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[elgrey]

Darkness Visible, Part Six

Angel woke with a jolt to a pounding pain in his head that could only mean one thing. When he tried to move, his iron-weighted limbs – stiff from being held in the same position – and the unmistakable clink of chains, confirmed it. Tranquilliser – the velvet cosh that sliced straight through the brain. He blinked to try to clear his vision and saw streaked walls; figures at the end of a smeary tunnel, a Gunn-sized blur and beside him a bright-red-clad green-headed blur that must be Lorne. There was something shadowy in the corner that smelt of tobacco, topped with obnoxiously yellow hair, which could only be Spike.

 

He flexed his body experimentally and found that the chains seemed to be everywhere, and although he had probably been in a fight, for once he seemed to have had the best of it. Only the knuckles on his right hand were sore, although there was a burn on the back of his hand, and, oddly enough, his cock felt rubbed and dry as if…

 

Memory hit him like a discus to the throat and he gasped around the horror of it. Wesley. The feel of his fist colliding with Wesley’s jaw, cheekbone, ribs… Ripping his clothes…“No… No… No… Tell me I didn’t…? Lorne…?”

 

The green demon advanced cautiously. “I'm here.”

 

Angel looked around for another blur, blinking furiously to clear his vision. “Where’s Wes? Is he okay? Is he here? I dreamt it, right? Like those murders Penn did. Tell me it was just a nightmare!” If his hands had been free he would have grabbed Lorne by the lapels.

 

He smelt nicotine and a familiar voice said, “It was real. Are you you?”

 

Memories were still hitting him like shrapnel; grabbing Wesley by the hair, slamming him into the wall, throwing him onto the table, punching him, kicking him, throwing him onto the bed, tearing off his clothes, tying him up, jamming a knee between his legs, then… No, this couldn’t be real because if it was real then he’d beaten and raped his friend.

 

“Not Wesley,” he whispered.

 

“He’s alive.” That was Gunn, voice grim but some compassion showing through.

 

Angel swallowed and realized with horror that he could still taste human blood in his mouth – Wesley’s blood.

 

“I fed from him…”

 

“He’s okay.” Spike grimaced. “Well, no, he’s not. But like Gunn said, he’s alive, he’s got all his fingers and toes and he can still walk and talk.”

 

“What I did to him…” He closed his eyes, not caring about the headache, just feeling every sensation now, the blood in his mouth, the ache of his knuckles, the sore feeling in his cock, blood from biting into Wesley’s neck, knuckles aching from beating him half to death, cock rubbed and dry from all that at-the-time agreeable friction as he thrust into Wesley’s bound and resisting body, now spent from all those climaxes.

 

“He’ll get over it,” Spike said quietly.

 

“I won’t.” Angel kept his eyes closed.

 

“Angel, you need to sing for me,” Lorne added. “For what it’s worth, I need to find out if it’s the real you. Not that I’ve proven myself to be exactly infallible on that score over the years but I think it’s worth trying…”

 

Angel sang mechanically: “ ‘I’ve got a ticket to the moon. I’ll be leaving here any day soon…’ ”

 

“It’s him.” Lorne didn’t sound triumphant. “As far as my empathic abilities can tell, it’s Angel complete with soul.”

 

“You don’t know what I did to him,” Angel said quietly.

 

“We have a pretty good idea,” Gunn returned.

 

“So why didn’t you stake me?”

 

“I wanted to. Wes wouldn’t let me.”

 

Lorne took a deep breath. “Look, Angelcakes, I know things look bad right now, but you’ve got plenty of practice at living with the guilt.”

 

“Having done lots of incredibly evil things doesn’t make it any easier to live with when you do a few more,” Angel said through his teeth. “When I came back from hell I promised myself that Jenny Calendar was going to be the last friend I killed. I told Cordy and I told Wes that if it came down to them or me they had to stake me. He should have staked me.”

