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The Tea Shop Detectives

 

Story One: Harrogate

 

I wanted to see the faces of the dead while they were living.

Adrienne Rich

 

1: Los Angeles

 

It was raining; a freezing drenching downpour that made the summer-warmed pavements steam with residual heat. The air crackled, not just with the unspent energy of a lightning storm, but with the sizzle of dark magic. The last time Giles had smelled air that smouldered with so much brimstone and sorcery, Buffy had swallow-dived to her death from a tower of twisted metal.

 

Beside him, Willow’s green eyes were focused on something he could sense, but not actually see. Like the streets of Los Angeles tonight, Willow was drenched in magic; it was in her bones and her blood, as incurable and unalterable as an n-stage cancer. She could never be who she had been before that absolute contamination of her being by dark magic, but although it had brought her to the brink of destroying the world, it was also enabling her to do the impossible now.

 

“He’s in here.”

 

The house was gothic, imposing. Exactly the sort of home one would expect a warlock to choose.

 

“There will be any number of wards, Willow…” Giles began.

 

She waved a hand, almost dismissively, and he felt the protection spells vanish, rendered as useless as torn cobwebs. He was not sure how much power she was using to do all that she had done since they had both realized that something terribly wrong was happening in Los Angeles. Something had lent them its magic, it was true, but Willow was the conduit chosen and she had already used magic of unheard of power to get them here, and now she was using more to find what remained of Angel and his people.

 

“I’m being helped,” she had explained, as she grabbed Giles’ hand just before they were transported in a way that was entirely impossible to these rainy streets.

 

“By whom? By what?”

 

“I don’t know. But I don’t think it will last for very long.”

 

There was no time now to worry about what this was doing to Willow or in what condition it would leave her when this magical assistance was so abruptly withdrawn. They had both been asleep in their own rooms in the coven in England when the vision had hit them simultaneously with the subtlety of an oncoming truck. He had seen the advancing horde of demons, the darkness behind them of fifty thousand more, converging on the human world in an unstoppable tide. He had been out of a bed in an instant, throwing on any clothes that came to hand, and then had darted out into the corridor to rouse the coven, which was when Willow had emerged from her room with a scared but resolute expression and said: “We have to go now or it will be too late.”

 

They knew things they had no way of knowing; not coherent or neatly assembled, a confusion of information, a baby they both knew was Angel’s son, a baby called Connor, although when Giles had gone to sleep only a few hours before he had known for a fact that Angel had never had a son, that he could not possibly, biologically, have a son; and then the memory had returned of a phone call to Sunnydale and Buffy wandering around in a daze wondering how it could be possible that the man who had left her because they could never have a family together now had a family of his own. Wesley had taken the baby to save it and lost it to Angel’s enemy, and almost died, and the child had returned, an angry teenager. Cordelia had been possessed by a rogue higher power. Angel had taken the position as CEO of Wolfram & Hart – the position that Giles had not been able to comprehend any good reason for anyone on the side of Good to ever accept – because it was the only way to save Connor and Cordelia. Connor’s timeline had been rewritten by the skill of a warlock of terrible power. A warlock called Cyrus Vail. Angel was going to try to bring down the Black Thorn, an attempt that would cause Wolfram & Hart to unleash the forces of its demon army on the frail unreadiness of the human world.

 

“How do we know this?” Giles demanded tersely, wishing he had snatched up a weapon before they embarked on this impossible journey through space and, quite possibly, time.

 

“Because we need to?” Willow eased open a door that creaked as if it had beaten out all manner of competition for the role of nail-studded entrance to an evil warlock’s dark lair. “Because we need to know this to help and someone wanted us to help.”

 

“Who wants us to help and why?”

 

Willow switched on a light and it felt incongruous, the chandelier shining on that red and black chequered floor. It should be lit exclusively by shadow-casting candles; the room smoky with the flicker of sputtering wicks and the hiss of heated wax. “I don’t think the apocalypse was meant to happen today. I don’t think some of the people who died were meant to die. I don’t think it was their time to be taken.”

 

Giles looked at the red and black flags beneath his feet and understood. The ancient forces of Good and Evil arrayed against one another, striving to maintain balance. “It’s a chess game. Black had the king in checkmate so White has used its queen.” He gazed at Willow, her red hair like molten copper in the light of the swinging chandelier. “The piece that can move in any direction across the board.”

