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Childish Things, Part Fourteen

 

Giles was never going to admit that just for a while – a very short while – he had found himself thinking that if no reversal spell could be found and Angel’s associates were forced to grow up as children once again that it might be an idea for him to become Wesley’s guardian. It wasn’t as if he had hugged the idea to him like a miser with the family silver. He had just contemplated it from a position of emotional neutrality. For Wesley to be returned to his real parents seemed to be out of the question. Even the thought of it had terrified the boy. Angel, for all his possessive paranoia, could not bring three children up by himself. Giles doubted that he had any legal documentation of his own so him attempting to get documentation for these child-adults would be problematic at best. And there was also the matter of Wesley’s true identity. It seemed all wrong that someone who had remained so resolutely British should be subsumed into the culture of Southern California. He would need some kind of touchstone to remind him of who he truly was – a trained Watcher and an Englishman. And it probably wouldn’t be too difficult for Giles to get some kind of papers made up that passed Wesley off as his late sister’s son, of whom he had guardianship since her death until he reached eighteen. That was plausible enough…

 

So, yes, he had thought about it. And if he was honest he did feel a slight pang of loss at the moment. It was a beautiful evening, dark and unusually clear, the lights of the fairground a multi-coloured swirl in the distance. It was one of those directions his life could have taken that would have brought enormous trouble and inconvenience but it would also have forced him into what might perhaps have been a positive change. And, of course, it had been an absurd idea. He was a Watcher. He didn’t have the time or the right to adopt a child – not any child anyway, but Wesley had hardly been any child – he had been someone whom perhaps only Giles could really understand. Anyway, there was some relief, and there was some regret, but for better or worse that was not now a direction his life was going to take.

 

Angel and Buffy were walking next to one another. To strangers they probably looked like a couple. They were laughing, not too intense despite that ever-present connection between them. Xander and Anya were behind him, Xander trying to explain more about the human world. Giles sometimes thought Xander was on a hiding to nothing there. Tara and Willow were hand in hand, every light they passed appearing to seize on Willow’s hair with relish; turning it a different shade of red with each different blare of neon. Autumn always carried in her hair. It reminded him of Westonbirt and he thought how absurd it was to be homesick for an English arboretum, here, when the majority of its most spectacular trees were North American in origin. At the front of their little group, Cordelia was making Wesley buy her things. Sticky food mostly which she then made him carry. They were sniping and giggling; and it was hard to believe that this was the girl who had reduced Wesley Wyndam-Pryce to stuttering incoherence every time she looked at him, and this was the same man whom Cordelia had gone all out to seduce with no conspicuous success. Now, they were completely the siblings that he could never have imagined them becoming back then; teasing and nudging and arguing amicably. A good ten yards ahead of them were Gunn and Dawn. Gunn was wearing something that made him look very tall and very handsome, and which had caused Buffy to have another spasm of adolescent regression in the hallway. Dawn was looking very pretty in a dress which she had borrowed from her older sister’s wardrobe and which Buffy had told her she would damage at the cost of her life.

 

Their object in coming to the fair had already been accomplished. While the rest of them lurked at a safe distance, Dawn had proudly paraded Gunn past her not-friend – as Gunn described her – and the unlikeable young man who had been so foolish as to prefer another girl to Dawn. The not-friend had been consumed with very obvious curiosity and some envy and the young man had looked put out, not to mention short, pimply and undercooked by comparison with Gunn.

 

Now they could just enjoy themselves, with only a few sighs over soft toys that a week ago could have been purchased for Gunn and which now he was attempting to win for Dawn on the rifle range.

 

“You should let Wes do it,” Cordelia called across to him. “You know he’s the sharpshooter on the team.”

 

Gunn gave Dawn an apologetic shrug. “I'm really better with an axe.”

 

Wesley picked up the rifle and drilled neat holes in the hapless cardboard ducks with no visible sign of effort. “It’s a pity there are so few demons that are susceptible to gunfire.” He handed Dawn the soft toy of her choice with what Giles was surprised to see was genuine modesty. “Most of them need the standard slice and dice. Gunn’s rather better at that than I am.”

 

“Don’t I get a soft toy?” Cordelia demanded.

 

“What would you do with it if you had it?” he returned patiently.

 

“I don’t know. I just want one.”

 

“If I get you one you have to carry it, and when we get back to LA no one will sympathize if Phantom Dennis sneers at you.”

 

Cordelia was persuaded with difficulty to give up the soft toy idea but made Wesley buy her lots of obnoxiously pink candyfloss in compensation.

