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Oct. 29th, 2005 04:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgreyAll parts linked to from Story Notes
Temps Perdu, Part Eleven
Wesley knew they thought it was ‘fussing’ but the fact remained that they were reckless and often unprepared and he frankly thought that Giles had been a Watcher for too long and had reached the ‘let them juggle knives’ stage because he was, in his opinion, very lax about making them going through their pre-mission checklist. There had been far too many occasions of late when Angel’s approach to demon-killing missions had reminded him of that old quote: “An Englishman thinks seated; a Frenchman standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards”. Not that Gunn was any better, for all his lack of Irish blood.
Wearily he asked again: “Gunn, are you sure you’re carrying the nails and eucalyptus leaves? You really can’t go up against a Shakoranak without some iron.”
Gunn held up his axe. “This is iron.”
“And if it gets knocked out of your hand in the heat of battle?”
Sighing, Gunn held up the pouch Wesley had insisted he tie around his neck. “You are such a worrywart, you know that?”
“Well, excuse me for not wanting to see you all dead.”
Gunn turned to Buffy, who was holding a crossbow and rolling her eyes. “Did Giles ever fuss like this?”
“No. I trained my Watcher. He’s all housebroken and everything.”
Giles looked up at her over his spectacles. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t fuss every time I go on a mission the way Wesley does. You just – give me the salient information and send me on my way. No fussing.”
“I don’t fuss,” Wesley protested. “I just – double check.”
“And triple check, quadruple check, and whatever comes after that check,” Buffy retorted. “You’ve elevated being anally retentive to a whole new level.”
“Lay off my Watcher,” Spike told her. “Go pick on your own. He’s used to it.”
“Since when was Wesley your Watcher?” Angel demanded. “He’s not your Watcher.”
“Okay, if you want to quibble, he’s not technically being paid by the Council to be my Watcher, on account of him not working for the Council and me not being a Slayer. But he’s functioning as my Watcher.”
“Our Watcher,” Gunn pointed out.
“And my substitute back up annoying spare Watcher,” Buffy added.
“He’s doing his best,” said Angel defensively. “You’ve never given Wes a chance.”
“Angel, I’m joking.” She looked at him in disbelief. “How can you not know I’m joking? Wes, you know I love you, right?”
He gaped at her, then reached for the place where his tie should be. “Well…”
“Oh, come on, did no one know I was joking?”
“I knew,” Giles assured her.
Buffy turned on Angel. “What do you mean I’ve never given him a chance?”
“Back in Sunnydale the first time around, I’m just saying, maybe if you’d shown a bit more patience, been a bit more reasonable – “
“Okay, let’s stop this conversation right there, shall we?” Wesley held up a hand, pleased with the way that had come out so crisp and authoritative. “For those of you with very short attention spans – which apparently includes everyone in this room who isn’t Giles or myself – you are going to clear out a nest of Shakoranak demons, otherwise know as spine-splitters due to their extremely nasty fighting habits. They are violently allergic to iron, which is lethal to them, so exchanging your wooden stake for something that might actually kill them would probably be a good idea at this juncture, Spike. They are also disorientated by eucalyptus leaves, hence the small bags handed out to you earlier that were prepared by Willow. Illyria, you may be a god-king of the fallen worlds but you also have a spine so please put on one of the bags. Thank you. Angel, remember that they have a particularly vicious retractable talon that is long, strong and sharp enough to behead as well as impale. If you see it move its wrist thusly –” Wesley demonstrated, “then the Shakoranak is probably about to unleash its talon. Don’t try to duck under it; its reflexes are terrifyingly fast, and it could easily behead you. Better to let it impale you if no other option is open to you. Buffy and Gunn, I suggest you wear the vests I left out for you earlier. The talon when fully extended is nearly two feet long and would go straight through you if you didn’t get out of its way in time. Is everyone clear about their fighting patterns or would you like me to go through it again?”
“Oh please,” Buffy muttered. “I could have taught a gerbil to foxtrot faster.”
“We remember the spine splitter dance steps,” Spike assured him. “Right flank, left flank, aerial assault. Watch out for the ones in the floorboards. We’ve got you.”
“Can we go now?” Gunn pleaded.
Wesley fought down the urge to smirk, maintaining a straight face as he asked earnestly, “Are you sure you don’t want me to run through it again? Oh and do remember to…go before you go, won’t you?”
“I’m not loving you so much now,” Buffy admitted. “In fact the old urge to hit you quite hard seems to be trying to break through.”
“Fight it,” Wesley advised.
“Stop picking on Wesley,” Angel told her firmly before adding quickly as he backed away towards the exit and escape, “But we really don’t need any more preparation, Wesley, in fact I think we should just…go.” With Illyria casting a last unblinking look of great intensity before she left, the demon-killers darted into the night world outside.
Giles waited until they had passed through the doors of the Hyperion before raising an eyebrow at Wesley. “Do you think they know you’re winding them up?”
Wesley smirked and reached for his tea. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Wesley, I knew you when you were genuinely at your most pompous and annoying and even then you never asked your Slayer if she needed to visit the bathroom before Slaying commenced.”
Wesley sighed and looked after them. “It doesn’t feel right – waiting here. I should be with them.”
“And I’m sure if there’s a case involving demons that tire easily and which are situated no more than a hundred yards from the hotel, you will be.”
Wesley looked down at himself in disgust. “I’d really like to punch the idiot on the nose who hijacked my body for the past five years.”
“That’s an idiot who happens to be a dearly loved friend of most of the people in this hotel, Wesley,” Giles reminded him.
“I can’t imagine why. He seemed to have – I seemed to have – elevated incompetence to an art form.”
Giles raised an eyebrow. “Well, then clearly they just loved you for your looks. I’m sure their affection for you had nothing whatsoever to do with you fighting demons alongside them, you risking your life for theirs, for the world, for the common good, or for the connection you all have because of shared experiences.”
Wesley darted him a glance. “Are you saying, I should…?”
Giles shrugged and reached for another reference book. “You’ve made your decision. You don’t want your memories back. I understand. Everyone understands.”
They researched for a while in silence but although Wesley tried to keep his mind on the text in front of him, those last words from Giles kept going through his head. No criticism had been offered, it was true, and yet he felt as if it had; a silent critique of his cowardice in not being prepared to accept what he truly was.
Giles had come to the conclusions many days since that he and Wesley had been very remiss in not keeping in touch better when the man had been in Los Angeles. Not only would he have been able to provide advice and assistance on the occasions when the man had clearly needed it, but they also had many books in their individual libraries that the other one did not possess, and they could have pooled resources. At the moment, for instance, he was in the process of translating a book of Wesley’s that dealt with gateways to demon dimensions and how to both open and close them that would have been very useful when they’d been dealing with Glory. It was written in Akkadian, and it was almost like being back in university again to sit here quietly translating cuneiform while sipping at a welcome cup of tea and enjoying the occasional nibble of a chocolate digestive.
“I like being sane,” Wesley said out of the blue. “I like being able to tie my own shoelaces and not crying all the time. And how useful could I possibly be as some neurotic weirdo who can’t go to the bathroom without a vampire holding his hand?”
He had evidently been processing what he perceived to be Giles’ criticism of his decision for the past twenty minutes. Giles bookmarked the page of the book he was reading with a torn off strip of paper. “I think you were managing the bathroom pretty well, actually. But I do see your point.”
“I know you can’t stay here forever and these people… well, let’s face it, strategising doesn’t appear to be a strong point.”
Giles bent his head to conceal a smile. “So, were you thinking of staying?”
“Well…yes. It’s not that I don’t want to do my duty, Giles.” Wesley unconsciously sat up straighter and adjusted his jacket, reaching again for a tie that wasn’t there. “I would like nothing better than to do what I was trained to do… They made me head boy.”
Giles frowned at the non sequitur. “I know. How is that…?”
“On the recommendation of teachers and a headmaster, not to mention a housemaster, who believed I had it in me to be a credit to them, to the Academy, to their teaching. I wanted to make them proud of me. I wanted them to feel they’d been justified in choosing me, despite my father…” Wesley moistened his lips. “If I helped now, with training the newly activated Slayers, perhaps there would still be a way to pay my debt to them for believing in me and to make them proud of me.”
There was a faraway look in his eyes as he said it that made Giles realize with an uncomfortable jolt, just how much it mattered to Wesley to be believed in, for someone whose authority he recognized and cared about, to be proud of him. But then Wesley was sighing sadly and shrugging. “But I can’t just leave them. They don’t know how to research. Gunn can read demon languages, it’s true, but only the ones that have a legal system affiliated with the demonic hall of records. Any of the demons who aren’t affiliated with that legal system or who pre-date it or who are too primitive or too sophisticated to have any part of demonic law are literally a closed book to him. Angel’s been around for two hundred and fifty years and never even bothered to learn Geshundi, and his spelling in Ortrax is so appalling that he can’t tell ‘omnipotent’ from ‘impotent’.”
“Doesn’t Illyria…?”
“Illyria has never troubled herself with the culture of anyone else. To her, demonic worlds were just something new to conquer. She has never had to take even basic steps to defend herself either. She was always too powerful to need to worry about it. Now she’s running on half power. She can’t just bend time or step into another dimension if danger threatens. She has to live within the confines of a human body, albeit one with extraordinary speed and strength. And how can she function in the world unless there is someone prepared to take on her guidance and to answer her questions? Spike has been doing his best, I can tell, but he’s not exactly a lodestone for morality at the best of times. And Gunn appears to have always had a death wish problem. I’ve found several references in my diaries to how haunted he is by the death of his sister and how much he blames himself. This is potentially an invaluable unit for the forces of good but if they’re all under-prepared and half the time are only going into battle because they miss the adrenaline rush or are half-hoping to get themselves killed, I don’t see how they’re going to last more than a few months.”
Giles topped up both of their tea from the pot. “Doesn’t that suggest that you – the previous version of you – must have played a pivotal role in helping to keep them alive?”
“Well…it’s hard to know exactly. Apparently Fred had a first class scientific mind and Cordelia had the visions, of course, which presumably gave them – gave us – something of an advantage when going into a hostile situation. However…yes, I can see that someone who was willing to plan and who had some in-depth knowledge of the demon world might have been useful on a number of occasions.”
“So, you’re staying here?” Giles handed him back his refilled cup. “As – you. You’ll be their Watcher as you are now?”
Wesley took the cup. “Thank you. Yes. It seems like the best solution. From what Angel has said, if I recover my memories – become the person I was – I’ll be so overwhelmed by my grief at losing Fred and the trauma of what I’ve endured over the past few years – not to mention my presumably constant and overwhelming sense of guilt at what I did to his son – that I won’t be able to function as Watcher. Or indeed as anything – except possibly a teapot.”
“His son is happy and safe.” Giles reached for the biscuit tin that they had so far managed to successfully conceal from the human gannets that inhabited the hotel with them. “And the prophecy was true. Angel did kill his son. You gave him back his son again when you smashed the Orlon window. Apparently Angel has spoken to Connor since then and Connor has confirmed that his memories also returned, that they have the consistency of a dream, that he prefers the life he has now, but he is grateful for what Angel did for him, and knows that he is his father.”
“So, Angel is now a bad dream to a boy he hoped to raise to be his pride and joy?”
“Wesley, haven’t you noticed that when Angel talks about Connor, he smiles? The boy is going to be a doctor. He’s going to make his family – and Angel – very proud. He’s going to help people. He’s going to do good, something he apparently wanted to do even in his previous incarnation. This story had a happy ending.”
“No thanks to me.”
“Yes, thanks to you. Biscuit?” Giles offered him the tin. “If you hadn’t stolen Connor, if Holtz hadn’t taken him into Quortoth, who knows if he would have survived those dangerous childhood years. Do you really think Wolfram & Hart wouldn’t have wanted to dissect him? Perhaps the Powers were looking out for the child they created, after all. Perhaps the only way Connor got to live was to be taken into a hell dimension.”
“Well, we’ll never know, will we?” Wesley broke a Rich Tea in half with precision.
“You really could cut yourself a little slack.”
“I don’t like myself. I don’t like what a mess I made of my life. I don’t like inheriting this chaotic existence when I like things to be neat and orderly. I don’t like waking up to find I have burnt my bridges with the Council, my father, my country, that I messed up as a Watcher, and have had one disastrous romantic encounter after another, most of which seemed to end in a messy death.”
