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Darkness Visible, Part Four

“Would you believe we spend all our time hunting vampires and the one ingredient we can’t get is the bodily fluid of a soulless being?” Gunn demanded. Not for the first time he wished that the elevator occasionally worked in Wesley’s apartment building or that the guy had got himself a place on the ground floor. He was getting seriously sick of having to drag his ass up these stairs a dozen times a month.

 

Spike shrugged. “Told you it would bite you all in the nuts one day being so pernickety about cleaning your weapons.”

 

“There’s supposed to be a nest in that abandoned warehouse by the docks.” Normally there was nothing Gunn would have liked better than to get axing some vamps; it was all part of his need to renew himself as the street fighter he’d once been; the guy who held onto his integrity, knew who the bad guys were and didn’t get them off in court; but tonight he just felt his back ache at the thought of yet another battle having to be fought when they were already exhausted. “We’ll have to make sure we get some blood from one of them before we kill it.”

 

Lorne pulled a face. “A little too Danse Macabre for my taste, Charles.”

 

“You need to get a mental lock on that open door policy of yours,” Gunn told him. “We don’t negotiate with the bad guys any more. We’re back to chopping their heads off and asking questions later. Keeping it simple keeps it…”

 

“Quiet.” Spike held up a hand.

 

“What’s up?” Gunn whispered.

 

Spike scented the air again. “Something’s…off. Or else Angel and Wes are… No, too much pain. Damn…” He turned to Gunn. “Do you have a key for Wesley’s place? I think something’s wrong.”

 

Gunn called Wesley’s name three times and when that got no response used the doorkey from the office to open the door. To his surprise it swung open before he even turned the key in the lock. He heard Lorne’s intake of breath and shot a glance at Spike in time to see the vampire wince as his senses clearly picked up a stronger aroma of the scent that was troubling him. Gunn gave the door a push and saw that the room was in disarray, furniture overturned and smashed but the lamp was lit beside the bed and lying on the bed was…

 

“Wesley…!”

 

It felt as if everything went into slow motion as he ran forward, as if some more of Illyria’s time-freezing mojo was whammying him even though he knew it wasn’t, an endless instant when he didn’t know if Wesley was alive or dead, only that Cordy and Fred were already lost forever and Wesley was lying there naked, curled up on his side with his back to the door, on top of the bed not under the covers, with his hands tied behind his back and all those cuts and bruises that were…everywhere.

 

“He’s still alive.” Spike spoke from behind Gunn. “I can hear his heartbeat.” A fractional pause before he added: “But he's taken one hell of a beating.”

 

Then Gunn was at the bed, with no knowledge of actually crossing the room, turning Wesley over, heart lurching at the way his head lolled so limply.

 

“His neck isn’t broken.” Spike had either developed mind reading powers, or else needed the reassurance as well.

 

Gunn found himself half sitting on the bed cradling a bound and naked Wesley in his arms; his own heart a rat-a-tat of panic. Wesley’s body was a delicate pallet of contusions; every shade a bruise could be imprinted on far too much of his bare skin. Gunn touched the one on his jaw first, a knockout punch, angrily purple, then traced the cut across his cheekbone, the matching cut on his forehead, wincing at everything he saw. He met Lorne’s gaze and the green demon was shaking his head, murmuring ‘No, no, no…” under his breath.

 

The bite wound at Wesley’s throat looked fresh and nasty and explained the ghostly pallor, the grey shadows under the eyes. Anaemia. In their line of work, unfortunately they saw a lot of it.

 

Gunn undid the belt lashed around Wesley’s wrists, wincing at the way the buckle had bitten right into the skin, then looked down at the body he held; so strange to see Wesley naked, this vulnerable. The man killed demons for a living; a leanly muscled often emotionally guarded destroyer of evil. He took his blows in the field like everyone else. Gunn was used to seeing him with a cut or bruised face; wincing a little from healing ribs or a wrenched back, bandaging a wound to his arm as they planned their next strategy. It never seemed to make him appear vulnerable; it was part of the warrior thing they’d all signed up for. They got hurt a lot and that was something they accepted; bruises and cuts just part of the job. But this was different – these injuries weren’t the by-products of battle, they were deliberate, sustained. Someone had wanted to hurt him and had taken his time about doing so.