 

Spike shrugged. “Don’t think you gave him much chance, mate. He didn’t know you’d turned evil before you were already in the room and after that he was too busy being your punching bag to get the chance to stake anyone. And maybe it’s just as well. This way you’re both alive, and, like Lorne says, you wake up every morning with the blood of innocents on your hands, a few more splatters shouldn’t make that much difference.”

 

“This isn’t about me.” Angel yanked at the chains angrily. “This is about Wesley. This is about what I did to him being the last thing on earth he needed. This is about someone who has already been through far too much crap I should have protected him from.” He slammed his head back on the pillow. “Wesley didn’t deserve this. He should never have had to go through this.”

 

"And your other victims did?" Spike demanded.

 

“Wes is tough.” Gunn took a step towards him. “He’s dealing with it – a damned sight better than any of the rest of us are anyway.”

 

Spike added levelly: “He knew what he signed up for.”

 

“Not for this!” Angel snapped back.

 

“He’s an ex-Watcher. He’d read your file. He knew what you used to be – what you were capable of becoming again. It was a risk that came with the job.”

 

Angel closed his eyes, flooded with memories, sharp as the slashes of a knife, his fists bruising Wesley’s face and body, the vicious way he’d tossed him onto the bed as if he weighed nothing, signified nothing; that leering pleasure Angelus had taken in first carrying out that brutal assault and then the sound of his own voice taunting Wesley with what he’d done to him. “Whatever you think you know I did – the reality was worse.”

 

Gunn gritted his teeth. “Wesley doesn’t want to talk about it and if I'm honest, neither do we.”

 

Angel tried to find some focus but he had a lurid snuff movie running through his head on a permanent loop. “How come I have my soul back?”

 

“Magic.” Lorne moved closer and there was compassion in his voice and expression that was missing entirely from the other two. “Wesley cast a spell that made the soul-eater give up all its latest meals – your soul included.”

 

“Did you kill it?”

 

“Deader than hell,” Spike assured him. “Way deader actually. Hell had a lot more life in it as I recall.”

 

“Is there a corpse I can kick?”

 

Spike lifted his right foot so Angel could see the slime encrusted on the toe of his boot. “Already kicked.”

 

Lorne sighed. “And, Angel, we all know that isn’t really who you want to be kicking, but beating yourself up isn’t going to solve anything.”

 

“It would feel pretty good to me right now.”

 

“It isn’t what Wesley wants.” Spike lit another cigarette. “Not sure why not, but he’s got it fixed in his head that you and your evil twin are two entirely separate entities and you don’t have to take the rap for anything Angelus does. Not sure I agree with him but after what he’s been through it only seemed polite to humour him. So, how about you do the same?”

 

Gunn looked across at Lorne. “Are we going to unchain him or what?”

 

“He feels like Angel to me.”

 

“To me too. I was just checking.” Gunn moved over to the bed. “Angel, I'm going to unchain you now, but if you’re still Angelus, let me tell you straight out, I'm going to ram a stake into your gnarly-ass beef jerky heart so fast you’re going to choke on your own dust.”

 

“Where’s Wesley?” Angel pressed, hardly caring as Spike, Gunn and Lorne began to unloop the chains that bound him to the bed. “Is he in the hospital?”

 

“In your bathroom.” A shadow passed across Gunn’s face. “He needed to take a shower or six.”

 

Angel closed his eyes and kept them closed as they pulled at chains and unlocked padlocks and cuffs from his wrists and ankles. He could feel where the metal had bitten in but it wasn’t enough; he wanted to self-mutilate; to stick knives into his body and then yank out the blade for the pleasure of the pain-scream in his nerves, the drip of his blood.

 

“We can get through this.” Lorne tentatively touched his shoulder. “All of us. We just have to remember that Angelus is something that happens to everyone, including you. I’m not saying we won’t need a few Sea Breezes and perhaps some serious therapy and a paid vacation in the Algarve but…” He glanced uncertainly at Gunn as he said it and Angel realized that Gunn was having the most trouble accepting that. Right now he had some trouble accepting it himself.