Giles sighed. “Wesley, trust me, the Council – the Academy – no one in England knows the first thing about what it means to be a Watcher except for the ones who had an actual Slayer. And that’s because it’s not something for which you can ever fully prepare. There comes a point where you just have to do it, and when you do it, when you’re responsible for the guidance and instruction of a living breathing human being who is as fallible and breakable as you are, mistakes will inevitably be made, but lessons are also learned. I have learned so much more from Buffy than I ever learned from the Council. You were under-prepared when you came to Sunnydale, it’s true – well, so was I. So is every Watcher who has ever turned up with his copy of the Watchers’ handbook under one arm and a briefcase full of research notes in the other. The Council don’t just separate themselves and their trainees from the realities of Slaying, they separate themselves from Life. Well, life is messy and painful and gets dirt under your fingernails. People die. People fail. People make terrible mistakes. The difference is in whether you have it in you to keep getting up again, when everything isn’t perfect, when it can’t be put back; when there is no restart button you can press so that…” Giles shook his head. “So that Faith never killed a man. So that Buffy never slept with Angel. So that Angel never killed the woman I love. So that Xander didn’t lose his eye. So that Willow didn’t dabble in magic that almost overwhelmed her and destroyed the world. You have to go on to the next place. To finding a way to deal with being in love with someone with whom you can never have a normal life. To being able to deal with your grief without letting it overwhelm you or make you hate someone who was as much a victim as you were. To learning to drive a car without proper depth perception. To helping Willow go on to the next place, as someone who is steeped in magic now, and who has to learn to find a way to control it and herself. That’s what life is and you can’t learn it out of books, Wesley. You have to get out there and just do it and fall down and screw up and get up again. That’s what Angel does every single day, after all.”
Wesley blinked and Giles wondered if he had understood, if this man, who looked like the Wesley who had endured so much, but who was mentally so fresh and innocent and newly-minted could grasp it. “I know. I wonder – I think what it must be like for him, to wake up each morning, and to hear the birds sing, and not be able to look at them. I wonder if he has a second before reality intrudes when he still thinks he’s Liam. Or does he wake to the remembered screams of all the people that he killed. All those murders he can’t take back? For which there can never be atonement. He has a debt he can never pay and yet he still pays it anyway. I suppose Spike doesn’t like to talk about his feelings on the matter. He’s in the unenviable position of being the second vampire with a soul, the apprentice who has ended up copying the steps of Angel’s life from carnage into a search for redemption – to others he can seem little more than a carbon copy but to himself he must feel entirely original – but although he doesn’t talk about, I presume he remembers the faces of his victims too – all those pleas for mercy that at the time he didn’t heed. And what happens to Illyria if she becomes too contaminated by her human side? Could a human ever survive the weight of death upon her shoulders? I feel they all have a death wish; they’re all in the process of some long jump from a cliff to a hell dimension below, they’ve just chosen to try to save some humans and kill some demons on the way. I wish I could find some hope for them, some…”
Wesley began to go through the papers on his desk. “I can’t accept that there can be no redemption for them, or that they should have to take full responsibility for crimes committed by their murderers. I suppose it’s a philosophical question about the true nature of a vampire, whether the vampiric infection and the loss of the soul reveals us all to be murderers at heart, or if the human is destroyed except for memories, and what Angel and Spike are now are demons with consciences. I suspect it’s more complicated than any simplistic analysis, and in some ways I don’t care. They are clearly not the people who committed these crimes and yet they are forced to carry the guilt for them. Why them and not every other murderous demon upon the earth – unless there is some special purpose intended for them? And if they have been selected by a higher power to be champions for humanity then surely there should be some reward? Not because it motivates them, not because it is the reason why they fight, but just because it…seems so unfair that they should have to pay and pay when no one else does, and never receive anything in return.”
Giles became aware that Angel and the others had returned and were standing in the doorway to the office.
Wesley, who had reached down to pick up a dropped scroll, remained completely oblivious. “That’s another reason why I feel I have no choice but to stay, Giles. I can’t help feeling that some extra research might reveal more about their destiny, their purpose. The Council spent centuries researching the myth of the Slayer and as far as I can tell from your words, Buffy and Willow between them managed to find a deeper layer to that mythology than all those years of learned research ever uncovered and what’s more managed to alter the power source of the Slayers and find a way to share it. A brilliant act, which, however reckless, has changed the odds from one Slayer fighting a million monsters to at least a few thousand Slayers being available to fight the good fight. I understand that sometimes one does have to throw the rulebook out of the window. And I refuse to believe that there are currently two vampires with souls, not to mention an Old One, all of whom have chosen to affiliate themselves with the cause of protecting mankind, and it not being of some greater significance. I don’t know if they’re meant to bring about the end of the world or avert it, but I can’t help feeling they must be here for something, and I’d rather like to know what that is. And, of course, there is the small matter of not wanting them to get themselves killed – something which, the more time I spend with them, seems to be far more of a miracle than the little matter of…” Wesley put the retrieved scroll triumphantly on the desk, beamed at Giles and then became aware that he had an audience.
“Oh.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Well, that was rather swifter than I anticipated. Did you find the nest?”
“Found it. Killed em.” Buffy shouldered her axe while looking between Angel and Spike.
“And you’re all…unharmed?” Wesley pressed, frowning at their silence.
Gunn recovered first. “Yeah. We’re good. The girly necklace things worked like a charm.”
“Possibly because they actually are a charm, Gunn.”
“And even though the demony thing gave it the good old college try, Spike didn’t get his head chopped off.”
“Apart from that everything went very well.” Angel was still gazing at Wesley.
“Jolly good.” Wesley looked pointedly at puddle of green liquid by their feet which Giles noticed was spreading outwards at an alarming rate. “You seem to be um…dripping – on the floor, which I believe Xander swept quite recently.”
“We brought you a head back.” Spike held it up.
“Oh, thank you!” Wesley’s eyes lit up and he hurried to take it from him, being careful to keep it away from the books as he carried it into the office. “I’d be fascinated to see how the cerebral cortex compares with that of a Geshinorax – it has been theorized that they share a common ancestor and the placement of the pineal gland could…” Seeing their expressions, he said, “Is something wrong?”
“You were saying nice things about them,” Buffy explained. “They’re not really used to it.”
“Oh.” Wesley placed the head on some newspaper. “Well, um… I was telling Giles that I think I can do more good here than in Cleveland. I’m sure those Slayers are doing a great deal of good too, but there is an infrastructure in place, or was until recently, that dealt with training Slayers. And I’m sure it was inadequate and Giles here was right to say that every Watcher is unprepared until he’s actually in the field and has the benefit of some training from his Slayer, but… There is no infrastructure to deal with being Watcher to a vampire with a soul or two vampires with a soul or an Old One in a human body. There is apparently only…me. And I feel I would be shirking my responsibilities if…”
Gunn looked at Angel. “Does that mean he likes us? He really, really likes us?”
“It means that I think that you’re even more in need of my help than a bunch of teenage girls.”
Spike was grinning. “And really when it comes right down to it, how useful are you going to be on the whole advising them about their periods thing anyway? With us, you don’t have to do that ever.”
Wesley blinked. “That hadn’t actually crossed my mind and now I’m hoping it never will again. Would you like to go and drip somewhere else because Giles and I are actually researching here?”
“You don’t want to hug?” Angel asked plaintively.
Giles was certain that this time at least Wesley noticed the twinkle in the vampire’s eye as he said it. “And you’re still here because…?”
They backed out of his office, grinning, Illyria gazing at Wesley intently, Gunn and Spike play punching each other in the ribs, Angel smiling like a complete dork. Wesley looked completely unprepared for Buffy abruptly wrapping her arms around him and squeezing him tightly. “Thank you,” Giles heard her breathe. “I needed to know I was leaving them in safe hands and now I know I will be.”
Giles saw that Wesley had tears shining in his eyes. The man automatically made to avert his eyes, ashamed of this show of weakness, but then seemed to notice that Buffy’s were bright too. Giles hoped Wesley would understand her now as he never had in Sunnydale, and realize that, under the quips and jokes about her terrible taste in boyfriends and star-crossed lovers with their gypsy curse problem, her connection to these vampires was a uniquely painful one. And Wesley seemed to be getting it, reaching out to gently squeeze her shoulder without acting as if he were being asked to pet a tiger. “I’ll do my best,” he promised her.
“That’s good enough for me.” She sniffed, wiped her eyes, kissed him on the cheek, said ‘Oh, cookies!’ Took a handful of biscuits and left.
Giles silently handed Wesley a handkerchief and said tactfully. “So, the life cycle of the Imharis Demon? Where were we with that…?”
***
They all looked at the third eye winking in the back of the girl’s head in silence. Illyria put her head on one side, clearly fascinated. Spike grimaced. Gunn and Angel exchanged a ‘here we go again’ look that Wesley noticed at once.
“We’ve encountered this before?”
“Skilosh,” Gunn told him.
“Can you help?” The anxious Mr and Mrs Patterson looked between Angel and Wesley.
“It’s curable. Wes found a de-oculating spell before.” Angel still looked somewhat glum.
“I did? Oh, I mean…I did.” Wesley nodded at the worried parents in a way that he hoped would inspire confidence.
Angel and Gunn exchanged another look. “The problem is what happens afterwards.”
Giles wandered into the office, intent on the papers he was reading, and holding onto his cup of tea, oblivious of the others, he glanced up to tell Wesley that he had found the papers on the cult of Narwath they had been researching, only to be confronted with a winking eye where it had no business to be.
“Good lord.” His cup rattled alarmingly in its saucer but he did manage to keep it more or less level.
“Skilosh spawn,” Angel explained. “They inject it into the cranium of human hosts. There tends to be a pretty short gestation period.”
“Ah.” Giles visibly thought of what it was going to do to that little girl’s skull to have a demon erupt out of it. “We’d better make sure it doesn’t come to term.”
“When did we encounter this before?” Wesley enquired. “If I have the date I can find the relevant notes I made at the time and we can speed up the process of curing it.”
“Early 2001,” Gunn told him. “Maybe January or February.”
Wesley smiled reassuringly at the parents. “I can assure you we will be able to solve this problem for you. You really have come to the right place.” Seeing Illyria still putting her head on one side and gazing unblinkingly at the third eye, he gently took her arm and towed her away. “Illyria, why don’t you…help me look for this information in my diaries?”
She turned to him at once. “Why do you wish me to assist you? Fred has no memory of these events.”
“Well, that makes two of us…” he murmured before leading her away from the nice normal people and their temporarily abnormal child.
Left alone with the others, Giles found Gunn and Angel both looking at him expectantly and then at the worried-looking clients. Clearly he was expected to step into the breach left by Wesley’s departure. Deciding that the second these people were out of the door, he would explain to Angel that one of the advantages of being a librarian in an American High School was that you didn’t have to meet the ordinary public at any time and stood a pretty good chance of never having to meet a High School student either, he sighed inwardly and plastered on his best reassuring smile.
“Would you like to sit down, Mr and Mrs…?”
“Patterson.” Gunn supplied the surname before slipping out of the door, Angel escaping with him at the same time.
Wearily, Giles picked up a pen and essayed another smile. “Perhaps you could tell me exactly how this happened…?”
Glancing across at the office from their safe haven on the lobby banquette, Xander said to Buffy, “Don’t you think that’s kind of cruel? Making Giles talk to people who aren’t –” he ticked it off on his fingers, “a – Slayers, b – Watchers, c – English or d – Librarians?”
“It’s good for him.” Buffy licked chocolate from her fingers. “It expands his horizons.”
“He looks sort of trapped and unhappy to me.” Willow ducked her head so there was no danger of Giles beckoning to her to come and help him out.
“What’s the problem?” Gunn enquired.
“You made Giles talk to the normal people,” Willow explained. “He didn’t really have to… not in Sunnydale. Well, except for Buffy’s mom.”
“And the less said about his interaction with my mom the better.”
Xander looked at her sideways. “You’re never going to forgive him for that, are you?”
“Not in this lifetime, no. Or, come to think of it, as I’m onto my second – uh no, never.”
Gunn frowned. “But I thought that’s what Watchers did. Wes always does the talking to the people thing. Cordy used to check their credit rating. Wes would ask them all the right questions and tell them Angel really cared about their problems, and as long as they didn’t actually meet Angel, it was fine.”