 

“It will get in your hair,” he told her as he handed it over. “And we will never hear the end of it. And you will probably blame me.”

 

“Well, that goes without saying,” she assured him.

 

“And yet she’s single,” he murmured. “Ow!” That was in response to a particularly sharp jab from Cordelia’s elbow. Giles couldn’t help wondering if there was some residual emotional immaturity from Cordelia there as he couldn’t imagine her being this physically abusive to her co-workers on a regular basis.

 

Wesley was still wincing as he straightened up, reminding him a lot more of the Wesley of old, who always made a big fuss over the slightest injury.

 

Looking at him, Cordelia went pale. “Oh my god! Your stitches!”

 

“I don’t have stitches any more.” Wesley was quick to reassure her. “No stitches. All gone. Healed up.”

 

“You went a funny colour. Let me see.” Cordelia yanked up his shirt while he ineffectually protested. She peered closely at his side and probed at his abdomen while he flinched and looked embarrassed.

 

“Cordelia, you’re going to get us arrested for an act of indecency if you don’t get your head up soon.”

 

“Well, as long as you don’t get your head…”

 

“Dawn is with us, remember?”

 

Cordelia quickly swallowed the end of her sentence and straightened up. “Okay. No stitches. I believe you. But you still went a funny colour.”

 

“How about you don’t viciously jab me in my recently healed wounds and then I won’t?”

 

“How about you don’t annoy me and then I won’t want to elbow you quite so often, Mister Smarty Pants?”

 

“How about…”

 

“How about you both stop squabbling right now?” Angel used an ominously paternal voice that he had never once used on them when they really had been children, and gave them a dark glare over his shoulder.

 

Wesley and Cordelia skittered a bit and looked mutinous. “He started it,” Cordelia offered, tossing back her hair.

 

“I did not.”

 

“You did too.”

 

“Children!”

 

Wesley actually jumped at that sharp tone from Angel while Cordelia settled for giving him a sulky shove. Giles shook his head in disbelief. It was hard to believe the very grown up little boy that Wesley had been could have become half of this emotionally immature constantly bickering duo.

 

“We’re only talking,” Cordelia muttered mutinously.

 

“Yes, we’re discussing the relative merits of…something relevant to fairgrounds.”

 

“Do it without arguing like a pair of six year olds then.”

 

Cordelia stuck her tongue out at the back of Angel’s head and looked up at Wesley. “He never wants us to have any fun.”

 

Willow whispered anxiously to Giles: “Do you think we only changed their physical form and they’re mentally still regressed?”

 

“No. I think they’re exactly how they used to be. The level of mental regression is all their own work.”

 

“But Wesley was so sensible,” Tara whispered.

 

Giles smiled. “Well, children always want to be treated like grown ups, don’t they? Once you’re an adult you don’t need to prove that you are any more so you can afford to be as infantile as you like. Which in Wesley and Cordelia’s case is obviously – very infantile indeed.”

 

“I wish I’d seen them when they were falling in love.” Tara looked at them fondly. “They must have been so sweet.”

 

“It wasn’t ‘love’, it was hormones,” Willow assured her. “Lots and lots of hormones.”

 

“And they were both exceedingly embarrassing and annoying to be around as I recall,” Giles assured her. “You really didn’t miss a thing.”

 

 

Buffy caught sight of the rings as they walked past the booth and stopped in her tracks. Friendship rings. She had to snatch a quick breath and, Angel, seeing them, moved her gently out of the flow of passers by, making it look as if they were just examining the jewellery.

 

“Are you okay?” he asked after a minute.

 

She inhaled quickly and then looked up at him and then, as that hurt too much, past him. About a hundred yards ahead of them now were Gunn and Dawn. She had her arm looped comfortably between his and they were laughing together at something. Proud teenager out with chivalrous handsome older boyfriend. Perfectly normal stuff. Except for Dawn being a key to another world fashioned into human form by mystical monks. Catching up with Dawn and Gunn were Wesley and Cordelia, they must have made up again as she had her head resting briefly on his shoulder, and he put an arm around her, both of them leaning into one another as if they were used to taking the other one’s weight at times of crisis. That looked the most normal of all. If she squeezed her memory into a long tunnel, blocked out so much of what had happened in between, she could make herself believe that it was the time of Graduation again. Here they all were, alive and well, so they had defeated the Mayor, Wesley had finally got up the courage to ask Cordelia out on a date, and there they were, dating; the Council had reinstated Giles after their sterling work in thwarting the ascension and asked Wesley to stay on in Sunnydale as his assistant. Perhaps there was a June wedding planned.