 

“The Powers have sent back the demons they didn’t summon and claimed the ones they call their champions. I think they have other tasks for them.” Willow pushed open double doors as if she were steeling herself for what lay on the other side of them.

 

Giles put a hand up to his head. “Then why…? Why are we here? What’s left for us to do?”

 

“They may have realized they shouldn’t have used the humans too. Or perhaps they felt they owed them or…” Willow snatched a deep breath. “Or Cordelia called in some old debts…”

 

That was when he saw the bodies. The red-skinned papery remnant of what had been, until very recently, a demon, exploded fragments of something that looked like crimson ash where its head had evidently once been. Cyrus Vail. He knew that, although it made no sense that he should do so, but apparently it was important that he should realize there was not only no way of saving this one, but no reason to do so either. The second body was human, blood from a vicious wound in the gut having left a crimson puddle around the still warm corpse. The face was marked with blood around his right eye and on his forehead, a gush having clearly welled from his mouth. He was immediately recognizable, but the wide unblinking stare was undoubtedly that of a dead man.

 

“Wesley…” It hurt so much more than he had expected.

 

Willow was already running. She flung herself down by the man and took his left hand in hers, placing her right palm on his forehead. “Wesley, you have to come back,” she said with a quiet note of authority in her voice that Giles had rarely heard before.

 

He crouched down next to them and placed his hand at the man’s throat. The skin was still warm, but there was no pulse. “Willow, he’s gone…” Wesley looked peaceful, despite everything – the proof in the shattered furniture and bloodstains that his death had been violent and undoubtedly painful – yet he seemed calm, quite ready to move on.

 

“His soul hasn’t left yet. He’s still intact. He can come back.”

 

Giles closed his eyes, thinking of Buffy ripped out of heaven, denied the peace she had undoubtedly earned. He had never seen anyone look more in need of a rest than Wesley looked now. “We don’t have the right.”

 

“He wasn’t meant to die.” Willow tightened her grip on his hand and began to incant words that Giles didn’t recognize or even understand. He thought about telling her again that she absolutely mustn’t do this, but the thought was overwhelmed with the question of how was she doing this? It wasn’t possible to bring someone back from the dead by will alone. Not even Willow, with all her extra powers, was capable of that. Healing a mortal wound before life had ebbed, perhaps, but not this. This was impossible. And yet it was happening, which meant that some greater power than Willow must be lending her its will.

 

“Giles, I have to do this.” She seemed to understand all the doubts he hadn’t voiced as she laced her fingers through Wesley’s. Giles snatched his own hand away from the man’s body; knowing that in some matters her authority was greater than his. He had been swept up in whatever magical whirlwind had transported them here to be her assistant, perhaps, or her witness. She knew more than he did, which in this instant, perhaps meant that she was the one in charge.

 

Willow’s words were louder, clearer, the world beginning to give way to her will with a warning crackle of static electricity. Giles felt his hair stand on end, his skin prickle; it was like being trapped in the midst of the Northern Lights. He saw Willow’s eyes turn black, and then her hair glow white as any star. She was still holding Wesley’s hand. There was a burst of blinding light and an energy so powerful that Giles was flung halfway across the room, the oxygen driven from his lungs, the air singed all around him. He snatched a breath and saw that the light had faded and Willow’s hair was red again, her eyes green, and Wesley’s eyes were open, not in a death-stare, but a blinking attempt to focus that left him gazing at her in utter confusion. In the same instant, Giles felt the power that had guided them here leave them as abruptly as it had found them, gasping as he felt himself suddenly bereft of the clarity and certainty that had guided them so far.

 

“It’s okay, Wesley,” Willow told him gently. “I’m sorry I called you back. But you’re needed here.” Her hand was shaking violently with exhaustion, her face pale and clammy with a cold sweat.

 

“Cordelia…” he gasped, and then with a note of even more breathless confusion: “Fred…?”

 

Willow tightened her grip on his hand. “Wesley, it’s Willow. Do you remember…?”

 

He sat up, reaching for his side. Giles saw that there was a jagged cut there, still oozing blood. It looked in need of stitches but it was no longer a fatal injury, more like a vicious stab that had intended great harm yet done no more than cut along the surface; decidedly not the mortal wound of before. Wesley focused on Willow and then Giles and his eyes widened. “Angel.”

 

“Do you know where he is?” Willow pressed.

