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Harrogate, Part Three
2: Westbury, Wilts.
By grief is the shadow granted substance.
William F. DeVault
Wesley awoke to the sound of an owl hooting through the open window of his bedroom. He lay still for a moment and just listened, carried back by that sound to so many nights when he had awoken as a child and heard other owls calling to one another in the starlit night. It anchored him as nothing else could have done. He had not heard that sound once in Los Angeles and one ‘t’woo’ was enough to let him know that there was no point listening for the sound of traffic or the wail of sirens. That part of his life had been left behind.
The coven was situated in a huge old farmhouse surrounded by several acres of organically-farmed fields and a section of privately-owned ancient woodland. Willow had taken him for several walks in the woods, presumably on the grounds that they were healing in some way. He had enjoyed the walks well enough, although he still missed the elms he had taken for granted for the early part of his childhood. Today, on their walk, Willow had gathered various mosses and lichens and leaves and stones that she needed for some cleansing ritual the coven had been asked to perform on a nearby haunted house. He had watched water trickling over rocks and felt the sunlight dapple onto his face through the waving branches and thought about showing this place to Fred, teaching her the names of these very English trees, telling her about his childhood. All the things they had never talked about in the time they had wasted in silence that they could have filled with words.
When he looked up, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see Fred standing in the deep shade beneath a yew tree. She was looking extraordinarily lovely in a floaty green dress. She put a finger to her lips and nodded her head in the direction of Willow. He gave Fred a tentative wave and she waved back, giving him a big smile, one of those ones that warmed him inside like good brandy. With her slender graceful body and long brown hair unbound and curling around her shoulders he thought she looked like a dryad. It was a relief that she had found him over here; despite Cordelia’s words of reassurance, he had been afraid they might not visit him again.
“Wesley…?”
He turned to find Willow gazing at him quizzically and when he looked back Fred had ducked out of sight. Willow followed his gaze to the tree and he thought he had better make something up to explain why he had been waving to it.
“Yew trees were very important to the ancient druids,” was the first thing that came into his head.
“To Hecate too.” Willow gave him an encouraging smile. “And in Ancient Ireland they were thought to have the power of memory and to be able to bear witness.” There was a pause before she asked tentatively: “Wesley, are you…seeing things…? Because sometimes you seem to be looking at people that aren’t… that I can’t see.”
“How do I know?” he asked, he thought quite reasonably. “I can see you but I don’t have any empirical evidence that you’re real.”
“I am,” she insisted.
“But, maybe you’re not and you just don’t know it? Have you ever not been real?”
“No, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m completely a hundred percent accept no substitutes real.”
“Well then, how would you know how it felt? To not be real? I was dead. I remember dying, and yet now you treat me as if I’m alive.”
“You are alive, Wesley. See…” She pinched him lightly on the arm. “Would I be able to do that to a dead person?”
“You might if you were dead too. Or if this is a dream; if this is all taking place in just the time between body death and brain death after my heart stopped beating. This could all be one long Pincher Martin. Or it could be a hell punishment to make me think I’m safe in England by a yew tree when I’m really about to be tortured in a hell dungeon.”
“I’m not dead and neither are you. I brought you back.”
“Why?” He gazed into her green eyes.
She grimaced. “Because I could. And because I felt that I should.”
“Well, I feel I’d like to be alone with that tree for a while. Is that okay with you?”
She hadn’t really left him alone, but she went a little further away and then kept an eye on him surreptitiously. He walked around the great seamed trunk of the yew and found Fred on the other side of it. They’d had to converse in whispers as she told him Illyria was still angry about not being able to kill fifty thousand demons and the lessening of her powers, and how it should have been her task to alter time that Wesley might never have been injured.
“Well, give her my regards,” he said a little awkwardly.
“I’m not angry with you for making friends with her,” she assured him. “I know it was for my sake. For the spark of me that was left in her.”
“I don’t understand why you had to die like that.”
She looked more amused than not. “Because dying in a different way wouldn’t have been so bad?”
