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Temps Perdu, Part Ten

“Is it your intention to remove Wesley from this place?”

Giles looked up in surprise to find the strange blue-haired Illyria gazing at him intently. Her voice and face were invariably impassive but he had noticed that whenever any emotion did wash across her face it was always to do with Wesley. He did find it a little strange that the uptight young man who had proven himself so astonishingly inept with women in Sunnydale should have won the heart of this god-king of the ancient world.

“That will be his decision.”

Lorne had given him a box of photographs, saying that as Giles knew almost as little about the past five years of Wesley’s life as Wesley did, what would these photographs say to him?

Feeling it was something of an exercise in futility but wanting to at least show willing to these semi-bereaved people, Giles had begun to spread out the photographs on the lobby desk. Now Illyria gazed at them, head on one side, pointing to people in turn:

“That is Cordelia.”

“I know.” Giles looked at her curiously, this strange creature with another woman’s memories in her mind but possibly no way of fully comprehending them in context because she didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to do so. “Cordelia was at High School with Buffy, Willow and Xander.”

“Fred had feelings of friendship for her. She appeared to have awoken from her coma but was in fact already dead. Fred felt feelings of grief at her loss.”

Giles gazed at the photographs of Cordelia and felt feelings of grief at her loss himself. It was difficult to believe that leaving the Hellmouth had actually taken Cordelia to a more dangerous life. He laid out some more photographs. Angel and Cordelia. Angel and Wesley. Angel, Wesley and Cordelia. Wesley, Gunn and Cordelia, who all had drinks in their hands and were grinning at the camera. Several clippings of Wesley from various magazines, looking very suave and happy with a pretty redhead on his arm. Gunn and Wesley, liberally splattered in some greenish goop triumphantly holding up a scaly horned head. Angel holding a baby. A very slender, very pretty girl, whom a glance at Illyria confirmed must have been Winifred Burkle, holding what appeared to be the same baby. A clipping cut from the paper, the photo of a beautiful brunette over the text: ‘Lilah Morgan promoted to Head of Department.’ It was dated two years before.

“Fred did not have feelings of friendship for Lilah.” Illyria’s expression suggested her feelings weren’t any too friendly either. “But she did regret her death. It caused much grief to Wesley.”

Giles put the picture of Cordelia next to the pretty redhead which another magazine clipping identified as ‘Virginia Bryce’, then added the picture of Winifred Burkle and the clipping of Lilah Morgan.

“What you looking at?” Buffy jumped up agilely to sit on the lobby counter.

Giles noticed the lollipop she was sucking on and rolled his eyes. He tapped the photographs. “Wesley’s…conquests.”

“Wow. Wesley was like the total chick magnet, wasn’t he?” She tapped the picture of Virginia. “Wesley – our Wesley – dated Virginia Bryce?”

Giles looked at her in confusion. “You know her?”

“Of her. She’s really rich. I think she’s going out with some tennis player or actor or something now. She could have anyone and she chose Wesley?”

Illyria regarded her levelly. “Do you not regard Wesley as a desirable mate?”

Buffy almost choked on her lollipop before noticing Illyria’s expression and wiping the smile off her face. “Well – he was – different when we knew him. Kind of…um…not big with the girl experience. Which could be sweet too, I guess, if you like them…dorky and kinda…gay.”

“Well, he seems to have made up for lost time on reaching Los Angeles.” Giles laid out some more photographs. There was one of Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Fred, and Gunn all wearing formal wear, evidently on their way to what with normal people would probably have been the theatre but in their case had no doubt been some kind of demon killing awards ceremony.

“That’s Fred?” Buffy peered closely at the picture. “She’s lovely.” Catching sight of Illyria’s expression, she added hastily. “Although the blue hair and blotches is a good look too.”

“I could look like Fred and behave exactly like her but he insists that it would be a lie. But if I look like her and have her memories and sound and act as she did, why is it still a lie?”

“Because you’re not her, Blue.” Spike appeared, an axe in his hand. “You’re the demon-god-king of the lost worlds of the fallen, remember? Fred was…Fred. Sweet girl, clever scientist, talked a lot, loved Wesley.”

“I also have feelings for Wesley,” Illyria insisted.

“But that doesn’t make you, Fred, Highness. Just makes you someone who looks like her and inherited her crush when you hollowed out her body and used it as your way back to this world. Wes may be crazy but he knows the difference between reality and illusion.” Spike noticed the photographs and frowned. “How come Wes managed to pull so many hot looking birds?”

“Because he’s pretty,” Buffy explained. As Giles and Spike looked at her in disbelief, she said, “Well, he is. These days. He wasn’t back in Sunnydale, he was just kind of…a dork. But once he came to LA he got all…pretty. And there’s the accent. And the ‘feed me’ thing too. He’s really got three lines of attack there: ‘Look what big blue eyes I have and how long my eyelashes are and yet what a chiselled jaw I have. Look how thin I am and how I obviously don’t take care of myself so you should take me home and make me a sandwich right now’, and then there’s the: ‘Although I may look all pretty and helpless and in need of feeding I’m actually incredibly clever and sophisticated which is why I sound like this and oh look I can kill demons really efficiently too’.” She shrugged. “It’s an uppercut, a right hook, and a knockout punch combined.”

“I still think Lilah was only doing him for information.” Gunn peered at the picture of Lilah with a frown.

“Well, she was doing him damned thoroughly for it,” Angel observed. “I could smell them all over each other.”

Buffy jumped. “Don’t sneak up on people like that!”

“I was just walking in my ordinary way. And Lilah was in love with him, people. He was the only thing she ever loved. Not saying she wouldn’t have killed him if the Senior Partners wanted her to – they pretty much owned her body and soul – but she did love him. The only time I really scared her was when she thought I was threatening Wesley.”

“Were you?” Giles asked.

Angel shook his head as he gazed at the photographs. “No, just letting her know that I knew what she and Wes were doing and how it wasn’t working on their stamp collections. But I saw a look of panic there I never saw any other time, and believe me, I did a lot of threatening of Lilah over the years. I ripped the top off of her convertible and all I got was a shrug. Mention of Wesley’s name – there was fear.”

“Maybe she thought you were pulling the jealous lover thing and were going to kill her for shagging him?” Spike suggested.