 

“He’s… the alley… We were supposed to meet in the alley…” And then he was up and staggering for the door. Giles caught his arm to support him, while Willow hurried to do the same.

 

Wesley snatched a breath, coughing violently, and then spitting blood into his hand in bemusement.

 

Giles gripped his shoulders to steady him. “What was Angel trying to do?”

 

Wesley looked as if he were having trouble remembering. “Make a stand, make a difference, make it stop, even for a second, just to stop the wheels from turning.” He still looked as if he wasn’t even sure who they were and Giles tightened his grip on him, feeling as if the man were a will-o-the-wisp at present, someone barely back in the mortal world, mind possibly elsewhere, spirit undoubtedly wounded. Wesley gazed at him without a single glimmer of recognition and said: “I have to find Angel.”

 

Giles personally thought it would make more sense to take Wesley straight to the hospital to have his still-bleeding wound sewn up, not to mention the blood in his lungs from when the wound had been mortal suctioned out, but he was relentless as an insane asylum inmate with an idée fixe. He moved with as little coordination as any Hammer Horror Igor lurching towards his master and Giles realized that his legs were numb from lying there dead, muscles set in the first inactivity that had swept through his body as it prepared for rigor mortis. That he had been dead and was now alive seemed to be of less importance to Wesley than that he was late for his meeting with Angel and the others in the alley behind the Hyperion. With a jolt of realization Giles wondered if Wesley thought he was dead but still wanted to make that meeting place, presumably so they could all move on to some kind of afterlife together.

 

The rain was drenching and more of a shock after the temporary relief of being in Vail’s mansion. It washed the old blood from Wesley’s face, and the new blood from his lips when he coughed up clots of arterial fluid that would have congealed in his corpse without their intervention. He didn’t seem surprised or in any way concerned by the quantities of blood he was coughing into his hand and then wiping heedlessly on his jeans, just blinking the rain from his eyes and running as well as he could with his body aching and confused by his jolt from life to death and then back again.

 

As they rounded the corner to the alley, Giles was half expecting the demon hordes of the apocalypse to be waiting for them, but there were just those gunmetal blue slants of rain, the ground spitting up spray from the impact as if riddled with machine-gun fire. Neon drowned in shivering reflective puddles and the scent of brimstone was so strong here that the air reeked of sulphur, a tarry catch in the back of the throat. Giles saw Willow wince as they rounded the corner, the impact of dark magic hitting her the hardest. She was wraith-pale and looked exhausted, no longer borne on that magical current of certainty that had guided her to Vail’s mansion. Giles suspected her legs were feeling as liquorice-like as Wesley’s, the huge effort needed to drag even a recently departed soul back from the dead taking a toll on her with each extra step.

 

Wesley staggered a little as the sulphurous rain of the alley washed over him but then forged on, breaking free from their supportive grip and running better now, the confusion of the world he had left and rejoined receded to the simplicity of one fixed idea.

 

“Angel…?” He shielded his eyes against the rain, turning circles before beginning to run down to the fence at the end. “Illyria?”

 

It looked as if there could possibly have been a battle here. It was hard to tell amidst the sound of the rain pouring in rivulets down the gutters, thundering onto discarded sheets of cardboard, rat-a-tatting a Sten gun rhythm onto overturned dustbins. Giles reached into his coat pockets and found the small torch he kept there for just such emergencies as these. When the thin beam shone onto the nearest puddle it revealed the water to be red.

 

“We’d never find dust here…” Willow looked around hopelessly, turning to Giles for confirmation. “I don’t… the power that carried us here, it’s gone.”

 

“I know. Perhaps we weren’t needed for anything else.”

 

“But he was so sure he had to come here…” She began to look between the dustbins. “As if someone gave him a message when he was…not alive.”

 

“He’s very confused – ” Giles broke off as Wesley abruptly spun around and ran towards another pile of refuse shadowed by the high wall.

 

“Gunn…!” Wesley flung himself down onto his hands and knees by someone he then cradled in his arms. “Gunn…?”

 

“Oh my goddess…” Willow was already running too.

 

Giles caught up as she felt the man’s neck. “He’s still alive…” she said breathlessly, “But only just.”

 

Giles helped her to pull back the man’s sodden jacket and there was the blood…lots of it, all over his sweatshirt. She pushed up the cloth and he grimaced at the wound, looking at her pale exhausted face in concern. “Can you…?”

 

“I’ll try.”

