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Temps Perdu, Part Nine

The story continued – tales of oracles and Doyle and Faith and visions, and demons slain and scrolls translated, and, most surprising of all, the tale of Darla. Wesley remembered her very well from his studies at the Academy. She was as notorious as Angelus himself; the two of them inspiring the other to more and more inventive feats of evil. No one in the Council had believed that she could really be gone, even though her reputation had faded in the last century – once separated from Angelus she had been nothing like as dangerous. But the story Lorne told was more extraordinary than any of her previous feats.

Lorne leant forward: “Angel dusted his sire, Darla, to save Her Buffyness. A few years later, Wolfram & Hart bring Darla back from hell as a human. Unfortunately she still had the same disease that was killing her four hundred years before and there wasn’t a cure. Angel underwent a trial to try to save her but it was a no go on account of her already having that first get out of hell free pass. Then one of the lawyers at Wolfram & Hart who’d fallen in love with her, brings in Drusilla – ”

“My sire,” Spike added helpfully. “Making Angel my granddaddy although for some reason he doesn’t like people to know.”

“Thank you, Pointless Interruptus.” Lorne glared at Spike. “I was talking.”

Angel sighed. “Drusilla turned Darla, made her a soulless undead thing again, damned her straight back to hell. I kind of saw…red. I knew I’d have to kill her. I didn’t want to but I would have done it if I could. Meanwhile Holland Manners orders up a massacre from Darla and Drusilla, and they gave him one – killed him and most of the lawyers in the room with him. I left them to it. Then I knew I was going to have to kill Darla and Dru and I didn’t want any witnesses. I fired you all. You and Gunn went off and did your…bonding.”

“Why are you saying it like that?” Gunn demanded.

Angel shrugged. “No reason.”

“You better not be implying what I think you’re implying because lawyer upgrade or no lawyer upgrade I still know how to stake a damned vamp.”

“I’m just saying you bonded.”

“Yeah, we did.”

“You and Wes most of all.”

“Well, I was right there when he got shot, which was more than you were.”

“Oh, so you’re throwing that at me now? How many years is it going to be before you let that one go?”

“How about never?”

Wesley felt a headache begin to throb behind his temples. He had a suspicion that might have been a familiar sensation around these two. “Shall we go back to Lorne telling the story?”

The green demon looked sorrowfully at his empty glass. “Where were we? Oh yes, you and Gunnsmoke were bonding. That went on for a while as I recall.”

Gunn rolled his eyes. “There was nothing wrong with our bonding. It was clean bonding. Wholesome.”

“Fine. You were bonding in a Mom’s Apple Pie manner and in no way like a homoerotic buddy cop coupling just waiting to happen kind of way. Then Angel sleeps with Darla. Has his epiphany and…”

“Wait!” Wesley held up a hand. “Angelus – Angel slept with Darla?”

“Yes.” Angel shifted uncomfortably.

“When she was a soulless vampire?”

“Yes.”

“Did you still have your soul?”

“Yes. But I was…confused.”

Buffy raised her eyebrows. “Oh is that what we’re calling it these days?”

Spike rolled his eyes. “As excuses go that one has to be the lamest ever. ‘Oh, sorry, officer, I wasn’t really picking up this hooker, she just made me all…confused’.”

“I’m waiting for the version where Connor was conceived by Angel tripping on a loose floorboard and falling awkwardly.” Gunn shrugged.

“Had his epiphany,” Lorne continued relentlessly. “Saves you, Gunn and Cordy from the Skilosh demons trying to impregnate you with their spawn.”

Angel jabbed a finger at Gunn. “You forget about the demon spawn they were trying to inject into your cranium, don’t you?”

“Well, I was trying to.”

“I saved you,” Angel told Wesley quickly. “From the Skilosh. You were in a wheelchair because of getting shot.”

“Oh, was I?” Wesley wondered if he should have gone with that offer of a drink earlier instead of the cup of tea. “That was careless of me.”

“You were with Gunn when it happened.”

“I didn’t know the cop was going to shoot him! I didn’t even know Wes was coming down there. And I had no idea the cop was a zombie. Maybe if you’d bothered to communicate with us instead of running off to your other blonde…”

“Okay, boys. I can either bring Wesley up to speed with you in the room but silent or with you out of the room completely, your choice.” Lorne glared between them.

Gunn said: “No, let me tell it...”

And Gunn had tried, he really had, Wesley thought, to convey it to him, a life of which he had no recollection, relationships of which he had no memory; a time when they had been abandoned by Angel, and how close they’d all grown, this man sitting next to him, and a dead woman named after the youngest daughter of King Lear.

“So, Cordy would get the vision of someone in danger or something nasty arising somewhere. You’d do the research and come up with the plan. Then you and me would go out there and deal with it, together. You face danger together every day like that, you get…close. Not like Angel was saying. We never did anything like that. But we wouldn’t have been any closer if we had been.”

It occurred to him for the first time – as perhaps Gunn wanted it to – that he must have had individual relationships with all of these people. Individual friendships. When Angel was around it was difficult to think of anything but the intensity of relationship they had evidently shared; that unconvincing denial that had left Wesley more than half convinced he had, in his dealings with Angel, basically allowed a dominant male personality to once again overwhelm him into submission. He had always liked having orders to follow, rules to apply, guidelines to be…guided by. There was probably a certain confidence that came from being alive for two hundred and fifty years that someone like Wesley would have been attracted to; swept up in the slipstream of Angel’s simple-minded certainties or rather his simple-minded certainties about Angel… He blinked and realized that Gunn was still looking at him, willing him to get something. He thought perhaps he did. Gunn was also confident; not a man with too many doubts, it seemed. Another alpha male. Wesley remembered those from school and the Academy: the captain of the cricket team; captain of the football team; prefects wearily taking responsibility for ant-like first-formers. People to look up to; literally in Gunn’s case, of course, as the man was so tall.

Gunn frowned. “Did I tell you who was in charge?”

Wesley blinked. Surprised it needed to be said aloud. “You.” Of course, you.

“No, Wes. You. You were the boss. Up to a point anyway. I mean, when it came to something that Cordy had strong opinions about she was always going to put her stiletto down. But apart from when it came to interviewing hookers, you were definitely the boss.”