“No. She… I’m not a ‘jealous lover’. Wes and I have never…”

“Well, you know that, and Wes used to know it, but who’s to say Lilah knew it? Most people who see you together for five minutes think you’re at it or have been at some point. Didn’t the guy spend three months playing Captain Nemo to find out where your hellkid had dumped you? Maybe she thought Wes and you were – you know…”

Buffy nodded. “Makes sense. I mean why did you want her to know she and Wesley were an item now anyway?”

“So she knew I was in the picture.”

“Could be construed as you saying ‘back off, evil lawyer bitch, away from my Watcher’, couldn’t it? I mean I’m really fond of Giles but I don’t go around sniffing the people he’s sleeping with and then telling them I know what they’ve been doing.”

“Giles has sex?” Spike enquired in what was evidently all too genuine surprise. “Well, that is a shocker.”

“It was different,” Angel insisted. “Lilah worked for Wolfram & Hart. She was an enemy. It’s important to let your enemies know you’re aware of their position.”

“Especially when it’s underneath one of your little friends, eh?” Spike looked at the picture again. “No, scratch that. That is a woman who likes to go on top if ever I saw one.”

“He never sniffed me.” Gunn looked back at the picture of Lilah. “Fred and I were an item for weeks before Angel found out.”

“Well, Fred didn’t wear perfume and… why are we even having this conversation? No one ever used to question my relationship with Wesley before Spike turned up.”

“Are you kidding? Cordy and I were always talking about you behind your back. Come on, Angel, you turned up on the back of Wesley’s big dog bike wearing a pink crash helmet. You didn’t think we were going to talk?”

Spike sputtered in delight. “Wes made you wear the lady’s helmet? Oh, that’s a classic. I knew there was a reason why I loved that guy.”

“You used to kiss Connor when Wes was holding him. You never kissed him when I was holding him. And thank you for that, by the way.”

“Nor Fred either.” Illyria put her head on one side to observe Angel better.

Angel gazed between them in disbelief. “I never even… I didn’t notice who was holding Connor. And anyway, I was more comfortable with Wes on account of him not being all vampaphobic or a girl, and girl’s get funny about personal bubbles. Whereas Wesley…”

“Was a bubble-free zone, apparently.” Buffy sucked on her lollipop again. “Well, as I think we’ve once again established that Angel was a big fat perv with sharing issues long before the whole hell dimension thing, shall we go and kill something slimy?”

“Slimy?” Giles looked up in confusion. “What?”

“Customer,” Gunn explained, holding up the axe. “Landlord of a place four blocks away. Thinks he’s got a Gravalorn in his basement on account of the tenants turning into nasty stains on the walls. I think he’s only bothered because he can’t re-let the place but for the sake of future tenants I think we have to help the dirtbag. Plus, he’ll pay us and we really need the money.”

“Well, have you researched the Gravalorn’s weaknesses and habits?” Giles demanded, reaching for the books.

Spike held up his own axe. “Been there. Done that. You chop their heads off. They die. End of story.”

“Only the males can be killed by that method.”

Giles spun around in surprise as Wesley made his way cautiously down the last three steps, holding onto the banister as he did so. He was wearing jeans and a shirt that looked very expensive, but by the way his fingers kept straying to his throat, Giles suspected he would have been much happier in a suit and tie. Giles saw Buffy clamp a hand onto Angel’s arm as he made to leap across the room to assist him, holding him still. “Let him do it,” she hissed in his ear. “You’re going to scare him.”

“What was that about the males?” Gunn asked. “And should you be up? You look kind of…groggy.”

“Well, I feel how I look, but I heard you talking about Gravalorns. I had to write a paper on them during my last year at the Academy. They’re tricky. The females, as with many demonic species, are more violent and dangerous than the males, and in this instance a great deal harder to kill. While beheading will kill an adolescent female Gravalorn or a male of any age, once a female has given birth, the hormonal alteration to her body causes her DNA to mutate, giving her the ability to re-grow any limb that is severed, including the head, and to activate the latent ingenium deterior. The brain of the post-gravid Gravalorn, although primarily situated in the cranium between the third and fourth horns, has a kind of back up – a second brain situated in what would be the liver area in a human physiognomy that can maintain almost full strength in a headless female Gravalorn until the new head has had a chance to grow back. In males and immature females this is a redundant organ, rather similar to our appendix, suggesting the Gravalorn was once asexual until it developed its current gender delineation. The loss of the head also gives the Gravalorn a burst of wild energy that makes it even more dangerous, especially as that is the period when an adversary, thinking that he or she has defeated it, traditionally drops his or her guard. Some of my research led me to believe that each beheading and regrowth actually increases the female’s strength and that there are some fascinating accounts of mating rituals that utilize this…” Wesley seemed to notice that Spike’s eyes were glazing over and Gunn was looking at him as if he’d never seen him before. “Um – you probably just wanted the salient parts of that information?”

“The short version would be nice, Wes.” Gunn looked at Spike. “But, it’s good you told us that because genius here told me he knew all about Gravalorns and you just have to chop their head off.”

“The one er…Spike encountered in the past must have been male. They have yellowish horns, the horns of the females are more bluish in appearance, and the females are considerably larger and more liable to attack pre-emptively particularly if cornered in their lair. Oh, they have a particular dislike of vampires, by the way. Apparently because they consider them a rival prey animal that encroaches on their territory whilst not being of any nutritional value themselves.”

Buffy jumped down from the counter. “So, Gunn and I had better go in first. And we need to get the liver and the head or else we’re just laying up trouble for ourselves?”

“I’d suggest a full dismemberment to be on the safe side. The second brain isn’t always exactly in the same place although usually a sustained attack on the right rear midsection area should find it. If you wouldn’t mind bringing back the head I’d love a chance to dissect one.”

“Oh yes.” Giles looked up with interest. “I’ve never had a fresh one to examine.”

Buffy gave them a long stare. “Okay, you two are weird, but I suppose everyone has to have a hobby.”

“It is actually our job to be knowledgeable about the strengths and weaknesses of various demons that a Slayer may encounter in the course of performing her duties,” Wesley pointed out. “And the crypto-zoological intelligence gleaned from such studies can be of as much importance on occasion as the mystical, weaponry-based or narrative aspects of research.”

Buffy looked across at Angel. “I think we need to double check that Faith’s not in torture-your-Watcher-if-he-annoys-you mode again before we pack Wesley here off to Summer Camp.”

“Am I being annoying?” Wesley blinked in confusion. “I thought I was being rather useful.”

“You’re being both,” Buffy assured him. “But that’s okay. I’m used to it because when I knew you, you were pretty much annoying all the time, and your people don’t mind because they love you anyway.”