 

He gazed down the length of Wesley’s body and his first thought was that Wesley would hate them all crowding around him like this, seeing him nude, seeing him unconscious; the second was how scarily skinny the guy still was. The shoulders were muscled it was true, and the upper arms leanly muscled also, a hint of strength across a chest that wasn’t overly narrow, but that was it. There was a hollow where other people kept their stomachs; his skin the thinnest covering over bones barely cushioned by any hint of flesh. There were fingermarks on his hips; deep mauve angry bruises from someone gripping hard. The contusions across his ribs were almost beautiful, sunbursts of red. Someone had really done a number on him. But the bruises on his ass were the ones that really frightened Gunn. Wesley naked, hands bound behind his back, on the bed. Why was he naked? Why had someone been gripping him by the hips? Why were there those damned ugly bruises across Wesley’s skinny white English butt?

 

He looked to Lorne for reassurance and only got sorrow and anger and a lot of other things he didn’t want to see in the horned demon’s expressive red eyes.

 

Someone kept saying: “He’s alive. All that matters is that he’s still alive…” It took Gunn a moment to realize that he was the one saying it.

 

Lorne found his voice with what seemed to be difficulty: “Yes. Breathing in and out. That’s the big difference.”

 

Gunn looked over his shoulder and saw Spike still standing in the doorway. “I invite you in,” he said.

 

Spike made no move to enter the room. “It was Angelus. Better get Wes to the hospital before he wakes up.”

 

“Angelus?” Gunn stared at him in horror. “What the hell are you…?”

 

“This place stinks of Angel and Angel on his worst day wouldn’t do to Wes what was… done to him. It has to be Angelus.”

 

Gunn’s mind stuck there for a moment. Angelus. The demon who hated them for being Angel’s bridge to humanity. The demon who probably hated Wesley most of all for being the guy who had helped trap him last time. The guy who had distracted Angelus while Faith injected herself with Orpheus; the guy who had put himself up for what could have been a fatal beating at Angelus’s hands to get the job done. The guy who had evidently unsuspectingly opened his door to Angel only to find himself alone with a sadistic creep of a soulless demon who had taken his revenge in full measure for what Gunn was afraid must have been a good long time.

 

Gunn reached for the sheet to wrap Wesley in, cradling his head awkwardly, trying to gather all of his body at once and finding it wasn’t possible. Legs too long; body too heavy. Strange to discover that someone as close to skin and bone as Wesley still felt heavy when you tried to lift him. Gunn looked over at Spike again. “Help me with him.”

 

Reluctantly, the vampire stepped over the threshold, flinching from what seemed to the smell of the place.

 

“Surely you can keep your damned bloodlust under control until…?”

 

Spike said quietly, “The blood isn’t so bad. It’s the stink of pain and pleasure in the air. Too many hours of both.”

 

“Let’s not talk about it.” Gunn tightened his grip on Wesley. “Let’s just get him to the hospital and…”

 

“Pretend it never happened?” Spike took the other side of Wesley’s now sheet-wrapped body. “Count me in.”

 

Wesley groaned then and opened his eyes, wincing as he did so, as if a hundred aches and pains awoke with him, blinking in confusion, moistening his cut lips, tasting the blood, only then focusing on Gunn’s face. “Charles?”

 

Gunn said gently, “Hey, English.”

 

“It was Angelus. The soul-eater must have attacked Angel.” His lip split open and he winced at the pain, licked the blood off tentatively. He squinted at the bedside clock. “I wasn’t out for long. A few minutes. You must have scared him off. I think we can still get his soul back but we have to move fast.”

 

“Something you can’t really do right now,” Spike pointed out quietly. “What with you being a pint or so of blood short and bruised all to bugg…” The silence following that hastily swallowed word was truly ghastly.

 

Wesley said evenly: “He didn’t take that much blood. I don’t think any bones are broken. No organs ruptured. He didn’t want to kill me, just make me…hurt. And I'm the only one who can do the spell to release the souls.” He focused on Lorne, and Gunn wondered why he should be shocked that naked, bruised, bleeding Wesley sounded almost the same as fit healthy Wesley; the same clipped quiet British voice; the same authority in his tone. His voice was just a little raspier, a little hoarser, the bruises around his throat explaining that. “It’s not a spell that can be performed by a demon. Even a good demon.”

 

“My horns notwithstanding, he drank your blood…” Lorne pointed out.

 

“Not much. He’d already fed. He was just making a point with me about how easily he could kill or turn me if he wanted to. He wasn’t really hungry.” Wesley struggled into a sitting position. “Can you hand me some clothes?”