 

He suspected she had less than nothing left and reached into his pockets to see if he had a cellphone, realizing in time that, of course, his wouldn’t work here. Wesley was gazing anxiously at the unconscious man he held and Giles decided it would be quicker to just reach into his pockets and hope he found a phone. Wesley didn’t even notice as he rifled through one, pulled his jacket round and then snagged a mobile from his far pocket.

 

Giles was dialling 911 even as Willow snatched a breath, closed her eyes and then pressed her hand against Gunn’s bleeding wound. For a moment – a very brief moment – the magic surged around them, a purple swirl of crackling mist, and then Willow fell back, shaking and dripping with sweat. “I can’t… I don’t…” She snatched another breath and then pressed her hands against him again. The crackle was barely discernible this time, the weakest sizzle of magic in the air before she hung her head in exhaustion. “It may be enough. I don’t know. Tell the ambulance to hurry…”

 

Giles looked at Wesley, who had Gunn clasped anxiously in his arms, wiping the rain from his face as it fell even though more fell a moment later, still wiping it with his sleeve again and again. Wesley looked around the alley as if Angel would somehow magically appear and make everything better. “He said he’d be here,” he said. When he looked at Giles it was still with no glimmer of recognition. “Angel said he’d wait for us.”

 

Gazing at the two humans that were all that remained – barely – alive of Angel’s adopted family, Giles thought of the Christmas card the vampire had sent to them, a photograph they’d had taken for some flyer they were putting out: Angel in the centre holding the baby he’d been forced to give up; to his right, the girl Fred, who had later been hollowed out by the god-king Illyria, her corpse animated by the demonic power of her murderer; to her right, Cordelia, who had been tricked into giving birth to a rogue higher power, and burned out by the act of doing so, given one last glorious sputter of existence that had been a kind lie to help her friends; and to her right the anagogic demon whose livelihood had been destroyed by association with these people. To his left had been Wesley with a flamethrower and Gunn holding a crossbow. They had looked utterly united as Giles recalled, a family unbreachable and indivisible by any means, and now all that remained were two fragile half-dead humans bleeding in a rain-drenched alley.

 

Giles closed his eyes briefly, willing the next sound he heard to be the siren of the ambulance coming closer, Willow’s fingers now red-stained and slippery pressed to that wound of Gunn’s that was still oozing blood; Wesley cradling the man in his arms as if with him lay the last of all his certainties.

 

***

 

The ambulance had a whited sepulchre feel, shiny and antiseptic yet a place where death was always present. The vehicle blared at them through the slanting rain, a flashing light and dying siren above a square of brightness cut out of the wet night; men in blue shirts lifting Gunn onto a gurney and sliding him into place, the clatter of their shoes on the metal interior, the siren starting up again, a wail of warning that they were conveying the wounded as Gunn bled into sterile dressings and was force-fed oxygen through a mask. Willow’s red hair was dripping rainwater onto her coat, green eyes full of doubt and anxiety. She no longer looked like an instrument of ancient power, a witch with the power to undo death, just a worried young woman afraid that she had done the wrong thing.

 

The busy paramedics bombarded Giles with questions to which he had few answers. He was busy trying to keep Wesley out of their way, making him sit down where he wouldn’t be jolted onto the patient as they went around a corner. Willow said: “I don’t think I did enough. I didn’t have enough left to…” One of the paramedics looked over his shoulder at her and gave her a reassuring smile before going back to calling out Gunn’s vital signs to a driver who was giving their ETA to St. Matthews Hospital.

 

It was beginning to feel more rather than less unreal to Giles as time went on. He had to look down to see if he was still wearing his pyjamas; wondering if this could possibly be a particularly vivid dream. Perhaps someone had called them with news of what had happened in LA and this was his guilty conscience taking his subconscious for a walk. The fine details suggested this was reality though, and the way he could feel the bone of Wesley’s arm as he gripped it through his coat. The ambulance reeked of plastic, the stink of sterile dressings awaiting a crisis that had not yet occurred; Wesley smelt of sweat. No doubt he smelt of blood and pain as well, but Giles wasn’t Angel; he couldn’t pick up the metallic taste of mortality on the tip of his tongue. Only if Wesley had begun to rot could he have even said for certain that he smelled of death.

