(no subject)

[elgrey]

Harrogate, Part Ten

Gunn was glad to escape down to the teashop even if it was only to eat more oddly-named cakes and insubstantial sandwiches. Wesley had insisted on bringing his book and was still copying things from it into his little notebook. He also seemed to be writing out some kind of spell formula on a napkin. Willow and Giles would probably have kept arguing until the sun went down if he hadn’t pointed out that he was hungry and that Wesley needed a cup of tea. As things were, they reluctantly joined him and Wes after a few minutes, and began to eat something called ‘Bakewell Tart’ and more cucumber sandwiches.

 

Giles was still giving off a kind of black cloud of grief, which had made him terse with Willow about her suggestion and even terser with Wesley about existing. As he sat down he said: “He needs a bath tonight, and clean clothes that fit him. Not to mention a shave and a bloody haircut. I am sick and tired of Wesley looking like the poster child for mental instability.”

 

“Don’t start,” Gunn warned him.

 

“You can’t just take it out on Wesley because you’re angry with me,” Willow hissed at him before switching to a reassuring smile for Judith.

 

“Watch me,” Giles returned grimly.

 

“Giles, we’ve tried spells to reveal a source of dark incantation and we keep getting nothing, and you and I both know that someone was casting a spell of terrible power and yet we can’t trace it.”

 

“I concede that it’s troubling that we haven’t yet been able to find a spell that will locate the source of the incantation, but we don’t need to overreact,” Giles insisted. “The magic is in you, absorbed into your bone and blood in a way that no other witch has ever accomplished and I, though I say it myself, am more than ordinarily knowledgeable about the casting of spells to detect dark magic. We just need to keep going until we find the right spell and then trace these people.”

“And what if they kill again tonight?”

 

Gunn sighed. “Willow, I think Giles is right about your plan – it’s not workable. Even apart from the risk to you – which is crazy – there’s no reason for them to come back there. You sitting up on the moors casting little witchy spells to make them come after you isn’t a good plan on all kinds of levels.”

 

“The place is steeped in sorcery now,” Willow insisted, in between vigorously buttering a fruit scone. “They’re bound to go back there.”

 

“For all they – or we – know the police have the place staked out,” Giles pointed out.

 

“More tea anyone?” Judith proffered the teapot and Wesley held up his cup without looking up from his work.

 

She gave him a refill and received an absent-minded ‘Thank you’ for her pains. Giles conceded that he would also like another cup of tea and Willow and Gunn also held their cups out.

 

Judith examined Wesley’s squiggles on his napkin for a moment and then gave him a reassuring smile. “I’m sure you’ll get it eventually, dear…”

 

Giles waited until she was out of earshot before murmuring, “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

 

Gunn thought about trying to explain that Wesley had always been a functioning crazy person. He could still reason and analyse and research and come up with ideas even when in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He suspected Wesley’s family had always had mental health issues, and had developed this way of dealing with stress; they had the meltdown but they did it in a way that meant they could still do their job; because if you were a Wyndam-Pryce all that mattered was the work you did, of course. He felt a pang of guilt about having just looked at the crazy packaging recently while not remembering the complexity of the man underneath.

 

He reached across to touch Wesley’s arm, getting his attention. He gave him what he hoped was a normal sort of smile. “How’s the research going?”

 

Wesley gazed at him for a moment and Gunn could see Giles’s point about him looking as if he was part of some kind of outreach program. He really did look like all kinds of crap. If he could just sleep at night instead of having whispered conversations with people who weren’t there, Gunn suspected that would solve most of his problems right there. He also thought Wesley had a point that cleaning him up and putting him in new clothes wasn’t going to change the confusion in Wesley’s mind. He squeezed Wesley’s arm gently. “Wes? The research? How’s it going?”

 

“I’ve discovered several possible incantations that might require the blood of witches – all of them very dark and powerful in nature – but none that explain why Giles and Willow haven’t been able to locate the source of the spell. There was something I studied at the Academy that I’m sure was relevant, but I can’t remember what it was.”