“Me?” Wesley tried to make sense of that. He felt a little like someone faced with a piece of inexplicable modern art for the first time. He kept walking around it but he still couldn't make it have any correlation with its label. He'd always liked to think he had leadership qualities; had thought on occasion that if people would just shut up and listen to him that he actually did have leadership qualities, but every time that had been tested in the field, when they were sent out orienteering on Exmoor with a faulty compass or the like, finding that he invariably couldn't get his peers to pay any attention to him in a crisis situation had rather knocked the confidence out of him. He looked at Gunn again and still couldn't make sense of it. Wesley had managed to command the attention of the younger boys, certainly, and had taken pretty good care of them during lightning storms and snow drifts that had left them all even more cold and scared and wanting their mothers than him, but in the past he'd found that no one over the age of fourteen seemed very inclined to take him seriously.

Gunn seemed unaware of his thoughts: “Same thing happened when we went to Pylea. Lorne's dimension. The rebels there voted you their leader too.”

“Ah, that would be because of my…” Wesley decided he couldn't even think of a vaguely snippy comment to make. “No, I… I don't understand.”

Gunn sighed. “Okay, we need to backtrack a little. We're all newly Angel Investigations-Without-Angel and I get a call from my old crew that the cops in this area by a shelter are beating up anyone on the street who ain't white and wearing a suit. I hook up with Rondell and George and we have this plan, right? We're going to walk down to where the cops have been beating people up and if they start anything with us we get it on tape and…”

“That was your plan?” Wesley frowned. “But isn't that…? I mean…? Wouldn't it have been a better idea to…?”

Spike, who had been listening intently, looked bemused. “Sounds like a winner to me. What's wrong with it?”

Gunn grimaced. “Okay, maybe it was a dumb plan. The point is, you thought it was a dumb plan when I told Cordy about it over the phone. So, you came down to where we were being hassled by this cop – you being a white guy in a suit with a nice accent who remembers to say 'please' and 'thank you', and therefore the kind of guy the cops usually 'please' and 'thank you' to right back, and you told him that I was a friend of yours. And he shot you. Right in the gut. Because it turned out he was a zombie cop on a mission to clean up the streets and leave no witnesses and didn't give a damn how nice your diction was. And you nearly died, Wes. Trying to help out me and Rondell and George. Do you know how many hours I've spent over the years sitting in damned hospitals waiting for you to wake up?”

“I'm sorry,” Wesley said automatically. It was difficult not to respond to the level of pain in Gunn's eyes. He looked down and found that Gunn was holding his hand. It didn't feel familiar, at all. He couldn't remember a man ever holding his hand like that before; not someone trying to joke-grope him in the back of the assembly hall or during choir practice – without even the compliment paid to him of it being done with any passion, more like a way of getting at him; but as if there was a connection between them that could only be communicated by touch. He looked down at Gunn's hand clasping his own and although there was nothing about it that jogged a memory at all, it did hit him with a sudden spike of mingled pain and recognition of how much it must have meant to him to have a person like this care so much for a person like him. These must have been such dangerous friendships; too many damaged people needing the others around them too damned much. He slipped his hand loose from Gunn's grip and put it in his lap where it couldn't be reached again. But he said again, “I'm sorry.”

Lorne sighed. “Gunn, I already covered this.”

“You didn’t tell him the important things.”

“Well, it’s not a story about Wesley getting shot and being in a wheelchair for a few weeks and you carrying him to the bathroom. Would that it were because then Cordelia and Fred would still be here, but that’s not what was important.”

“It was important at the time,” Gunn insisted. “It was important to me and it was important to him.”

“We need to tell him about Fred,” Lorne insisted. “And Cordelia. And Connor.”

By the way the room seemed three degrees chillier, Wesley guessed that none of these were exactly Tales From the Riverbank stories.

“Okay.” Gunn turned back to him. “We rescued a girl from Pylea – Lorne’s home dimension. Name of Winifred Burkle.”

Gunn and Spike both looked at Illyria then and she gazed back at them and then looked at Wesley. It was strange to see yearning in the eyes of an old one. Almost as strange as it had been to see Angelus, the scourge of Europe, grinning like a dork and looking as if it mattered to him so passionately that Wesley Wyndam-Pryce should still like his eggs.

“You and me – we were really good friends. We both liked Fred – Winifred Burkle, but we didn’t know the other one liked her in that way. I thought you saw her as a sister. I guess you saw me seeing her the same way.”

“But surely if we’d been such close friends as you say, we would have told each other…” Wesley broke off at Gunn’s expression.

“We were best friends, Wes, not girls.”

“Oh.” Wesley felt disappointed. “I always thought… I never had a best friend at school. I was hoping perhaps you could tell them anything.”

“Well, sometimes you can tell them stuff. But… anyway, we didn’t. You never had a best friend at school?”

Spike snorted. “Colour me not at all surprised.”

Gunn looked at him in irritation. “Lay off, Spike.”

“Oh, come on. You know I love Percy to pieces and all, but of course he never had a best friend at school. He was too busy asking for extra homework and double Latin with everything. Be honest. How are friendships formed anyway? In the cracks between the rules. In the moments of rebellion. In the times you…”

“Go sack a convent and share the same nun…?” Gunn enquired.

Angel grimaced as Spike shrugged. “Well, yeah, okay. But, it’s being in the same team; facing down the common enemy; getting away with something you shouldn’t. You don’t make best friends turning up to lessons on time, always doing your homework when you’re supposed to and never taking a night off in case you only got a B minus instead of an A plus.”

Gunn gave Spike a last glare before turning back to Wesley. “Don’t pay attention to him.”

“No, he’s right.” Wesley saw no point in lying about it. He had been intending to bluster for six when he got to Sunnydale, cover up who he was by any means necessary, make them think he was something more than he was until he could become the person he was pretending to be. But what was the point in trying to practise any deception upon people who knew you far better than you knew yourself? “That probably is how friendships are formed because I didn’t form any. Not the kind of friendship you’re describing.”

Gunn snatched a breath. “Okay, so we’re both falling in love with Fred and not telling one another. You’re in charge of the agency. Cordy is having the visions. Angel’s not going dark side or screwing anyone he shouldn’t be. Then Darla turns up with a belly out to here and it’s pretty clear Angel left a deposit with her on their night of sleazy vamp passion that’s just about to mature.”

There was another long painful silence. Angel was gazing at the cutlery on the table, Buffy was grimacing; Giles looked as if he would really like to have been somewhere else.

Gunn looked at Angel. “Do you want to…?”

