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Oct. 29th, 2005 03:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgreyAll parts linked to from Story Notes
Temps Perdu, Part Seven
Wesley awoke to semi-darkness. He blinked a few times, automatically reaching for his glasses on the bedside table. He felt the base of a lamp but the switch was elusive and his fingers skimmed over the wooden surface of the table three times before he realized that his glasses simply weren’t there. He reapplied himself to trying to get the table lamp to work, finally locating a pull switch, and making himself squint painfully as the low wattage seemed abruptly as bright as daylight.
Gazing at the room, he realized with some dismay that he didn’t recognize it. He felt a brief stab of panic before the remembered that he was far from home now. In America. This was his hotel room. Probably in Sunnydale.
He frowned as he realized that he could see. Even though his glasses were still mysteriously AWOL, he could make out the fine details. Like those clothes that had been placed on that chair nearby. Jeans, a white t-shirt, a grey-green sweater. Where was his suit? His tie? Where was his suitcase? All his notes? He tried to scan the room for it but there was nothing in sight. Perhaps it was on the other side of the room?
Wesley rolled over and –
There was a man in the bed next to him. A man. In the bed. Next to him. As his heart jolted painfully in his chest with the shock of it, he realized that he, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, was naked. As in not wearing any clothes. At all. And that the maninthebednexttohim also appeared to be naked. At least he wasn’t wearing anything on his muscled torso. The muscled torso that left no doubt at all that this really was a man. In his bed. Next to him.
Wesley dived out of the bed so fast he nearly cannoned into the chair, scrabbling backwards in confusion, away from him, the stranger, the male stranger. Ohgodohgodohgodohgod. What had he done? What on earth had he done?
No, this couldn’t be happening. This had to be some kind of prank being played on him by the Watchers’ Council or else…
Or else a few hours after landing in a strange country his overwhelming feeling of unreadiness for the task ahead of him had caused him to drink himself into such an insensible condition that he had let himself get picked up by a man in a bar and accompanied the man back to his hotel room. Presumably, at some point, intercourse had…
Wrapping his arms around his knees, Wesley began to rock, and then realized all over again that he was naked, and couldn’t make any of the whimpering noises he so needed to because of his terror of waking up the stranger. Internalizing his panic was making him hyperventilate. Sooner or later he was going to have to breath out and when he did he was afraid it was going to turn into a long anguished wail.
How could he possibly have screwed up already? And so monumentally, too? Two Slayers. That’s what Travers had told him. He was being entrusted with two Slayers. Two teenage girls from an alien culture were going to follow his orders and do as he told them because the Council told them so. His authority was in his office, he’d been told. The fact that no one had ever done anything he told them to, even when he was Head Boy, was apparently not an issue. All he had to do was walk in there, present his credentials, do his work as a Watcher, and they would be eating out of his hand and slaying vampires under his orders. Yes, absolutely, and the moon was made of green cheese and babies were brought by the stork and watched over by the fairies at the end of the garden.... You can do this, Wesley. You’ve been trained for this since.... That was something to cling onto, that his preparations had at least been thorough. He’d read everything there was to read on Slayer mythology and Sunnydale in particular. Even if he couldn’t impress them with his authoritative manner perhaps he could win them over with his know-how. Not that he wasn’t going to try to be authoritative. He certainly was. He was going to walk in there with his shoulders back and look everyone in the eye, shake them firmly by the hand, introduce himself as if he didn’t have a flicker of doubt in the world, and keep reminding himself that the Watchers’ Council wouldn’t have sent him if they hadn’t believed he had it in him to do this job right. All he had to do was follow the rules. Follow them to the letter; rely on the wisdom of those who had performed this office before him – those who hadn’t got themselves sacked for becoming too emotionally invested in their charges, of course – and he wouldn’t go far wrong.
Except you’ve already gone so far wrong you can’t possibly go right now, you blithering idiot!
Wesley realized he was still rocking and not remembering to breathe and snatched a hasty intake of oxygen before daring another glance at the bed. The stranger was dark-haired with a prominent brow and looked peaceful. His body was curled around the warm place on the mattress which Wesley had left, one arm draped across the top of the pillow. He looked about Wesley’s age but much more powerfully built. He was handsome and muscular and probably quite a catch if you went in for that sort of thing. Which he apparently did now. Only with great difficulty did he manage to suppress a whimper. Oh god, what was that old joke women were always making in crowded bars, usually looking at him with amusement in their eyes as they did so?
Question: What’s the difference between a straight man and a gay man?
Answer: About two pints of lager.
But that couldn’t be it, could it? It couldn’t just be that. One day he was straight if somewhat…okay, completely inexperienced, and the next he was letting strange men in airport bars pick him up and take him home for…?
Make it a bad dream. Let me close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them again, he’s gone....
Wesley closed his eyes. Opened them. The man slept on. He had to fight the urge to laugh hysterically. Wonderful. He had left England a straight and sober member of the Watchers’ Council and arrived in California an irresponsible gay slut. Perhaps British Airways were putting ergot in their meals? Perhaps…? Perhaps he should just find some clothes, any clothes, and sneak out of this place. Just in case he had really outdone himself this time and managed to get himself picked up by a serial killer.
He felt so sick inside with the shock of his own idiocy; except it wasn’t really a shock, was it? It was more of a ‘oh, so that’s how you screwed up this time’ moment of revelation. After all, there had never really been any doubt about whether or not he would screw up, had there? It was just the time, method, and execution of the inevitable screw up that had ever been in doubt. He just hadn’t expected it to be so…sordid. Trying desperately to remember meeting the man he’d apparently shared a bed with all night there was just a blank; nothingness. Had he got drunk on the plane? So drunk he’d had to be escorted out of the airport or something? No, wait – there was a memory of the plane journey. He’d read all his notes again and got a dirty look from the guy next to him who wanted the light off while he wanted to double check the history of the Hellmouth for the fortieth time. The flight had felt endless, the in-flight movie had been moronic, the food inedible, and the seat very uncomfortable for someone with legs as long as his. He’d avoided alcohol, not thinking it was a good idea in his state of nerves. He even remembered leaving the plane, and he’d definitely been sober then. He’d had a driver waiting to take him into town. No point in renting a car. Better to just get dropped off at his hotel and then buy some transport of his own once he was settled.
But then how…? He looked back over at the man in the bed, trying to make him fit the driver, but he didn’t. They looked nothing like one another. He had no memory of arriving in Sunnydale. Just getting into the car, the driver talking about things that were meaningless to him until he’d almost snapped at him that he needed to check his notes again. A journey passed in resentful silence while he pretended it wasn’t making him car sick to keep going through these notes while the car jolted over every bump in the road. Then…nothing.
Never mind. The main thing was to get out of this room and away from the strange man. Once he’d escaped, he could try to find out what had happened. He looked around for his clothes again but there was still no sign of them. Okay, no point in panicking. And breathing, yes, breathing would be a good idea. He snatched a quick breath. Those clothes on the chair, they would fit him. He would wear those. He would – strategically withdraw the hell out of this nightmare situation and then he would try to… Oh god, he wasn’t sure there was anything that could be done to remedy this. He supposed it could have been slightly worse. He could have woken up in bed next to a dead woman. That was about the only thing he could think of as being worse than waking up next to a live man.
As he reached out to snatch the jeans on the chair, the man on the bed opened his eyes and looked straight at him.
Wesley gasped in shock and slithered backwards on his seat. He knew he ought to say something authoritative that made it clear he wasn’t someone to be trifled with, whatever kind of…trifling had gone on the night before, but now that he was faced with the reality of being alone in a darkened bedroom with not just a strange sleeping man but a strange awake and looking straight at him one, he just felt choked with fear.
The man on the bed frowned. “Wes…? Are you okay…?”
He’d given him his real name. Wonderful, he wasn’t just someone who went in for sordid liaisons with men he’d just met, he wasn’t even intelligent enough to give his pick ups a fake name. Slutty and stupid. His father would be so proud. His father. God, just – no.
“Wes…?” The man sprang out of the bed, revealing that he was indeed entirely naked; all over; especially at the…front.
Wesley tried to back up further and realized he was wedged against a chest of drawers whose ornate handles were now digging painfully into his bare back.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay? Was it a nightmare? Why didn’t you wake me?”
The strange man was coming straight for him, acting as if they were…intimates. Had he had a blow to the head? Why couldn’t he remember?