“In a platonic way,” Angel added hastily.

Giles exhaled before summoning a bright smile. “Cup of tea, Wesley?”

“Thank you.” Wesley was clearly still confused by the ‘annoying’ comment as Giles gently ushered him towards the office. “But, isn’t that what a Watcher’s supposed to do? Give them the information they need to do their job?”

Gunn gave Wesley a gentle pat on the back. “Like Cordy used to say, Wes, no one likes a smartass rogue demon hunter.”

“Oh,” Wesley grimaced. “Showing off, eh? I didn’t mean to…”

“Wes, it’s fine.” Angel darted Buffy a warning look. “The information is very useful. You sit with Giles and drink tea and…talk about cricket and…Watcher things. We’ll just go and kill the Gravalorn and then we’ll be right back, okay?”

Wesley gave him another look of bewilderment, clearly not understanding why this vampire would think that the length of their absence would be of concern to him or why he would be anything other than relieved to have them out of the building. But he said only: “Okay, why don’t we all do that then.”

Sighing, Giles put on the kettle once again and hoped that he and Wesley the newly-minted Watcher might be able to get along rather better now than they had in the past. Otherwise it was going to be a very long afternoon.

***

Rupert Giles has suggested that it might be useful for me to maintain my habit of keeping a Watcher diary. A habit I have apparently been neglecting for the past few…well…years. After three days of analysis I have come to the conclusion that every one of my former associates in the company known as ‘Angel Investigations’ is – in my admittedly amateur opinion – insane. My former self – as I think of the person I was before this memory loss restored me to the person who graduated from the Watchers’ Academy – being the most insane of all of them.

I also feel as if that person carjacked my body and then ran it into the ground without ever changing the oil or getting its five thousand mile service. I understand that being trapped in a hell dimension is bound to take a toll but I do resent feeling on the point of exhaustion all the time when the last thing I remember I was in pretty good physical shape – ready, in fact, to take on the training of two Slayers – and now can barely walk across a room without needing to sit down for an hour.

‘Angel Investigations’ is a so-called ‘detective agency’ set up to ‘help the helpless’ and claiming to specialize in paranormal investigation. It also claims to be an enemy of the vampire, the demon, and the various oppressors of mankind. The members of this agency consist of no detectives of any kind, or anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of detective procedures; two vampires, Angelus (now known as Angel) and William the Bloody (now known as Spike), both ensouled, both, previous to their ensoulment, notoriously vicious serial killers, rapists, and torturers; an Old One, known as Illyria, a past god-king of the universe and past master in the art of oppressing mankind, disinterred from the Deeper Well in which the souls of those others of her kind have been – rightly – held captive for millennia, now inhabiting the body of the woman she killed, a Winifred Burkle, whose form she can apparently assume at will. Her plan to overwhelm the human world with her army of doom was apparently cancelled due to bad weather. Next up is a demon by the name of Krevlorneswath of the Deathwok clan, an anagogic denizen of the Pylean dimension with some interesting empathic powers and the ability to shatter crystal with a high note that any soprano essaying "Der Holle Rache kocht in meinen Herzen" could only marvel at in envy. And, finally, Charles Gunn, a human demon-killer with a number of fake documents that prove he is a lawyer. He is in fact a lawyer of sorts, despite never having attended so much as an evening class in that discipline, due to permitting the notoriously evil law firm of Wolfram & Hart to download into his cerebral cortex the information necessary to hold his own in the human and demon courts. Apparently he knew that this was a safe thing to do because the conduit which connected the evil pan dimensional beings known as the Senior Partners to the earthly world of tort and corruption told him so. It had assumed the form of a melanistic leopard at the time although I’m still not clear why this should have reassured him to the extent that it evidently did.

The above mentioned are what Buffy Summers calls ‘my people’. Buffy is now apparently not The Chosen One but just one of the many Chosen Ones who have been turned from potential into actual Slayers in a plan for which she had apparently no Council backing of any kind, which has unleashed upon the world a number of untrained and probably somewhat confused activated Slayers. One of these Slayers apparently killed a number of people earlier this year and cut off William the Bloody aka Spike’s arms – they were subsequently re-attached using the resources of the aforementioned evil law firm in which we were all apparently holding key positions until recent months. Buffy did at least have the sanction of her Watcher, Rupert Giles, for this plan, although one suspects she would have gone ahead with it in any case as she appears to be a law unto herself. Knowing that there are so many ungoverned Slayers loose upon the world causes me considerable anxiety, which, oddly enough, Buffy’s frequent exhortations to ‘take a chill pill’ are doing very little to set to rest.

Apparently, while Buffy and her cronies are in LA, the task of training and collecting the Slayers around the world has fallen to Faith Lehane and her partner, Robin Wood, the son of a Slayer – murdered, incidentally, by William the Bloody – although without any inherited Slayer tendencies of his own. Faith, it seems, was in prison for manslaughter as a consequence of what Angel insists was a ‘confluence of events’ but which to my eye appears to have been the result of my failure to return her to the Council so that she could receive therapy and assistance after she accidentally murdered a civilian. This failure on my part apparently drove her into the arms of the Mayor of Sunnydale, a once-human villain hoping to ascend to pure demonic form. She subsequently made several attempts upon the life of Angel, and a second attempt to recapture her by the Council to take her to England was again thwarted by Yours Truly. For some reason both Buffy and Giles – of whom I would expect a more objective view – consider this clear dereliction of my duty as her Watcher to have been a heroic act of my part. Also during one of her crime sprees, Faith apparently kidnapped and tortured me. Given my catalogue of failures as her Watcher, that is perhaps her only action that I find at all explicable. She had however, at Angel’s behest, given herself up to the authorities and was paying her debt to society until my previous self – I don’t know how else to describe someone of whom I have no memory and with whom I feel almost no sense of connection – asked her to break out of prison so that the notoriously evil Angelus could be captured alive. As I was apparently responsible for his being Angelus rather than the soulled version (Angel), having decided that the best possible solution to a Los Angeles overrun by a murderous beast would be to add a vicious undead killer to the mix, perhaps my sense of responsibility was not misplaced. Since recapturing Angelus, Faith has apparently been at large and working in the cause of Good. The idea that she should perhaps return to prison to finish her sentence was greeted with such marked incredulity from all present when I voiced it that I have decided to keep my feelings to myself on the subject from now on.