The vampire shook his head. “I wouldn’t tell it right.”

Which was why it was Lorne who finally told him about Connor; the miracle child born to two vampires; whose soul had been so pure that he had contaminated his soulless mother with so much love that she had staked herself to give him life; the child sought by the eighteenth century vampire killer, Holtz, whose family Darla and Angelus had murdered so foully, and who had sought their son in retribution, and been given, when Wesley, after translating a false prophecy, had stolen the child and carried him straight into danger…

He had sat for a long time after Lorne reached that part of the story, not able to find a response. An apology seemed much too small a thing for a cock up of such monumental proportions. He wondered dispassionately how he had lived with that mistake; how he had woken up each day and gone to work knowing that he had been instrumental in sending an innocent child into a hell dimension. When Lorne had rapidly told him about Connor coming back, alive and well, and now a teenager, it had seemed to be happening a long way off. After that, the other tragedies had unfolded around him as gracefully as the wings of seagulls skimming a white-foamed sea, wailing plaintively all the while. Betrayal and the thin slit left by a sharpened blade and the white smothering of a pillow wielded by an anguished father and then a confusion of abandonment and patricide and filicide, and the woman who had almost killed him kept prisoner in his closet, and the woman who had almost killed all of them, repeatedly, a frequent visitor to his bed, and their affair and her death, and Cordelia’s possession by a rogue higher power and the beast and Angelus, and Faith, again, only a friend this time instead of a foe, and Angel accepting the keys to the kingdom of Hell, Incorporated, and then another maelstrom of disaster, confusion and resurrection and Cordelia’s false awakening from the coma that had claimed her, and the vision she had given to Angel of the coming apocalypse and Fred, whom he had loved, apparently, yet did not remember, and who had died in his arms, most tragically, and whose corpse had been reborn as Illyria. And the scalpel he had jabbed into Gunn, and the smashing of the window of Orlon and the return of his memories and fleeing of his sanity. And then it had all been very apocalyptic and dramatic and he had done something reckless or self-sacrificing, depending on one’s interpretation, and ended up in a hell dimension, with only Angel for company, and been captured and enslaved, and survived, and returned with a bomb wired up inside him, which Willow had removed and in the process mislaid five years of his memories.

And all of it so long ago and far away and nothing to do with him. Except that he had been in the thick of all of it and now at least he knew why, when he looked in the mirror, this was the reflection that gazed back at him.

“I did forgive you,” Angel said abruptly. “I forgave you when I was under the sea. I just wanted it back how it was before. I had these…murderous impulses towards Connor, even towards Cordelia, for not having met me. But not for you. I knew all the time that you did it to save Connor. I just couldn’t forgive you right away for having betrayed my trust and for having lost my son.”

Wesley forgot Angel was a vampire for a moment; the brown eyes just seeming to belong to that of a man; and a man with whom he evidently had a very intense and very complicated history. “Those are things I probably couldn’t forgive either.”

“Sweetie…”

Wesley turned in surprise to find the green demon looking at him intently.

“We’ve filled you in on what you’re not remembering and now we need to know if you’re still you… The memories you’ve lost. If they’re gone completely or if you just can’t access them because of a kink in the spell. I have a little experience with memory spells, myself, and although the one I know isn’t exactly foolproof…”

“You can say that again…” Gunn muttered.

“…I think Willow and I can fine tune it between us. But only if you’re…still in there.”

Wesley thought about what he must be; this wrecked remnant of a man who had caused so much pain and endured so many losses; a dark kernel within him, twisted and broken. There was a razor blade inside the man he was now that the past had made his previous self swallow, and which had now worked its way into his brain. He could almost feel it, a bright coolness on the edge of his cerebral cortex, and if he were not very careful it would find a way to cut him open, and let all his dangerous memories spill out. But all he said aloud was: “How do you propose to find out?”

“You have to sing.”

“Sing?” Wesley thought about saying that he couldn’t possibly, then realized that he didn’t have the right. It was strange to be here, and feel entirely complete, and to be only a potential bridge to these people to the man they’d lost.

“If those memories are gone, they’re gone,” Angel added at once. “We’re all agreed that there’s only one try to get them back – supposing you even want them back – and if it doesn’t work, there’s a new beginning.”

“Any spell is dangerous, Wesley,” Giles said quietly. “None of us want to put you at any more risk than you have been already. You’ve been the victim of three alterations of your memory now. Once when a previous spell of Lorne’s backfired, once when the Senior Partners played with your memories to eradicate Connor, and now as a consequence of removing the bomb that was inside you you’ve been returned to this…earlier setting. If a spell devised by Willow, Lorne and myself can’t restore your memory to you we’d rather not attempt it again. As Angel has pointed out, you’re…you. You have your childhood memories, adolescent memories. You have much of the knowledge that made you such an excellent researcher and could continue those studies on the foundations you still have. And you’re…in your right mind.”

“Five years ago, Gunn didn’t know you, Lorne didn’t know you, Spike didn’t know you, and Illyria didn’t exist. I hardly knew you, and what I knew I didn’t particularly like. We built those friendships from nothing. We can do it again.” Angel gazed into his eyes with that strange intensity which was so unsettling. An intensity which so far Wesley had been unable to decide if it came from the man or the demon. “Or you can have a different life without us. Either way you get to choose.”

Wesley moistened his lips and then turned to Lorne. “I’ll sing for you. Alone, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Lorne nodded. “Okay, cupcake. Let’s go into your old office and see what we can learn. Do you have a song picked out?”

Wesley half-smiled. “‘Yesterday’ seems the most appropriate.”

As he followed Lorne upstairs to the office he didn’t know which was stronger – his instinctive fierce rejection of having to accept the reality of this life he had lost, and his desire to be complete again, and honestly who he was, even if the man he was happened to be honestly and completely a basketcase. He almost hoped they would take the decision out of his hands of whether or not he should stay with his ‘new setting’ or be given back the memories that were gone. He supposed the only person who could answer that question was the person he had been a moment before the spell had taken place; the one currently either permanently erased or lost in limbo; the person whom perhaps Lorne might be able to read as a shadow behind his own faltering rendition of a song about having lost everything and never being able to get it back.

***

They all looked at Lorne expectantly as he walked back into the dining room.

“So…?” Angel demanded.

