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[elgrey]

Harrogate, Part Five

 

3: Harrogate

 

Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.

Xenophon

 

The Haven Tea Shop was situated on a side street ten minutes walk from a municipal car park. Miranda had drawn him a map on the back on an envelope and Giles had followed it through the complications of traffic lights and zebra crossings that had led to an oblong of dusty concrete and those ubiquitous oblong white squares. He and Miranda had joked in the past that aliens would assume that car parks were places of worship for metallic creatures who gathered there for sacred occasions while their captive bipeds were released for a short walk, paying tribute on their way out of the car church in the upright metal equivalent of a poor box. Being that childish felt like something that had happened a long time ago and would almost certainly never happen again.

 

Giles ducked under the purple plumes of a wild buddleia, bright with small tortoiseshells and cabbage whites, and wondered if Alicia had ever parked in this space. It made sense that she might have done, especially at night. The white rectangle on the grey tarmac stood under shade and yet close to an old fashioned street light, making it safer than most parking places. He wondered idly if that black iron light was a retro Victorian refit for the tourists, or something that had somehow survived two world wars.

 

“No, Wes, we’re going to leave the books for now. Pick them up in a little while.”

 

Giles turned to find Gunn trying to get Wesley to put back the books he was carrying. They had explained the situation to Wesley last night over dinner. Giles had decided that if no spells could be used the only way forward was to treat Wesley as if he were normal. So, he had shown him a photograph of Alicia, introduced him once again to Miranda and made him shake hands like a civilized human being – which, he had to admit, Wesley had done quite politely – and then explained that they were going to Harrogate to investigate Alicia’s murder and that of the two other women from Knaresborough. He had mentioned Exodus 22 and the Malleus Maleficarum and Wesley had looked at him blankly for what had felt like a very long time before saying:

 

“But ‘Chasaph’ doesn’t mean ‘witch’. It means ‘poisoner’. It was only translated as ‘witch’ to keep James the First happy because he was paranoid about witches. Reginald Scott rebutted it in The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Wesley was already getting to his feet to look for the book.

 

“We know that, Wesley.” Giles caught him by the arm and pulled him back down into his chair again, already feeling this was probably something he should not have attempted to discuss with Wesley in front of Miranda. “But that didn’t prevent any number of witches from being burned in the past, and as it was quoted it seems to have been a factor in Alicia’s death. Of course, it could be sleight of hand, an old boyfriend trying to conceal his motive, but the murder of the other two women seems to tell against that theory.”

 

“Were they all drained of blood?”

 

Giles gritted his teeth. “Let’s talk about the details later, Wesley.” When the mother of the murdered girl isn’t sitting four feet away from you, you insensitive berk.

 

“Can you pass me the potatoes, Wesley?” Willow asked in a clear attempt to distract him.

 

He looked at her for a moment and then at the potatoes and then handed them to her in something that Giles supposed was at least an approach to normality.

 

Wesley dug his fork into his plate of vegetable lasagne as if he was going to go through the motions of eating to keep everyone else happy but couldn’t really see the point of it. “It’s just an awful lot of blood.”

 

“We’ll talk about this later,” Giles snapped at him. “All you need to keep in mind is that we’re going to Harrogate tomorrow and I’d appreciate it if you could pack some overnight things and be ready first thing in the morning.”

 

“I’ll help him with that,” Gunn said quickly. “We’ll get packed and ready tonight. Don’t worry.”

 

The rest of the meal had passed in a solemn silence until Miranda had given up her attempt to eat with them and run from the room, great gulps of grief reverberating through her.

 

Wesley had watched her go and said: “Love can be a terrible thing.”

 

“No, the untimely death of an innocent girl is a terrible thing, Wesley,” Giles heard himself saying through a throat raw with anger. He nodded to Willow and Gunn as he rose to his feet. “Excuse me.” He had spent the rest of the evening with Miranda, dreading coming to this place and having to see Alicia’s possessions, her little hopes and fragile dreams, all rendered irrelevant by the malice or mania of someone he had promised her mother he would find.

 

The only consolation on the journey up had been that Gunn was having a worst time than he was. They were just out of the inevitable traffic crawl past Sheffield when Wesley had asked the man out of the blue:

 

“Do you think Fred loved me?”

 

Gunn looked at him in shock. “Of course she did, man.”