Buffy’s ‘people’ are also staying at the hotel, the Hyperion, an art deco hostelry with some fascinating architecture and an extremely chequered past. Her people consist of Rupert Giles, one of the few Watchers to survive the attack upon the Council building in London last year; Willow Rosenberg, a girl who is apparently one of the most powerful witches to ever walk the earth, although she does disguise it rather frighteningly well; and Xander Harris, a cheerful sort of fellow despite having lost an eye in the battle between good and evil, also last year, in his case the battle being with the First Evil, who apparently manifested in Sunnydale and were driven off at the last only due to the activation of the Slayers and the use of a magical amulet which helped to bury the Hellmouth. William the Bloody aka Spike was wearing the amulet at the time and was apparently burned alive… well, undead at any rate. His restoration first to ghost and then to corporeal still-soulled still-undead creature seems to be a source of some annoyance to his grandsire, Angelus, the eponymous leader of Angel Investigations.

In short, I have woken from what feels like a very long sleep to find myself the lackey of a vampire. Apparently in my old role in the company, I was responsible for researching and formulating strategy. Something I entirely believe as no one else amongst ‘my people’ seems to have the first idea how to do either. Spike and Illyria have a worrying tendency to plunge headfirst into whatever mayhem presents itself, apparently for the hell of it. Angel – as the soulled Angelus prefers to be called – has admitted that his planning has never really evolved beyond kicking in the first door he finds and hitting anyone he finds on the other side of it. Gunn appears to be deeply divided as to which part of his personality he prefers, one day talking like a lawyer, and one day entirely like a fighter. In group situations all four tend to have a ‘rush of blood to the head’ habit that makes it seem ever more miraculous to me that they weren’t all dead and dusted years ago. Lorne – as Krevlorneswath of the Deathwok clan prefers to be known – is a pacifist, who seems to have the makings of a first class alcohol dependency problem. I’m very surprised – in view of his daily consumption of cocktails – that no one has yet suggested an intervention.

His empathic abilities were seriously undermined when a previous colleague of ours was apparently taken over by a rogue Higher Power who cast a spell preventing him from giving correct readings, then further damaged when Angel took it upon himself to have the memories of all his associates – including mine – tampered with by mystics working for Wolfram & Hart so that the child born to him and his equally evil sire, Darla, Connor – who had apparently become psychotic as a consequence of my disastrous attempt to avert an ancient prophecy which told of Angel murdering his son – could be given a new and happier life. As a consequence of this mental tampering, Lorne’s ‘reading’ abilities have apparently been seriously undermined, and those of us who had followed Angel to Wolfram & Hart all behaved in an irrational manner as a consequence of losing the ‘anchor’ of our memories. Or were simply even more unbalanced/corruptible/psychotic than we had previously supposed and would have acted with an equal lack of self-control whether we had been ‘mind-wiped’ or not. I notice that I have a legal document, amongst the many which were cleared out of Wolfram & Hart by our remaining associates after Angel and I dived into a hell dimension, suing me for personal injury after I apparently shot a subordinate in the kneecap. How reassuring to know that even while my brain was apparently dribbling out of my ears I did manage to keep up my target practice.


Wesley put down his pen and stretched his fingers, wincing as he did so. Writing this down was definitely not helping. It was only making it clearer to him that he was in the wrong place and had somehow strayed from his true destiny so far that he didn’t now see how he could get back. He had compounded his failures as a Watcher – failures grievous enough that they had led to his being fired by the Council – by working for a vampire and then following that vampire to a position at Wolfram & Hart. There was absolutely no evidence that he had done anything for Good for the past five years. It seemed to him that he had taken leave of his senses, developed an adolescent crush on the first charismatic male to cook him breakfast and then followed his undead object of hero worship literally straight to hell. Apparently all those miserable years of being terrorized by his father hadn’t been enough for him; he had needed to spend another half a decade being terrorized by a vampire as well.

Sighing, Wesley had to admit to himself that it wasn’t quite that simple. These people – humans and demons alike – had shown him a warmth and kindness that he had never known before. They did occasionally make fun of him it was true. Buffy had asked him a few hours earlier if he was sure he was getting enough starch in his shirts. Gunn mimicked his accent as if he had been doing so for years. Spike called him ‘Percy’. But there was no malice in their gentle mockery. He had been mocked enough over the years to know the difference between the kind that was spiteful and the kind that wasn’t. In the past he had often been mistaken for someone intent on grabbing leadership for himself. Not that he thought of himself as someone lacking in leadership abilities; but he had found in the past that others did not tend to fall in easily with his suggestions. His plans were invariably the most workable but he had somehow failed to acquire the knack of selling them to others; meaning he tended to be ignored while another louder and less intelligent strategy would win the vote. When they had been given problems to solve at the Academy, because he was usually the first to come up with a workable plan or to find a flaw in someone else’s plan, he had always felt the rough side of alpha male aggression, people telling him they had no intention of letting him order them around when he had intended no such thing. He had feared the same thing might result with his allotted Slayer although he had hoped that her gender and comparatively tender years would give him a glow of authority that might carry him through. But here when he suggested that a certain strategy might be the right one, people didn’t respond to him with either aggression or scorn, they nodded as if he was invariably the person with the workable solution.

He still seemed to be giving them rather more information than they wanted. Gunn had said ‘Cut to the chase, Wes!’ with more than a hint of impatience earlier, while Spike now prefaced almost every question with ‘And before you ask, yes, I want the short version’, but there was an…affection there that he found a little bewildering and seductively warming. They teased him the way he had seen family members tease one another – in other families, of course. His father scolded, berated, sneered, punished. He didn’t tease. Gunn and Spike teased him. Angel fluttered anxiously, constantly reassuring Wesley that he would return soon or that he shouldn’t be upset by their words, despite the fact that Wesley always felt safer when the vampires were absent and had managed to work out for himself after the first couple of emotional winces that Gunn and Spike were actually fond of him and didn’t mean him any harm.

Illyria had suggested that, as his memories of Fred were now no longer an issue between them, they should have sexual intercourse, and had seemed entirely uncomprehending of why he had backed away so hastily.

“Watcher, love,” Spike had observed while taking her by the arm and moving her gently away. “They don’t put out for demons.”

“I am no mere demon. I am – ”

“The god king of the universe. Yes, your mightiness, I know that, but it’s still not a selling point to a guy whose been brought up to marry a nice girl called Caroline and settle down with her in Shropshire to breed Cocker spaniels…”

Although he’d been affronted by Spike’s words and ready to take offence, he’d realized very quickly that the vampire had actually meant it kindly; a tactful ‘it’s not you, it’s him’ to the rejected party, while at the same time having rescued Wesley from a situation that at the very least was embarrassing.