“Wes, hey…” The naked man crouched down in front of him and stretched out a hand.
Wesley managed a strangled: “Don’t....” Oh, that was such a pathetic whimper, but it stayed the man’s hand.
Brown eyes gazed into his that were full of concern. “What’s wrong?”
“Please, I don’t…” Wesley found he was stuck on panic. The man was so close to him; all broad shoulders and bare skin and naked and very, very male, and wanting to touch him; obviously already had touched him, and he didn’t want to be touched like…that. But if he made him angry perhaps he would.... Wesley swallowed. “I don’t want to....”
The stranger frowned, obviously confused. “Don’t want to what…? Wes, you’re shivering. Come on, let’s get you to back to bed....” He reached out to touch him again; a decisive sort of movement.
“No!” A strangled yelp where he would have liked something calmly authoritative but it did make the man snatch his fingers away from him as if he was burning. “No…bed....”
“Wesley…?” The stranger sniffed the air, then sniffed him and then moved back, dawning realization on his face. “You’re afraid.”
“I assure you, I…” He wanted to cry and rock; and was so ashamed of being here, being this, this pathetic snivelling naked person. “I’m not....” He couldn’t help it; even though he knew he should be firm and authoritative, the way his father was always telling him, to earn the respect of others with his demeanour and manner, he couldn’t manage it. He gazed up at the stranger, hoping against all hope that he hadn’t been so drunk or insane as to pick up someone entirely without compassion. “I’m not...”
Before he could finish his sentence, explain that he didn’t do things like this, the stranger was saying in a hurt tone, “Yes, you are. Don’t lie to me, Wes. You’re afraid of me. Why? Did you have a nightmare? Did you think I was Angelus?”
Wesley jerked his head back in shock. “Wh-what do you know of Angelus?”
“What?” The man gazed at him in disbelief.
“Only Council members are supposed to have access....” Wesley broke off as he realized he might be revealing more classified information. Oh dear Lord, there was only one way this could have happened, and that was yet another dereliction of his duty. In a humiliated whisper he managed: “Do I talk in my sleep?”
“Look, Wes…” As the man made to touch him again, Wesley jerked back against the chest of drawers, wincing as it bruised his back.
The man flinched and hastily moved back. “Hey, it’s okay, I promise.”
Wesley really tried not to look at the man’s…genitalia, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was…right there, and semi-erect and…oh god, oh god, oh god, please make there be some way my father never has to find out....
The stranger seemed to notice Wesley’s rabbit-hypnotized-by-a-stoat gaze and quickly backed up further. “Let me....” He grabbed a pair of tracksuit bottoms from the chair and pulled them on, before saying: “Are you cold? Do you want your robe?”
“Robe?” Wesley echoed faintly. That suggested more than a one-night stand. That suggested they were – God help him – sharing this bedroom for the weekend at least. “Did I – Did I hit my head…?”
The man held out a blue dressing gown to him which was not the one he had packed; definitely not the same one at all. “I don’t think so. Not hit it. But you did pass out. Willow said it was just a deeper than usual sleep. The good news is the bomb is gone.”
“Bomb?” he stared at him aghast. Dear God, he’d gone to sleep a respectable watcher and woken up a gay terrorist.
“Willow got rid of it.” The man offered him a hand. “Do you want some breakfast? You know Buffy is just dying to…”
“Buffy?” Finally something that made sense! “Buffy Summers?”
The man frowned. “Yes. Buffy. Why are you saying it like that?”
“You know her?”
Total disbelief on the stranger’s face. “Wes, you know I…” Then his expression changed completely. “No, you don’t, do you? You don’t know a damned thing.”
That stung. “I assure you, I have studied extensively for this post and I think you’ll find there is considerably more emphasis on field work these days than…”
The stranger fell back and Wesley noticed how pale he was. Not had just gone. Always apparently was. He crossed to the door and opened it, calling: “Giles! Willow! Buffy!” Great, now two of them were panicking. But, had he just said…?
“Giles?” Wesley echoed in dawning horror. “Rupert Giles? Is here? Where…we are? No, you don’t understand. You can’t tell him about.... The Council mustn’t....” He hastily pulled on the dressing gown the stranger had given him, as if that would somehow help him.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” A girl’s voice, and there was its owner; a young redhead in pyjamas with bed hair and a pale, pretty face. Oh wonderful, now there were strange women looking at him as well as strange men. Wesley hastily belted his dressing gown.
“He doesn’t remember me.” The stranger sounded positively tragic.
“What…? Are you sure?” Another man. English. Which would make him…
“Giles, he doesn’t know who I am!”
Wesley closed his eyes tightly. No other way to escape from this situation except the tried and tested – had never worked in the past but perhaps it would work now – method of closing his eyes so no one else could see him. Rupert Giles. The man he was replacing. The man he had hoped to impress with his efficiency and authority was seeing him for the first time as a half-naked, shivering thing, cringing in a corner after a night of drunken passion with a strange man. The only way for this situation to be improved would be for his father and Quentin Travers to walk in with half the Council in tow. No, he couldn’t even make jokes about that in the privacy of his own head. He started to shake and couldn’t seem to stop.
“Dear Lord… Wesley…?”
He opened his eyes. Impossible not to when there was an authoritative-sounding older Englishman crouched in front of him telling him to do so. The eyes gazing at him were kind behind their glasses, but that didn’t make the situation an iota less confusing and humiliating.
“Is Angel right? Have you forgotten us?”
“Angel?” he echoed in disbelief. “You mean that’s…” He stared up in fascinated horror at the stranger who was wringing his hands by the doorway. Of course, now he saw him in the light from the corridor he realized that the man in whose bed he had awoken was familiar; that, despite the different hairstyle, he was unmistakably… He could hardly bring himself to even whisper the word: “Angelus…?”
The stranger flinched and turned to the redhead in desperation. “He doesn’t remember me!”
“I assure you I remember you perfectly.” Wesley clutched his dressing gown to himself and rose to his feet. “And what havoc you wreaked across Europe for more than a century. Young lady, I advise you to move away from that creature this instant.” He turned to Giles in disbelief. “Why haven’t you informed the Council that Angelus is in Sunnydale?”
“Because he’s not. He’s in L.A.”
Wesley turned to see a young blonde woman step into the room.
“And he isn’t Angelus, he’s Angel.” She gazed at him intently. “You don’t know who I am, do you? I’m Buffy Summers.”
He looked at Giles in confusion. “I don’t understand. Why are you allowing a dangerous animal like Angelus to roam loose and why am I…?” That was when it hit him. He hadn’t spent the night in the bed of a strange man at all; he’d spent the night in the bed of a vampire. A blow to the solar plexus could not more efficiently have knocked the wind from his body.
“Easy…” Giles gripped him by the shoulders, looped an arm around his neck and steered him back to the bed.
At the sight of the crumpled sheets, Wesley gave a strangled yelp. “No!”
“You need to sit down.” Buffy took his other arm and he was surprised by the strength of her grip. When she shoved him – not ungently – onto the bed, he really had no choice but to do as she said and sit. She looked at him and then turned to Rupert Giles. “Giles – explain.”
As Angelus came forward, Wesley automatically flinched and the vampire stopped, a look of distress on his face. Gently, he said, “Wes, I know if you just woke up and don’t remember anything this must seem a little bizarre to you….”
“Understatement of the century there, I think,” Buffy told him.
“What do you remember?” Giles pressed. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Wesley snatched a much needed breath, trying to tell himself that having a Slayer between him and Angelus meant he was safe. It was really bothering him that the redheaded girl was still within reach of that monster though. “I remember – the plane journey and hiring a driver to take me into Sunnydale and…I must have fallen asleep during the drive.”
“Oh no…” said the redhead faintly. “I’ve tabula rasa’d him.”
“No, you haven’t,” Giles assured her. “It’s probably just a temporary side effect from the spell and will wear off very soon.”
“What if it doesn’t?” she said desperately.
“Wes, you have to trust me on this.” There was an ache in the vampire’s voice that almost made Wesley believe him until he realized it was probably just a ploy of his kind. “We’re friends, you and I. The best of friends.”
Wesley looked at him narrowly. “You may have these people fooled but I know exactly what you are and there is no way on earth that I would ever be friends with…”
Buffy marched to the chest of drawers, picked up a photograph and then shoved it under Wesley’s nose. “Think again.”