It was the unfairness of it that still irked him. Quite apart from the lacerating grief there was a completely independent resentment at the unfairness. “You survived all those years on Pylea. You taught yourself how to make traps and kill things to eat. You stole and hid, and you were so clever you could work out the equations to open a wormhole. You endured two years in the Hyperion fighting demons and averting an apocalypse and you die because you’re curious?”
“You’re still angry with me about that, aren’t you?”
“A little,” he admitted.
“Well, I’m a little angry with you for being too slow to catch a cold when it comes to realizing a woman’s interested in you.”
“You weren’t giving any outward signs,” he protested.
Fred rolled her eyes. “Cordy was right about you. You’re really not too good with women.”
He felt a little aggrieved. “I was educated in a series of single-sex establishments.”
“I know…” she sighed. “But I invited you in for coffee and you said I looked tired and you’d see me in work and then you told me how much you loved me and how happy I’d made you and you got back into the car and went away.”
“You did look tired.” He remembered it distinctly. “We’d been working to get that spell reversed that turned Angel into a puppet and we’d had little or no sleep. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome.”
“And the next night I asked if I could come up and look at that book you were telling me about, the one counteracting spells for making portals into demon dimensions. And do you remember what you said…?”
He thought back. “That I could bring it into work tomorrow.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“I did bring it in,” he protested. “I was going to show it to you at lunchtime. It wasn’t my fault you decided to inhale a lot of mummy dust and get yourself murdered.”
She reached across and tapped him on the forehead. “Think about the reasons why a woman asks to come up to a man’s apartment at night, Wesley! I didn’t care about the book, I just wanted a reason to go up to your bedroom.”
“Oh.” He vaguely remembered her saying something about finally getting him up to her bedroom when she was dying, but he’d been thinking how childlike she seemed, her body seeming so frail and small beside his, taking comfort from the book she had asked him to read. “I suppose while I could believe that you might have fallen in love with me, as you told me you had, I did find it a little difficult to believe that you actually wanted to have sex with me.”
“Well, I did,” she told him forcefully. “Just because I was a few degrees subtler than Ms Evil Lawyer…Person doesn’t mean I didn’t want to have sex with you. Gunn and I used to have lots of sex. I used to wear him out. I used to make him beg for mercy.”
“I don’t need to know that.”
“You already did know it. It’s not like we were quiet about it. I’m just pointing out that you knew I was a sexual being, is all.”
“You looked so…pure.”
“Do you know how many years I took ballet lessons? Do you know what kind of muscles a girl has to possess to take all her weight on the toes of one foot? Calf and thigh muscles, Wesley. Serious thigh muscles.”
Wesley gulped and adjusted his collar. “Well, I’m sorry.”
“And you know what? I think you knew all the time what I wanted and you just wimped out on me because you were worried it wouldn’t be perfect.”
“I certainly thought it was less likely to be perfect when we were both exhausted, sweaty and had been battered by demon puppets, yes.”
“And you know what else? I think you were worried you’d forgotten how to have nice normal loving sex because of all that time you spent letting Ms Evil Lawyer…Person do really icky things to you.”
Wesley grimaced. “Well, I admit, I may have had some slight concerns about…”
“‘It’s not always about holding hands’, Wesley? You think I didn’t get that?”
“To be honest I thought you didn’t get it at all or have any clue what I was talking about. And I can assure you that anything Lilah did to me I did back to her with interest.”
“So, I get to die without ever having sex with the man I loved just because when you were all bitter and self-loathing you were whoring yourself out to Lilah Morgan and, afterwards, you weren’t sure you could remember how to have sex without breaking the furniture first? I seem to remember you and Gunn managed it okay when I was running for my life and you were all cosy with Jasmine.”
He winced. “I’m sorry about that but we were under the mind control of… And I don’t think Gunn and I actually… Fred, I’d already shown you so much of the darkness inside me. I didn’t want to…frighten you off.”
“Maybe I liked the darkness inside you, Wesley. Maybe there’s a darkness inside me, too. Do you remember what I wanted to do to my professor? All those times we talked about what Angelus was, what Angel told us Darla said – about some darkness being innate…? Didn’t you ever wonder why Illyria picked me?”
“Knox selected you to be the host for Illyria. There was no selection process made by Illyria herself.” He snatched a breath. “Do you…talk to Illyria?”