 

“Look,” Spike shrugged. “You’ve said it enough times yourself. You get vamped, a demon takes up residence in your body. It has your memories but it isn’t you. You and me, we’re neither one thing nor the other. We’re kind of us and we’re kind of not. We’re not who we used to be. Not human. Not those people. But we’re not the demon any more either. The soul drives out the demon or keeps it imprisoned inside. Then we’re like the demon was, right? We have the memories of what the demon did and felt but that doesn’t make us them. Isn’t that how it works?”

 

“I don’t know how it works,” Angel said tersely. “Maybe some darkness is innate, like Darla told me. Maybe you get the demon you deserve.”

 

Spike rolled his eyes. “Well, I was a poet, mate. My only crimes against humanity were to do with a lack of scansion in some of my iambic pentameter. That didn’t stop me turning into a vicious serial killing bastard once I was offed and the demon was in residence. Don’t see why it should be different for you.”

 

Angel glanced at him briefly. “You had a good teacher.”

 

Spike conceded the point with a shrug. “So did you.”

 

“Spike’s right,” Lorne said quickly. “You didn’t choose the demon you were stuck with, Angel, and Angelus isn’t you.”

 

“But maybe Angelus chose me because he knew he’d be right at home here. You remember what I said to Wes the last time Angelus came out to play? ‘Foul rag and bone shop of the heart. That’s where you live.’ Well, maybe that’s where I live. Maybe it’s where I’ve always lived.” He thought of a match dropping onto a pool of gasoline; Darla and Drusilla burning. The dead lawyers behind the door he’d locked from the outside.

 

“Do you need blood?” Lorne asked, still fluttering slightly, as if he were Switzerland and there was a world war brewing.

 

Angel closed his eyes again, remembering his fangs piercing the thin skin of Wesley’s deliciously warm scarred throat, not even hungry, just wanting him to feel it, the terrifying bleed of life, the chill spreading through him, the heaviness in his limbs, too weak to fight back and unconsciousness wrapping him in a deadening shroud; Angel still thrusting into him as he drank; Wesley’s body only relaxing against the onslaught at last as darkness from the draining blood loss claimed him… “I think I’ve had enough,” he said bitterly.

 

 

Gunn got as far as the bathroom door but didn’t quite have the courage to turn the handle. It was bound to be locked anyway, he knew that, even though he’d diffidently suggested to Wesley that after the blood loss he’d suffered he might faint if he had the water too hot, a reminder about sitting down if he heard a hissing in his ears, leaving the door unlocked, shouting for Gunn if he felt dizzy at all. Wesley had just nodded silently and then disappeared into Angel’s bathroom, the sound of the shower running a moment later preventing the possibility of further conversation.

 

On their way back from dismembering the soul-eating demon, they had tried to persuade Wesley to let them take him to a hospital. He had refused, not just with quiet determination but with a flicker of panic in his eyes that had silenced Gunn more effectively than the most eloquent reassurance of his good health. He and Lorne had exchanged a glance and both had to silently acknowledge that even leaving aside Wesley’s personal unwillingness to have anyone examine him there were also good sound reasons for keeping Wesley away from anything that might spark an official investigation. And if they took him to a hospital in his current condition the hospital was going to ask a lot of difficult questions. He was already on record as having been nearly killed in an explosion, nearly killed by a gunshot wound, and nearly killed from a slashed throat. Angel had brought him in after the explosion, Angel had been turned away by Cordelia when he tried to visit Wesley after the gunshot wound, and Angel had tried to suffocate him after the slashed throat. If you added to all of that, evidence of a brutal beating coupled with an equally brutal sexual assault, the doctors were going to send for the police. Wesley would deny it later, of course, but anyone who didn’t put a note on his casefile at that point that he was looking increasingly like the victim of the kind of domestic violence that was eventually going to end in a fatality just wasn’t doing his job right as a detective.