 

Giles looked up sharply. “Ways of concealing spells?”

 

“Something to do with witches. A cult that opposed them. I can’t remember where I read it, and I don’t have all my books here.” He looked around the teashop as if they might magically appear. “Where are my books?”

 

“The books you had at the Hyperion or the books you had at Wolfram & Hart?” Gunn asked him.

 

Wesley frowned in confusion. “I’m not sure.”

 

“Some of them are in storage, Wesley,” Giles explained, rather more patiently than usual. “But the books you had access to at Wolfram & Hart are gone. They stayed with the firm when you…left it.”

 

Gunn tapped the book Wesley had bought in the bookshop in Knaresborough. “What’s so special about this book?”

 

“It’s very rare. It has spells that other books don’t have.”

 

Gunn looked an enquiry to Giles who shrugged but picked the book up, adding a belated ‘May I?’ to Wesley only as an afterthought.

 

“Please do.” Wesley picked up his teacup and sipped from it.

 

Gunn watched Giles looking through the book, hoping that Wesley would prove to be saner than anyone realized, that he would have discovered something Giles and Willow had missed. He despaired of getting Giles to see the guy that Gunn had known; the Wesley who was cleverer than anyone he’d ever met; who could research anything, and always knew the answer to every question. If it turned out that all Wesley was doing with these notes he was making was the equivalent of typing ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ over and over then Gunn didn’t think he could take it. Because then he’d have to acknowledge what they were all in denial about, that when Willow had brought Wesley back, she’d either brought him back wrong, or missing something, or brain-damaged him in the process. Which would mean Gunn really had lost everyone because even Wesley could never be Wesley again.

 

Giles was frowning over the book without any sign of comprehension. “Wesley, I can see references to the usual incantations for raising demons, but I don’t see anything here that wouldn’t have been revealed by Willow’s spell.”

 

Wesley leaned across, looked at the page Giles was looking at, and then pointed to something on the page. Gunn looked at Giles hopefully, wanting to see the man get that look someone got when something was revealed to them, a sudden ‘Oh!’ of realization. But Giles just sighed and took off his glasses to clean them before saying, very quietly: “Wesley, that’s just a fault in the binding, a blank half page under the last spell. There’s nothing there.”

 

Gunn felt the last of his hope dissolving, thinking dully that, of course, the spells Wesley was so diligently transcribing didn’t exist. Most of the people he was talking to these days didn’t exist either. That was Wesley’s gift at the moment – seeing things that weren’t there; even if they were just things he needed to see.

 

“There’s a spell,” Wesley insisted.

 

Giles handed the book to Willow who looked at it and sighed. “Wesley, Giles is right, this half of the page is blank.” She looked so sorry for not only Wesley but for Gunn as well, that he wasn’t sure he could take it.

 

“He’s going to get better,” he heard himself saying; except it didn’t sound much like him; more like a guy who was talking too loud and this close to bursting into tears.

 

“It’s right there.” Wesley took the book back. “I can see it.”

 

Gunn abruptly rose to his feet; realizing the only thing he disliked more than Giles getting pissed with Wesley was him looking sorry for him; all grave and regretful, as if Wesley was a lost cause who could only be cared for now. He didn’t want Giles reminding himself to be more patient and regretting his earlier words, the way Giles was so clearly doing right now, he wanted him being challenged by Wesley and the two of them throwing book references and spells at each other, and Wesley standing up to the guy and being his equal.

 

“This isn’t who he is,” he managed with difficulty. He knew he was being too tall and too loud in a place this quiet and dark and cosy but he couldn’t help it.

 

“I’ll do the spell,” Willow said hastily. “I’ll do it tonight. No more hallucinations.”