The green demon inclined his head expressively. “All done. I sent our handsome amnesiac off to bye-bye land. The mind may be as fresh as a newly-trained Watcher but the body just got back from a hell dimension. After ‘Yesterday’ and a run through of ‘White Rabbit’ the boy needs his eight hours. And incidentally who knew Wes was big with the Grace Slick love? I was tempted to ask him for ‘Across the Board’ just to see what he did with that ‘seven inches of pleasure’ line but my natural compassion intervened in time.”

“Lorne…?”

Lorne sat down and poured himself a drink. “It’s all in there. And I can read it. In fact I can read it better than I ever could before because Wes doesn’t know it’s there and isn’t throwing up all those little barriers you humans usually do. Right now, that boy is an open door to his buried psyche. He can’t reach those memories but they’re there all right, and how.”

Angel nodded. “So, at least the guy we know is still in there.”

“Did you learn anything…new…?” Gunn said it tentatively, knowing as he did so that he was basically asking Lorne if the guy had sneaked a peek, at the same time feeling it was important that they knew everything.

“Oh yeah. Like for instance, Wesley’s father? Not a nice guy. I can’t believe I told him my best stories. If I’d known…” The demon sighed. “And why he went to see Holtz?” He looked across at Angel. “I only got a couple of bars of a lullaby last time, but today I had two whole songs, with all the choruses – I insisted on that – and it was all in there. He offered his life for yours. Told Holtz we were his family and he wanted to avert bloodshed, tried to appeal to him as a reasonable man, explained that the demon who’d killed his family didn’t exist any more and he might as well kill Wesley for it as kill you. It was half desperation, half death wish. There were a lot of people in that place and Wes went in there alone. Same deal with the Loa. He knew it would probably kill him and when it threatened to he told it to go ahead. It told him betrayal and agony lay in wait for him.”

“It got that right,” said Gunn glumly.

Lorne nodded. “Just so, crumbcake. He was just trying to save us all, the poor idiot. Save everyone from Holtz. Save Connor from you. Save you from yourself. That boy has a martyr complex and a half. He tried so hard to keep Gunn and Fred safe… when they turned against him it was almost the end for him. He was trying to drink himself to death when Lilah started picking on him. And it was picking on not picking up at first. Like some nasty little girl pulling his hair in the school playground. But she was the only human being talking to him so after a while he started to think anything was better than the silence…”

“Don’t.” Gunn looked at him while the Sunnydale people looked at one another, wincing at a battle that wasn’t theirs, that they hadn’t witnessed and barely understood. “Just…don’t. I can’t make it right now, I can’t ever make it right, any more than he can make right taking Connor.”

“Muffin, I’m as guilty as the next demon. I just wanted to share the burden a little. He thought it was wrong to tell any of us because he’d be asking us to suffer what he was suffering as well as risking our lives if Angel didn’t take the stealing-his-only-son plan well. And let’s face it, we know how well Angel took it…”

Angel’s turn to wince. “If he’d told me we could have come up with a better plan.”

“He has a prophecy telling him that you were going to kill an innocent baby, Angel, and a Loa telling him that he would know when that was going to happen because of the earthquake, fire and blood. And no reason to think the prophecy was false.”

Earthquake. Fire. Blood. As if he were seeing it in front of him, he remembered the look on Wesley’s face as he crouched in the corridor, dazed from his impact with the doorway where Angel had thrown him to safety; blood spattering on Connor’s blanket; the flames still roaring in the burning room from the earthquake-caused fire. And another memory, so sharp and clear:

“…Life is funny. Listening to stupid people talking to hamburgers is funny. Worrying about things that will never...It’s all so incredibly funny and – and beautiful.”

He closed his eyes. “He was going to ignore it. Even though the Loa had confirmed the prophecy, he’d decided against it anyway, because there was no point in worrying about ‘things that will never…’ “ He put a hand to his head. “And then there was the quake, the fire, the blood…”

“You’re not wrong, Angelcakes, but how do you know?” Lorne frowned at him.

“He told me,” Angel groaned. “He was sitting on my bed, looking like he’d just been spat out of the ninth circle of hell, and he smiled for the first time in…forever and said that life was funny and beautiful. And now I know why – because I loved my son and he wasn’t going to have to take him after all.”

“Yes.” Lorne sighed. “I don’t know how you know, but you’re right. He got to a place where he’d decided not to take Connor after all and then all three portents hit him like an oncoming train. I just don’t understand how you…?”

“It’s that vamp memory recall thing, isn’t it?” Gunn edged his chair away another inch. “That creeps me out every time.”

“I’m thinking we should have a moratorium on prophecies for a good long time,” Buffy observed. “Especially false ones.”

“It wasn’t false.” Angel looked around at them. “Does everyone not get that yet? The prophecy was true.”

“And again I’m wondering how you know?” Lorne looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Have you been eavesdropping on my reading?”

“The Beast arose in an earthquake followed by a rain of fire, and it was a blood spell I had to make to give Connor his new memories.”

Lorne nodded. “Right again. The prophecy was true.”

“No.” Gunn pushed back his chair. “It a lie. Sahjhan…”

“Sahjhan changed the prophecy, it’s true. The original one said only that Connor was going to kill Sahjhan. He tried to alter it so that wouldn’t come true but what he actually did was create a new prophecy that was just an addendum to the old one. By interfering he ensured that Angel really would have to kill his son. And he did. Angel doesn’t have a son any more, or didn’t up until very recently. Connor was the son of the parents he remembers. That was his life. Angel was no longer his father. Then, ironically, in trying to undo what Angel had done, Wesley simultaneously gave Angel back his son and saved Connor’s life – if Wesley hadn’t broken the Orlon Window, Sahjhan would have killed Connor, but because of Connor getting his memories back at the critical moment, Sahjhan died and Connor lives – his memories intact, Angel’s son again, but this time happy and well-adjusted.”

“So, Wes saved Connor?” Gunn looked up in shock. “And the prophecy was…? He didn’t do anything…?”

“He was a cog in fate’s wheel, honeybuns. Some things aren’t as evitable as we might like. As soon as Sahjhan changed the prophecy he sealed everyone’s fate, ironically, including his own.”

“Then when I assisted Wesley to gain the Window of Orlon I was in fact helping Angel while only bringing back more painful memories for Wesley.” Illyria looked bleak.

“Painful or not, they were his, and he was entitled to them.” Gunn said. “We are what we did.”

“Then I’m a monster.” Angel met his gaze. “And I don’t know what Wesley is.”

