“Can we fall into them? If we were just going to the shops to buy something? Could we just trip and be in a hell dimension?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “It’s difficult to get to one of those places. You can’t do it by accident.”
His face cleared and Giles thought that, once again, Faith the impetuous instinctive teacher had headed off a nightmare that he, the anxious father figure, might have unconsciously caused. It was very difficult to try to tutor a fragile newly-seared-clean mind about the world in which they lived without laying up pockets of dark matter; nightmarish ideas and images to haunt him through his already sometimes tangled dreams.
Wesley frowned over his counting. “What comes after twenty-seven?”
“What comes after seven?”
“Eight.”
“So, why do you think it would be any different if there’s a twenty in front of it?”
Wesley thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “Oh. That makes sense.”
“Most things do.” She grinned at him. “Except for our lives.”
He reached behind him and held up the disreputable-looking soft toy rabbit the sweet but eccentric Fred from the other dimension had given him. “Feigenbaum controls the chaos.”
Faith leaned forward to pluck the rabbit from his fingers and regarded it critically. “Well, I don’t think he’s controlling it as well as he should be.”
Wesley glanced up at her from his calculations. “We haven’t fallen into a hell dimension, have we? You should thank him for that.”
“Thank you, Feigenbaum. You’re doing a bang-up job.” Faith solemnly shook his paw and then rolled her eyes. “What am I doing? You are not going to turn me as sappy as Xander.”
“Will you read to me?”
Wesley loved to be read to. Even though he was learning to read again himself at great speed and seemed to be able to learn several languages at once, there was something about being read to that made him happier than any book he read himself.
Faith narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t do the bedtime story thing. That’s Giles and Xander’s job.”
“Yes, you do.” Wesley frowned in confusion. “You’ve read to me lots of…”
Faith scuttled across the room to clamp a hand across his mouth, repeating firmly: “I don’t do the bedtime story thing.”
He gazed at her for a moment and then as she took her hand away said gravely, “So – lying then?”
“Damned right.” She thumped him gently on the arm. “That’s one of the things we always lie about. I am not being nailed for the sappy stuff.”
“If you read to me now it wouldn’t be bedtime and so it wouldn’t be sappy, would it?” he suggested.
“Don’t get cute with me.” She gave him Feigenbaum and checked his work with the weapons. “Okay. You got the names right. You got the numbers right. You are a good Watcher.”
He smiled at the praise, even half-joking praise like that, positively lit up because Faith had told him he was good.
She reached up and stroked his hair back, then took a comb out of her back pocket and with a few deft strokes tidied the hair she had earlier disordered. “I need to get you a better haircut. And we have got to do something about these garage sale clothes.” She looked into his eyes. “And you are a good Watcher, Wes. And by the time Giles and I have finished training you, you’re going to be the best Watcher ever in the history of Watcherdom.”
He positively beamed at that and then looked uncertain and anxious in case it wasn’t true. Faith put her arms around him and pulled him in against her and just for a second Giles saw the bleak misery wash across her face because the man she had known in the past – got drunk with and shared confidences with and gone on patrol with – was gone forever; but there was this other Wesley here now and there was a fierce tenderness upon her face when she held him that was unlike any other expression he had ever seen flicker across her mobile countenance. She rubbed his back gently – none of them could bear to touch him anything but gently, too mentally scarred still by what they had brought back from the Hyperion, all those wounds he hadn’t even noticed any more because what he had witnessed had been so terrible even razor blades and cigarettes held against his skin were nothing by comparison.
He loved to be held but he didn’t know how to ask to be held, which was why Faith, of all people, she who was the most uncomfortable person Giles had ever met with physical or emotional intimacy, the girl brought up in a trailer by a drunken mother and a succession of white trash boyfriends whom Giles very much feared had probably molested her on more than one occasion, had been forced to re-educate herself as someone who touched others. She was now someone who ruffled Wesley’s hair and hugged him and rubbed his back and held him when those strange inexplicable nightmares came back to haunt him. He had panic attacks sometimes and didn’t know why. But he never screamed or did anything audible to alert them. He would just go rigid and shake. Faith had developed something uncannily like a sixth sense where they were concerned. They could be talking in the kitchen having left him happily looking at books or interesting artefacts when she would suddenly sprint to where he was. By the time Giles and the others followed her in confusion, Wesley would be in her arms with her rocking him and rubbing his back and telling him that he was safe, he was absolutely safe and she was never ever going to let anything bad happen to him. Giles didn’t know if he was the brother she had admitted she had spent her childhood wishing for or the child she would probably never have, but whatever else Wesley was now, he was certainly her Achilles heel and her burden and without a doubt her most precious possession.