 

“Wes…” Gunn didn’t know what words were needed here to get Wesley on the right track, but he knew the man needed to be in a hospital. Quite apart from the blood loss and the physical trauma, he had to be in deep shock. “Angelus beat the crap out of you…”

 

“Yes.” Wesley looked up at him briefly, as if they were discussing the weather. “That’s what he does. Now we have to get Angel’s soul back or we’re going to lose him for good. There is no magic spell that can restore it once that creature has digested it. It will be dissipated into energy and irretrievable.”

 

It was Spike who said, “He fucked you.” It wasn’t a question.

 

The word did at least make Wesley snatch a quick breath; they saw him miss that solitary beat, the movement of his chest momentarily stilled, and then he was reaching for his pants. “He did what he thought would bother me the most. It’s not important in the wider scheme of things.”

 

“Wesley….” Lorne spoke gently. “It doesn’t do any good to…”

 

“Waste time here agonizing about things we can’t alter when Angel’s soul is about to be lost forever? I couldn’t agree more.” Wesley pulled on his jeans as if the denim covering every bruise was enough to make them no longer relevant.

 

“You don’t just walk away from…” Gunn began.

 

Wesley cut him off with a flash of what looked like genuine annoyance from his blue-grey eyes. “Actually you do. All it takes is getting up and putting one foot in front of the other.” He pointed to the closet. “There are tranquilliser darts in there and guns. Spike, can you pick up Angel’s trail? It should be fresh and I think we need to confine him first. Whether we can retrieve Angel’s soul or not, we owe it to the world not to leave Angelus at large…”

 

Gunn listened to the directions Wesley gave, voice just as clipped and unemotional as if this was some sewer demon they were going after and as if he were in perfect health. He had gotten to his feet before they could stop him, and although he had swayed, although Gunn could damned near hear the hissing in his ears, Wesley had simply pulled on a t-shirt and sweater and shoes with dogged determination and gritted teeth, and then, as they continued to gaze at him anxiously instead of doing what he said, limped over to the closet and started pulling out the box of tranquilliser darts himself. That had galvanised them into action. As the going-to-the-hospital or Wesley-staying-in-bed-to-recover scenarios were clearly not an option there was nothing else to do except what he wanted. While Wesley loaded guns and handed them out, Lorne found the first aid kit and did a quick patch up job on Wesley’s neck. Wesley thanked him politely enough but distantly, as if it wasn’t really important that he was oozing blood from those two puncture marks although he recognized that it made Lorne feel better to do something about it.

 

Gunn knew that he, like Angel, was a natural born leader. Spike was a natural born loner. Lorne was a natural born karaoke bar host with the bad luck to be born into a demon dimension where there wasn’t any music. Wesley was a natural born Watcher; Spike had been right about that. Confronted with something new and dangerous his first instinct was to gather more information, to reach for a dusty old book; he hated to go into a situation without a plan; always wanted to think everything through; to think himself to a standstill in the past; weigh up all the options until he paralysed himself with the conflicting possibilities. Ironically, cruel and unreasonable although it had been on Angel’s part, firing Wesley had been a watershed in the ex-Watcher’s development. That was when they’d found out that Wesley also had it in him to be a leader.

 

Gunn had spent a long time looking at popular culture to get mirror images of his companions. Angel was surprisingly easy and even lived in a close approximation to a batcave. Name any superhero with uncanny senses and a sense of alienation from the rest of the human race he spent his nights saving and there you had the comic book reflections of Angel. Gunn thought he made a pretty good echo of all the cool halves of various mismatched buddy-buddy movie partnerships too. But Wesley… He’d had to go back to black and white for Wesley. Dawn Patrol. The RAF officer sending untried men off to their deaths because it had to be done if the innocent were to survive even though it was eating him away on the inside. The young Captain walking into the guns and ordering his men to do the same in the mud of Flanders. He guessed that was what the English hero excelled at; not so much James Bond as the Any Dead Officer; following orders; making tough decisions; a strange combination of self-sacrifice, ruthlessness and gentleness that was constantly surprising. This was the same guy who had taken a bullet for him and stabbed him almost to death. In both cases it had probably seemed like the right and just thing for Wesley to do.

 

Now, Wesley was the one in charge again. He should have been in hospital but Wesley had neatly sidestepped the victim role Angelus had made ready for him. Gunn suspected the rape had been a means to an end. Angelus had left Wesley alive so that he would have to wake up again and find his friends clustered around him when he was bound, naked and bruised, and he would have to read in their eyes that they knew what had been done to him. Wincing, Gunn realized they’d fulfilled their side of the bargain perfectly. Lots of foot shuffling and eye avoidance. Wesley was the one who’d decided he didn’t want to play Angelus’s game any longer.