“Sometimes. She has some pretty impressive thigh muscles too and she really wants to shove you down on the floor and…”
He held up a hand. “Yes, thank you, Fred. I get the picture.”
“Are you sure?” she demanded. “Cause I was thinking I might have to draw it for you.”
“I just don’t think of you…like this.”
“But you knew,” she reminded him gently. “You always knew who I really was. You knew I didn’t survive five years on Pylea being pure and sweet.”
“I didn’t want you to be pure and sweet,” he insisted. “I may have been guilty of idealizing you a little but...”
“Oh, Wesley…” She reached up to stroke a hand through his hair, sad but fond. “If you’d idealized me any more I would have had to be Angel.”
“Did I tell you not to use a portal to cast your evil professor into a hell dimension because it would upset my view of you as something untainted and good? No. That was Gunn. I liked you how you were.”
She sighed. “I just wish I knew for sure that your view of how I was and mine were even a little bit alike.”
“Well, me too. Lilah said that you would never know me the way she did.”
“Well, she was right, thanks to you being all coy and saving yourself, I never did get to know you in the Biblical sense, did I?”
His turn to sigh. “Let’s not fight. I love you so much and I miss you all the time…”
“I know.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the forehead. “I love you too.”
Eager to change the subject, Wesley asked her about her box of possessions, the toy rabbit which had so confused him. “What was his name?” he asked.
Fred smiled and kissed him. “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know, Wesley, you know the rules.”
“I killed Knox.”
“You probably shouldn’t have done that.”
“I stabbed Gunn.”
“You definitely shouldn’t have done that. All he did was sign a piece of paper. Nothing he did afterwards would have made any difference.”
“I know.” He lowered his voice still further to add: “He’s out of the wheelchair. The doctors said it would be weeks but Willow has been healing him. Should I tell him you said hello?”
She shook her head. “Probably not. We don’t want him thinking you’re crazy.”
“Am I crazy?” he pressed. As someone who had been a crazy person herself for a while, he thought she was probably better qualified than most to know. There was also a good chance that she would know if she were real or a hallucination, the way she had been able to work out exactly what degree of ghost Spike was. He could imagine her bringing her scientific acumen to bear upon that particular problem with great skill. “Fred…? Am I…?”
Which was when she vanished, and left him talking to a tree. Later he had gone to bed early and Willow and Giles had talked for hours in the room underneath his bedroom, a hushed consultation that nevertheless crept up through the ill-fitting floorboards like smoke, in which Giles suggested cleansing spells and Willow said she wanted to leave it a little longer, just a little longer. At the time he hadn’t understood, but now as he listened to the owl hooting through the open window, he finally comprehended what they had been discussing.
“That’s right, lover.”
He looked up to find Lilah walking towards him with a seductive swing of her hips.
“What’s right? And it’s good to see you, Lilah.”
“Giles wants Willow to do a spell to help you differentiate between reality and… well, people like me. And it’s good to see you, too, although I have to say I’ve seen you looking better.”
“You too.” He drew a finger across his throat and she raised an eyebrow at him as she sat on the bed and leaned across to whisper in his ear:
“If we’re talking about unsightly scars, let’s not forget you gave me this one and you had yours first…” Then she was licking up his neck and he was shivering at the delicious warmth of her tongue on his skin. “I always knew how to push your buttons…” she murmured in satisfaction.
“How did you find me?” He reached out, tentatively, and stroked her hair back from her face, the way he had after she had been dead, which she still was, of course, technically speaking.
“Oh, there are exit signs even in hell, handsome. They won’t miss me for an hour.” She breathed on his neck again, making him gasp with the pleasure of it, feeling himself get hard as her lick traced his scar and then her open mouth hovered over the place where a vampire would bite. “You really are a psychiatrist’s dream, you know that? And as for that creepy crush you had on your dead psycho boss…”
“You never understood the complexity of our relationship – which was strictly platonic.” He wasn’t actually certain about that; his memories of many events being somewhat hazy, but he said it as if he had no doubts and hoped he wasn’t just bluffing her. They had been equally matched at poker in the past but he suspected she might have learned a few new tricks in hell.