 

Perhaps worse than that from his perspective, they were going to put all his injuries on a record that Wolfram & Hart or any other nasty could probably access. That perhaps the rebuilt Watcher’s Council could access. That perhaps his father might find out about. Gunn winced in sympathy just at the thought.

 

Spike had chosen to be the one to lay it on the line. “Look, mate.” He turned around in the passenger seat and looked at Wesley steadily. “No one wants to put you through any more crap than you’ve already been through, okay? But, if it comes down to you dying of peritonitis or getting asked some difficult questions by a junior doctor, you need to make sure you’ve got your priorities straight.”

 

Wesley had sighed in that world weary way he had which sometimes made him appear older than any other person on the planet, including the undead legions of darkness. “There’s no danger of… Angelus was…” It quite quickly became obvious that he had no method of finishing that sentence.

 

Spike persisted and even as he cringed, Gunn was grateful to him as it meant he didn’t have to. “Angelus – not big on the foreplay, as I recall. Much keener on the inflicting as much pain as possible.”

 

“Not this time.” Wesley took a deep breath. “He – wanted me to live. He therefore took pains not to really…injure me… It was all…surface. No trauma. I just need… I just want a shower.” Then he had so obviously been about to hurl if anyone made him talk about it any more that even Spike shrugged and gave it up.

 

“All right, have it your way. We don’t talk about it. We don’t make you see a doctor – as long as you don’t get a fever. But if your temperature goes up one lousy degree I'm knocking you out and taking you to the ER myself. Got it?”

 

Wesley nodded. “Understood.”

 

As a compromise they had stopped off at an all-night pharmacy and Gunn had bought Wesley a family sized bottle of double strength Ibuprofen and some Coke to wash it down. For all his claims to be not really injured, when Gunn wordlessly held out two pills them and then opened the Coke can, Wesley had taken and swallowed them without a protest. Wesley had fallen asleep in the car then, which was good, as it meant they could pull in to his apartment without him knowing about it, Gunn taking the stairs two at a time up to the trashed place, grabbing some clothes and Wesley’s toothbrush and razor then stashing them out of sight before Wesley woke up. It had been tacitly agreed amongst them that he was not going back to that place for a good long time, certainly not alone, and never to sleep again. There were a million other apartments in LA and in none of them had Wesley been held prisoner by Angelus.

 

“He looks like shit,” Spike muttered as he looked in the rearview mirror at the man slumped in the back seat, Wesley’s head on Lorne’s immaculately pressed shoulder, the green demon’s arm protectively curled around his shoulders.

 

“Being treated like shit will do that to you,” Gunn also glanced at him. The bruises didn’t look any better in the raking strobes of neon light that intermittently blared across the back seat. Lorne was humming something under his breath that was low and soothing enough to qualify as a lullaby. Gunn wondered if Lorne was working some gentle hex to keep Wesley sleeping through this journey back. When Wesley had been awake, every time they had gone over a bump in the road he had winced, just the way he had when he’d been shot in the gut, and Gunn had felt his rage levels spiral dangerously close to bursting through the top of his head. They could all smell Angelus on him. And the bruises were just getting darker and angrier; the cut across his lip looking as if it might break open again any minute; the one on his forehead and cheekbone still shiny with unshed blood.

 

He hadn’t woken up until they drew up outside the office, stirring sleepily, the little boy bed hair something that on any other occasion Gunn would have said looked really cute. But as Wesley opened his eyes he winced, disorientated, clasping a hand to his abdomen and then putting the back of his hand up to his split lip, only then did he seem to remember and the flinch had been violent. For a second Gunn had seen the inner conflict Wesley was still processing, how he really felt, deer-in-headlights panic as he felt the world spiralling away from him, but then Wesley blinked and became aware of them all looking at him. Lorne gently helping him to sit up straight, Spike saying tersely, “All right, mate?” Gunn just looking and probably everything he was feeling right there on his face for Wesley to see it.

 

It was Gunn that Wesley answered, even though he hadn’t spoken, looking into his eyes and saying, “I'm okay. Just a bit… I'm fine.”