 

Gunn thought about the Hyperion and how sometimes, out of nowhere, he could still smell that baby milk scent of Connor, the way it had got all over them because they all had little bits of baby spew on their shoulders, and they got into the habit of just wiping it off instead of changing their clothes right away, because any minute now someone would hand the baby over and he’d probably spit up something on them again. The way it had seemed so natural, so fast, that you just learned to do things one-handed, opening drawers, and picking up books, and filling the kettle, and eating your lunch, as the baby got passed around, until you hardly noticed sometimes if you were carrying him or not. He thought of being able to talk to that Fred and that Cordelia, being able to see them again; Fred giggly and a little crazy, and rocking Connor, and Cordelia full of so much heart and courage making those doting faces at the baby.

 

Then he thought of Wesley just sitting in a corner staring at nothing, because he couldn’t see the dead or the living any more; the past as lost to him as it was to Gunn.

 

“No, just – leave him alone. Let him keep what he’s got.” He turned away.

 

Willow said: “Gunn, why don’t you…?”

 

He said shortly: “I’m going for a walk.” Then he was crossing between all those little tables and those women with their purses, and that kid in the buggy gazing up at him as if he was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen, and then the bell was dinging, just like the bell in the bookshop, and he was out into the thin English daylight, with tears streaming down his face he didn’t want anyone seeing.

 

***

 

The air felt slightly singed; the throbbing in his temples very like the one he would get when there was a thunderstorm sitting over the house. Except this time, it felt to Giles as if the thunderstorm was actually happening in his head. He looked around the room, grimacing at the wreckage; the print whose glass had been shattered, the scorch mark on the wall; the burnt place on the arm of the sofabed.

 

“Well,” Gunn said, from the safety of the doorway into the kitchen. “I guess you can wave goodbye to your security deposit.”

 

Giles looked up to a glare that told him Gunn wasn’t going to be forgiving him any time soon for nearly setting Wesley on fire. The man was still standing squarely in front of Wesley and had been every since the tongue of white flame had licked out of the circle in which Giles and Willow had been casting their spells of revelation, the flame that would undoubtedly have set at least Wesley’s clothes alight if Gunn hadn’t pulled him to safety.

 

“I said I’m sorry.”

 

“Yeah, well, set yourself on fire next time.”

 

Willow sighed. “I think we nearly did that too. Several times.”

 

Wesley licked his finger, tested the air, and then tasted it. “Copper.” He took out his notebook and wrote that down, heading back towards the table where his books were, and only stopping when Gunn’s grip on his arm arrested his forward movement. He looked at Gunn’s fingers and then up at Gunn in some confusion.

 

“Wait,” Gunn told him. “Have you two finished?”

 

Giles shrugged. “Well, we haven’t learned anything but… Yes, for the moment, I’m completely out of ideas.”

 

Gunn let Wesley go. “Just – if those two start up with the abracadabras again – duck.”

 

“Thank you for the vote of confidence, Gunn.” Giles rose to his feet, wincing at the way his joints ached as he stood up. He was definitely getting too old for his body not to rebel at having that much dark magic channelled through it.

 

“Hey, I call it like I see it, and so far I’ve seen you two achieve diddly except nearly killing Wes and me and trashing this apartment.”

 

“I’m actually a very powerful witch,” Willow protested. “I nearly destroyed the world once.”

 

“You keep telling yourself that, Willow.” Gunn pulled out Wesley’s chair for him, and picked up the books that had been scattered when he had yanked him away from the white flame.

 

“No, Willow’s right,” Giles insisted. “She is a very powerful witch. She managed to harness the power of an ancient weapon to share the Slayer strength with every potential in the world. She brought your friend back from the dead.”

 

“Yeah, and he’s still thrilled about that.” Gunn picked a feather out of Wesley’s hair from when their spell had belched back all its power and filled the air with flame and rage, spewing their spell-making ingredients at them like a whirlwind.

 

“We weren’t trying to hurt him,” Willow said meekly. “Or set the apartment on fire.”

 

“You still nearly did both of those things, so how about next time you want to make with the Glinda thing you do it outside?”

 

“You’re missing the point.” Giles brushed flakes of ash from his slightly singed sleeve. “Any one of those spells should have worked. We’ve used them before and they’ve worked before. There are no effective counterspells against them.”