 

“But how can you tell? Perhaps she was wrong? Perhaps she just thought she did. She didn’t have all of her memories at the time. Perhaps it was a mistake.”

 

“The only mistake between you and Fred was the two of you taking so long to get around to it and I know I had a part to play in that and I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about what happened to Fred.”

 

Wesley looked genuinely perplexed. “I just don’t know why she would.”

 

On another day Giles would have felt sorry for Gunn at that point but he was actually feeling horrible enough to enjoy someone else having an even worse ten minutes than he was.

 

“Wes, trust me, she loved you. You and Fred would have been great together.”

 

Wesley gazed at Gunn curiously for a moment. “Do you love me?”

 

Gunn darted a look of horrified embarrassment at Giles who was barely able not to smirk at him in the rearview mirror. “Well, not like Fred but…yeah, man, I love you. Just don’t want to be getting sweaty and naked with you.”

 

“Why?” Wesley kept gazing at him unblinkingly.

 

“Why don’t I want to be getting sweaty and naked with you…?”

 

“Why do you love me?”

 

Gunn swallowed. “I just do.”

 

“But there has to be a reason.”

 

“No, there doesn’t. It’s one of those things. Sometimes you just love people and that’s the way it is and you can’t change it. And sometimes you go on loving them even when you don’t even like them any more. But then one day you have to admit you still love them and you never stopped loving them and they never stopped loving you either. And that’s what family is.”

 

Wesley looked down at the books he held and then back at Gunn. “Do you think Fred loved me because she thought I was safe?”

 

Gunn seemed to be mentally counting to ten. “Wes, you chased Fred with an axe. You knocked Lorne unconscious. You kidnapped Connor. You slept with Lilah. You fed Angel your own blood when you knew he was starving and wanted to kill you. You let out Angelus and you broke a psychotic Slayer out of jail. Not to mention shooting one guy in the kneecap, another in the heart, and stabbing me. If you were any less safe you’d come with a government health warning, so, no, Fred didn’t love you because you were ‘safe’, she loved you because you’re you. Which – before we have to get into it – is why I love you too. It’s just one of those great unexplained mysteries, like the pyramids, okay?”

 

“Do you think Angel loved me?”

 

Gunn rolled his eyes. “Of course he loved you.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because you loved him and you needed him to love you, and the only thing Angel likes as much as being loved is being needed. That’s why he never loved me, because I didn’t need him to. Now can we please talk about something that doesn’t have an off the scale embarrassment factor?”

 

They had driven the rest of the way in silence.

 

Giles suspected that half of the time when Wesley started a conversation it was – from his perspective – the other half of a dialogue he had been having with someone else, but as they were not privy to those conversations it was becoming very difficult to predict what he would do or say next. Looking over his shoulder now he noticed that Gunn had hold of Wesley’s arm, presumably in case those voices in Wesley’s head told him that a fun thing to do would be to play in traffic. Wesley was carrying a book so he guessed Gunn had given in or bartered him down to one leather-bound volume. He wondered if they were going to have to steer him past the sweets at the supermarket checkout counters from now on to avoid temper tantrums.

 

An image of Alicia presented itself to him in slightly grainy colour, as if it should be accompanied by the whirl of an old cine-camera; a three year old, triumphant in her pushchair, wearing some ridiculous little duffle coat and red Wellington boots, the gloves she refused to wear dangling from pieces of elastic through her sleeves, chocolate smeared on her face from the bar for which she had successfully bartered in the local Fine Fare. He remembered flying saucers of rice paper, mint humbugs in their see-through wrappers; a quarter of sherbet lemons out of the sweet jars behind the counter, handed to her surreptitiously in a twist of white paper because he didn’t like carob either.

 

“Giles? Are you okay?”

 

Willow was looking at him in concern.

 

“Of course.” He pretended to consult the map Miranda had given him. “Just getting my bearings. Down here, I think.”

 

Willow matched her strides to his while behind them Gunn was coaxing Wesley away from a second-hand bookshop whose window display had caught his attention.

 

“It’s okay not to be okay,” she offered tentatively. “Under the circumstances it’s even…normal.”

 

“I think Wesley has commandeered the crazy allowance for everyone for the moment.” He hadn’t meant to sound so terse.

 

But Willow had evidently known him for too long to be put off by him doing what Buffy called his Oscar the Grouch routine. She slipped her arm through his and he found himself unexpectedly touched by the contact, and more by her knowledge that to be touched by someone with kindness was something he needed right now.