He had looked at photographs of the people he’d forgotten and events that were locked away in his memory. Fred looked much prettier than any girl he would have expected to show an interest in him but he couldn’t say he felt any stirrings of love for her. She looked like…a pretty girl in a photograph. Winifred Burkle. Even saying the name aloud didn’t make her seem any more real. Cordelia was a very striking-looking woman as well. He had gazed at pictures of himself with these women, with Angel, with Gunn, with Lorne, with all of them together, a picture of himself holding a baby that he had later lost, and felt as if he were looking at a complete stranger. This was not his life. These were not his memories. He could not find himself in this place. Or else, perhaps, he was too afraid to look.

As he familiarised himself with the office computer, he had looked up on the internet a few random quotes about memory, as if waiting for some light from above to illuminate his options and tell him what he should do next. The first quote had seemed promising:

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Well, he knew all about insignificance, so that was definitely a vote for the ‘yes, you want your memories back’ box. But the next was not so positive:

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.

He wasn’t very enthralled by the idea of being given back five years of mournful rustlings. “One all,” Wesley murmured. “All right then, the next one shall be the decider.” He clicked on the next ‘memory quote’ that came up.

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.

Grimacing, he sat back and clicked off the quote site. So much for advice from On High. “Well, that’s definitely a ‘no’ then.”

Given his physical condition, he was forced to spend a great deal of time resting, but had been given a box of his old diaries to read so that he could think of it as research and presumably be less whiney and annoying to everyone else about how fed up he was with not being able to walk across a room without needing to sit down and recuperate.

Word had evidently gone out that Angel Investigations were back in their old quarters as there had been a steady – if not flood, at least trickle of new cases. Wesley had noticed in some dismay that the approach from Spike, Angel, and on occasion Buffy and Gunn, was to pick up a sword first and think later. Several times he’d staggered down from yet another of those annoying rests his body kept insisting that he took to find them almost out of the door with no kind of a plan to deal with what they were facing and sometimes only the haziest idea of the best way to neutralize it. He’d tried to impress upon Gunn that they should plan first and act later but they’d all looked at him blankly when he said that. Illyria simply tossed her blue hair back and said that the demons of this world would tremble before her wrath, while Angel looked like a small boy given a detention when he had to slope back for a briefing before setting off on a demon-killing spree. Wesley had managed to elicit a half-hearted sort of promise that they would at least talk to Giles about what they were facing before marching off to kill it but had not yet been able to persuade them to wake him up so he could research the problem first.

The thought of them all going off and getting themselves slaughtered because Giles and Willow were researching magic spells to restore his memory and he was asleep in bed really worried him, and he’d tried to just catnap in the office, close to the books, so they couldn’t tiptoe across the lobby without waking him. Luckily, none of them had any idea of what covert meant, and had yet to manage removing a sword or axe from the weapons cabinet without making enough noise to wake the dead, let alone a restless watcher. So he had caught them twice and managed to prevent them from taking a flame thrower to deal with a flame-eating Vikoresh serpent demon – an approach on their part that would have super-charged its powers to the point where it could have belched them all to a cinder – and taking Gunn into a Thraxian Lelmath situation without any horehound to hand. Even the habitually confident attorney-come-demon-killer had been a little subdued by the accounts Wesley had read to him of humans dying in horrible agony from a scratch from its highly poisonous talons. He was still getting phrases like ‘Don’tcha just hate a smug knowitall Watcher?’ (Buffy) ‘You really are an annoying little tit sometimes, Wes, mate’ (Spike) and ‘Okay, I get it! Enough about the internal bleeding!’ (Gunn) thrown at him on a regular basis. But they were still alive and he was starting to realize that he might have played a rather larger part in that process in the past than he’d initially realized.

He’d pretty much managed to annex what seemed to be his old office and would have enjoyed having so many new books to read had it not been for the way he kept falling asleep over them. Willow would wake him gently from such slumbers with a cup of tea but Buffy could hardly have been less sympathetic when she found him:

“Yes, Wes, we know it must be frustrating. All those incredibly boring old books to read and you can’t stay in research mode for forty eight hours straight with no sleep like you used to. My heart bleeds. Now, do as I told you three hours ago and go and take a nap. Otherwise you’re just going to be cranky later and we won’t let you stay up and watch TV.” Buffy positively yanked a very interesting volume of Deux Daemonicus di Regnum Infernus out of his hands while he could only gape at her in disbelief.

“But I was reading…”

“Eight months in a hell dimension ringing any bells with you?”

“No, actually. Due to the amnesia, it isn’t.”

“Don’t get snippy with me, stuffy Watcher Guy.”

“Well, Giles may permit you to treat him like a retarded ten year old but I have no intention…”

“Giles doesn’t act like a retarded ten year old. Which is why I almost never have to grab Giles by the scruff of the neck and physically drag him…”

Wesley backed up hastily. “By the powers vested in me by the…”

“You don’t have any powers vested in you by the Council, remember? You’re just another rogue demon hunter now, and, guess what? I have special dispensation to use my super Slayer Strength to put those over my knee and spank them.”

Wesley gaped at her in horror. “You wouldn’t!”

“Are you nuts?” Xander demanded. “You don’t want her to?”

“Of course, I don’t want…” Wesley realized that Xander was now in the room and would therefore save him from Buffy and exhaled in relief. Snatching another breath, he said, “Buffy, I really think we can discuss this reasonably, like sensible adults.”

“Well, I think you need to go to bed right now and this time without reading under the covers with a flashlight like a six year old.”

“I was not ‘reading under the covers’, I was just making a few notes.”

“I’ll tell Angel.” She opened the door and stood there with her arms folded. “He will carry you up to bed and undress you. He has vampire strength and a frustrated parenting complex. If you get away without him reading you a story, it will be a miracle.”

That was the point where he decided that sometimes discretion was the better part of valour and that there was a great deal to be said for the art of compromise. “I’ll just go and rest for a few hours then. Upstairs. But when I come back down again I expect that book to be where I left it and not to have any peanut butter on it.”

Buffy held the door open for him. “What about jelly?”

“That isn’t even slightly funny,” he assured her.

“I was right not to want you for my Watcher.”