 

Wesley looked up at Giles for a moment as if trying to recall a memory. “There were extra lessons on alternate Wednesdays. If you took them you weren’t allowed to take classes with Mrs Taschen.”

 

Giles frowned. “Dear Lord, was Mrs Taschen still teaching at the academy when you attended, Wesley? She was about a hundred and three when I was there. I swear she did actually fly to classes on her broomstick.”

 

“I had lessons with Professor Brewer instead.”

 

“Never heard of him.” Giles turned to Gunn. “If you’ve quite finished glowering, Willow and I would rather like to drown our disappointment in tea.”

 

“My father said I had to take them because I would be more useful in research than studying practical witchcraft. On account of never amounting to anything.”

 

Giles had been heading for the kitchen, when Wesley’s words stopped him in his tracks. He turned around. “Wesley, you were head boy of the Academy. You were the youngest Watcher I’ve ever heard of to be allocated even one Slayer, let alone two. What more could your father possibly have asked of you?”

 

Wesley looked up at Giles. “Perhaps he wanted me to be more like you.”

 

“Well, he had a funny way of showing it. My father encouraged me to think for myself. He didn’t always like my thoughts when I did, but he did at least think that’s what I should be doing. When did your father ever tell you – even once – to trust your own judgement?”

 

Wesley dropped his gaze to his books. “He said he’d trust my judgement the day I developed any. I killed him.”

 

Giles put a hand up to his aching head. “No, Wesley, you didn’t. I saw him in London only a few months ago. He was quite well, I assure you. And very much – as he has always been.”

 

“It was a robot, Wes, remember?” Gunn put in.

 

“I think I frightened Fred. I know I frightened myself.” He looked up at Giles again, trying to see him, it seemed, as if some part of Giles wasn’t yet in focus. “I didn’t think I was angry with him. I just thought I was…afraid – of the next thing he might say or do to me. I don’t know why I shot him so many times. I spent so many years trying to make him proud of me and then it was just a gun and all those bullets and a trigger I couldn’t stop pulling.”

 

He hated when Wesley looked like that – when he could see, not just the annoying little twerp who’d first turned up in Sunnydale behind those haunted eyes, but the teenager he must once have been, who had such high hopes of becoming the best Watcher in the history of Watcherdrom. He almost asked him what his father had done to him. If he’d beaten him, terrorised him, if there had been ritual punishments to make the blood run cold, but then realized that it didn’t matter now. Wesley was what he was and it couldn’t be undone by talking about his father; in fact he was so far beyond that point it was almost funny. Instead he said: “Would you like a cup of tea, Wesley?”

 

Wesley’s face cleared and he looked relieved at the distraction. “Yes, please.”

 

Giles gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

 

 

They had gone back to the books. Gunn, perhaps still suspecting them of wanting to incinerate him and Wesley, had suggested that Wesley continue his research in their room. Giles had noticed that Wesley, despite being perfectly capable of saying ‘No, thank you’ to most of the things Giles suggested, was usually happy to acquiesce to Gunn’s ideas, making him think that, underneath the delusions, Wesley still had quite firm opinions about what he did and did not want to do.

 

He and Willow had taken over the sofa bed and were both working their way through a stack of spellbooks, trying to find a spell they hadn’t yet tried, that might work where their others had failed.

 

“I haven’t forgotten what I did.”

 

Giles looked up in surprise to find Willow gazing at him from distressed green eyes. People often asked if she were his daughter, especially witches visiting the coven for the first time; picking up on an aura without troubling to think through the differences of accent. Sometimes he almost said ‘yes’, because on some level she and Buffy and Dawn all were the daughters he had never had. But he doubted their fathers would have accepted that he had taken on that role, and it was true that he had never been there when they were growing up. Sometimes it felt as if he had been; sometimes it felt as if there was no day since their births he had not witnessed, so completely had their lives bled into his.