 

“Breaking stuff is also acceptable,” Willow said conversationally. “And cursing out other drivers.”

 

“I thought I did some of that on the way up?”

 

“I thought you were very restrained,” she confided. They walked along the cracked pavement past a specialist delicatessen that would not have looked out of place in London. “You know Buffy would come right away if…”

 

“No.” He patted her hand where it rested on his arm. “If anyone deserves a break, it’s her.”

 

“I’m not sure why.” Willow pouted in a way that Giles had to admit if only privately he found perfectly adorable. “She’s the only one of us having regular sex right now.”

 

“And we did talk about hell having frozen over before I want to know about any of your sex lives, didn’t we? It’s bad enough having to listen to Wesley getting Gunn to declare his undying love for him.”

 

She sniggered next to him. “Poor Gunn.”

 

“Just reassure me that Dawn isn’t dating?”

 

Willow grimaced and then widened her eyes in a show of transparent truth-telling. “Absolutely. She’s actually thinking about becoming a nun.”

 

“Oh dear lord, don’t let her do that. I always associate convents with Angelus.”

 

“Becoming – staying celibate, I mean. Forever.”

 

He nodded. “Excellent. Now if you and Buffy could just follow her example, that would suit me admirably.”

 

“Well, I only date girls now, and that’s not as bad, is it? I thought it was only boys it was wrong to date? Because of the penises.”

 

“It’s not as bad,” Giles conceded. “But it still comes a very poor second to a life of celibacy and temporal reflection.”

 

Willow frowned. “Thinking about time?”

 

“No, Willow – temporal as in secular. Have you heard from Xander, by the way?”

 

“Yes, he’s fine. He sounds a lot more like…Xander.”

 

“He is being careful, isn’t he? There are some very powerful umthakathi near his region. I hope you reminded him not to touch any death masks.”

 

“He’s definitely avoidy with the death masks. Also the witchcraft and voodoo and invocations to raise demons.”

 

“I’m very relieved to hear it. Tell him to take care of himself, won’t you?”

 

Willow bit her lip. “I will.”

 

Not looking at her, Giles added conversationally: “You’re going to have to expect a heightened level of paranoia about you all for a while. You know that, yes?”

 

“I already sent out the Defcon Five warning to Buffy and Dawn.”

 

“Good. Because if anything were to happen to any of the rest of you right now…” He didn’t finish the sentence, just waving a hand. “Just…don’t do anything unusually reckless or careless or in any way dangerous.”

 

“I promise.”

 

“And you can’t have any pets.”

 

She looked at him in confusion. “Because they could get run over and that would be…sad?”

 

“No, because it’s on the lease agreement. I’m just trying to head off any arguments before they begin. Gunn strikes me as the sort who’ll want to get a dog ten minutes over the threshold.”

 

The words ‘Haven Tea Shop’ were more of a shock than they should have been. They were inevitably going to have to reach this place at some point, after all. He had just walked a route that Alicia must have walked a thousand times, aware of her with every step, despite being here to investigate her murder, still expecting to see her across the road, hair untidy and unbound, struggling with carrier bags, a point of brightness in some multi-coloured sweater. But breaking down wasn’t an option, or doing as Wesley had done and side-stepping reality altogether. Miranda needed answers and closure, and so did he, and if the people who had murdered Alicia were part of some kind of witch-hating cult then there would be other young women in this city who needed protection.

 

He took a deep breath and forced a smile that he suspected was fooling no one. “Well, here we are then.” And then he was walking through the door Alicia must have used so many times before and stepping into the Tea Shop in which she had spent the last day of her life.

 

***

 

Willow liked the tearoom as soon as they stepped into it, all those dark wooden tables arranged with pretty white cotton cloths and posies of flowers in little vases, salt and pepper cellars waiting in their little silver ‘cruets’, blue and white striped sugar bowls with heaps of golden brown granules or proper white cubes. She liked the home-made cakes under the glass, and the cheese scones, and the smell of baking they left behind, and the chalkboard with the soup of the day – broccoli and stilton – written up on it in white capitals. She liked how it was so English and quaint and how Giles and Wesley didn’t even notice it was either of those things; as if they had never even been to California; as if this was the real world, of course, and always had been, and now they were back in it again.