 

As they passed into the sewers, Gunn saw Lorne put a hand very gently on Wesley’s shoulder and murmur something to him quietly.

 

Wesley shrugged. “Best revenge…living well etcetera. Although in this instance I’ll settle for the best revenge being to shoot Angelus full of tranquillisers and, as Faith always so aptly puts it, shove a soul up his ass.” He looked over his shoulder at Gunn. “He’s aware all the time he’s in there, trapped and seething and impotent, choking on Angel’s good deeds. If we lose Angel, Angelus wins. Even if we stake him, even if we send him to hell for eternity, he still wins.”

 

Gunn wondered why Wesley was addressing that comment to him and then looked down and realized he was carrying a stake, and that his fingers were white on the wood where he was gripping it so hard. Breathing out – and his lungs hurt so much when he did that he wondered how long it was since he’d remembered to exhale – he put the stake away and took the tranquilliser gun Wesley held out to him.

 

“We can do this,” the Englishman said quietly.

 

Gunn tried to look just into Wesley’s eyes, where there was all that steely determination, but it was so difficult to filter out the bruising around the eye, the bruise and cut on the cheekbone, that livid bruise on his jaw, the cut across his nose, under the other eye, on his forehead, another purplish bruise spreading out from that one where Angelus had so obviously grabbed him by the hair and slammed his face into a hard surface. Then there were the bruises at the throat and the way the blood was still seeping through that band-aid Lorne had slapped on so hastily while Wesley was loading his guns. The sweater Wesley had pulled on hid the cuts and bruises across his back but the limping made Gunn flinch; he could tell himself it was where Angelus had thrown him around but he knew it was because of the bruising so deep inside, where it had no business being, where nothing had any business being without Wesley’s signed in triplicate written permission, and even then Gunn would have had a problem with it. Even if there had been flowers and chocolates and a mariachi band underneath Wesley’s goddamned window for a month of wooing beforehand he didn’t think there was any guy in any dimension who he would have been happy to have doing that to his friend. And Angelus out of every dimension and every possible person was absolutely the last guy on that non-existent list.

 

“Get over it, Charles,” Wesley said quietly. “He only did it to freak you out.”

 

Gunn gritted his teeth. “You mean it isn’t freaking you out?”

 

Wesley turned away so Gunn wouldn’t have to see the expression in his eyes change, although Gunn could imagine the bleakness, the lost look, the despair he wasn’t going to let any of them see. “I’ve had worse.”

 

Wesley usually lied better than that. Gunn knew then that this had to be close to the worst thing anyone had ever done to him; worse than being rejected by his father or rejected by the rest of them; maybe not as bad as the grief of losing a loved one, but of things done specifically and deliberately to him to hurt him, this was in a class of its own.

 

“I don’t know that I want Angel back more than I want to kill Angelus,” Gunn confessed.

 

Wesley looked over his shoulder at him again, eyes grave and thoughtful. “Well, get sure before we see Angelus because killing him isn’t an option while there’s still a chance we can retrieve Angel’s soul.”

 

“That’s easy for you to say,” Gunn told him. “You only had the crap kicked out of you. Me, I have Issues.”

 

Wesley’s smile made his lip bleed but it was worth it; just for an instant there was a light in his eyes again; a crack in the shell he’d erected around himself that revealed he was still capable of being touched by a friend’s affection.

 

“I smell him.” Spike held up a hand, sniffing the air. “Actually I smell…” He winced at his own tactlessness. “Anyway, it’s him.”

 

Gunn wondered why Angelus hadn’t taken a shower after he’d finished with Wesley; washed away the man’s scent, making him that much harder to track through these sewers. Angelus knew everything Angel knew, and sometimes more, so he certainly knew that Spike was now on their team and had all of a vampire’s preternatural senses.

 

“Because he’s an arrogant prick,” Spike murmured in Gunn’s ear. “Thinks he can take all of us. Wants to gloat. Remind us how powerless we are and how cool he is. The guy never changes. And, okay, because we got there sooner than he thought and he didn’t have time to finish his fun.”

 

Gunn met the vampire’s gaze, remembering Angelus with his hand around Wesley’s throat, the pleasure he was taking in slowly squeezing the life out of him, himself with a clear shot and his finger ready to squeeze on the trigger and Faith ready to take him the moment the bolt hit; then Wesley crashing into him so hard Gunn still wondered how they hadn’t both broken every bone in their bodies, and Faith doing as Angelus had somehow known she would, letting her concern and compassion overwhelm her ruthlessness.