“Hey,” the vampire protested. “I’ve been working on my empathy.”
“Well, Giles hasn’t,” Xander explained. “In Sunnydale we tended to shield him from the general public.”
“Librarian.” Spike nodded as if that explained everything. As Gunn looked at him in confusion he rolled his eyes. “Where else can you put a notice on the wall of your workplace that no one’s allowed to talk to you?”
Seeing Giles drop his pen on the floor, Buffy frowned. “Maybe Willow should help him out.”
As everyone looked at Willow, her eyes widened in panic. “I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.”
“Every stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet, Will,” Xander told her brightly.
“Well, why can’t they be your friend you haven’t met yet or Buffy’s?”
“Because we’re eating chocolate.” Buffy held up her fingers. “Wouldn’t make a good impression.”
Willow quickly snatched a piece. “Me too.”
“Humans are pathetic,” Spike observed. “I’ll talk to them.”
“No!” Gunn grabbed one arm as Angel seized the other.
“What?” Spike demanded. “You don’t think I’m a people person?”
Xander looked up at him. “Only in the way that say Imelda Marcos is a friend to the poor and needy.”
“I’ll do it.” Angel squared his shoulders. “I had to talk to people all the time when I was running a big evil law firm, after all.”
“No, you didn’t,” Gunn reminded him. “You got Harmony to screen your calls and you made Wes or I talk to the clients first.”
Angel blinked as the truth of Gunn’s words permeated but he only stabbed an accusing finger at him. “Well, why aren’t you talking to them then?”
“Because…” Gunn scratched his head awkwardly. “I don’t want to. The back of their kid’s head kept blinking at me. And how are we supposed to tell them that even if we get rid of the third eye, the rest of the Skilosh are going to….”
“…Target them for retribution.” They looked up to see Wesley walking down the stairs, intent on the diary he was reading. He turned a page. “At least this time we’ll be prepared and can formulate an appropriate strategy.”
“Would that be one that doesn’t involve getting a hole punched in the back of our heads or getting our clients killed?”
Wesley looked up from the notes in mild surprise. “I was thinking along the lines of luring the entire tribe to a location of our choice and wiping them out. What did you have in mind?”
“I was really concentrating most of my energies on ways to stop you using the word ‘gestating’.”
Wesley looked at him for a long moment. “You and I were really best friends?”
“Had your own handshake and everything,” Angel confirmed.
“How very…adolescent of us.”
“Hey, our handshake was tight.” Gunn took some chocolate. “This is good. Is it imported?”
“Probably.” Buffy shrugged. “It’s from Giles’s secret stash of goodies he thinks are too good to share with us.”
Willow snatched her hand away from the bar. “You didn’t tell me it was stolen!”
“I prefer to think of it as…liberated.” Buffy took another piece. “It’s like – go, fly, stuffy English chocolate, find your way to new horizons.”
“It’s Cadbury’s.” Wesley looked at them in confusion. “That isn’t imported. That’s what you can buy at every newsagents.”
“Only if you’re in England,” Buffy reminded him. “Which if you ever stepped outside the hotel you’d realize that you’re not. For one thing it’s not raining all the time.”
“Actually the constant butchering of my mother tongue had pretty much tipped me off.”
Angel beamed paternally. “See, he’s all waspish again.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. “You must be so proud.”
“How is the tribe of Skilosh to be destroyed?” Illyria demanded.
Wesley gave her a look of approval. “I’m glad one of us can stick to the point.”
“She just likes killing things.” Gunn took another piece of chocolate.
“And you do not?” Illyria enquired, unblinkingly.
Gunn went to answer her, faltered over her having a point, and then turned back to Wes. “So, you had a plan?”
“Are they bound by demon law?”
“No. They have their own separate justice system which involves anyone who isn’t a Skilosh not having any rights. It’s a problem with quite a few demon tribes. Well, most of them, actually.”
“Then luring them here and hacking them to pieces is looking like our best option.” Wesley closed the diary. “I’d better go and explain the situation to Mr and Mrs Patterson. Unless…Angel…?”
“No, you do it. I’ll…stand behind you and – lend moral support.”
Wesley looked over his shoulder. “And would you say here was the best place to bring them?”
“Bring who?”
They turned to see Lorne resplendent in a dressing gown of magnificent peacock blue silk. As they all looked at it, he shrugged. “It was a gift from an admirer. What, I can’t have admirers? Now, who are we bringing here and will I need to dress for dinner?”
“The gang of crazed vengeful Skilosh who are going to want to kill us after Wesley destroys their spawn,” Gunn answered helpfully.
“So, that’s probably a ‘no’ on the formal wear,” Buffy added.
“Oh yes, that’s a cracking idea.” Lorne held up his glass. “And luckily I came prepared.”
“Or we could just tell Mr and Mrs Patterson that we can’t help them and that they will soon find themselves the proud parents of an adult Skilosh and a somewhat messy corpse.” Wesley looked between them expectantly.
Spike grimaced. “Or we could go with Wes’s first plan.”
“I’m cool with the demon bait idea,” Buffy shrugged.
“I relish the prospect of such a battle,” Illyria observed.
“Why am I not surprised?” Xander observed to Willow.
“Okay then.” Wesley nodded to Buffy, Spike, Gunn and Illyria. “I suggest you make a study of the strengths and weaknesses of the hotel and see if you can agree on the most defensible position. It’s important that all of the Skilosh attend for the retribution or we’ll be sending the Pattersons home to an ambush. Gunn, if you could make some notes on everything you know about the tribal customs of the Skilosh that would be invaluable. I’ll also ask Giles to help me research with the books we have available to us. In the meantime, you and I, Angel, had better tell the Pattersons of our plan and see if we can obtain their consent.”
As Wesley walked towards the office with Angel beside him, Buffy licked some more chocolate from her fingers and looked at Willow. “He’s all manly when he gives orders, isn’t he?”
“Gives me chills,” Spike observed.
“I still miss insane Wesley,” Xander admitted. “He was kind of cuddly.”
Gunn sighed. “Don’t. It’s not a joke to us.”
Xander looked at him. “I know. I was just… trying to lighten the mood. That’s kind of my allotted role, you see, in the imminent death circumstances – I make inappropriate jokes, everyone else snaps at me. It’s sort of a tradition.”
“I like your inappropriate jokes,” Willow assured him.
“And the crazy amnesiac is now in charge?” Lorne looked around at them all. “Just checking, in case I missed something.”
“He’s Strategy Boy,” Buffy explained. She waited a beat before conceding, “Okay, he’s until recently crazy and still very amnesiac strategy boy but still pretty much the…”
“Man with the plan,” Gunn finished.
“And would this plan involve us all risking our necks because it’s The Right Thing To Do?”
Spike shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“Well, then forgive me for failing to see the difference between Wesley being in charge and Angel being in charge. Either way it always seems to involve my property getting destroyed and my life being threatened.”
Buffy blinked. “There’s another way to live?”
Lorne took another gulp of his drink. “Apparently not.”
“So, why are you here, green genes?” Spike enquired. “Seeing as you’re a self-proclaimed coward and all?”
“Because our fearless heroes got my club blown up?”
Gunn gazed at him affectionately. “And…?”
“And I may have possibly caught a dose of that champion flu that was doing the rounds here a while back, but, trust me, I’m going to throw it off any time now.”
“Good luck with that,” Xander said sincerely.
Lorne looked at Xander’s eye patch and took another sip of his drink. “Did you ever look around a room and see more people gathered together who are incapable of learning from their past mistakes?”
Spike looked across at Buffy. “Some past mistakes are better than others.”
Willow looked at Xander. “Much better.”
“Yeah.” Gunn looked at Wesley who was still talking to the Pattersons and then noticed everyone looking at him. “Hey, not that kind of past mistake.”
Lorne took another gulp of vodka. “You stick to that story, strudel, and none of us will mention the era of the warm fuzzy goddess love make out sessions, then perhaps someone could fill me in on how we’re going to be inviting imminent death this time?”
“We are intent upon inviting the wrath of the Skilosh by destroying their spawn so that they may seek to wreak their vengeance upon us,” Illyria explained.
Lorne rolled his eyes. “Yes, because that went so well last time. No, your blueness, I got that piece of jolly news the first time. I meant nuts and bolts, how is this…happy aim to be achieved?”
Willow looked at Buffy. “Weren’t we supposed to be…?”
“Oh yeah.” Buffy finished licking the chocolate from her fingers. “Weak points. Defensible positions. Yadda yadda.”
“Make sure you lure them to somewhere dark and creepy,” Lorne called after them. “Oh yes, and let’s make certain we all split up and don’t switch any lights on while we’re at it.”
Spike shrugged. “Hey, if we’re going by the movies, it’s always the blonde who gets it first, so you should be okay. They always save the green guy to the end.”
“And you and Buffy may as well go and measure yourselves up for his-and-hers body bags. Although in your case, of course, a dust-buster will suffice…”
Gunn frowned. “Isn’t it only the virgin who ever survives?”
Lorne looked around at the assembled company. “We’re all so very dead.”
“Wes doesn’t remember having sex,” Xander pointed out. “Maybe that counts.”
“Are you kidding me? I don’t care what he remembers, he still has Lilah’s teethmarks on his ass.”
Gunn looked at Wesley with renewed interest. “Are you sure?”
“Maybe they’re Angel’s.” Spike also looked that way.
“And…thank you for that image. I now have to go and scrub out my mind with Clorox,” Gunn told him, shouldering an axe.
“Why are you taking that on a reconnaissance?” Xander enquired.
“Just in case,” Gunn said as if it was obvious. “And anyway, the best way to test a defensible position is carrying the same equipment you’ll be holding in the battle situation.”
Lorne held up his glass. “I am so with you on that, sugar. And, for strict accuracy, I really need a refill, because, trust me, on any occasion when we’re inviting vengeful Skilosh around to lay their babies in our brains, I’ll be needing a large drink.”
***
“Are you sure Willow is going to be okay?” Xander asked Buffy for the third time. He said it in a whisper on account of their position in a darkened corridor lying – well, standing, to be strictly accurate – in wait for the bad guys, but it was a penetrating whisper as whispers went. Buffy sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t share his concern, but she was just getting a little fed up with being asked the same question over and over with only the name of the person being asked about altering. Gunn had asked her that about Wesley and Angel had done the same; even Illyria, She Without Human Emotions, had suggested that her place was in the kitchen with those who were less capable than she of fighting off the Skilosh.
She took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go through it again, shall we? Willow is in the kitchen. So are the Pattersons. So is Wesley. So is Giles. Three hours ago exactly, Wesley and Giles destroyed the Skilosh spawn in Julie Patterson’s head. Any minute now the vengeful Skilosh tribe will arrive determined to kill or capture us so that they can either stomp on our corpses until their claws are sticky or inject disgusting Skilosh goop into our skulls and make us hatch out little Skilosh for them. They will try to get to the dining room to get to the kitchen. We will try to kill as many of them as possible before they reach the dining room. You and I taking this corridor, Gunn and Spike taking the other access corridor while in the dining room itself, protecting the kitchen and Willow are…”
“Angel and Illyria putting aside their differences to come together to fight evil in a box office record weekend buddy cop kind of way…”
Xander and Buffy both looked around to find Lorne standing next to them. “Why are you here?” Xander enquired.
“It seemed the safest place.”
Buffy preened. “You think I’m a better fighter than Angel or Spike.”
“Of course I do, sugar. And unlike them you can actually strategize.”
Buffy nodded at Xander. “He has an eye patch because of my great strategizing skills.”
“When you first arrived in Sunnydale and gathered your little clan of goodies around you, how many of you were there?”
“Well, me, Giles, Willow, and Xander…” She grimaced. “Okay, I get you.”
“Good, because much as I love Angel – and for those not keeping up on current events that’s considerably less than I used to before he messed around with my memory and screwed up my empathic abilities to the point where I can’t trust myself to take a reading from a well-trained budgerigar – he has shed more than a few associates along the way.”
“Do you blame him?” It hadn’t occurred to Buffy that anyone might. No one could be harder on himself than Angel so it felt like kicking a man when he was down to pile yet more guilt onto him.
Lorne sighed. “I try not to, sweetheart, I really do. But the fact remains that even if you go through every room in this hotel you’re not going to find Cordelia or Fred.”