“Gently, Buffy,” Giles said in mild reproach. “He just woke up naked in bed with a vampire. You must expect a little disorientation.”
Wesley gazed in disbelief at the picture of him and Angelus and a pretty dark haired woman with a dazzling smile. “But… That is to say, I don’t… Why would I…?”
“Angel has a soul,” Buffy told him. “He’s a champion for good. He fights evil. You fight it with him. You, Angel, Gunn, Lorne, Illyria and Spike.”
“Spike?” He looked up at her in horror. “As in William the Bloody?”
Buffy and Giles exchanged a glance. Buffy grimaced. “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Spike yet?”
“That might have been a good idea,” said Giles dryly.
“You’re saying I fight evil alongside the most evil vampire to ever walk the earth and the second most evil vampire to ever walk the earth?”
“I don’t think I was that bad,” Angelus said a little sulkily. “The Master was worse.”
“They both have souls,” Giles explained.
“Oh, I see. Both of them, you say? Was there a special on at Wal-Mart? Buy one vampire soul, get another free?”
“Wasn’t free.” Another voice he didn’t recognize. “I worked bloody hard for that soul.”
Wesley took one look at the peroxide demon in the doorway and got to his feet. “All right, this insanity has gone on long enough. I refuse to accept that I have so abdicated from my responsibilities that I choose to work alongside the vampire who attempted to murder my own father and…”
“Given what your father’s like, I would have thought that was a selling point.” There was the flare of a lighter before the peroxide vampire looked across at him. “And I wasn’t trying to kill him particularly. I was just trying to eat a few orphans. And it’s not as if I succeeded on either account.”
“Stop confusing him,” Angelus hissed at Spike.
Spike rolled his eyes. “I think confusion is a little on the inevitable side, mate. He thinks he’s here to play Wesley the Watcher and he wakes up in bed with a vampire. If you hadn’t been so weird and kinky about having to snuggle up with him every night, at least he wouldn’t be sitting there thinking he’s turned gayboy as well as minion of evil.”
“I’m not a minion of evil!” Wesley looked up at Giles for guidance. “Am I?”
“No. Wesley, I know it’s a lot to take in, but you do have to trust me where Angel and…Spike are concerned. Angel was cursed by gypsies and his soul restored in revenge for a member of their clan that he killed. The reason why there are no Council records of him for a century after his last known place of slaughter is because he was haunted by remorse and lived…”
“…in the sewers, eating rats,” Spike supplied helpfully. “And if you’re thinking that makes him a big fat loser, you’d be right.”
“…lived apart from humanity.” Giles glared at Spike. “So he wouldn’t be tempted to feed upon them.”
“Which I didn’t,” Angelus put in hastily. “Feed on them, I mean.”
Buffy nodded. “Angel’s good. He’s a people’s champion sort of vampire now. He helps the helpless.”
Wesley wondered if he was still dreaming. That would make everything so much more explicable. “Angelus and William the Bloody are now defenders of humanity?”
“I prefer ‘Spike’,” the vampire explained. “It’s shorter.”
“Yeah, and he can actually spell it.” Angelus moved forward and Wesley instinctively pressed back. The vampire looked downcast. “Look, Wes, I know this is difficult for you to take in, but we really are friends, I swear. And we were only sharing a bed because we just came back from a hell dimension and you get nightmares.”
“Oh, that I believe,” said Wesley faintly. “I appear to be having one now.”
“I’m so sorry,” said the redhead desperately. “I don’t know how I… There was a tiny instant when the spell seemed to…hitch, but it was just for a moment, less than the blink of an eye really. I was using Wesley’s power to make the bomb return to an earlier state of being and I think I must have… He must have been affected by it, just for that millisecond.”
“But he hasn’t returned to an earlier state of being, Wills,” Buffy pointed out. “He still looks the same as when Angel carried him up here in that Hammer Horror damsel in distress kind of way. He just can’t remember the past five years.”
“The past, what…?” Wesley breathed in horror.
Buffy winced again and looked at Giles apologetically. “Probably another of those bits of information I should have saved until later, huh?”
“That might have been a good idea.”
Wesley sank back down on the bed, noticing that the room now appeared to be spinning.
“Wesley…?” said Buffy anxiously. “You don’t look so good… Giles, do you think he’s…?”
“Passing out…? Yes, I’d say that was a pretty good…”
Wesley woke up to find Angelus, the scourge of Europe, anxiously patting his cheek. “Wes…? Wes…?”
“No one calls me ‘Wes’…” Wesley muttered.
“I do.” The hurt in those brown eyes was so convincing he even felt a pang of guilt. Angelus was scarily close to him. They moved so fast, vampires. He remembered being shown that in a controlled experiment; just how swiftly they could grab the unsuspecting; and how strong they were. He wished Angelus would move away from him but it was probably a bad idea to show fear, even though he was certainly feeling it.
He winced at the thumping in his head and looked around the room. There were now even more people in it. Okay, this was definitely a nightmare. Otherwise, why would there be a green-skinned, red-horned demon in a silk dressing gown sipping from a cocktail glass and gazing at him anxiously, and a blue-haired woman with unblinking pale blue eyes, also gazing at him anxiously, and a very tall black American peering at him in concern and saying: “Hey, English? Do you remember me?”
“No, he doesn’t remember you,” Angelus said, a little petulantly. “He doesn’t remember anyone.”
“Maybe he’s just blocking you out on account of you being a bloodsucker.”
“The last thing he remembers is being driven into Sunnydale. Unless you were working as a cab driver back then, he won’t remember you.”
Wesley blinked and looked up at the various pairs of eyes all gazing at him. Giles, Buffy and the redheaded girl were also still hovering and there was now another presumably human male staring at him, too, out of the one eye that wasn’t covered by a piratical patch. “I don’t remember any of you,” he croaked. And I’m not at all sure that I want to.
“Wesley…” There was authoritative voice that automatically made him want to sit up straighter. Rupert Giles. The man he was supposed to be replacing. Except…
“Drink this.”
He found a cup of tea placed in his hand and looked at it in confusion.
William the Bloody rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think the poor bastard needs something a bit stronger? Christ, if I ever woke up in bed with broodypants there, I’d need a bottle of Glengoyne at least. What am I saying? For that it would have to be Mortlach.”
“I think he would be more comfortable with tea, thank you, Spike.”
“Thank you.” Wesley sipped it automatically and felt a little soothed. “I don’t drink whisky.”
He became aware of everyone exchanging meaningful glances and sighing. “What?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” the redheaded girl hastened to assure him. “It’s just that you’re…different. It takes some getting used to.”
Wesley looked at Giles in horror. “I’m not a dipsomaniac, am I?”
“No, of course not,” Giles said a little too heartily.
“Just nuts,” muttered William the – Actually, Wesley thought, it was no wonder people had decided to call him Spike. Perhaps he would do the same from now on.
Angelus elbowed the other vampire hard. “Shut up.”
“What?” Wesley looked back to Giles for help. “Did he say…?”
“He’s a moron,” Angelus told him forcefully. “Don’t listen to him.” There was that look again, all anxious and pleading with him.
Wesley hastily averted his eyes. Perhaps that was how Angelus had become the scourge of Europe, through lulling people into a false sense of security with the puppy dog eyes and acting as if he really cared about you.
“Look, we can’t just hover over him all day, like this,” Giles said. “Why don’t we leave Wesley to have a shower and get dressed, and then he can come downstairs and have some breakfast and we can discuss the matter calmly and rationally.”
“Glad you suggested that, Giles,” Spike observed. “Because I was planning to stand on a chair and scream.”
“There’s no need to get snippy,” Wesley told the vampire and then as it advanced towards him, leant back on the bed, heart hammering as he realized he’d just stupidly provoked a dangerous killer.
Spike rolled his eyes. “Wes, I’m not going to…” He sighed. “I do actually like you, you pillock. You don’t think I’d have signed up for that whole hand holding and mumbo jumbo malarkey for anyone, do you?”
“He doesn’t remember, remember?” Angelus told him tersely.
“Oh yeah.” Spike put a cigarette in his mouth while still gazing at Wesley curiously. “I forgot.”
“We all like you.” That was the young man with the eye patch who hadn’t spoken to him directly until then. “You may want to remember that. However – freaky things are, you are among friends.”
Wesley looked around at them again, trying not to goggle too obviously at the green-skinned demon and blue-haired woman, and the two notoriously evil vampires.