 

He could hear the low murmur of Gunn and Wesley’s voices, a background hum that he had been finding oddly comforting. Exhausting and irritating though those two often were, he was growing used to having them around, and for all the man’s occasionally volatile temperament he suspected he might have cause to be very glad of Gunn before this was over. And if he still had the occasional pang of guilt about the way he had treated Wesley in the past, he was being given every chance to make amends now.  But Willow was part of his life, one of those people he had grown to love as if they were his own children when in Sunnydale; someone who had wept for Jenny, wept for Buffy; lost and found herself in front of his watchful gaze. Someone he had saved.

 

“I know,” he told her gently.

 

“I wouldn’t want you to think I think it’s a joke now. ‘Oh, I nearly destroyed the world once. Look how powerful I am.’ Because I still see what I did. I still dream about it – I think I’m that person again, only this time, I’m watching me and I can’t stop myself. All those things I did – to Buffy, to Xander, to you…there isn’t a day I don’t think about it. I killed a man. I tortured him and then I killed him, and I’ll always be a murderer. And I’ll always be sorry for what I did.”

 

“I know,” he repeated. “You don’t need to tell me.”

 

“I don’t want you thinking I don’t remember all you’ve done for me. I just want to be able to do this one thing – stop these people and make sure they don’t kill again. All this power, the way I got it… what I did with it – it’s only bearable if I can think maybe it was for a reason in the end because I can do more good than I could do before. Except I’m not doing any good. I’m not doing anything.”

 

He reached out and patted her shoulder. “Willow, you’re doing everything you can.”

 

“But it’s not enough. And I don’t understand why it isn’t working.”

 

Sighing, he looked down at the book of spells in front of him. “Neither do I. These spells are tried and tested. They should have revealed the place where the evil is emanating from by now and yet…nothing.”

 

“Perhaps it’s not the spell, it’s the place?” She picked up another book. “I’m going to research places with special properties – ones shielded from spells or something. There has to be an explanation.”

 

“Like Wesley, I have something in the back of my mind, but I think it was a throwaway comment from thirty years ago, and I can’t remember it now. If Wesley were only able to… I just wish I knew if anything he’s saying or doing has any logic behind it or if it’s all cuckoo clock time.” He looked around the room, and there were still a few traces of Alicia. No one had moved her stack of CDs next to her hi-fi. The paperback she had been reading was still on the coffee table. She had laid it face down instead of using a bookmark. He never had been able to get her out of that. Sighing, he leaned across and picked up the book, keeping his thumb in the page she had reached. Music & Silence. There was a price in pencil written inside the cover, so she had evidently not bought it new. Someone else had got a chance to finish it and knew how the story ended, but Alicia had not. She had been so close to the end as well, only a few pages to go. That was probably why she’d been late, why she’d just left her sweater inside out and her cup of coffee on the table instead of rinsing out the mug; trying to get to the end before she had to leave to meet Karin. She had always needed to be dragged away from books. He knew he should just close it, because the truth was that she was never going to finish it now, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that yet, and plucked a tissue out of the box, carefully marking the page she would never finish, before he put the book back down.

 

“Are you angry with Angel?” Willow asked quietly.

 

He looked at her in surprise. “Should I be?”

 

“Because he didn’t keep his people safe.”

 

“I’m sure he tried.” Giles thought of Buffy hitting the ground in front of him; her body snapping on impact like a broken doll. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do, they still die.”

 

“I think I’m a little bit angry with him,” she confessed. “And at the same time I feel so sorry for him because I think all he really wanted was to have a family of his own and protect them and all do good together, and instead…”

 

Giles thought of the rain-swept alley and Gunn’s blood soaked fingers; Wesley lying dead on the chequered floor of a warlock’s stronghold. “Perhaps I’m a little angry with him, too. He ate every member of his first family and – had sex with every member of his second family, perhaps he should have considered the possibility that some people, however strong their need to gather a family around themselves, are not suited to family life.”

 

“Would you have taken Connor?”

 

Giles looked at her in shock. “I don’t know, Willow. I wasn’t there. I do wish Wesley had…”

 

“Told Angel about the prophecy?”