 

The ambulance roared on through the neon-lit streets while rain battered against blacked-out windows. A part of Giles was still listening for the wail of sirens, distant screams, the gunfire of a human populace being overwhelmed by the demon hordes he had seen so vividly in his mind. To him the air still had the carbine tang of a world post-battle; its edges singed by demonic flame; but no one else seemed in any way perturbed. Wesley – who would logically have had the clearest idea of what the Senior Partners had been likely to unleash upon them – seemed most indifferent of all, all his attention focused on the man on the gurney. Gunn looked frighteningly close to dead still yet did keep breathing in and out.

 

The brightness of the hospital interior was a shock after the rain-drenched exterior, the warmth a welcome relief, but the oblong lights overhead making their eyes water, Wesley blinking painfully, words and sounds coming at him from all directions in a way that clearly made no sense to him. Giles remembered Buffy telling him how long it had taken for the world to come back into focus again when she was dragged back from beyond the grave, everything smeared like a wet painting in the rain.

 

They were still having to hold onto Wesley to stop him stumbling, while he was still ignoring them, perhaps just finding them too confusing to deal with so shelving the fact of them until he had some mental space to deal with it. All his attention was focused on Gunn.

 

They were bombarded with questions about what had happened and why and to whom. Giles answered them as well as he could, trying to keep hold of Wesley while busy people in white coats clustered around Gunn, blocking Wesley’s view and making him crane his neck.

 

“Prepare the ER…”

 

A doctor turned to them. “There’s considerable blood loss. We’re going to have to prep him for surgery.”

 

Willow flinched beside him and he could see her trying to summon power she didn’t have, pale with exhaustion, shaking with what was quite possibly shock. Giles shook his head at her firmly and she reluctantly moved her outstretched fingers away from Gunn’s leg.

 

A doctor pulled Giles away from the throng, demanding more information. The lies came surprisingly easily: “There was a fight of some kind, we think. They were both stabbed. No, we weren’t with them although we were on our way to visit them. Wesley was unconscious when we found him, but regained consciousness quite soon afterwards.”

 

Wesley was pushed gently into sitting down on a bed in a cubicle, while, in front of them, people were still doing things to Gunn that looked urgent and frightening.

 

“Hello, Wesley. I just want to take a look at this wound. You seem to have lost a lot of blood.” Hands rendered alien by sterile gloves pulled up Wesley’s clothing and probed at his wound while Willow bit her lip anxiously. “I’d expect a deeper wound with all this blood loss.” The doctor gave Giles a look of relief. “I think your friend was lucky.” He turned his attention to Wesley. “Wesley, can you tell me what happened to you?”

 

Wesley looked at him without any glimmer of comprehension. “We were supposed to meet in the alley.”

 

“Did someone stab you?”

 

“Cyrus Vail.”

 

The doctor looked to Giles for an explanation. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

 

“I’m sorry, no.”

 

“Is that a person or a place, Wesley?”

 

Wesley craned his neck to see what was happening to Gunn. “I don’t remember saying goodbye to Charles.”

 

“Charles Gunn? Your friend? He’s lost a lot of blood but we’re going to prep him for surgery, okay? Everything that can be done to save him, will be, I promise you.” The doctor was examining the back of Wesley’s head, gloved fingers nimble in his hair as he looked for an injury. He glanced across at Giles. “You found Wesley in the street?”

 

Feeling guilty about lying to someone who was trying to so hard to help, Giles nevertheless described the alley where they had found Gunn, the alley where the rain would have already washed the bloodstains clean. He doubted anyone associated with Cyrus Vail would be going to the police.

 

The doctor was giving Wesley a reassuring smile but also seemed to be doing a reassessment of the level of questions he should be asking him. “Can you tell me your name?”

 

Wesley looked past him. “How would Illyria know how to be so completely human? Where did her compassion come from if it wasn’t from Fred’s soul? What if it wasn’t destroyed? What if it was only consumed?”

 

The doctor grimaced and turned to Giles. “Was he disorientated when you found him?” He felt Wesley’s neck, hands gentle and skilled.

 

“Yes, he was disorientated. He doesn’t seem to recognize us but he was…unwell before this attack.”

 

“Unwell how?”

 

The doctor shone a penlight into Wesley’s eyes and Giles watched his pupils contract to escape the brightness, his blink of confusion. Giles was painfully aware of the blood all over Wesley’s clothes, glad of the rain that had at least washed it from his face and hands.