Buffy grimaced. “Not saying your taste in friends isn’t a little…out there, Wes, but you really are among them. Honest.”
Then they were gone and he was left alone with his cooling cup of tea and the memory of Angelus, the most evil vampire in the world, giving him that wistful look of anxiety as he reluctantly closed the door. Shouldn’t an evil vampire look a little more…evil than that? Not to mention slightly less…dorky?
Wesley drank his tea automatically. It was currently the only thing in front of him that wasn’t complicated and that he understood. Five years. He had lost five years of his life. He couldn’t accept that. It simply made no sense. But then most of the things they had said to him had made no sense. That could be, of course, because he’d lost a huge chunk of his memory, say – five years worth – as a side-effect of some clearly dangerous magic that redheaded child had been dabbling in. Don’t end a sentence in a preposition, Wesley! He flinched instinctively and tried to gather up his scattered thoughts. Unfortunately they kept wanting to return, like a compass needle to magnetic north, to the thought of his father. He shied away from that at once.
Or – if he wanted to face it head on – he had either won so little respect from his Slayer on his first appearance that she had decided to make him the victim of a humiliating and ridiculously complicated practical joke. Or he had been told the truth, in which case sometime over the past five years he had apparently departed so far from his hereditary calling that he now slept with the enemy and fraternized with demons. Either way, he had utterly failed in what he had set out to do: become a Watcher worthy of his surname, and win his father’s respect.
Right, that wasn’t helping at all. He took another sip of tea and decided to approach the problem logically. He should examine the practical joke theory first. Buffy Summers was a teenage girl and they were notoriously…frivolous creatures, well, by reputation they were anyway. The Academy’s habit of keeping its students segregated from anything that might be construed as a distraction certainly was useful when it came to concentrating on one’s studies but was not perhaps so efficient in giving its Watchers an all round knowledge of… That thought process seemed likely to lead straight back to his waking up naked in a vampire’s bed with no idea how he’d got there. The point was that he didn’t know what teenage girls were like. For all his life the Slayer being a young girl had just been an interesting anomaly which had led to some controversial papers being written on the correlation between the possibly demonic power source of the Slayer and the claim by clerics of the Middle Ages that female of the species was not possessed of a soul. There was never really anything written that told of…nail varnish and earrings and make up.
If he had thought about it at all, he had always assumed that Slayers…slew. He was aware that they had to do other things in between staking vampires but he had thought of those being along the lines of: training to Slay, sleeping to gather strength for Slaying, eating to gather strength for Slaying, studying the Slayer’s Handbook and so on; a mirror image of the life of the Watcher-in-training, all preparation and research and weapons training. But Buffy had certainly not looked like a young woman who spent every waking hour, not in the gym or the cemetery, working on her demon and weapons identification. She looked like a woman who liked pink lipstick and eye shadow and cared about clothes and shoes and giggling inanely in the manner of those young women he had sometimes passed on the way back to his lodgings who had appeared to speak a language and live a life so far removed from his own that they might as well have been inhabiting a parallel dimension. Those sort of girls had always made fun of him; of his accent, of his lack of interest – if he tried not to gawp at them in too much the manner of a man encountering exotic wildlife from a newly discovered continent – or his over interest if he couldn’t help looking at them wistfully and wondering just exactly how one did go about striking up a conversation with these incomprehensible creatures. So, he could hardly dismiss out of hand the possibility of her having been instrumental in some deception designed to make him look foolish, and perhaps to discredit him with the Council so she could keep her preferred Watcher.
But there were the practicalities of such a deception. It wasn’t as if a Slayer and even one vampire should be on nodding terms, let alone joining forces with two of them to make fun of her new Watcher. And, wouldn’t it have made more sense to come up with a scenario less unbelievable than this one? Not just one, but two, reformed vampires? Green-skinned demons? Blue-haired women? And it was difficult to believe that Rupert Giles would be party to such a deception. He probably had his reasons to feel bitter towards the Council, but if a joke had been carried out, it had involved drugging Wesley, removing his clothing, leaving him in bed with a serial killer, and, last but by no means least, looking another Englishman in the eye and lying to him. He didn’t believe Rupert Giles was capable of that last act. The man was a Watcher. A scholar. A librarian. According to the Council he had failed in his duties because he had allowed himself to become too emotionally attached to his charge. That suggested he had a compassionate nature, if nothing else, and Wesley had no reason to doubt that he had an honourable one as well.
That left the lost five years possibility. Appalling and unbelievable as it was, he found it slightly less appalling and unbelievable than the alternative that a trained Watcher had been party to a spiteful practical joke against a fellow graduate of the Watchers’ Academy. He finished his tea and got to his feet. He felt dazed, but that was helping a little; it was as if he was slightly separated from his body and his surroundings. No doubt it was simply shock, but, like a swelling around a broken ankle, it left him capable of moving when he would otherwise have had no choice but to stay still and whimper.
There should be evidence of those lost years, right? He looked at the photograph again. He looked in it pretty much the way he thought of himself looking; except for the appearing happy part. As if he belonged with these people. As if he knew they wanted him there. That beautiful girl with the dazzling smile and the man whose naked body he had woken up beside less than an hour before. The vampire he had been trained to help destroy, for whose sake he had apparently severed himself from the Council and presumably his family. There was no way that his father would ever have been anything other than appalled by such a decision. And rightly so, it had obviously been an appalling decision for any Watcher to make. A rejection of his calling, his training, his peers. Yet, he looked so happy in the picture. He didn’t remember seeing a photograph of himself where he looked truly happy before. Of course he must have done. Laughed at jokes and films and plays. Smiled when he got the highest marks again. There was just something different about this expression. He touched his face tentatively, as if it might have left some kind of evidence it had once been there. The stubble was a surprise. Perhaps looking at himself in a mirror might be a good idea? That would surely tell him if he was older than when he had set out from England more effectively than any attempt to play Hercule Poirot?
He walked into the bathroom and there was a razor, soap, towels, a shower. And a mirror. Why would a vampire need a mirror in his bathroom? Because mirrors in bathrooms are standard fittings and he’s so used to not having a reflection that he doesn’t even notice it any more... Wesley took a deep breath, positioned himself in front of the sink and gazed at…
A stranger. This wasn’t him. No. This was… The ghost of Christmas Future. He put a hand to his face and leant closer to examine it more closely. What scared him the most was how minor the changes were. Different hair, the unshaven jaw… Yet, he was undoubtedly a stranger to himself. Odd to see himself clearly when his reflection wasn’t wearing glasses. He must have had laser surgery. It was him, after all, but…not the same man who had left for Sunnydale, no. Definitely not him. The eyes were more or less the same, but the shadows under them were pretty spectacular. The cheekbones looked higher, with those hollows beneath them that he didn’t recognize. The planes were the same though, underneath the surface changes. He ran his fingers down the side of his face, remembering how long it had taken him to need to shave. He’d used to sit there willing the bristles to grow as proof that he was truly becoming an adult. Odd to think of that now. Shaving had quickly become a bore… He wasn’t the same Wesley any more. He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them quickly as if he could surprise his reflection – his true reflection – into putting in an appearance. But there was no one there looking back at him with glasses and carefully parted hair, wearing that suit with the shoulder pads and the blue tie with the tiny white polka dots, which had always been a favourite. Someone clean and neat and untouched by life; the incipient panic hidden behind the comfort of those disguising lenses. This was someone else.
He was an emaciated ruin and yet he had an unsettling, unfamiliar kind of…beauty. He didn’t know another word for what he had become. He looked for himself and there he was, in places, half-hidden, the same bones he thought he remembered but everything was altered by the surface changes, the thinness and the stubble and the shadowed eyes and that strange weariness but also as if something disguising had been burnt away to reveal the essence beneath. Even though he was the hollow shadow of a man, he looked at himself and was reminded of that quote from DeLillo: Such men have the glamour of a wrecked Ferrari. He looked like the kind of man who had used to get the attention of those giggling girls who had never looked at him. He found himself abruptly appalled by and jealous of what he had become.
His life had clearly been terrible and yet there was something in his reflection that held him half-mesmerised because he had never known he had it in him to look like this. Was this who he was now or had he simply learned the art of disguise so well that he could pass for something he wasn’t? Either way this was not who he had been when he stepped onto that plane.