 

Gunn realized it abruptly: “He’ll go for Wesley.”

 

“I’ve already auditioned for the hostage role – several times.” Wesley looked over his shoulder. “I don’t think it suits me.”

 

“Practice makes perfect, Wes…”

 

And Angelus was there, out of nowhere, out of darkness, no warning, no sound; smiling viciously and moving so fast he was a blur, but this time he wasn’t the only one with preternaturally fast reflexes and it was Spike who grabbed Wesley by the sweater with his left hand a fraction before Angelus’s hands closed on him. He yanked the ex-Watcher out of Angelus’s range and threw him straight to Gunn, yelling, “Catch him!” With his right hand he was already firing; as was Lorne and this time both tranquillisers hit.

 

Angelus snarled in disbelief and rage, yanking out one dart and turning on Spike with it raised ready to stab. Wesley fired unflinchingly while Gunn held him up and Angelus swayed and then went down onto one knee.

 

“Don’t!” Wesley cautioned Gunn as he levelled up a shot of his own. “Three is enough and we don’t want to kill Angel.”

 

“Speak for yourself.” Spike also had his gun trained unwaveringly on the vampire.

 

Lorne was still looking queasy but he reloaded all the same. “You know I love Angel, kids, but if it’s down to him or us…”

 

“It should still be him.” Wesley gazed down at Angelus who was trying and failing to get off his knees.

 

Angelus snarled up at the man: “I should have broken your fucking neck when I had the chance.”

 

“Where would have been the fun in that?” Wesley returned impassively.

 

“I remember your face when you saw me sucking the blood from Lilah’s corpse. Now that was fun.” Then, mercifully, Angelus slumped into unconsciousness.

 

Spike turned on Wesley angrily. “What do you mean ‘it should still be him’?”

 

“Lorne hasn’t done anything that requires atonement but the rest of us have. We don’t have the right to rob the world of a champion like Angel just for the sake of our necks.”

 

Spike looked across Wesley to Gunn. “This death wish thing, is this new with him?”

 

Gunn shook his head. “Actually, it’s pretty old.”

 

Spike glowered at Wesley. “So you took his soddin’ kid and it didn’t end well. Get over it.”

 

“It isn’t just Connor. There’s Faith.”

 

“Useful member of society from where I was sitting.”

 

“She has blood on her hands because the Watcher assigned to her by the council was a waste of space.”

 

“Maybe she could have had Gandhi as her Watcher and it would still have all gone to shit. Maybe she had issues before she ever met you that put her on the fast track to solitary confinement. Maybe you taking her side instead of the Council’s after she’d tortured you half to death was one of the things that helped pull her back from the brink. Did you ever think about that?”

 

Wesley was still gazing at Angelus. “Angel pulled her back from the brink. All I ever did was push her to the edge of it. And I have other things to atone for.” He looked at Gunn.

 

“I'm still here.” Gunn shrugged.

 

“I shouldn’t have stabbed you.”

 

“I should haven’t signed the papers to let the sarcophagus through Customs that killed the woman we both loved. On the cosmic scale I don’t think what you did was so bad.”

 

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start breast beating over Knox being dead now, are you?” Spike added.

 

Wesley pulled a face. “No. I can’t lose any sleep over Knox. Although that doesn’t make what I did right.”

 

Spike grabbed him by the shoulders. “You have to have one shining light in the world to make all the pain and suffering worthwhile? Fine. Do what you like to get yourself through the day, mate, but don’t expect me to sign up for it being Angel. I was there with him, shoulder to shoulder, when he was doing some of the things that he did.”

 

“That was Angelus.”

 

“It was in him somewhere. It’s what makes a champion, Wes. The same thing that makes a monster. It’s that darkness you can reach out and touch inside yourself; the thing that makes killing something you choose to do – bad guys or weeping innocents: two sides of the same coin; makes the pain something you can ignore; makes the cause worth it. Bad cause when you’re evil; good cause when you’re not; same difference. Same chemical reaction fuelling the adrenaline to the brain that keeps sending you back out there to do what has to be done.” Realizing too late where this conversation was leading, Spike took a step back. “But that doesn’t mean… I mean, I said it myself, back in your flat – Angel on his worst day wouldn’t…”

 

“We should hurry.” Wesley’s face was perfectly unreadable. “We need to get Angelus secured before he wakes up.”

 

***