 

“No, certainly not. But would it have killed him to pick up the phone and call me? I could have helped him. I could at least have given him someone to discuss it with.”

 

“He probably thought that if he told you, you’d tell Buffy, and then she’d tell Angel.”

 

Giles opened his mouth to refute it and then sighed. “It’s not what I would have done, but I can see why Wesley might have thought it would be. He and I never really learned to communicate when he was in Sunnydale. Perhaps if I’d been more patient he might not have…”

 

“Giles, he wasn’t unhappy in LA. He loved those people. Why do you think he’s still seeing them even after they’re dead? We would never have cared about him like they did. Not then. Now, it’s different. Now, it’s just the four of us…”

 

Giles didn’t really want to accept that it was now ‘the four of us’. He was still thinking of it being him and Willow, with Gunn and Wesley a separate unit who temporarily needed their help, and that once Wesley was well again, Gunn and Wesley would go…elsewhere. But when he considered it logically, he realized that he could hardly abandon two ordinary mortals with no special skills to the mercies of the Senior Partners and the Bringers. The First had been defeated but it had not been destroyed and all Watchers were still targets, and that was without starting on the vengeance the Circle of the Black Thorn might still be seeking.

 

“This isn’t exactly how I was planning to spend my retirement, Willow.”

 

“You’d die of boredom if you retired,” she assured him.

 

“I think I might prefer that to having my entrails ripped out or being exsanguinated by a vampire.”

 

“It could be worse…”

 

“How?”

 

“You could be helping Faith and Wood to train the potentials.”

 

Giles sat back in the sofa, thinking about all those teenage girls; the constant clamour and bustle of them, the thought of steering them all through puberty and having to listen to endless stories of their latest boyfriends; the pain of them getting themselves killed. “Well, all right, when you put it like that, I concede that Gunn and Wesley don’t look so bad.”

 

“See, Wesley may be crazy, but he’s not going to talk to you about who he’s dating.”

 

“And for that I am grateful.” As Willow reached forward to pick up another book, he thought how pale she looked. “You’ve done everything humanly possible, you know, Willow. We’ll find a solution. It’s just a case of discovering the right spell.”

 

Willow stroked a finger across the worn fabric of the sofa. “I had enough power to kill and destroy. Why don’t I have enough power for this?”

 

“No one is suggesting that you forget what you did. Anyone with as much power as you should be aware of how much harm they could do if they lost control. But you should remember the good you’ve done as well.” Giles bent his head to look at her face. “Willow, what happened to Alicia isn’t your fault. We are going to find these people and we’re going to stop them doing whatever it is they’re attempting to do.”

 

There was a pause before she said: “I’m good with you breaking something if you want to.”

 

Giles had to acknowledge her perspicacity. “Maybe later.”

 

“You don’t have to be the grown up any more. We’re all grown ups too, now. You don’t always have to be the one who’s calm and sensible and doesn’t cry. You’re allowed to have Giles Time.”

 

Giles thought about the past, about feeling the demon enter his body, the rush of it, that incredible high of being possessed, feeling for those brief minutes, more alive, more empowered, more himself than he ever did when alone; wanting to hold onto this feeling, not have to sink into the inevitable aftermath of the black dog low after the iridescent high. He remembered the clarity of setting out after Angelus, determined to burn him alive, not caring if he lived or died. He closed his eyes. “Perhaps you’re not the only one with control issues, Willow.”

 

“When this is over you need to go up there and say goodbye, alone, without having to babysit us.”

 

Again, he saw a little girl clapping her hands as her cake rose up, a teenager gasping in disbelieving pleasure as she floated a candle across the room. He wondered if what he really needed to say to Alicia was not ‘Goodbye’ but ‘I’m sorry’.

 

“Perhaps I will.” He picked up another book. “For the moment we have work to do…” But even as he hoisted the heavy book onto his lap and began to search through the archaic text for a spell that would work, he could see Alicia’s battered little paperback sitting on the table, the story that she would never finish, the end that she would never now read.

 

***