“Sleeping, I hope.” Lorne rose to his feet. “And I need to do the same. As readings go that was a humdinger and the inside of Wesley’s mind – not the cosiest place to be. It’s no wonder the poor munchkin ended up crazier than a box of jumping beans.”

“And now he has a second chance.” As Lorne wended his slightly unsteady way away, Angel looked down at his hands; the same ones that had held the pillow pressed over Wesley’s face. “He can forget all the bad times.”

“And the good times.” Giles picked up the photograph of Wesley, Cordelia and Angel that had been left on the dining room table. “He’ll be forgetting those too.”

“There were less of those.” Gunn rubbed his head, wishing everything wasn’t so complicated, that their lives hadn’t sucked quite so much these past five years.

“Are you saying…?” Angel looked across at him.

“I don’t know what I’m saying. The point is we’re not going to be the ones making that decision anyway, Wesley is. We told him everything that happened, now it’s up to him if he wants to remember that stuff or not.”

“But what do you want him to decide?” Buffy enquired.

Gunn looked down at the plate in front of him. “I don’t want to lose my friend again.”

Xander said quietly: “And which way do you think is the most likely to make that happen?”

“I think it happens either way. Either he doesn’t remember me or he’s driven so crazy by getting his memories back that it doesn’t matter that he remembers me because he’s still no one I know.”

“He was a kind of happy crazy…” Buffy offered tentatively.

Willow nodded. “Yes, I thought he was still in there. He was kind of…spacey, but he remembered the past and he was still sane sometimes.”

“He was brilliant.” Gunn looked up at them bleakly. “The guy I met, the guy who became my friend. He was so smart and so…good. He knew what right and wrong was. He knew where his place in the world was. He believed in what he was doing. He had issues, yeah sure, who doesn’t? Being an insecure guy whose daddy never loved him made him come across like a pompous little jerk sometimes, but he was in his right mind.” He closed his eyes and saw Wesley in that office with the books all over the floor, listening to his watch as he scampered about in his socks like some half-tamed creature from a fairy tale. Unable to say Fred’s name and so proud of himself because he’d found a way to circumvent it. Articulating his thoughts without even knowing he was doing so and his thoughts being so tangled. “I miss my friend,” he said sadly. “But I think I may have been one of the people who helped kill him a long time before now.”

“Don’t…” Angel bowed his head.

“Angel, what you did to him…”

“I know.” Angel gazed into the half-empty jug of orange juice as if it contained all the secrets of the universe.

“You broke him into so many pieces. I don’t think there’s a way to glue him back together again.”

“Why are you dumping all this on Angel?” Buffy demanded. “Weren’t the rest of you there too?”

“Because I’m the one who tried to smother him, I’m the one who couldn’t forgive him, and I’m the one who stole his memories. And I’m the one who took us all to Wolfram & Hart and got Fred killed.”

“You’re also the one who followed him into a hell dimension,” Giles pointed out. “Who kept him alive in that place; whom he trusted absolutely; body and soul, and I mean that literally.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Angel looked across at Gunn. “I tried giving him the edited highlights of his life before. I left him what I hoped were the good memories and I took away what I thought must be the worst memories, all it did was make him unstable and confused even before he got the bad memories back again.”

Gunn nodded. “I know.”

Xander gazed across at Gunn. “You were the one who said he should have his memories back.”

“Maybe Angel’s right. Maybe we’ve done Wes enough damage. Maybe the best thing we can do for him now is to let him go home with Giles and start over again where we can’t screw up his life for him any more.”

“He’s your friend,” Buffy said quietly. “You don’t give up on friends.”

“The thing is we did. Maybe you didn’t with yours. Maybe the mistakes you made didn’t involve turning your backs on them when they needed you the most, but we did. That’s the reality. We can’t change that.”

“There’s no evidence that Wesley perceived things like that even if you do,” Giles returned.

Gunn half laughed. “As accusations go, how does ‘I had my throat cut and all my friends abandoned me’ sound to you?”

“Is that what he said?” Angel looked at Gunn in dismay.

Gunn nodded bleakly. “You know the best part? At the time, I didn’t even let myself care. Christ, Angel. He made a mistake. A really terrible stupid awful mistake that had really terrible stupid awful consequences but shouldn’t we have…? I don’t know. I just can’t help thinking. Would it have killed us to hear his side…?”

“How did he survive?” Xander asked. “If his throat was cut, I mean. Why didn’t he just bleed to death?”

“Gunn and Fred found him.” Angel nodded across at Gunn. “They saw Justine was driving his car and followed her, got her to tell them what she’d done to Wes, then went out looking for him. They got to him just in time.”

“So, then, he’s alive because his friends did care, isn’t he?” Xander insisted.

“We cared enough to not want him dead, yes.”

“You knew that he’d only been trying to protect Connor?”

“Not at first, we didn’t know anything. Fred was sure he couldn’t have done anything wrong and I didn’t care if he had or not I just wanted to find him before Angel did.”

“Then you did care about him,” Willow pointed out. “Even though he’d done something terrible.” As Gunn just slumped in misery, she said, “Look, everyone here knows my history. I tried to destroy the world. I flayed a guy alive. And I was a real bitch to my friends. But they forgave me. Maybe not right away but they did it. Didn’t you forgive Wesley? I mean, you were all working together in your stupid evil law firm, weren’t you?”

“Yes, we were.”

“Wesley stole Angel’s baby and he was brought up in a Hell dimension as a consequence and yes, it sounds like Angel took it about as badly as anyone could, but it wasn’t permanent, was it? I mean when Wesley turned up at this hotel the next time, did you spit on him or what?”

Angel shrugged. “I told him everything was okay between us but he didn’t believe me. He thought I was just fishing for information about Cordelia.”

Xander was the one to look Angel in the eye. “Were you?”

“No, I actually wasn’t. I just assumed he wanted to come home, that he’d been waiting for me to tell him it was okay for him to come back, and that we’d all look for Cordy together, like old times. I’d thought of him as a guy waiting to be invited back, not someone who’d moved on. I didn’t know what the gripe was between him and Gunn. I still don’t really.”

“He shut me out and then he shut me out.” Gunn finished a waffle despondently in between sentences. “He didn’t tell me about the prophecy and then he doesn’t tell me where you were. Fred and I we’re working our asses off trying to find a clue about where you were, where Cordy was. Three months of big fat zip. Then Wesley just turns up with you out of nowhere. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what the number was. He could have called, explained he’d got Justine, that he knew what had happened, but, no, he has to play the lone ranger and leave me looking like an idiot.”