Aloud he said only: “Not a practical joke then.”
***
Temps Perdu, Part Seven
Wesley awoke to semi-darkness. He blinked a few times, automatically reaching for his glasses on the bedside table. He felt the base of a lamp but the switch was elusive and his fingers skimmed over the wooden surface of the table three times before he realized that his glasses simply weren’t there. He reapplied himself to trying to get the table lamp to work, finally locating a pull switch, and making himself squint painfully as the low wattage seemed abruptly as bright as daylight.
Gazing at the room, he realized with some dismay that he didn’t recognize it. He felt a brief stab of panic before the remembered that he was far from home now. In America. This was his hotel room. Probably in Sunnydale.
He frowned as he realized that he could see. Even though his glasses were still mysteriously AWOL, he could make out the fine details. Like those clothes that had been placed on that chair nearby. Jeans, a white t-shirt, a grey-green sweater. Where was his suit? His tie? Where was his suitcase? All his notes? He tried to scan the room for it but there was nothing in sight. Perhaps it was on the other side of the room?
Wesley rolled over and –
There was a man in the bed next to him. A man. In the bed. Next to him. As his heart jolted painfully in his chest with the shock of it, he realized that he, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, was naked. As in not wearing any clothes. At all. And that the maninthebednexttohim also appeared to be naked. At least he wasn’t wearing anything on his muscled torso. The muscled torso that left no doubt at all that this really was a man. In his bed. Next to him.
Wesley dived out of the bed so fast he nearly cannoned into the chair, scrabbling backwards in confusion, away from him, the stranger, the male stranger. Ohgodohgodohgodohgod. What had he done? What on earth had he done?
No, this couldn’t be happening. This had to be some kind of prank being played on him by the Watchers’ Council or else…
Or else a few hours after landing in a strange country his overwhelming feeling of unreadiness for the task ahead of him had caused him to drink himself into such an insensible condition that he had let himself get picked up by a man in a bar and accompanied the man back to his hotel room. Presumably, at some point, intercourse had…
Wrapping his arms around his knees, Wesley began to rock, and then realized all over again that he was naked, and couldn’t make any of the whimpering noises he so needed to because of his terror of waking up the stranger. Internalizing his panic was making him hyperventilate. Sooner or later he was going to have to breath out and when he did he was afraid it was going to turn into a long anguished wail.
How could he possibly have screwed up already? And so monumentally, too? Two Slayers. That’s what Travers had told him. He was being entrusted with two Slayers. Two teenage girls from an alien culture were going to follow his orders and do as he told them because the Council told them so. His authority was in his office, he’d been told. The fact that no one had ever done anything he told them to, even when he was Head Boy, was apparently not an issue. All he had to do was walk in there, present his credentials, do his work as a Watcher, and they would be eating out of his hand and slaying vampires under his orders. Yes, absolutely, and the moon was made of green cheese and babies were brought by the stork and watched over by the fairies at the end of the garden.... You can do this, Wesley. You’ve been trained for this since.... That was something to cling onto, that his preparations had at least been thorough. He’d read everything there was to read on Slayer mythology and Sunnydale in particular. Even if he couldn’t impress them with his authoritative manner perhaps he could win them over with his know-how. Not that he wasn’t going to try to be authoritative. He certainly was. He was going to walk in there with his shoulders back and look everyone in the eye, shake them firmly by the hand, introduce himself as if he didn’t have a flicker of doubt in the world, and keep reminding himself that the Watchers’ Council wouldn’t have sent him if they hadn’t believed he had it in him to do this job right. All he had to do was follow the rules. Follow them to the letter; rely on the wisdom of those who had performed this office before him – those who hadn’t got themselves sacked for becoming too emotionally invested in their charges, of course – and he wouldn’t go far wrong.
Except you’ve already gone so far wrong you can’t possibly go right now, you blithering idiot!
Wesley realized he was still rocking and not remembering to breathe and snatched a hasty intake of oxygen before daring another glance at the bed. The stranger was dark-haired with a prominent brow and looked peaceful. His body was curled around the warm place on the mattress which Wesley had left, one arm draped across the top of the pillow. He looked about Wesley’s age but much more powerfully built. He was handsome and muscular and probably quite a catch if you went in for that sort of thing. Which he apparently did now. Only with great difficulty did he manage to suppress a whimper. Oh god, what was that old joke women were always making in crowded bars, usually looking at him with amusement in their eyes as they did so?
Question: What’s the difference between a straight man and a gay man?
Answer: About two pints of lager.
But that couldn’t be it, could it? It couldn’t just be that. One day he was straight if somewhat…okay, completely inexperienced, and the next he was letting strange men in airport bars pick him up and take him home for…?
Make it a bad dream. Let me close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them again, he’s gone....
Wesley closed his eyes. Opened them. The man slept on. He had to fight the urge to laugh hysterically. Wonderful. He had left England a straight and sober member of the Watchers’ Council and arrived in California an irresponsible gay slut. Perhaps British Airways were putting ergot in their meals? Perhaps…? Perhaps he should just find some clothes, any clothes, and sneak out of this place. Just in case he had really outdone himself this time and managed to get himself picked up by a serial killer.
He felt so sick inside with the shock of his own idiocy; except it wasn’t really a shock, was it? It was more of a ‘oh, so that’s how you screwed up this time’ moment of revelation. After all, there had never really been any doubt about whether or not he would screw up, had there? It was just the time, method, and execution of the inevitable screw up that had ever been in doubt. He just hadn’t expected it to be so…sordid. Trying desperately to remember meeting the man he’d apparently shared a bed with all night there was just a blank; nothingness. Had he got drunk on the plane? So drunk he’d had to be escorted out of the airport or something? No, wait – there was a memory of the plane journey. He’d read all his notes again and got a dirty look from the guy next to him who wanted the light off while he wanted to double check the history of the Hellmouth for the fortieth time. The flight had felt endless, the in-flight movie had been moronic, the food inedible, and the seat very uncomfortable for someone with legs as long as his. He’d avoided alcohol, not thinking it was a good idea in his state of nerves. He even remembered leaving the plane, and he’d definitely been sober then. He’d had a driver waiting to take him into town. No point in renting a car. Better to just get dropped off at his hotel and then buy some transport of his own once he was settled.
But then how…? He looked back over at the man in the bed, trying to make him fit the driver, but he didn’t. They looked nothing like one another. He had no memory of arriving in Sunnydale. Just getting into the car, the driver talking about things that were meaningless to him until he’d almost snapped at him that he needed to check his notes again. A journey passed in resentful silence while he pretended it wasn’t making him car sick to keep going through these notes while the car jolted over every bump in the road. Then…nothing.
Never mind. The main thing was to get out of this room and away from the strange man. Once he’d escaped, he could try to find out what had happened. He looked around for his clothes again but there was still no sign of them. Okay, no point in panicking. And breathing, yes, breathing would be a good idea. He snatched a quick breath. Those clothes on the chair, they would fit him. He would wear those. He would – strategically withdraw the hell out of this nightmare situation and then he would try to… Oh god, he wasn’t sure there was anything that could be done to remedy this. He supposed it could have been slightly worse. He could have woken up in bed next to a dead woman. That was about the only thing he could think of as being worse than waking up next to a live man.
As he reached out to snatch the jeans on the chair, the man on the bed opened his eyes and looked straight at him.
Wesley gasped in shock and slithered backwards on his seat. He knew he ought to say something authoritative that made it clear he wasn’t someone to be trifled with, whatever kind of…trifling had gone on the night before, but now that he was faced with the reality of being alone in a darkened bedroom with not just a strange sleeping man but a strange awake and looking straight at him one, he just felt choked with fear.
The man on the bed frowned. “Wes…? Are you okay…?”
He’d given him his real name. Wonderful, he wasn’t just someone who went in for sordid liaisons with men he’d just met, he wasn’t even intelligent enough to give his pick ups a fake name. Slutty and stupid. His father would be so proud. His father. God, just – no.
“Wes…?” The man sprang out of the bed, revealing that he was indeed entirely naked; all over; especially at the…front.
Wesley tried to back up further and realized he was wedged against a chest of drawers whose ornate handles were now digging painfully into his bare back.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay? Was it a nightmare? Why didn’t you wake me?”
The strange man was coming straight for him, acting as if they were…intimates. Had he had a blow to the head? Why couldn’t he remember?