 

She wanted to hug Gunn for looking so wonderfully out of place, ducking heavy beams as if they were out to get him, his fingers reaching for the handle of an axe he didn’t own any more; gazing around suspiciously at the local watercolours with their prices stuck onto their pale wood frames as if anything that looked this tame had to be demonic somehow. Wesley had started examining the chalk written menu while a woman in a delightfully frilly apron came out from the back to see if Giles was the person she hoped he was. She had clearly been crying. Willow liked her for that right away.

 

Giles’s quiet formal murmur: “Mrs Philips? I believe Miranda called to tell you we were on the way…? I’m Rupert Giles, this is Willow Rosenberg, Charles Gunn, and Wesley what are you doing…?”

 

Wesley looked at Giles as if he was perhaps on some kind of medication, and said very clearly so there could be no possible confusion: “Asking for a cup of tea. I’m thirsty.”

 

Giles reached for his wallet and wordlessly handed Gunn a five pound note. “Will you…?”

 

Gunn didn’t look very sure of the note, examining the pictures on it as if it were Monopoly money. Willow remembered that she had to show Gunn a British Monopoly board soon so they could exclaim together over the way all the names were different. Giles had never been able to grasp how interesting that was. Gunn handed the note over to the woman behind the counter, who had also been crying.

 

“No, no, you don’t need to pay. Just give them what they want, Jean.” The woman who had greeted Giles, waved a hand to the other woman behind the counter. “You’re here to help Alicia. You don’t pay for anything here.”

 

Willow noticed the way the woman had said ‘help’, even though the girl was beyond help. ‘Avenge’ was too gothic. ‘Investigate what happened to’ too clinical. ‘Help’ didn’t even need to acknowledge that the girl was gone; as if she were only trapped in limbo somewhere, and still in need of their assistance. Willow thought about the unendurable weight of grief, and how clever the mind was in finding ways to sidestep the impossible truth that someone who had been completely here was now entirely gone. The subconscious did magic tricks for the first few weeks to distract the mind and eye, and then, unendurable loss or not, the living found themselves still living and the dead still dead.

 

As he was handed back the five pound note, Wesley juggled the book he held to take it, saying ‘Thank you’ before looking at it in confusion. “I’m sure they used to be bigger than this.”

 

Gunn took it from him and then turned him back to the woman behind the counter. “Tell the lady what you want, Wes.” As Wesley still looked as if they were all behaving very oddly, Gunn sighed and leaned past him, unexpectedly pulling out a dazzling smile, under the influence of which the middle-aged woman behind the counter visibly gave at the knees. “Could you get him a cup of English Breakfast tea? No sugar. Not too strong. And he likes it made in the pot if that’s not too much trouble?”

 

After that smile of Gunn’s, Willow suspected flying out to India to collect the leaves by hand wouldn’t have seemed like too much trouble. The woman fluttered and then rallied enough to say: “I’ll bring you all up a pot on a tray. Would you like some macaroons with that? They’re fresh out of the oven.”

 

Another smile from Gunn that would have lit up a coal cellar like a lighthouse beam. “That would be wonderful.” He held out a hand. “Charles Gunn, by the way.”

 

“Jean Roper.” She took Gunn’s hand tentatively and he gave her a firm-but-not-crushing handshake while gazing straight into her eyes in the manner of the heroes of the romantic novels Willow had read in the past. She decided that Gunn could be a great asset if they had to interview straight women or gay men. That smile definitely had some mileage in it.

 

When she turned her attention back to Giles she found he was deep in conversation with Judith Philips, Alicia’s landlady, who was eager to be as much use as she could.

 

“She was never any trouble. Such a warm, friendly girl. Not stand-offish at all – she helped out here so many times when I was short-staffed, watched my daughter’s youngest when she couldn’t get a babysitter. None of us can believe it, can we, Jean?”

 

Jean wiped her eyes in an immediate outpouring of what seemed to be genuine grief. “No one can. It just seems so senseless. Who would do something like that to a girl?”

 

“That’s what we’re here to find out, Mrs Philips,” Giles said quietly. Willow thought that if a policeman had said that it might just sound like something they had to say, but when Giles said those words they felt like a pact he’d just made, like he’d given her a promise that was written on vellum and sealed in blood and wax. There was a look in his green eyes she hadn’t seen in a long time, and for all the shadows beneath them and the grinding exhaustion of his sorrow, he looked like the man who had stood up to her when she was possessed by magic, who wouldn’t back down before a hurricane or an all-powerful witch driven insane by grief.