“And I’m understanding more and more why I fled from Sunnydale to LA…”

Only as he was walking across the lobby did he hear her say to Xander: “I love him really. But I don’t think it’s good policy to spoil your ex-Watchers. It just makes them needy.”

“I can’t believe you were going to spank Wesley when you’ve never once offered to spank me. That’s just blatant favouritism.”

“What can I say? He has the earnest blue eyes. They earn him extra spanking privileges.”

“And he doesn’t even know how lucky he is…” Xander sighed sadly.

Wesley positively sprinted up to bed. It was galling that Buffy’s insistence on him resting had been proven correct by the way he had been asleep three seconds after his head hit the pillow and hadn’t woken up for six hours straight. It was so typical of her too, to not say a single ‘I told you so’ when he stumbled blearily downstairs, but to have kept some food hot for him and to hand him a cup of tea, brewed in the pot, and a pen and a piece of paper so he could go back to his research, all without a murmur of criticism. He had been having a very nice time amongst his books, trying to plot the hibernation cycles of the extremely vicious Traklar demon – two of whom Angel Investigations had recently sliced and diced in the local sewers – when Xander and Spike had insisted on dragging him into the residents’ lounge to watch a particularly idiotic film which, for all its obvious stupidity, had made him laugh out loud several times.

“You see, Wes.” Gunn handed him a beer without asking if he wanted one, while elbowing his way onto a couch designed to hold three that was already accommodating that number of people. “We teach Illyria how to evolve from an Old One into someone with normal human empathy and then we do it with the English people we know as well.”

“Do please leave me out of your rehabilitation plans,” Giles told him. “I don’t care how many beers you make me drink, this film is never going to be anything other than pointless and stupid.”

“It’s supposed to be pointless and stupid,” Xander insisted. “Some things are just meant to be – like Spike.”

“I don’t have a chip these days,” Spike reminded him.

Xander looked at him sideways. “But you have a soul.”

“So did Ted Bundy.”

Xander said, “Change places, Wesley. You sit next to Spike, and I’ll sit over here.”

He found himself being bodily shoved next to a vampire; his heart automatically beginning to race at the close proximity. Spike offered him a bag of crisps with a regretful expression on his face that suggested he knew all about the fear and wasn’t going to say a word about it. Wesley took a handful and managed to say ‘thank you’ without sounding as scared as they both knew he was.

“Must take some getting used to,” Spike said after a few minutes, undercover of Gunn and Xander having a spirited conversation about sport, which involved them leaning back and shouting behind Spike and Wesley. The thought of switching down the volume on the TV, or pausing the video didn’t seem to occur to them. Wesley noticed that all Xander had done by moving was change Spike from his right side to his left. He hoped that he didn’t have body odour that no one was telling him about, and then realized that Xander was just too drunk to reason logically. He seemed as confused as Wesley was by still having Spike next to him.

“I said it must take some getting used to.”

“What?” Wesley looked at Spike warily.

“This. Us. You. Not being…who you remember being.”

“But I am who I remember being, I just don’t remember being who I don’t…remember being.”

Spike thought for a moment, nodded, then said, “No, you lost me. Never mind. Just saying, we all know it isn’t easy for you.”

Wesley looked across at Angel who was sitting slumped in an overstuffed armchair morosely sipping from a beaker of blood. Every now and then he would look across at Buffy and sigh or look across at Wesley and sigh or look across at Giles and wince. Presumably that was a sigh for what might have been, a sigh for what had been, and a wince of unalleviated guilt. Wesley hated the way he found it so easy to feel sorry for Angel. It was as if there was a switch inside him that kicked in automatically. He could feel himself starting to get to know the vampire’s moods; aware of him and the way he was feeling even when he was hardly looking in his direction. Presumably that was what had happened last time; he’d ended up joined to one of the undead by an invisible psychic thread. He definitely didn’t want that happening twice. Sighing himself, he said, “I don’t suppose it’s very easy for the rest of you either.”

“No, it isn’t. Especially for old brood-for-his-country.”

“Hey.” Gunn nudged him gently in the ribs. “We trained you up once, we can do it again.”

Wesley looked at him sideways. “How – kind of you.”

Gunn grinned at him. “No sweat, English. You want a game of Risk later? It’ll be just like old times – I always win, you always lose.”

“I have research to do.” Wesley sounded as stuffy as he possibly could, but couldn’t help grinning.

“You just know that I’ll kick your ass.”

Spike offered him the crisps again. “Did I mention that you owe me fifty bucks?”

“Sorry, it must have slipped my mind.” Wesley cautiously took a handful, relieved that his heartrate had returned to normal again. Spike seemed to be aware of it too, giving him a smile of approval.

“Did I say fifty? I meant…”

“Don’t even try it,” Gunn warned the blond vampire.

“Do you think we should tell him about his wife? And the six kids?”

“Stop abusing his trust, Spike,” Angel warned.

“Sorry, I was forgetting that’s your job.”

There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence and Spike grimaced. “Sorry, mate. Couldn’t resist. Kind of wish I had now though if…”

But Angel had already got up and walked out. It was only with the most supreme effort of self control that Wesley stopped himself from him following him. But he couldn’t help watching him walk out of the room, a black cloud of misery permeating the whole hotel. Gunn looked at Wesley and then winced. “Sorry. I’m just used to you being the guy who… I’ll go and talk to him.”

“No, leave him.” Spike leant across Wesley to catch Gunn’s arm. “I’ll talk to him later. When he’s less likely to punch my teeth down my throat.”

“Spike, there’s never a time when Angel doesn’t want to punch your teeth down your throat.”

Xander looked up. “Why am I not surprised?”

“He isn’t sleeping.” Gunn reached for another beer. “It’s making him cranky.”

“Too much caffeine in his blood?” Xander enquired.

Spike jerked his head at Wesley. “Doesn’t have his blanky, does he?” He leant forward and Wesley flinched instinctively as the vampire put his ear to Wesley’s chest and listened intently for a moment. He straightened up with a shrug and snaffled the beer from Gunn as he did so, lifting it out of reach. “Doesn’t sound that special to me. The usual tick-tock. And get your own, you’re nearest the crate.”

Gunn reluctantly did so while Wesley automatically put a hand across his heart; trying to feel that rhythm Spike had mentioned. After a few minutes when the attention had moved from him, he found himself getting up and going out into the lobby, not sure what he was planning to say to Angel when he found him, just feeling compelled to say something. There was no sign of him in the lobby and after a glance into his office, he tried the garden. Angel was standing on the balcony, looking tragic.