She eased him back away from her gently, rubbing his upper arms with light reassuring strokes. “Do you want me to read to you now?”
He lit up. “Now? Really?” He glanced out of the window. “Even though it’s still light?”
“Couch looks comfy enough. Be a while until Xander gets here, and Buffy and Giles haven’t finished making supper yet. What do you want to read?”
He darted across to his bookcase; the one that had looked so incongruous to Giles at first in the middle of his familiar home but which he now just accepted as part of the new order of things; that mixture of picture books and Dorling Kindersley guides and then first readers and now worn paperbacks and old hardbacks. Wesley plucked a book from it and held it up so Faith could see it.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, could you be any sappier? I can’t read a girls’ book.”
“Xander reads me girls’ books.”
“Well, Xander is way girlier than me. And you’re going to grow up girlier than him at this rate.”
Giles wondered if she’d noticed herself doing that; talking as if Wesley were a child. He supposed she meant grown up mentally, which was the process they were nurturing and observing at the moment in many ways, teaching him how to read and write and do arithmetic.
Wesley never cared what Faith said to him. He was sensitive and easy to crush in many ways; Giles spent a lot of time picking his words with care so as to keep his fragile self-esteem buoyant, but with Faith that didn’t seem to apply. Wesley knew she loved him. He knew it completely and he knew it apparently with every molecule in his being. She could tell him he looked like day old camel dung and he’d still know it was a joke. So, now he just beamed at her, even though if Giles had said the same thing in far more tactful words Wesley would have been upset or hurt or angry or sulky. “Nothing wrong with being girly.” Wesley pushed the book at her. “Slayers are girly.”
“No, we’re girls. Not girly. Girly is wanting someone to read A Little Princess to you for the twenty-seventh-millionth time.” But she was doing it, miraculously enough, she was settling herself on the couch so he could settle next to her, and she was opening the book at the first page and holding it out so he could read it with her and check that she wasn’t missing anything out. And she would show him the pictures and ask him questions throughout to make sure he was understanding everything – which he was now; not surprising really. Willow had explained it by saying Wesley was like a computer hard-drive that had been reformatted. Everything had been wiped but the memory and hard drive capacity were the same as they’d always been. Wesley still had a swift agile hungry mind; he just didn’t have his accumulation of nearly three decades of experience to draw upon.
Xander kept trying to find a silver lining, saying that Wesley would be able to read every Agatha Christie again and not know who the murderer was, and Giles was trying to make himself think that way as well, all those things that were new to him and exciting and fresh and fascinating. Otherwise he would have to break down and cry about what had been done to this brilliant young man more than his customary once a week.
He felt a gentle pressure on his arm and turned around to see Buffy there. She said gently, “He really is happy, Giles.”
“I know.” He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “It’s just… Those poor women…and all that knowledge… All that suffering, for nothing, to no purpose at all – the corpses of his friends used to make such a mockery of everything they must have held so dear.”
“That’s why it’s good he doesn’t remember,” she said softly. “It’s good that all he knows is this.” She spread out her hands to encapsulate the house, the people that he knew now, his life.
Giles knew she mourned Angel still. That she had fits of heartbroken weeping in the middle of the night, but she didn’t regret that Angelus was dead; she might be selfish, she had said, one night, but not so selfish that she wanted Angel to have to wake up to the memory of killing his own child, of raping Cordelia and Fred to death. Angel would never have to deal with any of that. Angel’s last moment upon this earth had been spent in a state of perfect happiness, knowing that his son was going to grow up to be a hero, and that all of his friends loved him absolutely. Everything from them on had been Angelus. But that didn’t mean she didn’t miss him, every single day. Giles was relieved, all the same, that it had not been him and Faith who had fired the bolts that turned Angelus to dust.
Giles thought about Wesley’s life, and this time made himself do as Xander did and not weep for what was gone but think about what it must be like for him to have so many new books to read and new things to learn and to be surrounded by people who loved him as much as they all did. Even more than they had done before, if he were honest, because in the past Wesley had been someone who presented a version of himself to them that had been likeable enough certainly and had won their genuine affection and respect, but now what they got was undisguised and innocent and trusted them all absolutely, and they loved him unconditionally with varying degrees of Faith’s passionate protective adoration.