 

Judith nodded her head. “I’ll be very grateful to you if you can, Mr. Giles.”

 

“Please, my friends call me ‘Giles’. I believe you said that my colleagues and I could have the use of Alicia’s flat while we conduct our investigation…?”

 

“Of course. It’s just up the stairs. It’s got a sofabed in the sitting room and there are two bedrooms. Not that she used the second one for sleeping. She had it as an office for when she was writing her essays but there’s a camp bed in there. Did you know she was taking a teacher training course?”

 

“Her mother told me, yes.”

 

“She had so much patience. I always told her she was a natural born teacher. She could make my grand-children behave like no one else I know.” She wiped her eyes again. “It just seems like such a waste, doesn’t it?”

 

Giles’ face was grim. “It really does.”

 

Judith lowered her voice, leaning towards Giles as she nodded to Gunn and Wesley. “Are they all right sharing?”

 

Giles opened his mouth to say one thing and then waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll sort something out, please don’t worry about it.”

 

“I’ll bring you up that tea in a moment,” Jean told Gunn. “Would you like some sandwiches? Egg and cress? Or we’ve got some nice local ham. Home-baked bread, of course.”

 

“We really wouldn’t want to put you to any more trouble,” Giles said.

 

She shook her head. “Oh, it’s no trouble.”

 

Willow watched Gunn collect Wesley from where he seemed likely to wander off to look at the watercolours, gripping his sleeve firmly and saying: “This way, Wes.”

 

As she followed Giles up the stairs to Alicia’s apartment Willow looked over her shoulder at Gunn to say innocently: “And if we start to run low on funds we can always hire you out as a gigolo.”

 

Wesley snorted and Gunn gave him a withering look. “That you choose to understand?” Wesley dropped his gaze back to the book he was still carrying but Willow could see that he was still sniggering.

 

Gunn looked dignified. “My mom always told me that manners cost nothing.”

 

“Being all tall and gorgeous and flirting like a film star probably doesn’t hurt either,” she pointed out. “Do you even know what a macaroon is?”

 

Gunn conceded the point with a shrug while Wesley chose that moment to look straight at Willow as if he were the sanest person on the planet and say: “They’re flat almond-flavoured cakes cooked on edible rice paper. They’re very nice.”

 

Gunn gave him a look of surprise. “You rejoining us on Planet Earth, Wes?”

 

“Angel seems to think this is real,” he explained.

 

Gunn sighed in defeat and ran a hand over the smooth skin of his skull, glancing up at Willow as the weariness washed over his face. “Whatever.”

 

She gave him an encouraging smile, trying to cheer him up. “At least he remembers what macaroons are.”

 

 

Willow could feel the presence of the dead girl as she stepped through the door. Not a ghost haunting the room, just the quiet echoes that the living left behind, the feel of a room vacated by someone who had been intending to return. She suspected Wesley could too. He seemed to be on the cusp of this world and the one beyond at the moment. If Giles and Gunn had not been quite so hyper-protective she would have asked him to describe exactly what he was seeing, to get a better feel for exactly what his hallucinations were; an ability to see through the veil that separated this world and the next, or just a Freudian projection of the things he most needed to see and hear.

 

Alicia had left what Willow presumed was her coursework open on the table, a stack of books piled up next to it. An empty coffee mug of the same blue and white striped pottery as the sugar bowls downstairs stood next to a pen. There was an inside-out sweater tossed onto the sofa-bed; Willow had done that herself in the last minute rush to get out on time, weighing up whether a jacket would be enough or if a sweater was needed. The room was still redolent of a life interrupted and waiting to resume; a faint scent of sagebrush in the air from the dabs of oil Alicia must have applied before she headed out for the last time.

 

Giles turned and walked into the kitchen and Willow caught Gunn’s arm when he would have followed him. “I think he needs to be alone.”