 

Lorne took a deep breath. “Well, cupcakes, I guess this is when we find out if our esteemed leader has come back to us an angel or a demon.”

 

“He’s come back as both.” Wesley winced again as he got out of the car but waved aside Gunn’s offer of help. “Until he Shanshus Angel doesn’t have a lot of choice about the demon part.” The look he gave Gunn was intense, as if willing the man to get something. Gunn got it. He just didn’t like it. He guessed Rondell would have asked him what else he expected when he worked for a vampire? But he hadn’t actually expected this. Not even when Angelus had been sleazing his way around that cage in the basement of the Hyperion. Gunn had worried for Fred and he’d worried for Cordy, but he’d never picked up on the signals that said there could come a time when he would be having to do this: grab Wesley’s elbow on the sidewalk as the man got that hissing in his ears again, swaying palely under his darkening bruises as the urge to hurl had to once again firmly be repressed.

 

For all Wesley’s words, Gunn thought it was significant that on their return to the basement, Wesley hadn’t been able to look at Angel, just diving straight for the shower, while the rest of them had taken up their vigil positions around him, weapons at the ready.

 

Now that Angel was unchained, Gunn wanted to check up on Wesley again, make sure he hadn’t passed out in there, and perhaps also glad of any excuse not to be in the room with the person who had – kind of – done this to his friend. He didn’t know why he still thought of Wesley as his friend, after the way the guy had stabbed him, but he did, and he got now why Wesley had forgiven Angel everything after he’d tried to smother him in the hospital, why he’d just gone out patiently every night and tried to find him, but harboured anger towards Gunn. He’d thought it was because of Fred but he realized now it had something to do with justice. Wesley had thought Angel’s rage, even his murderous rage, towards him was just. He had thought Gunn’s anger was unjust and responded accordingly. Gunn got that now. What Wes had done to him had been pretty bad, but as he agreed with the guy that he deserved it, he couldn’t harbour resentment. So, yes, Wes was still his friend and he was mad as hell at what had been done to that friend, and however many times he reminded himself that it wasn’t Angel, that Angel himself had been a helpless bystander unable to lift a finger, a part of him wondered why the vampire’s love for his friends didn’t give him strength enough to overwhelm Angelus. Wondered why he hadn’t found a way to do something to stop Angelus from doing what he’d done to Wesley.

 

Angel is his soul, Gunn. Without the soul, there is no Angel. It’s as simple as that.

 

It was only as simple as that if you were Wesley. Gunn thought it was a lot more complicated.

 

Still hesitating outside the bathroom door he listened for the sound of the shower and there was no noise of running water. Perhaps Wesley had finally managed to use enough soap to wash away the scent of Angelus. Or –

 

Then he heard it – faint but unmistakable – the sound of a man crying; trying to stifle it, certainly, but unable to hold it back any longer, body-shaking wracking misery of sobs. He reached for the door handle at once and then held off, because what could he do to make this better? Wesley wouldn’t want someone to put his arms around him and tell him it was going to be okay. He would want no one to know that he was crying. No one to know that what had been done to him had devastated him so completely. Feeling like a coward and a crappy friend but knowing all the same that he was doing the right thing, Gunn backed away silently and went back into the basement.

 

 

“I should have told you.” Angel still looked as ill as Gunn felt and he suspected that nothing he said was going to make the rest of them feel any less nauseated either.

 

Thinking of Wesley crying in that bathroom roughened his temper. “Told us what? That Angelus is a sick creep? We already knew that.”

 

Angel met his gaze. “That he would keep Wesley alive, come what may. I knew what his intentions were after the last visit, I just… I didn’t think he would be coming back. I didn’t think it mattered what he wanted as he wouldn’t be getting it anyway.”

 

“What does he want?” Lorne asked quietly.

 

Spike was still standing in the corner with his arms folded, not helping. Gunn didn’t know if he was sharing some of the guilt here as a previously soulless demon who had also committed his share of stomach-churning crimes, or distancing himself from Angelus’s recent spree.