Giles drew in a deep breath. “I wonder if he’d like a dog? I’ve found several references to dogs being sensitive to certain dangerous demon species that might pass for human with the right glamour. And for tracking, a dog could be invaluable.”
“And puppies are cute and Wesley would love it.” Buffy lit up. “The only problem would be that you’d have Xander, Willow and Dawn as permanent house guests too.”
Giles managed a proper smile this time. “There are worse fates. We could discuss it with Xander and the others, perhaps, when Faith takes Wesley to the library tomorrow. Try to pick a breed that would be suitable for Slayer duties and…amenable to…”
“Being spoilt rotten?”
“That too.”
Buffy said quietly, “He’s going to be okay, Giles. He’s not going to be who he was before, but he’s going to be someone who’s happy and relatively sane and who is safe with us. How many people can you say that about? I’m the girl with the prophetic dreams, remember? And I know in my heart that Wesley is going to be okay.”
Giles looked across at where Faith had her arm around him, Wesley bent over so that even though he was so much taller than her, he could rest his head on her chest; her fingers idly tousling his hair. He wondered if it was some kind of residual fear that made Wesley need to hear a heartbeat, and which made him so aware of heartbeats and pulses and the warmth of skin. Sometimes he was even soothed by the ticking of a watch. Giles had found it odd at first, disconcerting, to have someone who, whatever he was mentally was also a grown man, needed to press so closely against him and listen to his heartbeat, but he was used to it now. They all were; would absently hold out their wrists for him to feel the pulse or listen to the tick of their watches; would arrange themselves on the sofa so that he could hear their heartbeat easily. Wesley was listening to Faith’s heartbeat as he read the book, gaze darting along the print at a much swifter rate than even the last time they had read this story together.
He was learning at such a rate and was being taught with so much kindness – mistakes were being made, Giles had no doubt of that as they were all beginners in many ways but he hoped that their good intentions would outweigh any number of tactical stumbles – that it was not difficult to imagine that in a few years time Wesley would be to all outward appearances a perfectly ‘normal’ thirty-something. Someone who could be told the truth about what had happened to him in the past. It occurred to him that when that time came, they would all probably – in between congratulating themselves and Wesley upon this achievement – feel a pang of regret for these early days of stumbling along the path of discovery together.
At present each day seemed a little newer because so many things were exciting to Wesley. Old books Giles had almost forgotten about suddenly a source of another’s enthusiasm. He had almost forgotten how wonderful old leather smelt, how clever it was, the way a book was bound, the stitching and the glue, and the smell of the paper. All things Wesley revelled in, so excited by the different textures and scents of them. And food. All those foodstuffs they never really thought about that Wesley found so fascinating: the sticky and sweet and icy and spicy. The way different languages were written, what a pretty shape an ampersand made upon the page, how exciting it was to look at a cylinder seal and know someone must have truly been alive all those centuries ago to make these actual markings. Electricity and steam engines and fossils and popcorn and okapis. All those kings and queens and what had become of them. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Dinosaurs and sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. The difference between fantasy and reality and how some things that pretended to be real were illusions and some things that looked too fantastical to be real were entirely three-dimensional. It was all exciting to Wesley, and it was impossible to stand on the brink of someone else’s excitement and not be a little affected by it also. So, they were already a little less jaded than they’d been before, more emotionally open with each other because they could be nothing else with Wesley, minds stimulated by more than just the ever-present daily battle with the forces of darkness. Thinking of things he might want to see, places he might like to visit, books he might want to read, food he might want to taste; thinking of new ways to explain things, new ways of looking; rediscovering music and art and literature and natural history and ancient history and even sunsets and sunrises because the sun had been rising every day before but it was different somehow when one decided to drive Wesley up to a viewpoint so he could watch it come up. Or when he discovered pictures or descriptions of places one or more of you had always intended to visit to which that there was now an excuse to go because it would be so wonderful for Wesley to see the pyramids, to see the Grand Canyon, to visit the ocean so he could watch the sun sinking into the sea.