“I lost Anya and Spike. Not to mention a lot of girls whose names I didn’t learn on purpose because I knew they were going to get killed.”
“Wesley doesn’t know the names of the people who died on Pylea following his orders but the humans on that world are still alive in part because of his plan. And I have to say, snowcone, I haven’t noticed a whole lot of evil Ubervamps chowing down on the residents recently. There are always going to be losses.”
“You have no idea how many times I have screwed up over the years,” Buffy told him passionately. “And isn’t the main difference between the people that I got killed and the people that Angel got killed that you didn’t know the people I got killed?”
Lorne sighed. “Cordy and Fred… It wasn’t supposed to end like that for them.”
“Xander lost Anya.” Buffy touched his arm as she said his name. “I lost Spike. She may have been a vengeance demon and he may have been a vampire and they may both have deserved to die for what they’d done over the years, but they were our friends and we cared about them and we lost them. That’s what happens when you go out there and try to do something about all the darkness in the world. You make mistakes.”
“Angel didn’t make a mistake, he made a decision – to mess with our memories with his eyes open. And he took the deal at Wolfram & Hart knowing that we were no longer exactly in our right minds.”
“You loved Fred.” Buffy thought of how she would feel if it had been Willow.
“Yes.” Lorne’s red eyes showed how much the loss of her had wounded him. “I really did. It hurts every time I think about her and it hurts every time I look at Illyria, but, you know what? I wouldn’t want to forget her and there is no way in any hell dimension that Wesley would either. If he was in his right memory. And I don’t think Fred would want to be forgotten. And you can quote all the Christina Rossetti at me that you like, sugar plum, I’m still not buying it. She was the woman of his dreams and now she’s just another face in a photograph.”
“It’s Wesley’s choice…”
“Angel told him he didn’t want those memories back. And if Wesley has a fault – and let’s face it, Wesley has dozens of faults – it’s his habit of assuming that because a guy has been walking this world for two and a half centuries that he’s somehow learned something during that time. I don’t blame him because I was guilty of that myself. Angel has glamour, and I don’t mean the magical pixie dust kind. I mean the kind that makes movie stars look a foot taller than everyone else in the room.”
“But Wesley doesn’t feel like that about Angel any more.” Xander grimaced. “That came out wrong. I mean – supposing he had the crush when he first came to LA – he’s over it now. He doesn’t even remember having it. Not that I’m saying he had it in the first place because that just makes me…deeply uncomfortable.”
“No.” Lorne looked at him levelly. “He’s just in the same mindset he was when he first met Angel and thought he had all the answers.”
“He doesn’t seem…crushy to me,” Buffy insisted.
“Everyone else in this hotel thinks he needs to remember what happened except for Angel. Who is he listening to?”
Buffy and Xander exchanged a look. “You may have a point,” Xander admitted. “I’m just not comfortable about discussing Wesley’s possible crushes.”
“You need to tell Giles to get in there and start being the father figure instead.”
“Giles isn’t old enough to be Wesley’s father!” Buffy could hardly have been more appalled.
“Who cares? He’s human, he’s English, he’s a Watcher, and he’s never locked Wesley in a cupboard…” Lorne broke off hastily. “He’s an acceptable substitute authority figure, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Instead of trying to get Giles to be the guy Wesley hero worships instead of Angel, wouldn’t it be a good idea to get Wesley to start thinking for himself?” Xander suggested.
“Actually, it always makes me nervous when Wesley starts thinking for himself. I just don’t want him listening to Angel either. I’m not saying there needs to be hero worship, I’m just saying – Giles seems like a nice sane normal sort of person whose advice Wesley could be taking. And I was thinking perhaps you could persuade Giles to start handing out some of that advice. And perhaps some of that advice could be…”
“Giles isn’t going to try to influence Wesley,” Buffy assured him. “He’s going to let him make up his own mind.”
“Are we sure that’s a good idea?”
Xander looked at Lorne for a moment. “Aren’t you the guy who’s supposed to help people find their own path?”
“Yeah, well I gave that up for Lent. On account of all the people I know taking a sky dive off their own path onto a much much worse path even after I’d told them what their own path was meant to be.”
“What’s Wesley’s path?” Buffy asked.
Lorne shook his head. “Sorry, sugar, not even the Slayer gets to hear anyone’s path but her own. I’m just saying – sticking his head in the sand and pretending everything is fine when it isn’t, that’s not Wesley’s way. He used to care about truth, and his life right now – it’s a lie. Another rose-tinted necro-tempered lie. Just like the one that just drove him right to the brink of his full strength crazy. I’ve lost two people that I cared about. I don’t have that many left. I’d like to try to keep them in one piece and in their right mind. And when I say ‘right mind’ I mean the full War and Peace, Ring of the Nibelungen, whole damned History of Middle Earth. Wesley deserves more than the Cliff Notes to his own life. And as no one else seems to be saying it out loud I’d like Giles to.”
Buffy straightened up, axe in hand. “It’s not that I don’t care about Wesley’s mental health situation, Lorne, but I really think we need to postpone this conversation.”
“Why?” Lorne demanded. “So we can let another day go by pretending everything is okay when it isn’t?”
“No.” She caught him by the arm and pulled him behind her. “So we can deal with the two dozen angry Skilosh currently running towards us with big nasty weapons.”
Illyria looked at Angel impatiently. “We should assist them.”
“We’re the second line of defence. That means we wait until the first line breaks.” Angel found that talking to Illyria habitually gave him a pain in the jaw. It had taken him until now to realize it was because she made him grit his teeth so hard. He could hear as well as she could the sounds of battle outside the two access doors to the dining room, and, given that Gunn and Buffy were two of the people fighting, he wasn’t exactly enjoying standing here and doing nothing either, but Wesley and Giles had insisted this was the best strategy and he trusted their judgement.
He heard Spike shout: ‘Come on then, you three-eyed wankers!’ just before green goop splattered across the glass panel in the left swing door. There was the thud of something solid as the doors were knocked open by a flying object that turned out to be Gunn, who picked himself up, looked across at Angel, said, “They’ve learned to use weapons,” and then threw himself back into the fray.
Angel looked from one door to the next, wondering when the break would come that meant retreat was the only safe option for the pairs outside.
“I do not care for a battle in which I can do no violence.”
Angel looked at Illyria and thought for the hundredth time how much chopping her head straight off her shoulders seemed like such a good idea. It was unfortunate that no one else seemed to agree with him. They all seemed to think that, as she was capable of mixing up being an arrogant god-king with having an all-too-human crush on Wesley, that she was salvageable. It didn’t help that Xander had turned up as the ex-honey of a vengeance demon who had apparently given her life in the end to save a human after a few years of his influence. He’d thought about kicking Xander under the table while he was telling Wesley the story of Anya but had realized in time that it would only serve to convince his already somewhat dubious disciples of his lack of human empathy.
“There will be plenty of violence to do, trust me,” he told her impatiently.
“I do not trust you.” She gazed at him from her unblinking blue eyes – so unlike Fred’s warm brown ones. “You are a liar and a thief.”
“I’m neither of those things,” he retorted angrily, breaking off to run to catch Xander as he was thrown through the swing doors by a savage backhand from a vengeful Skilolsh. Angel held him up under the arms. “Want to bring the fight in here?” he asked eagerly.
Xander wiped the blood from his mouth. “Buffy thinks we can stall them a little longer. Take out a few more first.”
Angel’s face fell. “Okay.”
“Can you give me a push?” Xander enquired.
Angel obliged, giving him a solid shove that gave Xander the impetuous to raise his axe, sound a battle cry and make a fair approximation of a pissed off Gunn as he charged back through the doors. Angel turned back to Illyria. “I’m not a liar or a thief.”
“You lied to Wesley about his past and you stole his memories. That makes you both of those things.”
“I was trying to protect my son!”
“What do your motives matter if your actions lack all honour?”
“What do you know of honour?”
“Wesley was teaching me of it. He was reading to me of the codes of chivalry of ancient warriors of this world.” She grabbed Angel by the shirt and yanked him forward. “You would keep him from me.”
“Yes, I would keep him from you,” he snapped back. “You were driving him insane. He’d look at you and see the face of the woman he loved – the woman you killed. You were a walking reminder of everything he’d lost.”
“She loved him.” Illyria gazed at him intently. “She felt stirrings of love for him many times before she admitted to them. But she feared the grief that it would bring; she feared the instability in him. She feared to hurt his friendships with others. She feared to lose his friendship herself. She delayed too long. She knew that. She died full of regret for the time she would never spend with him. She was afraid to die.”
“Don’t tell him that!” Angel hissed at her. “Don’t ever tell him that!”
“I have not.” He saw something flicker in her gaze that was uncomfortably close to emotion. She dropped her gaze. “I take no pleasure in wounding him. You do not trust me. You think that if you brought him back that I would injure him in his mind.”
“You’ve already injured him. You ripped out his heart.”
“You speak in riddles. His heart still beats.”
“If it wasn’t for you, he could…” Angel broke off.
“It is because of me that you fear his restoration? That is because you do not know him.”
“I know him better than anyone… I know him better than you.”
“Wesley is stronger than you think him. You do not pay him the respect of one warrior to another.”
“No one respects Wes more than I do.”
“Then why do you seek to always protect him from the truth? Why do you think yourself strong enough to carry the burden of memory yet consider him too weak?”
“I don’t think him weak.” Angel snatched a breath. “I just think he’s suffered enough.”
“He would not want to forget her. Fred, the owner of this body before it became mine.”
Angel yanked her hand off his shirt. “You just think that if he remembers her he’ll be drawn to you, the way he was before, that sick compulsion to try to help you and guide you because of the way you look…”
“You are wrong.” She put her head on one side, gazing unblinkingly into his eyes. “He has offered me his help and guidance already. He has spent many hours with me unbeknown to you, teaching me the ways of this world even without remembering the one whose body I now inhabit. You fear to lose him.”
“I fear to break him!” Angel snapped at her. “You gave him back to me in pieces, Illyria. He went into that hell dimension clinging to sanity by a fingernail, and then he let go and I caught him. I caught him. Not you. Do you think I like him not remembering me? Everything we’ve been through? I’ve already been through this! Events that don’t have meaning any more because the only other person in the world who knows about them doesn’t remember. I want him back more than I want… I just don’t want him back more than I want to see him destroyed again. He’s okay like this. He doesn’t have nightmares. He can do good. That’s all he ever wanted was to help people, do some good, make a difference, use all that knowledge and training to protect people from some of the darkness out there. All you want is for him to love you the way he loved Fred. Well, he never will. Giving him back his memory isn’t going to make him love you. It’s just going to make him nuts.”
“How could one as lowly as you presume to know my wishes or anticipate my wants? You think you are the only one who cares for Wesley’s happiness.”
“Since when did you ever give a damn about anyone except yourself?”
“Since when did you, vampire?”
The simultaneous slam of bodies impacting swing doors made them both wheel around. Illyria caught Gunn as Angel grabbed Lorne. Xander went skidding across the floor as Buffy backed up, looking over her shoulder to say. “We’re defending this room now.”
Illyria set Gunn back on his feet and then shoved him to the side as the Skilosh charged, vicious serrated weapons raised. She smiled coldly. “At last, I may do some violence.”
Gunn wiped some green blood from his eye and held up his own axe, not backing down as more Skilosh poured through the doors. Angel shoved Lorne into the centre of the circle they formed, the rest of them standing back to back, Buffy to his right, Illyria to his left, Gunn to her left, Spike between Gunn and Xander, and Xander between Buffy and Spike.
The leader of the Skilosh, gazed at the kitchen. “The destroyers of our spawn lie through that door.”
“A prize for the big ugly demon on the right,” said Buffy brightly. “But, guess what, you still don’t get to touch any of them – ever.”
“We will kill all of you half-breeds and then use the destroyers of our spawn to replace those of us who have fallen today.”
“I am no vampire.” Ilyria gazed at the Skilosh contemptuously. “And you shall pay heavily for your insolence.”
“Yes, because species identification is really what’s important right now,” Angel muttered.
“Will you two get over it?” Gunn demanded.
“Yeah, can the rest of us just enjoy killing a few demons without having it spoiled by you two bitching at each other all the way through it?” Spike added.
And then as the Skilosh all rushed them simultaneously, there was no time for anything except trying not to die.