 

But when she turned her head there was Tara where Oz would have been if the last year or so hadn’t happened. And the edifice crumbled then. Her mother was still dead and she and Angel hadn’t found a way to make it work in Sunnydale. They were never going to be together unless a miracle intervened. Very soon he was going to go back to LA. Back to his new life that didn’t include her, while she struggled on with her new increasingly dangerous and complicated life that didn’t include him.

 

“Buffy…?”

 

She looked up into his brown eyes and almost hated him for being able to make her feel better, just like that, with a look, with a touch. He had made her be too strong in the past; having to kill him was the hardest thing she had ever had to do; gazing into his eyes now she realized with horror that she couldn’t have done it now; not even if the world had depended on it; she was too deeply scarred from the last time; could never willingly give him up again; not to death and hell and eternal damnation. It was hard enough to give him up to a different town and a different life and to friends who loved him.

 

“Can people just crack open?” She looked down at her palm and wondered why it didn’t show; her mother’s death; her constant fear for Dawn; there should be veins of light running just under the skin; it should be obvious just by looking at her how close she was to being torn asunder.

 

“Buffy?” He bent his head to look at her intently, not realizing that when he looked at her like that, with so much care and so much love, he just made everything a hundred times worse. Or perhaps he did realize, and that was why he lived in LA these days, instead of here with her.

 

She averted her eyes so he wouldn’t see how much she was still in love with him, gazing past him to look at Dawn, her sister giggling over something Gunn had said, happy; despite everything still having the capacity to be happy. The young were so flexible. But I'm young, Buffy thought. But she no longer had that emotional elasticity of Dawn’s. Too many things to bounce back from; each time she could only pull herself a smaller and smaller distance away from the epicentre of the trauma. Then she saw them, moving so fast they could only be vampires, figures in blue robes with ridged foreheads and yellow eyes pouncing from the side of the booths, heading straight for Dawn. And suddenly everything made sense because she could do this, kill demons; it didn’t involve decision-making or loss, just instinct and reflexes; except as she pulled the stake out of her jacket she realized she was too far away and by the time she reached Dawn the vampires would already have killed her.

 

 

Giles saw it a fraction after Buffy; the vampires pounce, making for Dawn, always going for the young girl if there was a young girl around. Hard to know if the literature had followed the habit or the habit was now in place because of the literature; too many vampires who in their human or post-human days had taken to reading Bram Stoker. He hated himself for having the kind of mind that could be debating the post-modernist aspects of vampirism while a girl he loved like a daughter was about to have her throat torn out before his eyes, but that was the way his mind had always worked, compartmentalizing events into those that could be analysed and those that could not be borne.

 

As the vampire went to throw Gunn carelessly out of the way, the man elbowed it hard in the head, before spinning and kicking it hard in the groin, yelling ‘Wes!’ as he did so. It went down, groaning, but a second vampire threw Gunn hard into the booth, reducing it to splinters of wood and a pink and white spewing of stuffed animals. He cracked his head on the booth hard enough for them all to hear it and crumpled, looking out for the count. The vampire lunged at Dawn who screamed, but although Buffy was running flat out with Angel only a little behind here she could not possibly get there in time.

 

A tall figure came out of nowhere and grabbed the vampire by the jacket, yanking him away from Dawn, ducking the savage blow it aimed at him and snatching up one of the broken shards of wood from the ground as he did so. The vampire hit him hard with the second attempt, knocking him to the ground and then pounced on him. Its intended victim stabbed up hard and the vampire was dust. A tall woman with dark hair held out a hand and pulled him to his feet as if they’d done this particular two-step a hundred times before. As the second vampire sprang back up, the man pulled the woman out of danger, and punched it hard on the jaw, ducked its return blow then staked it before it could get in a third punch. Then he leant down and held out a hand to Gunn who was blearily coming around.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

Wesley’s voice. Of course it was Wesley. Giles could see now that he looked at him, that it had always been Wesley, but he hadn’t moved like Wesley or acted like Wesley.

 

Gunn groaned and put a hand to his head. “Only my pride is damaged.”

 

Cordelia handed him a handkerchief. “Well, the back of your head seems to be bleeding in sympathy.”