“Wes, hey…” The naked man crouched down in front of him and stretched out a hand.
Wesley managed a strangled: “Don’t....” Oh, that was such a pathetic whimper, but it stayed the man’s hand.
Brown eyes gazed into his that were full of concern. “What’s wrong?”
“Please, I don’t…” Wesley found he was stuck on panic. The man was so close to him; all broad shoulders and bare skin and naked and very, very male, and wanting to touch him; obviously already had touched him, and he didn’t want to be touched like…that. But if he made him angry perhaps he would.... Wesley swallowed. “I don’t want to....”
The stranger frowned, obviously confused. “Don’t want to what…? Wes, you’re shivering. Come on, let’s get you to back to bed....” He reached out to touch him again; a decisive sort of movement.
“No!” A strangled yelp where he would have liked something calmly authoritative but it did make the man snatch his fingers away from him as if he was burning. “No…bed....”
“Wesley…?” The stranger sniffed the air, then sniffed him and then moved back, dawning realization on his face. “You’re afraid.”
“I assure you, I…” He wanted to cry and rock; and was so ashamed of being here, being this, this pathetic snivelling naked person. “I’m not....” He couldn’t help it; even though he knew he should be firm and authoritative, the way his father was always telling him, to earn the respect of others with his demeanour and manner, he couldn’t manage it. He gazed up at the stranger, hoping against all hope that he hadn’t been so drunk or insane as to pick up someone entirely without compassion. “I’m not...”
Before he could finish his sentence, explain that he didn’t do things like this, the stranger was saying in a hurt tone, “Yes, you are. Don’t lie to me, Wes. You’re afraid of me. Why? Did you have a nightmare? Did you think I was Angelus?”
Wesley jerked his head back in shock. “Wh-what do you know of Angelus?”
“What?” The man gazed at him in disbelief.
“Only Council members are supposed to have access....” Wesley broke off as he realized he might be revealing more classified information. Oh dear Lord, there was only one way this could have happened, and that was yet another dereliction of his duty. In a humiliated whisper he managed: “Do I talk in my sleep?”
“Look, Wes…” As the man made to touch him again, Wesley jerked back against the chest of drawers, wincing as it bruised his back.
The man flinched and hastily moved back. “Hey, it’s okay, I promise.”
Wesley really tried not to look at the man’s…genitalia, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was…right there, and semi-erect and…oh god, oh god, oh god, please make there be some way my father never has to find out....
The stranger seemed to notice Wesley’s rabbit-hypnotized-by-a-stoat gaze and quickly backed up further. “Let me....” He grabbed a pair of tracksuit bottoms from the chair and pulled them on, before saying: “Are you cold? Do you want your robe?”
“Robe?” Wesley echoed faintly. That suggested more than a one-night stand. That suggested they were – God help him – sharing this bedroom for the weekend at least. “Did I – Did I hit my head…?”
The man held out a blue dressing gown to him which was not the one he had packed; definitely not the same one at all. “I don’t think so. Not hit it. But you did pass out. Willow said it was just a deeper than usual sleep. The good news is the bomb is gone.”
“Bomb?” he stared at him aghast. Dear God, he’d gone to sleep a respectable watcher and woken up a gay terrorist.
“Willow got rid of it.” The man offered him a hand. “Do you want some breakfast? You know Buffy is just dying to…”
“Buffy?” Finally something that made sense! “Buffy Summers?”
The man frowned. “Yes. Buffy. Why are you saying it like that?”
“You know her?”
Total disbelief on the stranger’s face. “Wes, you know I…” Then his expression changed completely. “No, you don’t, do you? You don’t know a damned thing.”
That stung. “I assure you, I have studied extensively for this post and I think you’ll find there is considerably more emphasis on field work these days than…”
The stranger fell back and Wesley noticed how pale he was. Not had just gone. Always apparently was. He crossed to the door and opened it, calling: “Giles! Willow! Buffy!” Great, now two of them were panicking. But, had he just said…?
“Giles?” Wesley echoed in dawning horror. “Rupert Giles? Is here? Where…we are? No, you don’t understand. You can’t tell him about.... The Council mustn’t....” He hastily pulled on the dressing gown the stranger had given him, as if that would somehow help him.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” A girl’s voice, and there was its owner; a young redhead in pyjamas with bed hair and a pale, pretty face. Oh wonderful, now there were strange women looking at him as well as strange men. Wesley hastily belted his dressing gown.
“He doesn’t remember me.” The stranger sounded positively tragic.
“What…? Are you sure?” Another man. English. Which would make him…
“Giles, he doesn’t know who I am!”
Wesley closed his eyes tightly. No other way to escape from this situation except the tried and tested – had never worked in the past but perhaps it would work now – method of closing his eyes so no one else could see him. Rupert Giles. The man he was replacing. The man he had hoped to impress with his efficiency and authority was seeing him for the first time as a half-naked, shivering thing, cringing in a corner after a night of drunken passion with a strange man. The only way for this situation to be improved would be for his father and Quentin Travers to walk in with half the Council in tow. No, he couldn’t even make jokes about that in the privacy of his own head. He started to shake and couldn’t seem to stop.
“Dear Lord… Wesley…?”
He opened his eyes. Impossible not to when there was an authoritative-sounding older Englishman crouched in front of him telling him to do so. The eyes gazing at him were kind behind their glasses, but that didn’t make the situation an iota less confusing and humiliating.
“Is Angel right? Have you forgotten us?”
“Angel?” he echoed in disbelief. “You mean that’s…” He stared up in fascinated horror at the stranger who was wringing his hands by the doorway. Of course, now he saw him in the light from the corridor he realized that the man in whose bed he had awoken was familiar; that, despite the different hairstyle, he was unmistakably… He could hardly bring himself to even whisper the word: “Angelus…?”
The stranger flinched and turned to the redhead in desperation. “He doesn’t remember me!”
“I assure you I remember you perfectly.” Wesley clutched his dressing gown to himself and rose to his feet. “And what havoc you wreaked across Europe for more than a century. Young lady, I advise you to move away from that creature this instant.” He turned to Giles in disbelief. “Why haven’t you informed the Council that Angelus is in Sunnydale?”
“Because he’s not. He’s in L.A.”
Wesley turned to see a young blonde woman step into the room.
“And he isn’t Angelus, he’s Angel.” She gazed at him intently. “You don’t know who I am, do you? I’m Buffy Summers.”
He looked at Giles in confusion. “I don’t understand. Why are you allowing a dangerous animal like Angelus to roam loose and why am I…?” That was when it hit him. He hadn’t spent the night in the bed of a strange man at all; he’d spent the night in the bed of a vampire. A blow to the solar plexus could not more efficiently have knocked the wind from his body.
“Easy…” Giles gripped him by the shoulders, looped an arm around his neck and steered him back to the bed.
At the sight of the crumpled sheets, Wesley gave a strangled yelp. “No!”
“You need to sit down.” Buffy took his other arm and he was surprised by the strength of her grip. When she shoved him – not ungently – onto the bed, he really had no choice but to do as she said and sit. She looked at him and then turned to Rupert Giles. “Giles – explain.”
As Angelus came forward, Wesley automatically flinched and the vampire stopped, a look of distress on his face. Gently, he said, “Wes, I know if you just woke up and don’t remember anything this must seem a little bizarre to you….”
“Understatement of the century there, I think,” Buffy told him.
“What do you remember?” Giles pressed. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Wesley snatched a much needed breath, trying to tell himself that having a Slayer between him and Angelus meant he was safe. It was really bothering him that the redheaded girl was still within reach of that monster though. “I remember – the plane journey and hiring a driver to take me into Sunnydale and…I must have fallen asleep during the drive.”
“Oh no…” said the redhead faintly. “I’ve tabula rasa’d him.”
“No, you haven’t,” Giles assured her. “It’s probably just a temporary side effect from the spell and will wear off very soon.”
“What if it doesn’t?” she said desperately.
“Wes, you have to trust me on this.” There was an ache in the vampire’s voice that almost made Wesley believe him until he realized it was probably just a ploy of his kind. “We’re friends, you and I. The best of friends.”
Wesley looked at him narrowly. “You may have these people fooled but I know exactly what you are and there is no way on earth that I would ever be friends with…”
Buffy marched to the chest of drawers, picked up a photograph and then shoved it under Wesley’s nose. “Think again.”