Temps Perdu, Part Eleven
Wesley knew they thought it was ‘fussing’ but the fact remained that they were reckless and often unprepared and he frankly thought that Giles had been a Watcher for too long and had reached the ‘let them juggle knives’ stage because he was, in his opinion, very lax about making them going through their pre-mission checklist. There had been far too many occasions of late when Angel’s approach to demon-killing missions had reminded him of that old quote: “An Englishman thinks seated; a Frenchman standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards”. Not that Gunn was any better, for all his lack of Irish blood.
Wearily he asked again: “Gunn, are you sure you’re carrying the nails and eucalyptus leaves? You really can’t go up against a Shakoranak without some iron.”
Gunn held up his axe. “This is iron.”
“And if it gets knocked out of your hand in the heat of battle?”
Sighing, Gunn held up the pouch Wesley had insisted he tie around his neck. “You are such a worrywart, you know that?”
“Well, excuse me for not wanting to see you all dead.”
Gunn turned to Buffy, who was holding a crossbow and rolling her eyes. “Did Giles ever fuss like this?”
“No. I trained my Watcher. He’s all housebroken and everything.”
Giles looked up at her over his spectacles. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t fuss every time I go on a mission the way Wesley does. You just – give me the salient information and send me on my way. No fussing.”
“I don’t fuss,” Wesley protested. “I just – double check.”
“And triple check, quadruple check, and whatever comes after that check,” Buffy retorted. “You’ve elevated being anally retentive to a whole new level.”
“Lay off my Watcher,” Spike told her. “Go pick on your own. He’s used to it.”
“Since when was Wesley your Watcher?” Angel demanded. “He’s not your Watcher.”
“Okay, if you want to quibble, he’s not technically being paid by the Council to be my Watcher, on account of him not working for the Council and me not being a Slayer. But he’s functioning as my Watcher.”
“Our Watcher,” Gunn pointed out.
“And my substitute back up annoying spare Watcher,” Buffy added.
“He’s doing his best,” said Angel defensively. “You’ve never given Wes a chance.”
“Angel, I’m joking.” She looked at him in disbelief. “How can you not know I’m joking? Wes, you know I love you, right?”
He gaped at her, then reached for the place where his tie should be. “Well…”
“Oh, come on, did no one know I was joking?”
“I knew,” Giles assured her.
Buffy turned on Angel. “What do you mean I’ve never given him a chance?”
“Back in Sunnydale the first time around, I’m just saying, maybe if you’d shown a bit more patience, been a bit more reasonable – “
“Okay, let’s stop this conversation right there, shall we?” Wesley held up a hand, pleased with the way that had come out so crisp and authoritative. “For those of you with very short attention spans – which apparently includes everyone in this room who isn’t Giles or myself – you are going to clear out a nest of Shakoranak demons, otherwise know as spine-splitters due to their extremely nasty fighting habits. They are violently allergic to iron, which is lethal to them, so exchanging your wooden stake for something that might actually kill them would probably be a good idea at this juncture, Spike. They are also disorientated by eucalyptus leaves, hence the small bags handed out to you earlier that were prepared by Willow. Illyria, you may be a god-king of the fallen worlds but you also have a spine so please put on one of the bags. Thank you. Angel, remember that they have a particularly vicious retractable talon that is long, strong and sharp enough to behead as well as impale. If you see it move its wrist thusly –” Wesley demonstrated, “then the Shakoranak is probably about to unleash its talon. Don’t try to duck under it; its reflexes are terrifyingly fast, and it could easily behead you. Better to let it impale you if no other option is open to you. Buffy and Gunn, I suggest you wear the vests I left out for you earlier. The talon when fully extended is nearly two feet long and would go straight through you if you didn’t get out of its way in time. Is everyone clear about their fighting patterns or would you like me to go through it again?”
“Oh please,” Buffy muttered. “I could have taught a gerbil to foxtrot faster.”
“We remember the spine splitter dance steps,” Spike assured him. “Right flank, left flank, aerial assault. Watch out for the ones in the floorboards. We’ve got you.”
“Can we go now?” Gunn pleaded.
Wesley fought down the urge to smirk, maintaining a straight face as he asked earnestly, “Are you sure you don’t want me to run through it again? Oh and do remember to…go before you go, won’t you?”
“I’m not loving you so much now,” Buffy admitted. “In fact the old urge to hit you quite hard seems to be trying to break through.”
“Fight it,” Wesley advised.
“Stop picking on Wesley,” Angel told her firmly before adding quickly as he backed away towards the exit and escape, “But we really don’t need any more preparation, Wesley, in fact I think we should just…go.” With Illyria casting a last unblinking look of great intensity before she left, the demon-killers darted into the night world outside.
Giles waited until they had passed through the doors of the Hyperion before raising an eyebrow at Wesley. “Do you think they know you’re winding them up?”
Wesley smirked and reached for his tea. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Wesley, I knew you when you were genuinely at your most pompous and annoying and even then you never asked your Slayer if she needed to visit the bathroom before Slaying commenced.”
Wesley sighed and looked after them. “It doesn’t feel right – waiting here. I should be with them.”
“And I’m sure if there’s a case involving demons that tire easily and which are situated no more than a hundred yards from the hotel, you will be.”
Wesley looked down at himself in disgust. “I’d really like to punch the idiot on the nose who hijacked my body for the past five years.”
“That’s an idiot who happens to be a dearly loved friend of most of the people in this hotel, Wesley,” Giles reminded him.
“I can’t imagine why. He seemed to have – I seemed to have – elevated incompetence to an art form.”
Giles raised an eyebrow. “Well, then clearly they just loved you for your looks. I’m sure their affection for you had nothing whatsoever to do with you fighting demons alongside them, you risking your life for theirs, for the world, for the common good, or for the connection you all have because of shared experiences.”
Wesley darted him a glance. “Are you saying, I should…?”
Giles shrugged and reached for another reference book. “You’ve made your decision. You don’t want your memories back. I understand. Everyone understands.”
They researched for a while in silence but although Wesley tried to keep his mind on the text in front of him, those last words from Giles kept going through his head. No criticism had been offered, it was true, and yet he felt as if it had; a silent critique of his cowardice in not being prepared to accept what he truly was.
Giles had come to the conclusions many days since that he and Wesley had been very remiss in not keeping in touch better when the man had been in Los Angeles. Not only would he have been able to provide advice and assistance on the occasions when the man had clearly needed it, but they also had many books in their individual libraries that the other one did not possess, and they could have pooled resources. At the moment, for instance, he was in the process of translating a book of Wesley’s that dealt with gateways to demon dimensions and how to both open and close them that would have been very useful when they’d been dealing with Glory. It was written in Akkadian, and it was almost like being back in university again to sit here quietly translating cuneiform while sipping at a welcome cup of tea and enjoying the occasional nibble of a chocolate digestive.
“I like being sane,” Wesley said out of the blue. “I like being able to tie my own shoelaces and not crying all the time. And how useful could I possibly be as some neurotic weirdo who can’t go to the bathroom without a vampire holding his hand?”
He had evidently been processing what he perceived to be Giles’ criticism of his decision for the past twenty minutes. Giles bookmarked the page of the book he was reading with a torn off strip of paper. “I think you were managing the bathroom pretty well, actually. But I do see your point.”
“I know you can’t stay here forever and these people… well, let’s face it, strategising doesn’t appear to be a strong point.”
Giles bent his head to conceal a smile. “So, were you thinking of staying?”
“Well…yes. It’s not that I don’t want to do my duty, Giles.” Wesley unconsciously sat up straighter and adjusted his jacket, reaching again for a tie that wasn’t there. “I would like nothing better than to do what I was trained to do… They made me head boy.”
Giles frowned at the non sequitur. “I know. How is that…?”
“On the recommendation of teachers and a headmaster, not to mention a housemaster, who believed I had it in me to be a credit to them, to the Academy, to their teaching. I wanted to make them proud of me. I wanted them to feel they’d been justified in choosing me, despite my father…” Wesley moistened his lips. “If I helped now, with training the newly activated Slayers, perhaps there would still be a way to pay my debt to them for believing in me and to make them proud of me.”
There was a faraway look in his eyes as he said it that made Giles realize with an uncomfortable jolt, just how much it mattered to Wesley to be believed in, for someone whose authority he recognized and cared about, to be proud of him. But then Wesley was sighing sadly and shrugging. “But I can’t just leave them. They don’t know how to research. Gunn can read demon languages, it’s true, but only the ones that have a legal system affiliated with the demonic hall of records. Any of the demons who aren’t affiliated with that legal system or who pre-date it or who are too primitive or too sophisticated to have any part of demonic law are literally a closed book to him. Angel’s been around for two hundred and fifty years and never even bothered to learn Geshundi, and his spelling in Ortrax is so appalling that he can’t tell ‘omnipotent’ from ‘impotent’.”
“Doesn’t Illyria…?”
“Illyria has never troubled herself with the culture of anyone else. To her, demonic worlds were just something new to conquer. She has never had to take even basic steps to defend herself either. She was always too powerful to need to worry about it. Now she’s running on half power. She can’t just bend time or step into another dimension if danger threatens. She has to live within the confines of a human body, albeit one with extraordinary speed and strength. And how can she function in the world unless there is someone prepared to take on her guidance and to answer her questions? Spike has been doing his best, I can tell, but he’s not exactly a lodestone for morality at the best of times. And Gunn appears to have always had a death wish problem. I’ve found several references in my diaries to how haunted he is by the death of his sister and how much he blames himself. This is potentially an invaluable unit for the forces of good but if they’re all under-prepared and half the time are only going into battle because they miss the adrenaline rush or are half-hoping to get themselves killed, I don’t see how they’re going to last more than a few months.”
Giles topped up both of their tea from the pot. “Doesn’t that suggest that you – the previous version of you – must have played a pivotal role in helping to keep them alive?”
“Well…it’s hard to know exactly. Apparently Fred had a first class scientific mind and Cordelia had the visions, of course, which presumably gave them – gave us – something of an advantage when going into a hostile situation. However…yes, I can see that someone who was willing to plan and who had some in-depth knowledge of the demon world might have been useful on a number of occasions.”
“So, you’re staying here?” Giles handed him back his refilled cup. “As – you. You’ll be their Watcher as you are now?”
Wesley took the cup. “Thank you. Yes. It seems like the best solution. From what Angel has said, if I recover my memories – become the person I was – I’ll be so overwhelmed by my grief at losing Fred and the trauma of what I’ve endured over the past few years – not to mention my presumably constant and overwhelming sense of guilt at what I did to his son – that I won’t be able to function as Watcher. Or indeed as anything – except possibly a teapot.”
“His son is happy and safe.” Giles reached for the biscuit tin that they had so far managed to successfully conceal from the human gannets that inhabited the hotel with them. “And the prophecy was true. Angel did kill his son. You gave him back his son again when you smashed the Orlon window. Apparently Angel has spoken to Connor since then and Connor has confirmed that his memories also returned, that they have the consistency of a dream, that he prefers the life he has now, but he is grateful for what Angel did for him, and knows that he is his father.”
“So, Angel is now a bad dream to a boy he hoped to raise to be his pride and joy?”
“Wesley, haven’t you noticed that when Angel talks about Connor, he smiles? The boy is going to be a doctor. He’s going to make his family – and Angel – very proud. He’s going to help people. He’s going to do good, something he apparently wanted to do even in his previous incarnation. This story had a happy ending.”
“No thanks to me.”
“Yes, thanks to you. Biscuit?” Giles offered him the tin. “If you hadn’t stolen Connor, if Holtz hadn’t taken him into Quortoth, who knows if he would have survived those dangerous childhood years. Do you really think Wolfram & Hart wouldn’t have wanted to dissect him? Perhaps the Powers were looking out for the child they created, after all. Perhaps the only way Connor got to live was to be taken into a hell dimension.”
“Well, we’ll never know, will we?” Wesley broke a Rich Tea in half with precision.
“You really could cut yourself a little slack.”
“I don’t like myself. I don’t like what a mess I made of my life. I don’t like inheriting this chaotic existence when I like things to be neat and orderly. I don’t like waking up to find I have burnt my bridges with the Council, my father, my country, that I messed up as a Watcher, and have had one disastrous romantic encounter after another, most of which seemed to end in a messy death.”