 

Buffy and Angel both slowed from a sprint to a walk, surveying the scene, in confusion in Buffy’s case, with close attention in Angel’s. Only the stitch in his side alerted Giles to the fact that he must also have been running, and looking around he saw Tara with her hair loose and her eyes anxious in her pale pretty face, and Willow looking as shaken up as Giles felt. Xander and Anya also arrived at a run.

 

Gunn was saying anxiously to Dawn, “Are you okay?”

 

She nodded. “Yes. Fine. Thank you.” Each word came out as a little gulp of air, but she did manage to speak.

 

Wesley turned to Angel, face intent and serious. “You saw their clothing?”

 

Angel nodded. “Blue robes.”

 

Cordelia put a hand to her head. “This is all my fault. I should never have let Harmony go.”

 

“I seriously doubt Harmony could motivate anyone, Cordelia,” Wesley reassured her. “A lot of those vampires got away. Some of them much higher up in the organisation than her. We should have expected them to try to set up business somewhere else.”

 

“Who were they?” Buffy demanded.

 

“Did Wesley just…?” Xander pointed at the dust on the floor. “I mean…? Two? Without turning a hair…?”

 

“We have to find them.” Wesley looked at Angel. “They could already have their food bank in place. I expect it’s somewhere local but we need to find it quickly. Angel, you go east – that’s the direction those two came from, see if you can track them. Have you got your cellphone?”

 

Angel held it up. “Right here.”

 

“Is it switched on?” Cordelia demanded. “And have you recharged it any time in the last month?”

 

“Yes and yes.” He held it out to her for inspection. “Lorne already gave me that lecture when we left LA.”

 

“Well, thank god you listen to him more than you listen us.” Cordelia took Gunn’s arm. “Come on, concussion boy. I guess we get the parkers to check out?”

 

Wesley nodded. “I would expect there to be several of these attack parties, working in groups. Keep in touch. I’ll try south. The first one to score a blank with their search area, try north.” He turned around and seemed to remember Buffy and the others for the first time. “Oh, sorry. It’s just that – time is somewhat of the essence. Perhaps you should take Dawn and the others home, Buffy?”

 

Buffy looked at him levelly. “Slayer? Ringing any bells with you? As in person who slays? There’s a reason it doesn’t say in the Watcher’s Handbook: When the going gets tough, the Slayer goes home and bakes cookies.”

 

Wesley took a deep breath. “My apologies. These particular vampires are part of a kind of cult. They have a philosophy of turning two victims and grabbing a third to stockpile for food. They keep the humans in a cage while they look for new recruits to their cause and give each other excruciatingly dull lectures on how they can all maximise their personal growth potential in a style first originated by a now happily deceased self-styled ‘life coach’.”

 

Cordelia chimed in: “Basically, Sunnydale’s already scary mortality rate is just about to get a lot scarier.”

 

Angel nodded. “‘Turn two the rest is food’.” He indicated the Fair. “Lot of food here.”

 

“And he’s speaking as one who knows,” Xander observed.

 

“Will you take Dawn and Anya home?” Buffy asked him urgently.

 

“And Tara,” said Willow quickly. As the young woman looked hurt she added hastily, “So that Dawn has you with her, not just because I'm paranoid and my life would be over if anything happened to you. Oh dear, no.”

 

Xander glanced briefly at Wesley and the others who were still unaware of Dawn’s real condition. “Do you think sending the only friend of yours who doesn’t have super powers is really the best…?”

 

“Glory follows the protection. She’ll assume that if you’re not protected you’re not the key. That’s what I'm thinking anyway. Please?”

 

Xander nodded and beckoned to Tara and Anya. “I guess we’re on keeping the home fires burning patrol, girls.”

 

“Sending out for pizza would be good too.” Buffy touched him briefly on the shoulder in gratitude. “Slayage is bound to make us hungry.”

 

“We can do that.” Xander led the girls away, Dawn looking over her shoulder at her sister as they did so.

 

Buffy turned back to Wesley who was waiting with thinly veiled impatience. “So, the plan is…?”

 

“You three cover the north.” He held up his cellphone. “Keep in touch. Anyone in robes, assume they’re up to no good.” Then he was gone, walking swiftly between the booths.

 

“I liked him so much better when he was a little kid,” Buffy observed as she, Willow and Giles headed north.

 

“But if Wesley had still been a little kid then Dawn would be dead now.” Willow picked up two of the broken spars of wood from the ground and handed one to Giles. “I'm still… They were so fast. They just came out of nowhere. It all seemed to be happening so far away but in close-up.”

 

“I know.” Buffy took her stake out of her jacket pocket in readiness. “I just can’t – it takes some getting used to.”