They had taken on this mind-wrecked body-ravaged refugee from a tragedy and he had made their lives better. Giles realized that quite suddenly; that it wasn’t just that Wesley would one day be okay, was indeed already okay, was excited and stimulated and fascinated by the world around him and knew himself to be safe and loved and of vital importance to every single person that ever crossed the threshold to the small kingdom that was his home; but that they were all different because of him. Faith had a purpose she had never had before; not just the slave to a mythic destiny but the protector of this fascinating human being who certainly loved her as no one else ever had or perhaps ever would. And Giles felt as if some part of him – a small part but there nevertheless – that had been left unfulfilled by helping Buffy in her work when she was never going to be interested in the whys and wherefores of the research, only the results – was being satisfied every day with these quiet lessons with Wesley. And Dawn had started to sit in on some of them, asking very humbly if they would mind if she also copied out the passages in cuneiform and Aramaic and listened to the explanations of how the different languages had evolved. Just in case she went insane and decided to become a Watcher herself some day. There was a spring in Xander’s step Giles hadn’t seen before as well; frustrated parenting instincts finally getting an outlet with someone that didn’t feel smothered by his attention, and because Xander had never really had enough love, and Wesley undoubtedly loved him. The world had too often reflected back to Xander that he was unimportant; not the one chosen, not the one necessary. What Wesley reflected back to Xander was that he was a good man who made someone who had been horribly traumatized smile with relief when he saw him, and who felt better when he was around and missed him when he left.
And Willow’s fascination with magic had been – not curtailed really, just moderated a little – by Wesley’s equal interest in it. It was as if answering his questions about the way magic worked, explaining to him the way magic demanded balance, how dangerous it could be, how one always had to be aware that one was dealing with a natural force, as potentially powerful as a lightning strike, had made her realize it also in a way she had never done before. She did smaller spells now and seemed to think long and hard about whether each one was necessary, what it would take from her, the surrounding environment, if it would in any way cause another small imbalance to the cosmos. She had promised him they could do some very small spells together but only if he promised her faithfully that he would never do any spells without her or Giles with him. He was a quick study and repeated it back to her so often – how dangerous it was, what damage it could do, why one must always be very careful and never use magic frivolously – that she seemed to recognize and understand those truths in a way she never truly had before. Giles had noticed she had started meeting Tara for coffee again and that when he saw Tara in the street now she was smiling a lot more often; a reconciliation something that seemed to be very much on the cards.
Their good deed to a friend they had barely seen for a few years had turned into something that had benefited all of them; even Buffy smiled more now, could not go from being gentle and quiet and patient with Wesley to being intolerant and uncaring with her sister, while Dawn seemed less inclined to mope these days, never lacking a focus or diversion because Wesley would always enjoy another lesson or to be read to or to try a science experiment or painting or clay modelling or anything at all that Dawn might want to do. Having someone who was never too busy to play with her and was always happy to see her had done wonders for Dawn’s feeling of being unwanted. Giles had to admit, if only in the privacy of his own head, that it had done a great deal to alter his feeling of being redundant as well. None of them had ever been so needed as they were by this extremely fragile fellow human being, and yet taking care of Wesley rarely felt like a chore and so often seemed to repay their time and trouble tenfold.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” Buffy asked tentatively. “That Wesley is going to be okay? You know I wouldn’t say it unless I truly believed it.”
Giles smiled at her and this time there was no need for subterfuge or eye avoidance. “I believe you, Buffy. And I think you’re absolutely right.” He looked back into the sitting room where Faith was just turning the page, Wesley listening to her heartbeat as he followed the story with rapt attention, her fingers still gently disarranging his hair. “I think he’s going to be okay too. Perhaps better than okay.” And perhaps all of us are going to be better than okay because of Wesley too. Or perhaps Feigenbaum really is the Master of Chaos and we owe it all to a lop-eared stuffed bunny rabbit. But either way, I think that out of that terrible tragedy, that pointlessly cruel loss of valuable life, something rather important is taking place. I believe that every one of us values every hour of every day in a way we never did before and I think I know now that the world is a wonderful, impossible, terrible and fascinating place and we should never take it or our place in it for granted.
He would tell Buffy some or all of what he was thinking later, the way he always did with her eventually. But for now he just felt lighter, not just his heart, but as if some leaden weight upon his soul, that had perhaps been there since Jenny’s death, had finally been lifted. Although all he said aloud was, “Oh look, there’s Xander coming. I think he’s brought pancakes.”
The End