 

“His plan last year was that he turned Faith but left Wesley human, then the two of them kept Wes as a pet.” His disgust with the demon within him flickered briefly on his face but then he went on quietly: “Angelus and Faith would take Wesley back to their lair, torture him for kicks, then keep him chained up in a corner so that when they brought their victims home there would be someone with a soul to bear witness to just how evil they were being. Someone left alive at the end to keep hearing those screams. Someone they could drive mad just like Angleus – I – drove Drusilla mad, only keep him human, keep him warm-blooded and breakable and with no escape from his soul so he’d feel everything that much more acutely.

 

“Vampires like families and Angelus likes to keep in touch with the people who matter to me, so he would have come after all of you, picked you off one by one. Would have killed Connor because he was too dangerous to keep alive. Would have turned you, Gunn, because you’d be such an asset as a soulless killer and what worse thing could anyone do to you than turn you into one after you’ve spent your whole life fighting the undead? Wesley would have to witness that as well, of course, what I’d done to you, what you’d become. Fred he would have kept human to rape, to share with Gunn, to rape some more, to make Wesley watch everything they did to her. Same with Cordelia, although her I think he might have turned. I don’t think he’d made up his mind which would be the most fun with her. But Wesley always got to stay human and he always got to stay alive and to keep on suffering until he could find a way to kill himself.”

 

There was a long silence before Angel raised his head and looked at Gunn. “I should have told you that before. I'm sorry. It wasn’t something I was exactly eager to share.”

 

Grimly Gunn said, “I get that.”

 

“So, the next time I turn into Angelus, stake me first, ask questions later. Okay?”

 

“No.”

 

Gunn turned to see Wesley had emerged from the bathroom and was now wearing Angel’s robe and towelling his hair with Angel’s towel as if nothing could have been more normal between them. More than normal, come to think of it, Gunn realized, as that wasn’t something Wesley usually did even when he was borrowing Angel’s shower gel after pulling an all-nighter. Wesley was making a point here, which was that he was so okay with Angel he was going to act way more okay with him than usual. His eyes did look a little red but that could be accounted for by the shampoo, and Gunn didn’t think that anyone except him would know about the man’s temporary breakdown. The bruises on his face still looked spectacular, the finger-marks even more visible around his throat, while the bite-mark had evidently started oozing again. The cuts and contusions didn’t look any better after an application of soap and water but the blue robe wrapped tightly around his body did at least hide the multi-coloured bruises marking him elsewhere.

 

“You can’t rely on us to kill you until all other possibilities have been exhausted, Angel.”

 

The vampire looked at his face and flinched violently, every bruise on display clearly hitting him as hard as Angelus had hit the Englishman. “Oh my god, Wes…”

 

In the face of Angel’s aghast horror, Wesley briefly faltered then he was coming forward to join them all as if nothing had happened.

 

“I'm so sorry…” Angel breathed and the ache in his voice made Gunn close his eyes briefly, too much confirmation in that tone of just how bad it had got back there and how Angel and Wesley must equally be remembering every moment of it.

 

“Can we not talk about it?” Wesley’s voice was clipped but there was a tremor just beneath the surface. “You were discussing Angelus’s future plans and why for some reason you think that makes you a candidate for the pointy wood. As I was saying, you can hardly expect us to kill you out of hand unless there is no other option open to us.”

 

Angel was still gazing at the cuts and bruises marking Wesley’s face. “Didn’t you just hear what I said?”

 

“Yes, I heard what you said. It doesn’t make any difference, except that we now know my life was actually in less danger than I originally supposed when Angelus turned up at my flat.”

 

Gunn waited until Wesley had sat down on the bed before addressing him. “You’d stake me, right? If it went down like Angel said Angelus had planned. If I was a vamp, you’d stake me before I could…”

 

“I’d probably try to get your soul back.”

 

Gunn gritted his teeth. “But you wouldn’t have the option, Wesley, because in Angelus’ Master Plan you’re the first one he captures, remember?”