“Are you okay?” Wesley asked quietly.

Angel nodded. “Fine. Are you? Do you need anything?”

“No.” Wesley stood there awkwardly for a moment. “Well, I just wanted to know if you were… And I see you are, so I’ll…”

“Wes…?”

His name said like that… There was a power to it that scared him. He felt a shiver inside that wasn’t exactly fear and wasn’t exactly warmth, but a strange combination of the two. When they were alone together like this, he could feel it, the connection between them. That was when he knew that they had been friends, not just because of photographs and diaries and the events people kept describing to him, but because on some basic level he could still sense it. He didn’t know if it was just an awareness of all that sense of their connection from Angel, or if he just remembered it on a level so deep that it side-stepped memory. It made him shiver inside because he knew it could never have been easy, or safe, or simple. It must always have been as intense and painful as first love. Except at least with a love affair there was some kind of path one could take, a way of moving forward towards marriage or away from it, towards children or divorce, or chilly indifference. But this relationship must have been like this all the time. Nowhere for it to go. All this overpowering emotion trapped in the fragile membrane of a friendship that couldn’t evolve except into something even more intense, even more terrifying.

Wesley swallowed hard. “I’m sorry I don’t remember.”

“I’m not sure that I am.” Angel gazed into the darkness and Wesley wondered what it must be like never to feel the sun on your skin; to never stand on a mountain and watch the sun come up. Liam had been born in rural Ireland, close to nature. In between the whores and the taverns, the fights and the drinking, there must have been moments when he walked in the light, breathed in the scent of wet grass. “There were a lot of bad times.”

“I expect there were some good times too.” Wesley risked another look at him.

“Yes.” Angel half-smiled. “Some damned good times. And take it from someone damned when I say that.”

He wished it didn’t hurt to think of Angel as ‘damned’. Did that mean there could only ever be a hell dimension for him? He seemed to want to do Good. Got up every day and looked for good he could do, ways he could help his fellow man. Except they weren’t his fellow man, of course, which made it all the more extraordinary that so much of his time was devoted to trying to help them. He could have just retired to a basement somewhere, filled with beautiful things – he seemed to have a genuine appreciation for art and literature – and lived out his eternity quietly. The fear was still there, a constant with him, especially when they stood close together. He knew Angel must be able to hear it, his accelerated heart rate, the beat that had apparently comforted him in the hell dimension he’d dived into to try to save Wesley’s life. Not this Wesley, of course, the one he didn’t remember being now; the one who would remember Angel. The one Angel didn’t want him to be again in case it hurt him too much. It was so frighteningly easy to think of Angel as someone noble and better than other men. He already had to fight quite hard to remind himself of the many crimes of Angelus.

His instincts remembered it though; they knew he was standing next to something that fed on human blood; that hungered for it, hot from the jugular. He wondered if a whisky bottle flinched when an alcoholic walked by. Or perhaps it yearned to be drunk. Perhaps humans did too. Perhaps a vampire was something dreamt up by a human with a deathwish. It was supposed to be an almost painless death, wasn’t it?

He had scars on his body from events he didn’t remember. Battles fought in the lost time between reaching Sunnydale and waking up in that bed upstairs. Some of them were bite marks that matched Angel’s fangs. He wondered how it had felt, the teeth going in, piercing his skin, the blood being sucked from him. Had it hurt? Had he whimpered? Had he liked it? He swallowed, wishing his heart would stop racing like that, hurting Angel with every accelerated beat. But how many men could remain calm when standing besides a being that had drunk his blood, who knew how he tasted on the tongue, who had relied on what flowed through his veins to stay alive? Did he smell like food to Angel? He found his voice with difficulty.

“I’m thinking…I might stay here – if I could be useful. You don’t seem to have anyone else who can do research for you.”

Angel looked at him in surprise. “You don’t need to feel obligated, Wes. You don’t know any of us. And it’s not like the Watchers’ Council don’t need you too.”

“I know, but…” Wesley snatched a breath. “You just all go off…half-cocked. Someone comes in with a case and you go charging off to deal with it without even…”

“Gunn has lots of demon law in his brain.”

“Yes, and I’m sure he could negotiate a child custody case admirably for a Morlath in any of the three languages it speaks, but for some reason Wolfram & Hart didn’t seem to feel it prudent to give him the information necessary to help him kill some of their best paying clients.”

“You’re snippy again.” Angel smiled. “I missed that. You’d just got it back when…” His face fell.

Wesley swallowed. “When I lost my memory.”

“Your memory’s taken quite a beating these past few years, it probably decided to just…” Angel shrugged.

Abruptly Wesley rolled up his sleeve and held out his arm. “Giles told me that you had to drink from me in that hell dimension. That there was no other way for us to stay alive. Is this…?”

Angel carefully didn’t touch him. “Yes. That’s from my teeth. You fed me.” He nodded at a scar on the inside of Wesley’s forearm. “That one too.”

Wesley looked down at the cut. “It doesn’t look like a bite.”

“No. You cut yourself with a knife.”

Wesley shivered. “Like some acolyte with a cult leader.”

“Like a friend who was trying to save my sanity.” Angel gazed at him intently. “We hadn’t seen each other for months. The last time we’d had a conversation it consisted of you unable to speak because of a slashed trachea and me screaming at you that you were a dead man as they dragged me off you. The next time I saw you, you were feeding me your own blood.”

“It was my fault.” As always when confronted with another of the mistakes of his previous version he felt like a cat in a thunderstorm, hair prickling in indignation; hating the man he’d been for saddling him with all this inherited guilt. No wonder he was starting to know how Angel must have felt when he woke up from his century long killing spree with that soul. “I can justify stealing your son and betraying your trust, as it was to save a baby from being killed by a vampire. What I can’t ever justify is my hopeless incompetence in doing so. I didn’t even get him from this hotel to my flat before I’d lost him. How on earth did I think I was going to keep him safe from all the various cults that were after him? And I pride myself on my planning.”

Angel frowned. “Wes, you’d had about two hours sleep in the previous three days. You were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A beaten up woman staggers up to you and tells you she needs your help…”

“It was inexcusable. We both know that. If you’re going to betray a friend – even as an act of loyalty – you need to be competent about it. I should have told Gunn. With two of us protecting him, there might have been at least a chance of keeping Connor safe.”