 

Gunn nodded his understanding and turned back to Wesley who was looking at the books on the home-made shelving of planks arranged on bricks. “She was studying witchcraft.” Wesley took a book from the shelf and opened it. Gunn crouched down next to him to look through the books as well and Willow risked a glance towards the kitchen. Giles still looked as if he needed to be alone, so she took the bathroom. It was painted white and smelt of oranges and lavender from bath salts and chunky brown bars of hand-made soap. Willow picked up an orange bottle of bath salts and inhaled the spicy scent of them, and then stroked her fingers across soap that had a delicate stalk of lavender impressed into its surface. She put it down gently so that it was in exactly the same place. Light poured in through the small square window and onto the mirror over the sink and she wondered if Wesley would be able to step in here without lowering the blind just in case Angel should visit. She had noticed him doing it in the Cotswolds, wincing at rooms with open drapes and surreptitiously closing them until the sun had truly gone down. Giles hadn’t noticed and she didn’t think Gunn had realized either, they had just kept walking into rooms and wondering why they were so dark during the daytime. A couple of times, Giles had impatiently yanked open the drapes, but he didn’t seem to have connected their closed state to Wesley.

 

A hairbrush had been left on the shelf by the mirror, strands of fair hair trailing from it. It sparked a memory of Tara’s hairbrush looking exactly like that; the plain wooden handle and those strands of hair snagged in the bristles, so fine that they were almost invisible until the sun caught them. She picked up the brush gingerly and held it where the light could stream through the trailing strands, and when the tears sprang into her eyes she wasn’t sure if it was this girl she had never met and now never would or Tara that she was mourning.

 

A sound behind her made her spin around, hastily wiping her eyes. Seeing it was Giles, his face a mask of grief, the tears welled up again. “Oh, Giles, I’m so sorry.”

 

He came forward. “I know.”

 

“I can still sense her here. I would have liked her so much.”

 

“I’m sure you would.”

 

She wanted to hug him but he had never been very comfortable with hugging. She had never been able to decide if it was his position as a teacher that meant he didn’t like touching any of them or just the whole being English thing. She patted him gingerly instead.

 

He snatched a breath and then said a little hoarsely: “In a town of seventy thousand people, and a town, moreover, so close to Brimham Rocks there must be a number of witches. We need to find the people who killed Alicia before they find anyone else.”

 

She wiped her eyes again, trying to look something other than so sorry for him that it was overwhelming every other thought. “What do you want me to do?”

 

“Miranda has given me the name of a wicca group here in Harrogate which Alicia attended. I think they might be more at ease talking to you than me. Would you mind following up on that? See if they know anything? I’ll take Alicia’s address book, see if I can find out anything about a boyfriend or if they know who she was meeting that night.”

 

“What about Wesley and Gunn?” She just knew Gunn wasn’t going to be happy to sit this one out. He just wasn’t a sitting-things-out kind of person. He had been bleeding to death when he had walked away from his assignment and yet instead of calling himself an ambulance – as ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have done – he had not walked but run to a meeting place in a rain-drenched alley because that was where the next battle was going to be fought.

 

Giles seemed to realize that too. “Perhaps they can…”

 

“We need to look up spells.”

 

Giles jumped as Wesley appeared behind him. “Wesley, don’t sneak up on people like that…” He made a conscious effort to swallow the rest of his sentence, reaching for his patience. “What kind of spells?”

 

Wesley looked at him as if it were so obvious he was surprised he was being asked to state it. “Spells that need a lot of the blood of witches.”

 

***

Comments

[emeraldteal.livejournal.com]

I love how you've described the British countryside in the previous chapters- the owls, trees and rolling greens. Very atmospheric, makes me feel like I'm there. Likewise, with the description of the tea room :)

Forgive my ignorance, but what's the significance of Brimham Rocks and witches?

Charming!Gunn is a sight to behold. Naughty Willow for making that gigilo remark. And of course Wes chooses that moment to know what they're talking about. Hee :)

[elgrey.livejournal.com]

Forgive my ignorance, but what's the significance of Brimham Rocks and witches?

There isn't one that I'm aware of. They're just extraordinary rocks and I'm assuming for the purposes of this fic that people will have been going there to stir their cauldrons for centuries just because they look like the kind of place that would attract magical activity.

Charming!Gunn is a sight to behold. Naughty Willow for making that gigilo remark. And of course Wes chooses that moment to know what they're talking about. Hee :)

I never thought they really made enough on the show of how ridiculously drop dead gorgeous Gunn was and I know for certain that if he walked into any tearoom in the little town where I live women would be tripping over their own tongues to get him a cup of tea - myself included. *G*