“Do you really think that’s why he did it?” Giles frowned.

Gunn sighed. “No. I think he was on his atonement kick and he and Justine were the only people left alive apart from Connor responsible for how things had turned out with Angel, so they were the ones that had to find Angel and save him so he could put a little check mark next to their names in the Crimes Paid For column. But it didn’t look that way from where I was sitting. It looked like Wesley gave so little of a shit about Fred and me that he didn’t even bother to pick up the phone to tell us we were sharing a hotel with a psycho and had so little respect for us as people that he wasn’t even prepared to pool resources with us when we were all looking for the same thing. You have no idea how mad I was with him about that. I felt like he’d just wiped his feet on me, then pissed on the dirt tracks.”

“I presume that was pretty much how he felt about you all telling him that he needn’t ever show his face in the Hyperion again?” Giles observed.

Gunn shrugged. “It probably was, which is probably why I leapt to the conclusion that him going after Angel alone was another way of punishing us. I also thought he was trying to make me look like an incompetent ass in front of the woman I loved and who he had a thing for, and as an incompetent ass was pretty much what I felt like, I wasn’t feeling any too forgiving. The worst thing was that it made me feel like I didn’t know him, had never known him. That the guy I’d thought was my friend had never even existed.”

“And now he does not,” Illyria observed.

“I’m never going to get you, Chuck,” Spike told him. “Wes doesn’t let you in on his plan to save laughing boy from the fishes and you pitch a year long hissy fit, but he stabs you in the guts and you’re fine about it?”

“I deserved the stab. I didn’t deserve to be shut out of a plan to try to find Angel when finding Angel was Fred and I were driving ourselves nuts trying to do.”

Xander looked at Willow. “I’m starting to feel comparatively well-adjusted. Let’s stay here always.”

***

Angel had to get away for a while. Looking at Gunn was too much like looking at himself; morose and depressed about a past that couldn’t be altered. He’d already played that card. It hadn’t worked.

He’d gone to his room to look for Wesley, just to see if he needed anything, to see if he was sleeping, but he wasn’t there. Of course, he wasn’t there. Lorne had found him a room somewhere else, probably with clean sheets to go with his wiped clean memories. He kept getting flashbacks to Wesley in Sunnydale wearing that stupid Watcher’s suit; all buttoned up and pompous, and underneath so vulnerable and scared. Except he hadn’t realized it back then, of course, too much going on, and no one else had ever come into real focus for him back then compared with Buffy. He’d been fond of them, certainly, Willow and Cordy; Giles, despite the inevitable guilt, perhaps even Xander, despite the inevitable irritation. But Buffy had been the white noise drowning out all other signals. So, Wesley had been something on the periphery of his vision.

He’d never been good with men; never had a male friend. Spike had irritated him when he’d been Angelus; they’d only ever been temporarily allies against common foes. He’d enjoyed tormenting him over Drusilla and then teasing him with the appearance of friendship; enjoyed fucking him too from time to time when there was nothing better in the offing. Spike had possibly thought of him as a friend though; he’d kept more of his humanity, galling though it was for him to admit it, so perhaps he’d craved the company of a friend. Angelus never had. Doyle had been the first, really. He’d always been more comfortable in the company of women before then. It never felt like such a concession to admit a weakness in front of them. Perhaps because loving his mother and his sister had come as naturally as breathing, but his father had always been someone he couldn’t make into what he needed him to be. No doubt his father would have rejoiced to see the wreckage that had been his relationship with Connor. See how well you manage without recourse to anger or violence, to threats and to blame. At least he’d always told Connor that he loved him. But it hadn’t been enough; Connor had craved family more even than he’d craved truth. Ultimately, the mind wipe had saved him.

In the back of his mind he’d thought that truth might apply to Wesley, too. He’d craved family as well, and for the same reason, because he’d never really known it. He wondered how fucked up a man you had to be to be incapable of loving your own child. Of wanting to see them falter and fail; to prefer for them to feel fear of you when they were so ready and willing to offer you love. To take some kind of malicious pleasure in crushing their self-confidence, in making them question everything; of sucking all the joy and enthusiasm out of their world. He would almost have respected Roger Wyndam-Pryce more if the man had been an honest sadist, but he just knew that through every step taken to crush Wesley a little further into the dirt, he’d told himself it was for the child’s own good; never able to look straight in the eye of his own dislike; to admit that he had no love for this boy, only a combination of ambition and fear of being overtaken that combined into something indistinguishable from spite.

He’d had the power to take away the memories that related to Connor; to the mistake Wesley had made because of who Angel was; who he’d been, what he was to Wesley; and he’d done it because it was possible. And at once he’d been so much lonelier. When they shared a glance after the mindwipe it had something missing. Wesley looked at him with all the old affection and respect and it didn’t mean as much as it should have done because it didn’t come from a place of full memory. It didn’t mean that Wesley had learned to trust in their friendship again, had forgiven him for the pillow, or accepted that Angel had forgiven him for the betrayal of his trust, it just meant that he didn’t remember they had ever been anything other than friends.

At least he’d found the courage to admit to Wesley that he liked him dependent. It wasn’t a truth he was proud of it, but he’d still said it aloud. He’d hated what Wesley had been through in that hell dimension, the beatings, the branding, the claws tearing his skin, the starvation and sleep deprivation, the constant fear of a messy death. But it had been like getting that first Wesley back, too. The one who trusted him, looked up to him, believed in him. Perhaps he and Gunn had both had a problem with Wesley not needing them. He’d never thought about Gunn’s perspective. He had to be honest. It had simply bewildered him, this unwarranted hostility from the man who had once been Wesley’s friend. It hadn’t been all about Connor. It seemed ludicrous for it to be all about Fred. But perhaps it had been about being rejected so absolutely on a personal level. Wesley and Gunn had both turned away from one another and been left reeling in a place of mutual pain and rage.