 

“Grieving.” Gazing at Wesley in the light, Giles realized how terrible he looked, not just back-from-the-dead ill, but long-term self-neglect from what must have been weeks beforehand. “His…girlfriend died very soon after the death of another long-term friend.”

 

“I can’t find any head injury but this level of disorientation is unusual even after a violent attack. Does he have any history of mental illness?”

 

How would I know? I barely know the man. “No.”

 

“Drug-use…?”

 

“No.”

 

“Alcoholism?”

 

“I don’t think so.”

 

“We’ll treat him for shock and keep him in for observation. I’ll send someone to clean and stitch this wound while I try to find him a bed.” The doctor nodded to a cubicle that was curtained off. “Wait in there and I’ll send someone.”

 

Giles had to hold onto Wesley quite hard as they wheeled Gunn away.

 

“They have to operate, Wesley,” Willow said gently. “Gunn needs some surgery, but then they’ll bring him back. Why don’t you sit back down in here and wait for him?”

 

Thinking of how ill the young man had looked, Giles wasn’t at all sure that there was going to be a living human being to wait for. “Don’t promise him things that may not happen.”

 

“I’m just trying to accentuate the positive,” she murmured back.

 

They managed to get him to sit but he kept looking between them as if they were mistakes waiting to be rectified. Giles wondered if he was waiting for the moment when they would magically become the people he knew; Giles morphing into Angel and Willow into Fred; and then Gunn would come out of surgery and they could all climb back into Angel’s convertible and drive back to the Hyperion where Cordelia and Lorne would be waiting for them. Giles closed his eyes, finding the sarcasm withered into terrible pangs of pity at how much these two had lost. He didn’t even know Gunn except as a voice on the other end of the telephone when he called to consult with Angel or Wesley, but he found the thought of his dying too difficult to contemplate at present. It seemed impossible for Wesley to survive without at least one connection to the world he had lost.

 

An intern came by at last and tried out his bedside manner on Wesley for a while. “You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you? Can you tell me where it hurts? Can you follow my finger? Did you hit your head? I think a few stitches would probably be a good idea here…”

 

Wesley looked at him blankly, clearly deeming him another confusing irrelevance, before his gaze went back to the double doors through which Gunn had been wheeled. Wesley winced at the prick of the needle as the local anaesthetic was injected into his side but didn’t listen to the careful explanation the intern had made him of how he was going to numb his wound so he could stitch him up, how he would need to keep the wound clean, have the stitches removed in ten days. To Wesley, Giles suspected, none of those words had even presented themselves as human speech.

 

The intern had fetched Wesley’s records while waiting for the local anaesthetic to take place, frowning over them in some concern, coming back to feel Wesley’s head and neck, and glands, and try again to get him to follow his finger.

 

“He’s worried about Gunn,” Willow explained apologetically. “They’re very close.”

 

“Gunn?” The intern looked back on the file. “It says here that he was brought in by a Charles Gunn and a Cordelia Chase before – after he was shot.”

 

“Cordelia?” Wesley looked at the intern the first glimmer of interest. “Was she here?”

 

“A couple of years ago, with you…” The intern was talking to Wesley as if he were slightly deaf now, enunciating every word with extra care. “You were shot. Do you remember?”

 

“It was cold,” Wesley said. “There was morphine.”

 

“Well, this isn’t morphine. This is just to numb your side so I can stitch you up. Were you and your friend mugged?”

 

“I don’t know what happened to Gunn.” Wesley looked back at the double doors, the intern evidently of no further interest now he wasn’t talking about people that he knew. “We had our own assignments.” He gazed at the intern with the light of interest blinking back on again, the hope making him look unexpectedly vulnerable. “Is Cordelia here now?”

 

Willow looked as if she was perilously close to bursting into tears of sympathy. She tightened her grip on Wesley’s hand. “Cordy had to go, remember? But I think she wanted us to find you and Gunn. I think she made them send us to you.”

 

Wesley focused on her for the first time. “Willow? Is Angel here?”

 

“Just you and Gunn, Wesley,” Giles told him quietly. “The others are gone.”

 

Willow gave him a look of reproach but the man was confused enough by his lurch back from dead to living; he couldn’t see the point in befuddling him further with lies.

 

“Gunn’s in surgery,” Giles continued firmly. “And you need to sit still while this young man stitches up your side.”