Giles sighed. “Wesley, trust me, the Council – the Academy – no one in England knows the first thing about what it means to be a Watcher except for the ones who had an actual Slayer. And that’s because it’s not something for which you can ever fully prepare. There comes a point where you just have to do it, and when you do it, when you’re responsible for the guidance and instruction of a living breathing human being who is as fallible and breakable as you are, mistakes will inevitably be made, but lessons are also learned. I have learned so much more from Buffy than I ever learned from the Council. You were under-prepared when you came to Sunnydale, it’s true – well, so was I. So is every Watcher who has ever turned up with his copy of the Watchers’ handbook under one arm and a briefcase full of research notes in the other. The Council don’t just separate themselves and their trainees from the realities of Slaying, they separate themselves from Life. Well, life is messy and painful and gets dirt under your fingernails. People die. People fail. People make terrible mistakes. The difference is in whether you have it in you to keep getting up again, when everything isn’t perfect, when it can’t be put back; when there is no restart button you can press so that…” Giles shook his head. “So that Faith never killed a man. So that Buffy never slept with Angel. So that Angel never killed the woman I love. So that Xander didn’t lose his eye. So that Willow didn’t dabble in magic that almost overwhelmed her and destroyed the world. You have to go on to the next place. To finding a way to deal with being in love with someone with whom you can never have a normal life. To being able to deal with your grief without letting it overwhelm you or make you hate someone who was as much a victim as you were. To learning to drive a car without proper depth perception. To helping Willow go on to the next place, as someone who is steeped in magic now, and who has to learn to find a way to control it and herself. That’s what life is and you can’t learn it out of books, Wesley. You have to get out there and just do it and fall down and screw up and get up again. That’s what Angel does every single day, after all.”
Wesley blinked and Giles wondered if he had understood, if this man, who looked like the Wesley who had endured so much, but who was mentally so fresh and innocent and newly-minted could grasp it. “I know. I wonder – I think what it must be like for him, to wake up each morning, and to hear the birds sing, and not be able to look at them. I wonder if he has a second before reality intrudes when he still thinks he’s Liam. Or does he wake to the remembered screams of all the people that he killed. All those murders he can’t take back? For which there can never be atonement. He has a debt he can never pay and yet he still pays it anyway. I suppose Spike doesn’t like to talk about his feelings on the matter. He’s in the unenviable position of being the second vampire with a soul, the apprentice who has ended up copying the steps of Angel’s life from carnage into a search for redemption – to others he can seem little more than a carbon copy but to himself he must feel entirely original – but although he doesn’t talk about, I presume he remembers the faces of his victims too – all those pleas for mercy that at the time he didn’t heed. And what happens to Illyria if she becomes too contaminated by her human side? Could a human ever survive the weight of death upon her shoulders? I feel they all have a death wish; they’re all in the process of some long jump from a cliff to a hell dimension below, they’ve just chosen to try to save some humans and kill some demons on the way. I wish I could find some hope for them, some…”
Wesley began to go through the papers on his desk. “I can’t accept that there can be no redemption for them, or that they should have to take full responsibility for crimes committed by their murderers. I suppose it’s a philosophical question about the true nature of a vampire, whether the vampiric infection and the loss of the soul reveals us all to be murderers at heart, or if the human is destroyed except for memories, and what Angel and Spike are now are demons with consciences. I suspect it’s more complicated than any simplistic analysis, and in some ways I don’t care. They are clearly not the people who committed these crimes and yet they are forced to carry the guilt for them. Why them and not every other murderous demon upon the earth – unless there is some special purpose intended for them? And if they have been selected by a higher power to be champions for humanity then surely there should be some reward? Not because it motivates them, not because it is the reason why they fight, but just because it…seems so unfair that they should have to pay and pay when no one else does, and never receive anything in return.”
Giles became aware that Angel and the others had returned and were standing in the doorway to the office.
Wesley, who had reached down to pick up a dropped scroll, remained completely oblivious. “That’s another reason why I feel I have no choice but to stay, Giles. I can’t help feeling that some extra research might reveal more about their destiny, their purpose. The Council spent centuries researching the myth of the Slayer and as far as I can tell from your words, Buffy and Willow between them managed to find a deeper layer to that mythology than all those years of learned research ever uncovered and what’s more managed to alter the power source of the Slayers and find a way to share it. A brilliant act, which, however reckless, has changed the odds from one Slayer fighting a million monsters to at least a few thousand Slayers being available to fight the good fight. I understand that sometimes one does have to throw the rulebook out of the window. And I refuse to believe that there are currently two vampires with souls, not to mention an Old One, all of whom have chosen to affiliate themselves with the cause of protecting mankind, and it not being of some greater significance. I don’t know if they’re meant to bring about the end of the world or avert it, but I can’t help feeling they must be here for something, and I’d rather like to know what that is. And, of course, there is the small matter of not wanting them to get themselves killed – something which, the more time I spend with them, seems to be far more of a miracle than the little matter of…” Wesley put the retrieved scroll triumphantly on the desk, beamed at Giles and then became aware that he had an audience.
“Oh.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Well, that was rather swifter than I anticipated. Did you find the nest?”
“Found it. Killed em.” Buffy shouldered her axe while looking between Angel and Spike.
“And you’re all…unharmed?” Wesley pressed, frowning at their silence.
Gunn recovered first. “Yeah. We’re good. The girly necklace things worked like a charm.”
“Possibly because they actually are a charm, Gunn.”
“And even though the demony thing gave it the good old college try, Spike didn’t get his head chopped off.”
“Apart from that everything went very well.” Angel was still gazing at Wesley.
“Jolly good.” Wesley looked pointedly at puddle of green liquid by their feet which Giles noticed was spreading outwards at an alarming rate. “You seem to be um…dripping – on the floor, which I believe Xander swept quite recently.”
“We brought you a head back.” Spike held it up.
“Oh, thank you!” Wesley’s eyes lit up and he hurried to take it from him, being careful to keep it away from the books as he carried it into the office. “I’d be fascinated to see how the cerebral cortex compares with that of a Geshinorax – it has been theorized that they share a common ancestor and the placement of the pineal gland could…” Seeing their expressions, he said, “Is something wrong?”
“You were saying nice things about them,” Buffy explained. “They’re not really used to it.”
“Oh.” Wesley placed the head on some newspaper. “Well, um… I was telling Giles that I think I can do more good here than in Cleveland. I’m sure those Slayers are doing a great deal of good too, but there is an infrastructure in place, or was until recently, that dealt with training Slayers. And I’m sure it was inadequate and Giles here was right to say that every Watcher is unprepared until he’s actually in the field and has the benefit of some training from his Slayer, but… There is no infrastructure to deal with being Watcher to a vampire with a soul or two vampires with a soul or an Old One in a human body. There is apparently only…me. And I feel I would be shirking my responsibilities if…”
Gunn looked at Angel. “Does that mean he likes us? He really, really likes us?”
“It means that I think that you’re even more in need of my help than a bunch of teenage girls.”
Spike was grinning. “And really when it comes right down to it, how useful are you going to be on the whole advising them about their periods thing anyway? With us, you don’t have to do that ever.”
Wesley blinked. “That hadn’t actually crossed my mind and now I’m hoping it never will again. Would you like to go and drip somewhere else because Giles and I are actually researching here?”
“You don’t want to hug?” Angel asked plaintively.
Giles was certain that this time at least Wesley noticed the twinkle in the vampire’s eye as he said it. “And you’re still here because…?”
They backed out of his office, grinning, Illyria gazing at Wesley intently, Gunn and Spike play punching each other in the ribs, Angel smiling like a complete dork. Wesley looked completely unprepared for Buffy abruptly wrapping her arms around him and squeezing him tightly. “Thank you,” Giles heard her breathe. “I needed to know I was leaving them in safe hands and now I know I will be.”
Giles saw that Wesley had tears shining in his eyes. The man automatically made to avert his eyes, ashamed of this show of weakness, but then seemed to notice that Buffy’s were bright too. Giles hoped Wesley would understand her now as he never had in Sunnydale, and realize that, under the quips and jokes about her terrible taste in boyfriends and star-crossed lovers with their gypsy curse problem, her connection to these vampires was a uniquely painful one. And Wesley seemed to be getting it, reaching out to gently squeeze her shoulder without acting as if he were being asked to pet a tiger. “I’ll do my best,” he promised her.
“That’s good enough for me.” She sniffed, wiped her eyes, kissed him on the cheek, said ‘Oh, cookies!’ Took a handful of biscuits and left.
Giles silently handed Wesley a handkerchief and said tactfully. “So, the life cycle of the Imharis Demon? Where were we with that…?”
***
They all looked at the third eye winking in the back of the girl’s head in silence. Illyria put her head on one side, clearly fascinated. Spike grimaced. Gunn and Angel exchanged a ‘here we go again’ look that Wesley noticed at once.
“We’ve encountered this before?”
“Skilosh,” Gunn told him.
“Can you help?” The anxious Mr and Mrs Patterson looked between Angel and Wesley.
“It’s curable. Wes found a de-oculating spell before.” Angel still looked somewhat glum.
“I did? Oh, I mean…I did.” Wesley nodded at the worried parents in a way that he hoped would inspire confidence.
Angel and Gunn exchanged another look. “The problem is what happens afterwards.”
Giles wandered into the office, intent on the papers he was reading, and holding onto his cup of tea, oblivious of the others, he glanced up to tell Wesley that he had found the papers on the cult of Narwath they had been researching, only to be confronted with a winking eye where it had no business to be.
“Good lord.” His cup rattled alarmingly in its saucer but he did manage to keep it more or less level.
“Skilosh spawn,” Angel explained. “They inject it into the cranium of human hosts. There tends to be a pretty short gestation period.”
“Ah.” Giles visibly thought of what it was going to do to that little girl’s skull to have a demon erupt out of it. “We’d better make sure it doesn’t come to term.”
“When did we encounter this before?” Wesley enquired. “If I have the date I can find the relevant notes I made at the time and we can speed up the process of curing it.”
“Early 2001,” Gunn told him. “Maybe January or February.”
Wesley smiled reassuringly at the parents. “I can assure you we will be able to solve this problem for you. You really have come to the right place.” Seeing Illyria still putting her head on one side and gazing unblinkingly at the third eye, he gently took her arm and towed her away. “Illyria, why don’t you…help me look for this information in my diaries?”
She turned to him at once. “Why do you wish me to assist you? Fred has no memory of these events.”
“Well, that makes two of us…” he murmured before leading her away from the nice normal people and their temporarily abnormal child.
Left alone with the others, Giles found Gunn and Angel both looking at him expectantly and then at the worried-looking clients. Clearly he was expected to step into the breach left by Wesley’s departure. Deciding that the second these people were out of the door, he would explain to Angel that one of the advantages of being a librarian in an American High School was that you didn’t have to meet the ordinary public at any time and stood a pretty good chance of never having to meet a High School student either, he sighed inwardly and plastered on his best reassuring smile.
“Would you like to sit down, Mr and Mrs…?”
“Patterson.” Gunn supplied the surname before slipping out of the door, Angel escaping with him at the same time.
Wearily, Giles picked up a pen and essayed another smile. “Perhaps you could tell me exactly how this happened…?”
Glancing across at the office from their safe haven on the lobby banquette, Xander said to Buffy, “Don’t you think that’s kind of cruel? Making Giles talk to people who aren’t –” he ticked it off on his fingers, “a – Slayers, b – Watchers, c – English or d – Librarians?”
“It’s good for him.” Buffy licked chocolate from her fingers. “It expands his horizons.”
“He looks sort of trapped and unhappy to me.” Willow ducked her head so there was no danger of Giles beckoning to her to come and help him out.
“What’s the problem?” Gunn enquired.
“You made Giles talk to the normal people,” Willow explained. “He didn’t really have to… not in Sunnydale. Well, except for Buffy’s mom.”
“And the less said about his interaction with my mom the better.”
Xander looked at her sideways. “You’re never going to forgive him for that, are you?”
“Not in this lifetime, no. Or, come to think of it, as I’m onto my second – uh no, never.”
Gunn frowned. “But I thought that’s what Watchers did. Wes always does the talking to the people thing. Cordy used to check their credit rating. Wes would ask them all the right questions and tell them Angel really cared about their problems, and as long as they didn’t actually meet Angel, it was fine.”
“Hey,” the vampire protested. “I’ve been working on my empathy.”