 

“But I might escape. I rather think I would escape eventually. When you’re being drunk on your own evil, how carefully do you really check your prisoners’ bonds?” Seeing their expressions, Wesley sighed. “If Fred had still been alive it would be different. If Cordelia… If it came to a vampire version of you or Angelus raping either of them, of course I would stake you before I’d let that happen, but as they’re no longer an issue, we would actually have more time to try to get you both back.”

 

“Get me back?” Gunn echoed in disbelief. “I’d be dead. I’d be gone, Wes.”

 

“Angel’s dead. He’s technically ‘gone’. I'm sorry that the person he used to be was murdered in an alley all those years ago. I'm sorry that he has to carry the burden of all Angelus’s crimes. But I wouldn’t rather wish that someone had staked him two hundred years ago just so he can know eternal peace. I’d rather he was here, with us, helping us fight the bad things in this city. And the same goes for you. I'm sorry, Charles, but it does. The first thing I’d do is get your soul back and only then if you still wanted it would I think about staking you. You’re too valuable to kill out of hand.” There was a pause before Wesley added quietly: “And although I mean valuable to the people who need help, I also mean valuable to me. Vampires aren’t the only people who need families. And you’re mine. You and Angel and Lorne are the only family I have left now. Well…” he shrugged, “who actually give a damn about me, as opposed to being related to me and so having to phone me on my birthday to remind me of all my failings.”

 

“Wes, what I did to you…” Angel broke off, evidently unwilling to have this conversation here, in front of everyone else. Gunn could certainly relate to that and it certainly wasn’t fair on Wesley to reveal all the sordid details of Angelus’ treatment of him. “I'm so sorry for what I did to you.”

 

“You didn’t do anything to me.” Wesley didn’t meet his eye. “It was Angelus.”

 

Angel gritted his teeth. “Then I'm sorry for what Angelus did to you.”

 

“Don’t be. You’re not him.”

 

Angel’s turn to count to five. “Wesley…”

 

“You’re the one who said you weren’t going to apologize for what Angelus did the last time we let him out of the box. You were right then and you’re right now. You’re not responsible for his actions. If you want to spend your life atoning for his past crimes, that’s your decision and as you do a lot of good that way, I support that decision. But you haven’t done a damned thing to me, Angel, and I'm not accepting an apology from you for something you didn’t do.”

 

Angel got to his feet and looked pointedly at the others. “Wes and I need to talk.”

 

Even Spike, never the most tactful person in the world, got that this meant they had to leave now. Only as Gunn stood up did he realize that he had a problem with leaving Wesley alone with Angel. He knew it was irrational and unjust, but leaving matters of soul and no soul out of it there had only been one physical body in the room along with Wesley when Wesley had been kicked all round the room and raped. For a moment he felt frozen with an instinctive mistrust of Angel that overrode his intellectual trust of him.

 

Wesley said gently, “Charles…”

 

Gunn winced and felt his lower back as if that was the only reason for his hesitation. “Damned demons. How come they never kick you where it doesn’t hurt?”

 

Spike elbowed himself off the wall and left without a word, his gaze went briefly to Wesley, and Gunn remembered belatedly that Wesley hadn’t included him in his ‘family’ members. He doubted it had been an intentional oversight. That just wasn’t how Wesley thought of him yet. Perhaps mentally they were all still back in the Hyperion. If he was honest, he didn’t think of Spike as part of the family either yet but he couldn’t deny his usefulness. The only one of them who had been able to match Angelus for speed and savagery when they needed it had been Spike and it was thanks to him Wesley hadn’t ended up a hostage again.

 

As the blond vampire headed for the door, Angel said, “Thanks,” to him. 

 

Spike didn’t say ‘For what?’ he just glanced briefly at Wesley before saying, “You’re welcome.” After a slight pause, he added: “And any other time you want me to stick you full of tranquillisers, Angel, mate, I'm your vamp. Always be a pleasure.”