 

Wesley sat still, as far as Giles could tell, because there was no reason for him to fidget or move. He could see the double doors through which Gunn had been wheeled, and clearly intended to stay where he could keep looking at them until Gunn was wheeled back. Giles suspected that one could have stuck him with red-hot needles in the interim, with or without a local anaesthetic first, and he would barely have noticed.

 

Willow fetched them tea from the dispensing machine, which was, of course, disgusting, but Giles was so thirsty that he drank it anyway. Wesley took one sip and then began to cough up blood in dark pungent clots, necessitating a panicky round of tests to which they had to accompany him, Giles feeling like a time-wasting fraud the whole time, knowing that the medical insurance Wesley had was useless as Wolfram & Hart would certainly never honour it, and that despite the clots of blood in their sputum trays, Wesley had no internal bleeding any more. Quentin Travers would never have given the stamp of approval to paying the medical fees of a disgraced ex-Watcher, especially one who had incurred his injuries while technically an employee of Wolfram & Hart, but Giles just handed over his credit card when the insurance showed up as ‘cancelled’ on the computer and told them to take for Gunn’s bills as well; the Watchers’ Council of Great Britain would cover it.

 

The only things the Watchers’ Council of Great Britain had in abundance at present was money and Slayers. He decided that they owed Wesley for the childhood their traditions had stolen from him and owed Gunn just because the man had been doing their job when most of them had been enjoying a brandy in the library back in London while he had been sleeping on the streets. He had told them in no uncertain terms that he was not prepared to take on the whole administration of the organization, nor was he ready to take on another Slayer, not yet. Let the Slayers train the Slayers, he had suggested; the ones who had seen action teaching those who were still so new to their powers. He was tired, and needed a sabbatical – twelve months off to recover from the long years of strain.

 

They had agreed, of course. Giles was important now, ironically enough, simply by virtue of having field experience and not being dead. They wanted to keep him sweet where once they had not cared if they fired him. His expertise was invaluable, his eccentricities tolerated. He had fled to the coven and tried to adapt to a life that was different from the one he had known for so many years; coming to realize, belatedly, that there was an existence for him that could be enjoyable that did not revolve around Buffy, that administration bored him senseless, that he missed being in the field, that he was very glad to see Willow when she arrived after her time in Tibet; that Andrew would probably always be an idiot but at least now that Giles had escaped to Wiltshire, he was only an idiot by phone and fax instead of in person. He missed Buffy and Dawn as he might his own children, and worried about Xander, who sent them emails from cyber cafés in far-flung places. The boy was undergoing the grieving process by trying to keep one step ahead of it, as if he could outrun the place where Anya wasn’t any more, if he just kept moving. And yet, he did seem calm and at times almost…wise in the emails he sent back. If he was running away from reality, he was at least doing it in a way that was providing him with a lot of insight into other cultures.

 

He had not been exactly surprised about the break-up between Willow and Kennedy. Grief was a strange thing and all relationships founded upon it were in danger of having been constructed on very rocky foundations. Willow had found herself again, somewhere in Tibet, and found that a relationship wasn’t something she was ready for yet, after all, even one with someone who loved her. He had felt sorry for both of them, for Kennedy, who really did love Willow in her own way, yet had never before not been able to have anything that she wanted. For Willow who had perhaps been vulnerable and overwhelmed by Kennedy’s certainty that they belonged together at a time when her own judgement was something she no longer trusted, and yet who now found herself in need of more space than such a passionate and strong-willed woman could provide.

 

“But I’m good for her…” Kennedy had protested tearfully to Giles. “I can take care of her. I can help her be who she is…”

 

Although he privately agreed that Kennedy had been very good for Willow he couldn’t think of much to say that was comforting. “She needs to do it alone,” Giles said gently. “It’s nothing you’ve done or failed to do, Kennedy. It’s just…bad timing.”

 

Kennedy had gone to Cleveland to help Faith train the new Slayers, quieter and bruised inside. Willow had been her first true love. Giles wondered if someone falling in love with another human being who was still mourning a true love of their own could ever really believe that it wasn’t some deficiency on their part that made them fail to match up. He wondered if it would make Kennedy stronger inside or just more brittle to have given her heart so completely to someone who had held it very tenderly for a while before gently giving it back. He realized, with more than a pang of guilt, that he was not sorry to be excused for a while the emotional highs and lows of a group of teenage girls. The memories of Buffy’s teenage years – even the painful times – were precious to him, and he wouldn’t have given them up for anything, but he was glad, all the same, that Willow was twenty-five now, and the witches at the coven all even older.