“Well, Giles hasn’t,” Xander explained. “In Sunnydale we tended to shield him from the general public.”
“Librarian.” Spike nodded as if that explained everything. As Gunn looked at him in confusion he rolled his eyes. “Where else can you put a notice on the wall of your workplace that no one’s allowed to talk to you?”
Seeing Giles drop his pen on the floor, Buffy frowned. “Maybe Willow should help him out.”
As everyone looked at Willow, her eyes widened in panic. “I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.”
“Every stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet, Will,” Xander told her brightly.
“Well, why can’t they be your friend you haven’t met yet or Buffy’s?”
“Because we’re eating chocolate.” Buffy held up her fingers. “Wouldn’t make a good impression.”
Willow quickly snatched a piece. “Me too.”
“Humans are pathetic,” Spike observed. “I’ll talk to them.”
“No!” Gunn grabbed one arm as Angel seized the other.
“What?” Spike demanded. “You don’t think I’m a people person?”
Xander looked up at him. “Only in the way that say Imelda Marcos is a friend to the poor and needy.”
“I’ll do it.” Angel squared his shoulders. “I had to talk to people all the time when I was running a big evil law firm, after all.”
“No, you didn’t,” Gunn reminded him. “You got Harmony to screen your calls and you made Wes or I talk to the clients first.”
Angel blinked as the truth of Gunn’s words permeated but he only stabbed an accusing finger at him. “Well, why aren’t you talking to them then?”
“Because…” Gunn scratched his head awkwardly. “I don’t want to. The back of their kid’s head kept blinking at me. And how are we supposed to tell them that even if we get rid of the third eye, the rest of the Skilosh are going to….”
“…Target them for retribution.” They looked up to see Wesley walking down the stairs, intent on the diary he was reading. He turned a page. “At least this time we’ll be prepared and can formulate an appropriate strategy.”
“Would that be one that doesn’t involve getting a hole punched in the back of our heads or getting our clients killed?”
Wesley looked up from the notes in mild surprise. “I was thinking along the lines of luring the entire tribe to a location of our choice and wiping them out. What did you have in mind?”
“I was really concentrating most of my energies on ways to stop you using the word ‘gestating’.”
Wesley looked at him for a long moment. “You and I were really best friends?”
“Had your own handshake and everything,” Angel confirmed.
“How very…adolescent of us.”
“Hey, our handshake was tight.” Gunn took some chocolate. “This is good. Is it imported?”
“Probably.” Buffy shrugged. “It’s from Giles’s secret stash of goodies he thinks are too good to share with us.”
Willow snatched her hand away from the bar. “You didn’t tell me it was stolen!”
“I prefer to think of it as…liberated.” Buffy took another piece. “It’s like – go, fly, stuffy English chocolate, find your way to new horizons.”
“It’s Cadbury’s.” Wesley looked at them in confusion. “That isn’t imported. That’s what you can buy at every newsagents.”
“Only if you’re in England,” Buffy reminded him. “Which if you ever stepped outside the hotel you’d realize that you’re not. For one thing it’s not raining all the time.”
“Actually the constant butchering of my mother tongue had pretty much tipped me off.”
Angel beamed paternally. “See, he’s all waspish again.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. “You must be so proud.”
“How is the tribe of Skilosh to be destroyed?” Illyria demanded.
Wesley gave her a look of approval. “I’m glad one of us can stick to the point.”
“She just likes killing things.” Gunn took another piece of chocolate.
“And you do not?” Illyria enquired, unblinkingly.
Gunn went to answer her, faltered over her having a point, and then turned back to Wes. “So, you had a plan?”
“Are they bound by demon law?”
“No. They have their own separate justice system which involves anyone who isn’t a Skilosh not having any rights. It’s a problem with quite a few demon tribes. Well, most of them, actually.”
“Then luring them here and hacking them to pieces is looking like our best option.” Wesley closed the diary. “I’d better go and explain the situation to Mr and Mrs Patterson. Unless…Angel…?”
“No, you do it. I’ll…stand behind you and – lend moral support.”
Wesley looked over his shoulder. “And would you say here was the best place to bring them?”
“Bring who?”
They turned to see Lorne resplendent in a dressing gown of magnificent peacock blue silk. As they all looked at it, he shrugged. “It was a gift from an admirer. What, I can’t have admirers? Now, who are we bringing here and will I need to dress for dinner?”
“The gang of crazed vengeful Skilosh who are going to want to kill us after Wesley destroys their spawn,” Gunn answered helpfully.
“So, that’s probably a ‘no’ on the formal wear,” Buffy added.
“Oh yes, that’s a cracking idea.” Lorne held up his glass. “And luckily I came prepared.”
“Or we could just tell Mr and Mrs Patterson that we can’t help them and that they will soon find themselves the proud parents of an adult Skilosh and a somewhat messy corpse.” Wesley looked between them expectantly.
Spike grimaced. “Or we could go with Wes’s first plan.”
“I’m cool with the demon bait idea,” Buffy shrugged.
“I relish the prospect of such a battle,” Illyria observed.
“Why am I not surprised?” Xander observed to Willow.
“Okay then.” Wesley nodded to Buffy, Spike, Gunn and Illyria. “I suggest you make a study of the strengths and weaknesses of the hotel and see if you can agree on the most defensible position. It’s important that all of the Skilosh attend for the retribution or we’ll be sending the Pattersons home to an ambush. Gunn, if you could make some notes on everything you know about the tribal customs of the Skilosh that would be invaluable. I’ll also ask Giles to help me research with the books we have available to us. In the meantime, you and I, Angel, had better tell the Pattersons of our plan and see if we can obtain their consent.”
As Wesley walked towards the office with Angel beside him, Buffy licked some more chocolate from her fingers and looked at Willow. “He’s all manly when he gives orders, isn’t he?”
“Gives me chills,” Spike observed.
“I still miss insane Wesley,” Xander admitted. “He was kind of cuddly.”
Gunn sighed. “Don’t. It’s not a joke to us.”
Xander looked at him. “I know. I was just… trying to lighten the mood. That’s kind of my allotted role, you see, in the imminent death circumstances – I make inappropriate jokes, everyone else snaps at me. It’s sort of a tradition.”
“I like your inappropriate jokes,” Willow assured him.
“And the crazy amnesiac is now in charge?” Lorne looked around at them all. “Just checking, in case I missed something.”
“He’s Strategy Boy,” Buffy explained. She waited a beat before conceding, “Okay, he’s until recently crazy and still very amnesiac strategy boy but still pretty much the…”
“Man with the plan,” Gunn finished.
“And would this plan involve us all risking our necks because it’s The Right Thing To Do?”
Spike shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“Well, then forgive me for failing to see the difference between Wesley being in charge and Angel being in charge. Either way it always seems to involve my property getting destroyed and my life being threatened.”
Buffy blinked. “There’s another way to live?”
Lorne took another gulp of his drink. “Apparently not.”
“So, why are you here, green genes?” Spike enquired. “Seeing as you’re a self-proclaimed coward and all?”
“Because our fearless heroes got my club blown up?”
Gunn gazed at him affectionately. “And…?”
“And I may have possibly caught a dose of that champion flu that was doing the rounds here a while back, but, trust me, I’m going to throw it off any time now.”
“Good luck with that,” Xander said sincerely.
Lorne looked at Xander’s eye patch and took another sip of his drink. “Did you ever look around a room and see more people gathered together who are incapable of learning from their past mistakes?”
Spike looked across at Buffy. “Some past mistakes are better than others.”
Willow looked at Xander. “Much better.”
“Yeah.” Gunn looked at Wesley who was still talking to the Pattersons and then noticed everyone looking at him. “Hey, not that kind of past mistake.”
Lorne took another gulp of vodka. “You stick to that story, strudel, and none of us will mention the era of the warm fuzzy goddess love make out sessions, then perhaps someone could fill me in on how we’re going to be inviting imminent death this time?”
“We are intent upon inviting the wrath of the Skilosh by destroying their spawn so that they may seek to wreak their vengeance upon us,” Illyria explained.
Lorne rolled his eyes. “Yes, because that went so well last time. No, your blueness, I got that piece of jolly news the first time. I meant nuts and bolts, how is this…happy aim to be achieved?”
Willow looked at Buffy. “Weren’t we supposed to be…?”
“Oh yeah.” Buffy finished licking the chocolate from her fingers. “Weak points. Defensible positions. Yadda yadda.”
“Make sure you lure them to somewhere dark and creepy,” Lorne called after them. “Oh yes, and let’s make certain we all split up and don’t switch any lights on while we’re at it.”
Spike shrugged. “Hey, if we’re going by the movies, it’s always the blonde who gets it first, so you should be okay. They always save the green guy to the end.”
“And you and Buffy may as well go and measure yourselves up for his-and-hers body bags. Although in your case, of course, a dust-buster will suffice…”
Gunn frowned. “Isn’t it only the virgin who ever survives?”
Lorne looked around at the assembled company. “We’re all so very dead.”
“Wes doesn’t remember having sex,” Xander pointed out. “Maybe that counts.”
“Are you kidding me? I don’t care what he remembers, he still has Lilah’s teethmarks on his ass.”
Gunn looked at Wesley with renewed interest. “Are you sure?”
“Maybe they’re Angel’s.” Spike also looked that way.
“And…thank you for that image. I now have to go and scrub out my mind with Clorox,” Gunn told him, shouldering an axe.
“Why are you taking that on a reconnaissance?” Xander enquired.
“Just in case,” Gunn said as if it was obvious. “And anyway, the best way to test a defensible position is carrying the same equipment you’ll be holding in the battle situation.”
Lorne held up his glass. “I am so with you on that, sugar. And, for strict accuracy, I really need a refill, because, trust me, on any occasion when we’re inviting vengeful Skilosh around to lay their babies in our brains, I’ll be needing a large drink.”
***
“Are you sure Willow is going to be okay?” Xander asked Buffy for the third time. He said it in a whisper on account of their position in a darkened corridor lying – well, standing, to be strictly accurate – in wait for the bad guys, but it was a penetrating whisper as whispers went. Buffy sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t share his concern, but she was just getting a little fed up with being asked the same question over and over with only the name of the person being asked about altering. Gunn had asked her that about Wesley and Angel had done the same; even Illyria, She Without Human Emotions, had suggested that her place was in the kitchen with those who were less capable than she of fighting off the Skilosh.
She took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go through it again, shall we? Willow is in the kitchen. So are the Pattersons. So is Wesley. So is Giles. Three hours ago exactly, Wesley and Giles destroyed the Skilosh spawn in Julie Patterson’s head. Any minute now the vengeful Skilosh tribe will arrive determined to kill or capture us so that they can either stomp on our corpses until their claws are sticky or inject disgusting Skilosh goop into our skulls and make us hatch out little Skilosh for them. They will try to get to the dining room to get to the kitchen. We will try to kill as many of them as possible before they reach the dining room. You and I taking this corridor, Gunn and Spike taking the other access corridor while in the dining room itself, protecting the kitchen and Willow are…”
“Angel and Illyria putting aside their differences to come together to fight evil in a box office record weekend buddy cop kind of way…”
Xander and Buffy both looked around to find Lorne standing next to them. “Why are you here?” Xander enquired.
“It seemed the safest place.”
Buffy preened. “You think I’m a better fighter than Angel or Spike.”
“Of course I do, sugar. And unlike them you can actually strategize.”
Buffy nodded at Xander. “He has an eye patch because of my great strategizing skills.”
“When you first arrived in Sunnydale and gathered your little clan of goodies around you, how many of you were there?”
“Well, me, Giles, Willow, and Xander…” She grimaced. “Okay, I get you.”
“Good, because much as I love Angel – and for those not keeping up on current events that’s considerably less than I used to before he messed around with my memory and screwed up my empathic abilities to the point where I can’t trust myself to take a reading from a well-trained budgerigar – he has shed more than a few associates along the way.”
“Do you blame him?” It hadn’t occurred to Buffy that anyone might. No one could be harder on himself than Angel so it felt like kicking a man when he was down to pile yet more guilt onto him.
Lorne sighed. “I try not to, sweetheart, I really do. But the fact remains that even if you go through every room in this hotel you’re not going to find Cordelia or Fred.”
“I lost Anya and Spike. Not to mention a lot of girls whose names I didn’t learn on purpose because I knew they were going to get killed.”