“Gently, Buffy,” Giles said in mild reproach. “He just woke up naked in bed with a vampire. You must expect a little disorientation.”
Wesley gazed in disbelief at the picture of him and Angelus and a pretty dark haired woman with a dazzling smile. “But… That is to say, I don’t… Why would I…?”
“Angel has a soul,” Buffy told him. “He’s a champion for good. He fights evil. You fight it with him. You, Angel, Gunn, Lorne, Illyria and Spike.”
“Spike?” He looked up at her in horror. “As in William the Bloody?”
Buffy and Giles exchanged a glance. Buffy grimaced. “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Spike yet?”
“That might have been a good idea,” said Giles dryly.
“You’re saying I fight evil alongside the most evil vampire to ever walk the earth and the second most evil vampire to ever walk the earth?”
“I don’t think I was that bad,” Angelus said a little sulkily. “The Master was worse.”
“They both have souls,” Giles explained.
“Oh, I see. Both of them, you say? Was there a special on at Wal-Mart? Buy one vampire soul, get another free?”
“Wasn’t free.” Another voice he didn’t recognize. “I worked bloody hard for that soul.”
Wesley took one look at the peroxide demon in the doorway and got to his feet. “All right, this insanity has gone on long enough. I refuse to accept that I have so abdicated from my responsibilities that I choose to work alongside the vampire who attempted to murder my own father and…”
“Given what your father’s like, I would have thought that was a selling point.” There was the flare of a lighter before the peroxide vampire looked across at him. “And I wasn’t trying to kill him particularly. I was just trying to eat a few orphans. And it’s not as if I succeeded on either account.”
“Stop confusing him,” Angelus hissed at Spike.
Spike rolled his eyes. “I think confusion is a little on the inevitable side, mate. He thinks he’s here to play Wesley the Watcher and he wakes up in bed with a vampire. If you hadn’t been so weird and kinky about having to snuggle up with him every night, at least he wouldn’t be sitting there thinking he’s turned gayboy as well as minion of evil.”
“I’m not a minion of evil!” Wesley looked up at Giles for guidance. “Am I?”
“No. Wesley, I know it’s a lot to take in, but you do have to trust me where Angel and…Spike are concerned. Angel was cursed by gypsies and his soul restored in revenge for a member of their clan that he killed. The reason why there are no Council records of him for a century after his last known place of slaughter is because he was haunted by remorse and lived…”
“…in the sewers, eating rats,” Spike supplied helpfully. “And if you’re thinking that makes him a big fat loser, you’d be right.”
“…lived apart from humanity.” Giles glared at Spike. “So he wouldn’t be tempted to feed upon them.”
“Which I didn’t,” Angelus put in hastily. “Feed on them, I mean.”
Buffy nodded. “Angel’s good. He’s a people’s champion sort of vampire now. He helps the helpless.”
Wesley wondered if he was still dreaming. That would make everything so much more explicable. “Angelus and William the Bloody are now defenders of humanity?”
“I prefer ‘Spike’,” the vampire explained. “It’s shorter.”
“Yeah, and he can actually spell it.” Angelus moved forward and Wesley instinctively pressed back. The vampire looked downcast. “Look, Wes, I know this is difficult for you to take in, but we really are friends, I swear. And we were only sharing a bed because we just came back from a hell dimension and you get nightmares.”
“Oh, that I believe,” said Wesley faintly. “I appear to be having one now.”
“I’m so sorry,” said the redhead desperately. “I don’t know how I… There was a tiny instant when the spell seemed to…hitch, but it was just for a moment, less than the blink of an eye really. I was using Wesley’s power to make the bomb return to an earlier state of being and I think I must have… He must have been affected by it, just for that millisecond.”
“But he hasn’t returned to an earlier state of being, Wills,” Buffy pointed out. “He still looks the same as when Angel carried him up here in that Hammer Horror damsel in distress kind of way. He just can’t remember the past five years.”
“The past, what…?” Wesley breathed in horror.
Buffy winced again and looked at Giles apologetically. “Probably another of those bits of information I should have saved until later, huh?”
“That might have been a good idea.”
Wesley sank back down on the bed, noticing that the room now appeared to be spinning.
“Wesley…?” said Buffy anxiously. “You don’t look so good… Giles, do you think he’s…?”
“Passing out…? Yes, I’d say that was a pretty good…”
Wesley woke up to find Angelus, the scourge of Europe, anxiously patting his cheek. “Wes…? Wes…?”
“No one calls me ‘Wes’…” Wesley muttered.
“I do.” The hurt in those brown eyes was so convincing he even felt a pang of guilt. Angelus was scarily close to him. They moved so fast, vampires. He remembered being shown that in a controlled experiment; just how swiftly they could grab the unsuspecting; and how strong they were. He wished Angelus would move away from him but it was probably a bad idea to show fear, even though he was certainly feeling it.
He winced at the thumping in his head and looked around the room. There were now even more people in it. Okay, this was definitely a nightmare. Otherwise, why would there be a green-skinned, red-horned demon in a silk dressing gown sipping from a cocktail glass and gazing at him anxiously, and a blue-haired woman with unblinking pale blue eyes, also gazing at him anxiously, and a very tall black American peering at him in concern and saying: “Hey, English? Do you remember me?”
“No, he doesn’t remember you,” Angelus said, a little petulantly. “He doesn’t remember anyone.”
“Maybe he’s just blocking you out on account of you being a bloodsucker.”
“The last thing he remembers is being driven into Sunnydale. Unless you were working as a cab driver back then, he won’t remember you.”
Wesley blinked and looked up at the various pairs of eyes all gazing at him. Giles, Buffy and the redheaded girl were also still hovering and there was now another presumably human male staring at him, too, out of the one eye that wasn’t covered by a piratical patch. “I don’t remember any of you,” he croaked. And I’m not at all sure that I want to.
“Wesley…” There was authoritative voice that automatically made him want to sit up straighter. Rupert Giles. The man he was supposed to be replacing. Except…
“Drink this.”
He found a cup of tea placed in his hand and looked at it in confusion.
William the Bloody rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think the poor bastard needs something a bit stronger? Christ, if I ever woke up in bed with broodypants there, I’d need a bottle of Glengoyne at least. What am I saying? For that it would have to be Mortlach.”
“I think he would be more comfortable with tea, thank you, Spike.”
“Thank you.” Wesley sipped it automatically and felt a little soothed. “I don’t drink whisky.”
He became aware of everyone exchanging meaningful glances and sighing. “What?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” the redheaded girl hastened to assure him. “It’s just that you’re…different. It takes some getting used to.”
Wesley looked at Giles in horror. “I’m not a dipsomaniac, am I?”
“No, of course not,” Giles said a little too heartily.
“Just nuts,” muttered William the – Actually, Wesley thought, it was no wonder people had decided to call him Spike. Perhaps he would do the same from now on.
Angelus elbowed the other vampire hard. “Shut up.”
“What?” Wesley looked back to Giles for help. “Did he say…?”
“He’s a moron,” Angelus told him forcefully. “Don’t listen to him.” There was that look again, all anxious and pleading with him.
Wesley hastily averted his eyes. Perhaps that was how Angelus had become the scourge of Europe, through lulling people into a false sense of security with the puppy dog eyes and acting as if he really cared about you.
“Look, we can’t just hover over him all day, like this,” Giles said. “Why don’t we leave Wesley to have a shower and get dressed, and then he can come downstairs and have some breakfast and we can discuss the matter calmly and rationally.”
“Glad you suggested that, Giles,” Spike observed. “Because I was planning to stand on a chair and scream.”
“There’s no need to get snippy,” Wesley told the vampire and then as it advanced towards him, leant back on the bed, heart hammering as he realized he’d just stupidly provoked a dangerous killer.
Spike rolled his eyes. “Wes, I’m not going to…” He sighed. “I do actually like you, you pillock. You don’t think I’d have signed up for that whole hand holding and mumbo jumbo malarkey for anyone, do you?”
“He doesn’t remember, remember?” Angelus told him tersely.
“Oh yeah.” Spike put a cigarette in his mouth while still gazing at Wesley curiously. “I forgot.”
“We all like you.” That was the young man with the eye patch who hadn’t spoken to him directly until then. “You may want to remember that. However – freaky things are, you are among friends.”
Wesley looked around at them again, trying not to goggle too obviously at the green-skinned demon and blue-haired woman, and the two notoriously evil vampires.