 

The ultrasound the meticulous intern used to check Wesley’s lungs confounded everyone except Willow and Giles; confused doctors peering at a scan that showed blood clots in number yet no wound. Wesley was sedated, had a tube put down his throat, and the blood was suctioned out carefully, revealing healthy lungs which showed no sign of trauma. Hooked up to machinery as he was, they had to admit that Wesley’s blood pressure was normal, that his body seemed to be showing no signs of suffering from a wound that would explain the blood. They decided to keep him in for observation, wheeling him into a room containing two beds, the other one put ready for a now post-operative Gunn. Giles didn’t know who had pulled off the miracle that meant Wesley and Gunn could share a room, too dumbfounded to enquire at first, he was just incredibly grateful.

 

It was only later, after Gunn had been wheeled in out of post-op and hooked up to all kinds of machinery in a bed next to Wesley’s, that the hospital administrator had walked in and mentioned something about Angel Investigations having helped her in the past. How she wouldn’t usually do something like this, but she and her child would be dead if it weren’t for them, how heroes deserved preferential treatment if anyone did.

 

Giles was ashamed to realize, after she had gone, that he had never once thought of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce as a ‘hero’ until that woman had said it so casually; as if, of course that was what he and Gunn were, men set apart by selfless deeds. As he sipped another foul-tasting cup of tea and waited for Gunn to wake up, Giles realized that was exactly what they were, and why they were here, and why it was, therefore, that these two men, one of whom he didn’t know, and the other of whom he had never liked, were now his responsibility – because there was no one else left in the world to take care of them, and the world owed them more than it could probably ever repay.

 

***

Comments

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

Love the start of this! So glad you are posting these huge meaty fics that are so plotty and full of detail!

Thank you so much!

[elgrey.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're welcome! Thank you so much for wanting to read them. I feel I've really been trespassing on the patience of Wesley fans of late, with yet another great long screed. This is the last of the long ones I've already written. Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

[versaphile.livejournal.com]

Believe me, your longfic is eagerly eaten up! Keep at it, it's very wonderful. :-D

[elgrey.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's really sweet of you. That's all I had already written so I'll try to finish my WiPs next in between the other things I need to do. The problem with Wesley is *not* writing about him all the time, isn't it? He's basically human crack.

[versaphile.livejournal.com]

He's basically human crack.

Hee! He's definitely that, though writing for me tends to be far more like pulling teeth than reading, which I could happily spend days on end in rapt attention. Which, thanks to you, I've had the opportunity to do.

[briesas.livejournal.com]

Giles personally thought it would make more sense to take Wesley straight to the hospital to have his still-bleeding wound sewn up, not to mention the blood in his lungs from when the wound had been mortal suctioned out, but he was relentless as an insane asylum inmate with an idée fixe. He moved with as little coordination as any Hammer Horror Igor lurching towards his master and Giles realized that his legs were numb from lying there dead, muscles set in the first inactivity that had swept through his body as it prepared for rigor mortis. That he had been dead and was now alive seemed to be of less importance to Wesley than that he was late for his meeting
with Angel and the others in the alley behind the Hyperion. With a jolt of realization Giles wondered if Wesley thought he were dead but still wanted to make that meeting place, presumably so they could all move on to some kind of afterlife together.

This whole chapter has absolutely, amazingly vivid imagery.

[elgrey.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for the feedback. (I just saw it.) And for reading the fic. :)

[emeraldteal.livejournal.com]

Did I see right? This is a series? There would be more? *inflicts puppy eyes at you* :)

NFA always left me ambivalent. I can't decide whether Wesley should get his deserved rest or stay alive because he deserves more than what life has thrown at him. *sigh*

But I'm sure I'm going to enjoy this. :)

I felt so sorry for Wes here, so lost and confused. *cuddles Wes*

Off to read more now :)

[elgrey.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is going to be a series. It's just a case of finding time to write the rest, but I really do want to go on with it and write several fic in this verse with the four of them. I'm very ambivalent about NFA too. I'm not sure how I feel about Mutant Enemy reviving Wesley as they are Big Meanieheads and would probably do even meaner things to him than they already have, whereas at least he is temporarily safe from them, but I do love him being brought back in fic and having a nicer life. And everyone should cuddle Wes. :)