Suddenly, when Gunn was talking, he had remembered a scene the man hadn’t even been in. Wesley dithering in the car as Angel waited impatiently for him to act like the leader he knew he could be; saying so helplessly: ‘We don’t have Gunn…’ He hadn’t liked them bonding, he could admit it in the privacy of his head, not that it was exactly a secret anyway after the way he’d snapped at Gunn about it earlier. But he didn’t deny that they had bonded, and for a while there Gunn had been the person who made Wesley feel safe. He’d envied Gunn that – the way Wesley didn’t fear him. It had seemed strange to him, even in the midst of his own swirling emotions of jealousy about Cordelia and Connor and residual anger towards Wesley for the stealing of his son, that Gunn should want to earn that fear. Should want Wesley to do what he’d used to do for Angel, and flinch a little if he moved too fast, loomed too large. Doctor Freud would have had a field day with all of them, no doubt. Maybe on some subconscious level Gunn had thought that as Wesley had started off scared of Angel and ended up trusting him, that to rebuild their friendship he first had to make him afraid of him. Or maybe he’d just been feeling as pissed off and irrational as they all were back then.

Either way, they’d both known a time when Wesley had been dependent on them. Gunn, when Wesley was in a wheelchair, and he when on Askaroth. And there had been times of dependency in between them. The guy who had first arrived in LA had needed Angel to take care of him even on the level of stopping him starving to death, as well as giving him a purpose, and some of the affirmation his father had always so cruelly withheld. And no doubt even before he was shot, Wesley had needed Gunn. He could hardly have fought demons alone and it wasn’t as if Angel had been around to…

He winced. So many mistakes between them. Buffy talked about the Sunnydale scoobies screwing up but they had been high school kids allying themselves to a girl on the side of good. His people had already made their mistakes, already had their past sins to atone for, and had allied themselves with a vampire of mythic viciousness.

It was strange to look at his new Wesley, who looked like the Wesley they knew but inside was the Wesley from Sunnydale, only without the need to impress anyone, not trying to be anything he wasn’t. Sometimes he saw the man begin a gesture or phrase that looked as if it was going to lead to some pronouncement, or absurdity, and then there was that mental shrug, the memory kicking in, presumably, that these people knew him better than himself. He had almost seen Wesley quietly severing the bonds between his past self and who he was now; ready to despise him out of habit.

The man knew intellectually that he’d been allied with them for half a decade, but Angel couldn’t blame him for still feeling like a Watcher. Of course his ties to England would be stronger than his ties to America, his ties to the Council stronger than his ties to a group of demon-killers from LA. Giles was the only one of them this new Wesley would be able to relate to. Giles and Faith between them could find a way to shelter him. They both owed him. Giles must know that he could have handled things better back in Sunnydale; could have made more allowances for Wesley’s youth and inexperience, and he doubted Faith needed any reminding about what she owed to the man who had put aside all those hours of torture to risk his life on her behalf. Faith had certainly paid her debt to Angel when she risked her sanity and humanity to capture Angelus alive, but he wasn’t sure anyone except Wesley – the old Wesley who was now just a group of forgotten memories in a sealed off compartment in this new Wesley’s head – believed that she had paid her debt to him. So, he knew if he asked her that she would take Wesley on as her Watcher and keep him safe from too many difficult questions, from the people who might want to get at Angel through him, from the Council who might still have a grudge. She’d let him feel useful and make sure that he became useful; train him as her Watcher while letting him think he was training her as his Slayer. She might even come to love him, in her way; he’d found Wesley pretty lovable, after all, and Faith wasn’t as tough a cookie as she liked to pretend. Wesley could have a useful life as Faith’s Watcher, and Angel trusted Giles to find a way to make the paperwork happen; to ensure that he was paid, wasn’t hassled for the past crimes of the Wesley he didn’t remember being, and, please god, to keep his father off his back.

But it would involve letting go. Delegating Wesley to someone else’s care. Accepting once and for all that he’d had his go at being Wesley’s protector and friend and had screwed up. Except –

This one last time he really hadn’t. Wesley had done the right thing diving into that hell dimension. No question. And Angel had done the right thing diving after him. And he had kept him alive and given him a feeling of safety even in the midst of all the horror and pain. They’d stuck together, grown closer than they’d ever been before, and they’d survived because of it. And at night they’d curled up together and known that they’d made it through another day and weren’t dead or dusted yet. It was going to be difficult trying to sleep tonight without the sound of Wesley’s heartbeat, without the warmth of him against his skin. He’d never had that before; not night after night; a naked human in his arms, warm-blooded and trusting. He missed the trust most of all. The way Wesley had used to offer him his arm in their cage, looking up at him with those terrible shadows under eyes that had grown curiously innocent:

“Angel, you have to…”

“You don’t have enough to spare…”

“You can’t win without it and if you lose we both know that I’m dead too…”

And then when he couldn’t stand the sight of those bruises on his thin arms and had moved onto the inside of his thigh; the same place he’d bitten that gypsy girl before he raped her and killed her, the skin so soft there, and the warm pulse of blood, hesitating in fang face, the hunger tearing at him, afraid that if he once started to drink he wouldn’t be able to stop. Whispering it; his fear that this might be the time he went too far.

Wesley leaning against the bars, half-dead already from lack of food, whispering back: “Angel, how do you think I’d rather die? Feeding you or feeding a Gorlax Demon?”

He’d thought of what the Gorlax Demon would do to Wesley before it killed him, the slow peeling of his skin, the eating of his organs while his heart was still beating, because the liver tasted better in a live body than a dead one, and he’d sunk his teeth into Wesley’s thigh and drunk deep. And Wesley had barely even flinched, just closing his eyes as the teeth went in and then drifting into the pulse of blood being lapped from him, as if he were on a boat being gently rocked by the sea. It was always Angel who had to tear himself away, hunger screaming at him to take another gulp. Then his hand across the wound, lifting Wesley up, hissing his name, making those eyes flicker open again.

“Stay with me.”

“It makes me sleepy.”

“It makes you very close to dead.”

“Peaceful way to go.” A half-smile from him, drowsy, even as Angel felt how much colder he was from the blood loss, wrapping his right arm around him and pulling him against his body while he kept his left hand clasped across his thigh, tilting his leg up to slow the blood flow, waiting for his saliva to do its trick and close the puncture wounds before too much precious liquid was lost. Wishing vainly for a body temperature with which he could warm him to make up for that lost heat. Wesley murmuring once: “They can’t have suffered much, Angel. The people Angelus killed. It’s just like going to sleep.”