Buffy grimaced. “Not saying your taste in friends isn’t a little…out there, Wes, but you really are among them. Honest.”
Then they were gone and he was left alone with his cooling cup of tea and the memory of Angelus, the most evil vampire in the world, giving him that wistful look of anxiety as he reluctantly closed the door. Shouldn’t an evil vampire look a little more…evil than that? Not to mention slightly less…dorky?
Wesley drank his tea automatically. It was currently the only thing in front of him that wasn’t complicated and that he understood. Five years. He had lost five years of his life. He couldn’t accept that. It simply made no sense. But then most of the things they had said to him had made no sense. That could be, of course, because he’d lost a huge chunk of his memory, say – five years worth – as a side-effect of some clearly dangerous magic that redheaded child had been dabbling in. Don’t end a sentence in a preposition, Wesley! He flinched instinctively and tried to gather up his scattered thoughts. Unfortunately they kept wanting to return, like a compass needle to magnetic north, to the thought of his father. He shied away from that at once.
Or – if he wanted to face it head on – he had either won so little respect from his Slayer on his first appearance that she had decided to make him the victim of a humiliating and ridiculously complicated practical joke. Or he had been told the truth, in which case sometime over the past five years he had apparently departed so far from his hereditary calling that he now slept with the enemy and fraternized with demons. Either way, he had utterly failed in what he had set out to do: become a Watcher worthy of his surname, and win his father’s respect.
Right, that wasn’t helping at all. He took another sip of tea and decided to approach the problem logically. He should examine the practical joke theory first. Buffy Summers was a teenage girl and they were notoriously…frivolous creatures, well, by reputation they were anyway. The Academy’s habit of keeping its students segregated from anything that might be construed as a distraction certainly was useful when it came to concentrating on one’s studies but was not perhaps so efficient in giving its Watchers an all round knowledge of… That thought process seemed likely to lead straight back to his waking up naked in a vampire’s bed with no idea how he’d got there. The point was that he didn’t know what teenage girls were like. For all his life the Slayer being a young girl had just been an interesting anomaly which had led to some controversial papers being written on the correlation between the possibly demonic power source of the Slayer and the claim by clerics of the Middle Ages that female of the species was not possessed of a soul. There was never really anything written that told of…nail varnish and earrings and make up.
If he had thought about it at all, he had always assumed that Slayers…slew. He was aware that they had to do other things in between staking vampires but he had thought of those being along the lines of: training to Slay, sleeping to gather strength for Slaying, eating to gather strength for Slaying, studying the Slayer’s Handbook and so on; a mirror image of the life of the Watcher-in-training, all preparation and research and weapons training. But Buffy had certainly not looked like a young woman who spent every waking hour, not in the gym or the cemetery, working on her demon and weapons identification. She looked like a woman who liked pink lipstick and eye shadow and cared about clothes and shoes and giggling inanely in the manner of those young women he had sometimes passed on the way back to his lodgings who had appeared to speak a language and live a life so far removed from his own that they might as well have been inhabiting a parallel dimension. Those sort of girls had always made fun of him; of his accent, of his lack of interest – if he tried not to gawp at them in too much the manner of a man encountering exotic wildlife from a newly discovered continent – or his over interest if he couldn’t help looking at them wistfully and wondering just exactly how one did go about striking up a conversation with these incomprehensible creatures. So, he could hardly dismiss out of hand the possibility of her having been instrumental in some deception designed to make him look foolish, and perhaps to discredit him with the Council so she could keep her preferred Watcher.
But there were the practicalities of such a deception. It wasn’t as if a Slayer and even one vampire should be on nodding terms, let alone joining forces with two of them to make fun of her new Watcher. And, wouldn’t it have made more sense to come up with a scenario less unbelievable than this one? Not just one, but two, reformed vampires? Green-skinned demons? Blue-haired women? And it was difficult to believe that Rupert Giles would be party to such a deception. He probably had his reasons to feel bitter towards the Council, but if a joke had been carried out, it had involved drugging Wesley, removing his clothing, leaving him in bed with a serial killer, and, last but by no means least, looking another Englishman in the eye and lying to him. He didn’t believe Rupert Giles was capable of that last act. The man was a Watcher. A scholar. A librarian. According to the Council he had failed in his duties because he had allowed himself to become too emotionally attached to his charge. That suggested he had a compassionate nature, if nothing else, and Wesley had no reason to doubt that he had an honourable one as well.
That left the lost five years possibility. Appalling and unbelievable as it was, he found it slightly less appalling and unbelievable than the alternative that a trained Watcher had been party to a spiteful practical joke against a fellow graduate of the Watchers’ Academy. He finished his tea and got to his feet. He felt dazed, but that was helping a little; it was as if he was slightly separated from his body and his surroundings. No doubt it was simply shock, but, like a swelling around a broken ankle, it left him capable of moving when he would otherwise have had no choice but to stay still and whimper.
There should be evidence of those lost years, right? He looked at the photograph again. He looked in it pretty much the way he thought of himself looking; except for the appearing happy part. As if he belonged with these people. As if he knew they wanted him there. That beautiful girl with the dazzling smile and the man whose naked body he had woken up beside less than an hour before. The vampire he had been trained to help destroy, for whose sake he had apparently severed himself from the Council and presumably his family. There was no way that his father would ever have been anything other than appalled by such a decision. And rightly so, it had obviously been an appalling decision for any Watcher to make. A rejection of his calling, his training, his peers. Yet, he looked so happy in the picture. He didn’t remember seeing a photograph of himself where he looked truly happy before. Of course he must have done. Laughed at jokes and films and plays. Smiled when he got the highest marks again. There was just something different about this expression. He touched his face tentatively, as if it might have left some kind of evidence it had once been there. The stubble was a surprise. Perhaps looking at himself in a mirror might be a good idea? That would surely tell him if he was older than when he had set out from England more effectively than any attempt to play Hercule Poirot?
He walked into the bathroom and there was a razor, soap, towels, a shower. And a mirror. Why would a vampire need a mirror in his bathroom? Because mirrors in bathrooms are standard fittings and he’s so used to not having a reflection that he doesn’t even notice it any more... Wesley took a deep breath, positioned himself in front of the sink and gazed at…
A stranger. This wasn’t him. No. This was… The ghost of Christmas Future. He put a hand to his face and leant closer to examine it more closely. What scared him the most was how minor the changes were. Different hair, the unshaven jaw… Yet, he was undoubtedly a stranger to himself. Odd to see himself clearly when his reflection wasn’t wearing glasses. He must have had laser surgery. It was him, after all, but…not the same man who had left for Sunnydale, no. Definitely not him. The eyes were more or less the same, but the shadows under them were pretty spectacular. The cheekbones looked higher, with those hollows beneath them that he didn’t recognize. The planes were the same though, underneath the surface changes. He ran his fingers down the side of his face, remembering how long it had taken him to need to shave. He’d used to sit there willing the bristles to grow as proof that he was truly becoming an adult. Odd to think of that now. Shaving had quickly become a bore… He wasn’t the same Wesley any more. He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them quickly as if he could surprise his reflection – his true reflection – into putting in an appearance. But there was no one there looking back at him with glasses and carefully parted hair, wearing that suit with the shoulder pads and the blue tie with the tiny white polka dots, which had always been a favourite. Someone clean and neat and untouched by life; the incipient panic hidden behind the comfort of those disguising lenses. This was someone else.
He was an emaciated ruin and yet he had an unsettling, unfamiliar kind of…beauty. He didn’t know another word for what he had become. He looked for himself and there he was, in places, half-hidden, the same bones he thought he remembered but everything was altered by the surface changes, the thinness and the stubble and the shadowed eyes and that strange weariness but also as if something disguising had been burnt away to reveal the essence beneath. Even though he was the hollow shadow of a man, he looked at himself and was reminded of that quote from DeLillo: Such men have the glamour of a wrecked Ferrari. He looked like the kind of man who had used to get the attention of those giggling girls who had never looked at him. He found himself abruptly appalled by and jealous of what he had become.
His life had clearly been terrible and yet there was something in his reflection that held him half-mesmerised because he had never known he had it in him to look like this. Was this who he was now or had he simply learned the art of disguise so well that he could pass for something he wasn’t? Either way this was not who he had been when he stepped onto that plane.
Aloud he said only: “Not a practical joke then.”
***