 

“What, that people change?” Giles enquired.

 

“That my sister could die in front of my eyes and there be nothing I could do about it.” Buffy snatched a breath. “I didn’t even say ‘thank you’ to Wesley.”

 

“Let’s hope you get another chance.”

 

“I'm still in shock from Angel taking orders from him,” Willow admitted. “I keep looking around expecting there to be dogs and cats living together right in front of me.”

 

“These are certainly scary times,” Buffy nodded.

 

 

They found evidence of a vampire attack behind the trucks for the fair; blood on the ground and churned up mud. They were surveying the scene in grim silence when the ring of Buffy’s phone made them all jump. She collected herself. “Hello?”

 

Angel’s voice sounded loud and terse: “Wes told me to tell you, I’ve followed the trail to the road but then it peters out. They must have been dropped off from a vehicle. Cordy and Gunn found three smashed car windows where the parkers hang out and lots of blood. No real trail to speak of. Wes was checking out a parking lot and will phone back if he gets anything. He suggested that if you don’t have a clear trail either that you head back to the cars and we try driving around to see if we can see anything suspicious. Obviously if come across any more of them try to find out where their base is.”

 

“Okay. Ten four. Over and out. Roger Wilko.” Buffy switched off the phone and responded to Giles’s expression with a shrug. “They're just so…terse about it. It’s all jump there, do that.”

 

“I like to think we can be dynamic and decisive ourselves,” Giles returned as they began to follow their footsteps back to the main body of the fair.

 

“Yes, I think we have snapped to it ourselves with the honed precision of a military… thingummy from time to time.” Willow nodded. “Especially when Riley was…” She broke off awkwardly to look at Buffy. “Sorry.”

 

She winced at the memory of Riley, who would undoubtedly have loved this operation and would have been as happy to throw around the military strategy as the All Adult New Improved Wesley or Xander in a Halloween costume. “I just don’t see Angel’s little Gang of Four ever taking the time to stop for donuts. They’re not even seeing the donuts for the demons. And all staking and no baking makes Wesley an uptight British guy. I’ve got to ask – where’s the fun?”

 

“Please do mangle a few more proverbs, Buffy, I think you only wounded one of them. Look it’s limping off into the woods now. If you run you could probably catch it.”

 

Buffy glanced across at Willow. “They talk about the tea drinking and the tweed wearing, but whoever calls them on the snippiness? I blame their weather.”

 

“I don’t remember Angel being a barrel of laughs himself,” Giles observed. “Perhaps he’s the one setting the tone for the LA Branch of demon-killers anonymous?”

 

“Yes, but then there would just be general brooding and brow furrowing. What I'm seeing is more of a shoulders-back, stand-up-straight kind of gloominess. It’s like a public school education hit a boatload of Catholic guilt and then went down with all hands.”

 

Willow nodded. “I think they really need Cordelia to bring in the shallow happy up there.”

 

“And Gunn.” Buffy automatically touched her hair to see if it was tidy.

 

“I saw that.” Giles smiled smugly.

 

Willow nodded again. “It’s like the way Xander used to twitch every time anyone mentioned Faith. It’s Pavlovian.”

 

Buffy rolled her eyes. “So? So? He’s handsome. I noticed.”

 

“We noticed you noticed,” Giles observed dryly.

 

“We noticed you noticed a lot.”

 

“If I owned a car and if I was the one who’d driven us here, this is the point where I would be telling you two that you were walking home.” Buffy stabbed a finger at them. “And that threat would have carried a lot more weight in a tense other than the future perfect. Or the future imperfect? And is that a tense or just a general philosophy of life?”

 

Giles looked across at Willow. “He’s very tall, too, you know.”

 

Buffy held up her stake. “Don’t think I won’t use this.” As a yellow-robed figure lunged out of the bushes at her she stabbed him smartly and straightened up for applause. Only to find Willow wincing at her. “What?”

 

“Weren’t we supposed to be trying to take one alive so we could question him?”

 

Buffy looked down at the dust on her shoes.

 

Giles said helpfully, “The word you’re looking for now is ‘bother’.”

 

As another vampire lunged at him, she stabbed swiftly with the stake and was already wincing as she withdrew it. “I know! I know! It’s a reflex. I see fanged things trying to eat my friends I tend to kill them first and ask questions later.”

 

Giles flicked the dust from his jacket. “I think you may need to raise that ‘bother’ to a ‘bugger’ and hope that Wesley had a little more luck finding a live one.”