He hadn’t had the heart to remind him that he’d made sure that they suffered because he liked the way fear tasted on his tongue, he’d just pulled him in closer and told him they would be getting out of here somehow, he promised…

Angel realized the world was blurry and had to blink hard. He’d lost that Wesley. A fitting punishment indeed because he’d never deserved to have the Wesley he’d evidently wanted all this time; the child-substitute and best friend, who loved him best, to whom everyone else was a distant shadow: Fred, Gunn, Lorne, Cordelia. Faded faces from a time that had the texture of a dream. Only Angel was real and three-dimensional and here with him in their mutual nightmare. He’d always had sharing issues. Perhaps the hell dimension they’d fallen into had been his secret paradise; a place where he was nothing but a hero and the choices were all so simple, kill or be killed, destroy the bad and save the good, and where Wesley loved only him and loved him unconditionally and with absolute trust. Almost the Wesley in his perfect day fantasy; a construct of Angel’s imagination. He’d followed someone mentally fragile into a place of darkness and suffering and been the only comfort in it, the only familiar thing, the protector and friend and provider of everything. There had been no guilt in that place, of course, because he’d felt like a champion – how could he not be when he was saving Wesley every single day? Not a shade of grey to be seen. Everything black and white and so simple they didn’t ever have to doubt. Keeping Wesley alive had been the goal and the prize; the only mission; every day in which he managed it, he fell asleep a hero.

He grimaced at his own simplicity, but still went looking for him; unable to stop himself scenting the air as he walked along the familiar corridors. They should never have left this place. Never made that devil’s bargain. Except – Connor was happy and Buffy was alive and Spike was, if not alive, at least undead again and the Hellmouth had closed with the evil dead on the right side of it, and none of those things would have happened if he hadn’t taken the deal. But Fred was dead and Illyria now stood in her place; Wesley’s crush upon a woman who couldn’t decide if she wanted him for a brother or a lover turned to forgotten grief and the stirrings of painful emotion in a breast that had never been intended to know human love.

Lorne had left the bedroom door ajar and he couldn’t help pushing it open wider, going inside, and there he was. Angel’s eyes adjusted quickly and he saw Wesley; so thin and with that hair Willow had cut to make him look like the Wesley Lilah had fucked all those tangled lifetimes ago. He edged closer, not wanting to wake him, but drawn by it all the same, the rapid beating of his heart. If he was asleep he was dreaming of something that frightened him. Had he inherited the nightmares of the Wesley whose thoughts were locked inside his head? How strange it would be for him to dream of things that he had never even glimpsed. Wesley had been worn new by sorcery; the outer husk so battered by life; the inner man still barely bruised. He sat down on the bed, carefully, but it still dipped, tilting Wesley towards him. He bent and listened to his heartbeat, breathed in his scent, closed his eyes and pretended this was still the man who knew him; the friend he’d carried safely back from hell.

“Angelcakes…”

Angel looked up at that whisper from Lorne. “I was just…”

“I know.” Lorne spoke gently: “But he needs his sleep. Half dead even before the magical mojo played flip-flop with his memory banks, remember?”

“I just needed to…” He could hear the rhythmic beat of Wesley’s heart, just as he’d heard it every night for the previous eight months. The sound that said his friend was still alive. He wanted to touch his hair. He remembered the feel of Connor’s skin against his palm. Not the teenager who had inherited the love he’d felt for the infant, but the baby Wesley had stolen; the milk scent of him something he could still recall sometimes. Wesley’s fear and sweat scent had become as comforting to him on Askorath as Connor’s baby scent had been. An anchor telling him he wasn’t alone; that the fight was worth it; that he could make a difference; perhaps even one day gain a reward, because the Powers had granted him a child; the Powers had let him save his friend.

He wanted to just curl up with him and in the morning Wesley would be the man who remembered Askaroth and didn’t care because they were safe now and home again, but who remembered it all the same, and found it comforting to wake up with Angel beside him, instead of Angel being some Watcher nightmare made real.

“Angel…” Lorne took him firmly by the arm. “He doesn’t know you, remember? He needs to know he’s safe here, whatever he decides…”

“I was thinking we could send for Faith,” Angel whispered hoarsely. “Have her come and meet him. See how they get on. See how he feels.”

“Not here. You’ll wake him.” Lorne pulled him towards the doorway, and Angel let himself be towed, resistant but unable to think of a reason why he should stay that wasn’t just because he wanted to.


Lying in the bed, Wesley wondered if the vampire could hear the hammering of his heart. He had been awake the whole time; and his heart had flipped over when Angelus had crept into his room; stealthy, feet silent on the carpet, looming over him. And yet… He’d sensed it. All that yearning. Not hunger. Just…no one had ever crept into his room like that before, not trying to catch him out or play a trick on him, just wanting to be near him, to have his company. He’d positively sensed Angel willing him to wake up. Whatever the vampire said it was obvious that what he wanted was the old Wesley back; the crazy ex-Watcher who evidently loved him so unconditionally that he’d followed him to hell. Oh no, that wasn’t right, was it? It was Angel who had followed Wesley into hell.

He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t felt it, from Angel in particular, but the same vibe from everyone else as well. It had taken him a little while to identify the feeling, it was so alien to him, but just then when the bed had creaked under the vampire’s weight, when he’d heard him sigh and felt his fingers so gently touch his hair, he’d known that this was what he’d waited for in vain for all those years at home. It had scared him far more than a boogy man emerging from under the bed. Made the panic freeze in his throat because it was so alien and terrifying and he had no guidelines or rulebook to show him how to deal with it.

The first time in his life he had ever been offered unconditional love and he found himself afraid to accept it. He didn’t know if he was afraid because the person offering it to him was a vampire, or because he was afraid that if he accepted it, it might be withdrawn. It had evidently been withdrawn before; with crushing effect. Apparently they had all offered him love and the promise of always loving him, and then taken it away completely. He almost gasped aloud at the thought of it. Of how terrible that must have been, to have all that lost warmth he had never known suddenly flooding through his veins, and then the chill. Like becoming one of the vampires he had been trained since birth to help destroy. He shivered and pulled the covers over himself, still feeling that ghostly sigh against his cheek and those fingertips so gently brushing his hair. It was such a terrible seduction these people offered him; the lure of belonging; perhaps it was better just to escape them now before the spell was cast a second time; while he still had his sanity and still remembered who he was: a Watcher trained to assist a Slayer in her hereditary duties, not the devoted acolyte of a vampire and his mixed bag of demon hunters.

Wesley closed his eyes up tightly and did his best to fall asleep.

***