“If Gunn had been with you when you took my son I would have killed him. I nearly killed you and I… Well, I liked you better than I liked him. Not that I don’t like him. I do. He’s my friend and a good man, but you and me…”

“I know.” Wesley winced. “I don’t, of course. But I sometimes… I can sort of guess. Too much damage in too small a space. All those incestuous romances, those incestuous friendships.”

“If you’re saying it was intense, then, yes, it was intense. But you can’t shy away from deep emotion just because it’s messy and complicated and makes you hurt inside.”

“Why can’t you?” Wesley countered.

Angel sighed. “I don’t know. Because one way of knowing you’re alive is…”

“How much you hurt?”

“You’re right. You don’t need that crap back, Wes. Cordy and Fred and Connor and the whole damned soap opera. Especially Fred. Two and a half years of being in love with a woman only to have her slip through your fingers after a kiss…” Angel closed his eyes. “I remember how it was with Cordy. I still wake up smelling her perfume. She was so warm and real and…alive. And she was already gone.”

Wesley snatched a breath. “But at least you have it. You had the grand passion. The romance of a lifetime.”

“I already had that with Buffy. With Cordy I don’t even know if… I don’t know for how long she was…Cordy. When the change started. How much I was manipulated. There was nothing about what the Powers let happen to Cordelia that was good. And Fred died a horrible painful death in your arms, Wes, and there was nothing you could do to save her. And then her corpse twitched and her murderer looked you in the eyes and told you she was Illyria now. Every time you looked at Illyria you had to look at Fred. You were clinging to sanity by a fingernail when you got all the memories of Connor back and then you were…”

“Crazier than a sackful of monkeys?” Wesley enquired conversationally.

“Yeah. Probably. I didn’t want to see it. I kept telling myself that if I just treated you as if you were the Wes I knew, you’d claw your way back to being him. Maybe you would have done too, but it sure as hell didn’t help when Illyria decided the best way to solve the problem of Fred’s parents visiting would be to look and sound just like her then ask if you wanted to have sex with her.”

Wesley flinched inside. “I can imagine that was… Actually, I can’t… I can’t imagine how it feels to have my heart broken into pieces by the loss of a woman I don’t remember. I’ve looked at the photographs and I can see she was beautiful and…kind, but I’ve never lost anyone I love. I’m not sure I’ve ever loved. There were friends at school I was fond of. But I’ve never… I don’t think one can love in isolation. There has to be some kind of reciprocity going on. I’ve never… No one’s ever…” Loved me.

“I know.” Angel always seemed to hear the words he hadn’t said aloud as well as the ones he had. “You were so…raw. I know you don’t feel that way. You feel all grown up and ready to face the world, well-prepared because you’ve read all the books and you can cross reference like a superhero, but you and Cordy were so…young. I just wanted to keep you safe. You can’t imagine how much I wanted that.”

“I wish I remembered her.”

“I wish you did too. You loved each other. You were the brother and sister the other one had never had. Strange, really, because you had a crush at first sight, but that just…dissolved overnight and suddenly you were twins. With Fred it was the other way round. You and Gunn were both so protective of her. I thought you saw her as a little sister and I think for a while you did. She was kind of crazy and so sweet and brave and…did I mention the crazy part? You wanted to keep her safe. And then you both fell in love with her. And…” He shook his head. “Maybe if you’d been out in the world a little more before it happened it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she became everything to you. She was the woman on the pedestal, the woman of your dreams, and she wasn’t an illusion; she was real and warm and she wanted you. She was… Well, I know what it’s like to have the woman who is your idea of perfection look you in the eyes and tell you that she loves you. I had it with Buffy. I had it with Cordy at the very end. When she kissed me I knew she loved me too. And then I lost her. We both lost the women we loved.”

“Would you choose to be without those memories?”

“No. But maybe I’d choose to be without the pain. Except they’re inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.”

Wesley felt a little stung. “You don’t think I can handle the pain?”

Angel gazed at him intently. “I know you can’t handle the pain. I watched it drive you crazy. I don’t want to see that happen again.”

“So, I give up all the most meaningful and intense experiences of my life and I…”

“Don’t hurt so much. Wes, there weren’t any happy endings for the guy you were. You came to LA and you and Cordelia bonded like brother and sister. And she died. She didn’t just die either. First, she turned against you, then she ascended to a higher plane, then she came back with a monster inside her. Then she woke up and we thought we had her back again. But she was just saying goodbye. What’s the point in remembering the good times when all they led to was us burying her? And the same goes for Fred. You fell in love with her and she chose someone else and then she chose you and you had – I don’t know – a day? There wasn’t even time for you to consummate your feelings for each other. And then she died in your arms and her soul was consumed by Illyria and maybe something of Fred is still in there but you’re the one who told me she was gone forever, that you can’t be half alive, that who Fred is doesn’t exist any more, that there’s only Illyria now.”

“Isn’t that what I am?” Wesley asked sadly.

“What?”

“Half alive.”

Angel set his teeth. “It’s better than being half dead, which is what you were before. Do you want to be crazy again? Do you want to have all those memories back that drove you to the brink before?”

“Do you think I would have been insane forever?”

“I don’t know. I just know you’re saner now.”

“Because I’m not who I am.”

“Because you’re not who you were.”

There was a long silence before Wesley said: “Isn’t there anything worth remembering? Nothing good at all?”

Angel bowed his head. “I can’t… All the times I remember you being happy it was about something that can’t happen any more. And I’m not the right person to ask. We both know what I… We both know that I miss the man you were. But I gave up Connor so he could have a better life and I’m not going to…” He shrugged. “Go back with Giles. Be Faith’s Watcher. You don’t need a bunch of demon-killing weirdos in your life, Wes, trust me. Lorne thinks I’m not on my path any more anyway. Maybe there’s still time for you get back onto yours.”

Wesley let the vampire go. The fear going with him. Angel walked back into the hotel and at once the balcony felt like a safer place. It also felt so much colder.

“But what if it isn’t Faith I was meant to be a Watcher for?” he breathed to himself. “What if I wasn’t intended to be the person I thought I was going to be when I got off that plane. What if I was meant to come to LA and be the Watcher to a bunch of demon-killing weirdos? What if you’re my path?”

Not knowing what else to do, he stood on the balcony and watched the clouds scudding in front of a moon half-hidden by a blanket of smog. He found himself thinking about the moonlight in Ireland. How different it must have been for the man Angel had once been. He wondered if he missed the air and the light and the green and the silence. He wondered if he missed the heartbeat that had once kept time in his chest.

***