“Wesley doesn’t know the names of the people who died on Pylea following his orders but the humans on that world are still alive in part because of his plan. And I have to say, snowcone, I haven’t noticed a whole lot of evil Ubervamps chowing down on the residents recently. There are always going to be losses.”
“You have no idea how many times I have screwed up over the years,” Buffy told him passionately. “And isn’t the main difference between the people that I got killed and the people that Angel got killed that you didn’t know the people I got killed?”
Lorne sighed. “Cordy and Fred… It wasn’t supposed to end like that for them.”
“Xander lost Anya.” Buffy touched his arm as she said his name. “I lost Spike. She may have been a vengeance demon and he may have been a vampire and they may both have deserved to die for what they’d done over the years, but they were our friends and we cared about them and we lost them. That’s what happens when you go out there and try to do something about all the darkness in the world. You make mistakes.”
“Angel didn’t make a mistake, he made a decision – to mess with our memories with his eyes open. And he took the deal at Wolfram & Hart knowing that we were no longer exactly in our right minds.”
“You loved Fred.” Buffy thought of how she would feel if it had been Willow.
“Yes.” Lorne’s red eyes showed how much the loss of her had wounded him. “I really did. It hurts every time I think about her and it hurts every time I look at Illyria, but, you know what? I wouldn’t want to forget her and there is no way in any hell dimension that Wesley would either. If he was in his right memory. And I don’t think Fred would want to be forgotten. And you can quote all the Christina Rossetti at me that you like, sugar plum, I’m still not buying it. She was the woman of his dreams and now she’s just another face in a photograph.”
“It’s Wesley’s choice…”
“Angel told him he didn’t want those memories back. And if Wesley has a fault – and let’s face it, Wesley has dozens of faults – it’s his habit of assuming that because a guy has been walking this world for two and a half centuries that he’s somehow learned something during that time. I don’t blame him because I was guilty of that myself. Angel has glamour, and I don’t mean the magical pixie dust kind. I mean the kind that makes movie stars look a foot taller than everyone else in the room.”
“But Wesley doesn’t feel like that about Angel any more.” Xander grimaced. “That came out wrong. I mean – supposing he had the crush when he first came to LA – he’s over it now. He doesn’t even remember having it. Not that I’m saying he had it in the first place because that just makes me…deeply uncomfortable.”
“No.” Lorne looked at him levelly. “He’s just in the same mindset he was when he first met Angel and thought he had all the answers.”
“He doesn’t seem…crushy to me,” Buffy insisted.
“Everyone else in this hotel thinks he needs to remember what happened except for Angel. Who is he listening to?”
Buffy and Xander exchanged a look. “You may have a point,” Xander admitted. “I’m just not comfortable about discussing Wesley’s possible crushes.”
“You need to tell Giles to get in there and start being the father figure instead.”
“Giles isn’t old enough to be Wesley’s father!” Buffy could hardly have been more appalled.
“Who cares? He’s human, he’s English, he’s a Watcher, and he’s never locked Wesley in a cupboard…” Lorne broke off hastily. “He’s an acceptable substitute authority figure, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Instead of trying to get Giles to be the guy Wesley hero worships instead of Angel, wouldn’t it be a good idea to get Wesley to start thinking for himself?” Xander suggested.
“Actually, it always makes me nervous when Wesley starts thinking for himself. I just don’t want him listening to Angel either. I’m not saying there needs to be hero worship, I’m just saying – Giles seems like a nice sane normal sort of person whose advice Wesley could be taking. And I was thinking perhaps you could persuade Giles to start handing out some of that advice. And perhaps some of that advice could be…”
“Giles isn’t going to try to influence Wesley,” Buffy assured him. “He’s going to let him make up his own mind.”
“Are we sure that’s a good idea?”
Xander looked at Lorne for a moment. “Aren’t you the guy who’s supposed to help people find their own path?”
“Yeah, well I gave that up for Lent. On account of all the people I know taking a sky dive off their own path onto a much much worse path even after I’d told them what their own path was meant to be.”
“What’s Wesley’s path?” Buffy asked.
Lorne shook his head. “Sorry, sugar, not even the Slayer gets to hear anyone’s path but her own. I’m just saying – sticking his head in the sand and pretending everything is fine when it isn’t, that’s not Wesley’s way. He used to care about truth, and his life right now – it’s a lie. Another rose-tinted necro-tempered lie. Just like the one that just drove him right to the brink of his full strength crazy. I’ve lost two people that I cared about. I don’t have that many left. I’d like to try to keep them in one piece and in their right mind. And when I say ‘right mind’ I mean the full War and Peace, Ring of the Nibelungen, whole damned History of Middle Earth. Wesley deserves more than the Cliff Notes to his own life. And as no one else seems to be saying it out loud I’d like Giles to.”
Buffy straightened up, axe in hand. “It’s not that I don’t care about Wesley’s mental health situation, Lorne, but I really think we need to postpone this conversation.”
“Why?” Lorne demanded. “So we can let another day go by pretending everything is okay when it isn’t?”
“No.” She caught him by the arm and pulled him behind her. “So we can deal with the two dozen angry Skilosh currently running towards us with big nasty weapons.”
Illyria looked at Angel impatiently. “We should assist them.”
“We’re the second line of defence. That means we wait until the first line breaks.” Angel found that talking to Illyria habitually gave him a pain in the jaw. It had taken him until now to realize it was because she made him grit his teeth so hard. He could hear as well as she could the sounds of battle outside the two access doors to the dining room, and, given that Gunn and Buffy were two of the people fighting, he wasn’t exactly enjoying standing here and doing nothing either, but Wesley and Giles had insisted this was the best strategy and he trusted their judgement.
He heard Spike shout: ‘Come on then, you three-eyed wankers!’ just before green goop splattered across the glass panel in the left swing door. There was the thud of something solid as the doors were knocked open by a flying object that turned out to be Gunn, who picked himself up, looked across at Angel, said, “They’ve learned to use weapons,” and then threw himself back into the fray.
Angel looked from one door to the next, wondering when the break would come that meant retreat was the only safe option for the pairs outside.
“I do not care for a battle in which I can do no violence.”
Angel looked at Illyria and thought for the hundredth time how much chopping her head straight off her shoulders seemed like such a good idea. It was unfortunate that no one else seemed to agree with him. They all seemed to think that, as she was capable of mixing up being an arrogant god-king with having an all-too-human crush on Wesley, that she was salvageable. It didn’t help that Xander had turned up as the ex-honey of a vengeance demon who had apparently given her life in the end to save a human after a few years of his influence. He’d thought about kicking Xander under the table while he was telling Wesley the story of Anya but had realized in time that it would only serve to convince his already somewhat dubious disciples of his lack of human empathy.
“There will be plenty of violence to do, trust me,” he told her impatiently.
“I do not trust you.” She gazed at him from her unblinking blue eyes – so unlike Fred’s warm brown ones. “You are a liar and a thief.”
“I’m neither of those things,” he retorted angrily, breaking off to run to catch Xander as he was thrown through the swing doors by a savage backhand from a vengeful Skilolsh. Angel held him up under the arms. “Want to bring the fight in here?” he asked eagerly.
Xander wiped the blood from his mouth. “Buffy thinks we can stall them a little longer. Take out a few more first.”
Angel’s face fell. “Okay.”
“Can you give me a push?” Xander enquired.
Angel obliged, giving him a solid shove that gave Xander the impetuous to raise his axe, sound a battle cry and make a fair approximation of a pissed off Gunn as he charged back through the doors. Angel turned back to Illyria. “I’m not a liar or a thief.”
“You lied to Wesley about his past and you stole his memories. That makes you both of those things.”
“I was trying to protect my son!”
“What do your motives matter if your actions lack all honour?”
“What do you know of honour?”
“Wesley was teaching me of it. He was reading to me of the codes of chivalry of ancient warriors of this world.” She grabbed Angel by the shirt and yanked him forward. “You would keep him from me.”
“Yes, I would keep him from you,” he snapped back. “You were driving him insane. He’d look at you and see the face of the woman he loved – the woman you killed. You were a walking reminder of everything he’d lost.”
“She loved him.” Illyria gazed at him intently. “She felt stirrings of love for him many times before she admitted to them. But she feared the grief that it would bring; she feared the instability in him. She feared to hurt his friendships with others. She feared to lose his friendship herself. She delayed too long. She knew that. She died full of regret for the time she would never spend with him. She was afraid to die.”
“Don’t tell him that!” Angel hissed at her. “Don’t ever tell him that!”
“I have not.” He saw something flicker in her gaze that was uncomfortably close to emotion. She dropped her gaze. “I take no pleasure in wounding him. You do not trust me. You think that if you brought him back that I would injure him in his mind.”
“You’ve already injured him. You ripped out his heart.”
“You speak in riddles. His heart still beats.”
“If it wasn’t for you, he could…” Angel broke off.
“It is because of me that you fear his restoration? That is because you do not know him.”
“I know him better than anyone… I know him better than you.”
“Wesley is stronger than you think him. You do not pay him the respect of one warrior to another.”
“No one respects Wes more than I do.”
“Then why do you seek to always protect him from the truth? Why do you think yourself strong enough to carry the burden of memory yet consider him too weak?”
“I don’t think him weak.” Angel snatched a breath. “I just think he’s suffered enough.”
“He would not want to forget her. Fred, the owner of this body before it became mine.”
Angel yanked her hand off his shirt. “You just think that if he remembers her he’ll be drawn to you, the way he was before, that sick compulsion to try to help you and guide you because of the way you look…”
“You are wrong.” She put her head on one side, gazing unblinkingly into his eyes. “He has offered me his help and guidance already. He has spent many hours with me unbeknown to you, teaching me the ways of this world even without remembering the one whose body I now inhabit. You fear to lose him.”
“I fear to break him!” Angel snapped at her. “You gave him back to me in pieces, Illyria. He went into that hell dimension clinging to sanity by a fingernail, and then he let go and I caught him. I caught him. Not you. Do you think I like him not remembering me? Everything we’ve been through? I’ve already been through this! Events that don’t have meaning any more because the only other person in the world who knows about them doesn’t remember. I want him back more than I want… I just don’t want him back more than I want to see him destroyed again. He’s okay like this. He doesn’t have nightmares. He can do good. That’s all he ever wanted was to help people, do some good, make a difference, use all that knowledge and training to protect people from some of the darkness out there. All you want is for him to love you the way he loved Fred. Well, he never will. Giving him back his memory isn’t going to make him love you. It’s just going to make him nuts.”
“How could one as lowly as you presume to know my wishes or anticipate my wants? You think you are the only one who cares for Wesley’s happiness.”
“Since when did you ever give a damn about anyone except yourself?”
“Since when did you, vampire?”
The simultaneous slam of bodies impacting swing doors made them both wheel around. Illyria caught Gunn as Angel grabbed Lorne. Xander went skidding across the floor as Buffy backed up, looking over her shoulder to say. “We’re defending this room now.”
Illyria set Gunn back on his feet and then shoved him to the side as the Skilosh charged, vicious serrated weapons raised. She smiled coldly. “At last, I may do some violence.”
Gunn wiped some green blood from his eye and held up his own axe, not backing down as more Skilosh poured through the doors. Angel shoved Lorne into the centre of the circle they formed, the rest of them standing back to back, Buffy to his right, Illyria to his left, Gunn to her left, Spike between Gunn and Xander, and Xander between Buffy and Spike.
The leader of the Skilosh, gazed at the kitchen. “The destroyers of our spawn lie through that door.”
“A prize for the big ugly demon on the right,” said Buffy brightly. “But, guess what, you still don’t get to touch any of them – ever.”
“We will kill all of you half-breeds and then use the destroyers of our spawn to replace those of us who have fallen today.”
“I am no vampire.” Ilyria gazed at the Skilosh contemptuously. “And you shall pay heavily for your insolence.”
“Yes, because species identification is really what’s important right now,” Angel muttered.
“Will you two get over it?” Gunn demanded.
“Yeah, can the rest of us just enjoy killing a few demons without having it spoiled by you two bitching at each other all the way through it?” Spike added.
And then as the Skilosh all rushed them simultaneously, there was no time for anything except trying not to die.
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Date: 2006-03-21 12:19 am (UTC)Shakatany
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Date: 2006-03-21 12:25 am (UTC)