“I understood it better than you did. You were born to crush, Wesley. And as for Angel, well, he never liked sharing, did he? Don’t try to tell me it’s pure coincidence that the first thing deadboy did when he got out of that cage was come after the woman you’d been sleeping with.”
“Angelus isn’t Angel.”
“Maybe he is now.” She stroked his hair back from his forehead, examining it critically. “You know you looked so much better when I was taking care of your…needs.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No. That’s what I came here to tell you in case you were wondering. Not sure if you ever got around to reading the fine print on the contract Angel signed. It wasn’t an employment contract, no standard perpetuity clause. None of you had to report to hell for your afterlives. He made that a condition. Didn’t want you all tortured for all eternity – what a guy, eh? The only thing he signed was the agreement to give Connor a new life and to give us permission to mess with the memories of the rest of you. And please tell me you’re still pissed with him about that?”
“I’m over it.”
Lilah rolled her eyes but began to unbutton her blouse. “Well, you shouldn’t be.”
“He was trying to save his son and do the best for Cordelia, do the best for all of us. He thought he was doing the right thing.”
“I thought it was kind of high-handed and arrogant myself. Not to mention controlling. Didn’t you ever wonder about that fantasy the Kun-Sun-Dai spun to make him lose it? Ever think about your part in that whole ‘perfect happiness’ thing…?”
“No.” He kissed her throat. It felt cool against his lips, not cold or in any way unpleasant, just the coolness of the dead, but it still smelt like her, like that very expensive perfume she liked to dab on to mingle with the after-sex sweat scent on her skin that always made him want to pull her back down onto the bed. He licked at her collarbone. “You never understood Angel. How could you? He cared about doing what was right.”
“Harsh.” She smiled at him seductively, her fingers closing in his hair, dragging his head up so she could crush his mouth in a kiss before licking around it salaciously. “But I think I understood Soul Boy better than you think. I think there’s a part of you that understood him too, you just didn’t want to acknowledge it to yourself. We both know Angelus was always closer than any of you wanted to admit.”
He was already hard; as if it was enough just to feel her skin against his; his breath catching as his heartbeat increased. “He was trying to undo what I’d done and to take away memories neither of us were sure I could live with. He was trying to protect Connor, and Cordelia, and all of us.” She had pulled off her bra and he cupped her breasts, bending his head to mouth at her left nipple.
She pulled his head in tight against her, encouraging him to suck. “And we all know how well that turned out, right? Or was I mistaken about the whole ‘you all ending up dead’ thing? I mean if we’re talking strategy here, Cordelia never really woke up from that coma, the Texas Twig got turned into the Blue-Rinsed Bitch, you were gutted by a guy you should never have been sent to fight, and Gunn – and this was a shocker – got himself cut open by the half a dozen vampires he was in no way equipped to kill single-handed. Angel was so busy making that last big glorious gesture that he got you all killed.”
Wesley acknowledged it with a sigh, knowing his breath must be a warm gust against her nipple; feeling that shiver of anticipation go through her. “Well, he never pretended to be a strategist and we knew the risks. We all took on those assignments with our eyes open.”
She licked up his neck again and then her teeth closed on his skin, making him shiver with longing. “Maybe so, but without the ginger wicca and old man grouch, you’re still a corpse right now.”
“Can we just have sex?” he pleaded, his fingers already running up her thigh.
“I always knew you had no problem with necrophilia, Wesley – Angel’s faithful little watcher and keeper of the cult of the repentantly ensouled.” But she was pushing his head in the direction of her right breast, reminding him that it had not yet been welcomed back to his bed, and when he licked the cool mound her nipple hardened under his tongue, just like old times.
It was like remembered dance steps, her teeth pinching his skin, her fingers freeing his erection as she pulled down the ludicrously formal pyjamas with which Giles had provided him, his mouth on her breasts, his fingers between her legs. She was already wet, although curiously cool to the touch. He slipped his fingers in deep, twisting them the way she liked, making her arch and mew and punish him for daring to take her to the brink so easily by slamming herself down onto him, hard and skilfully enough to make him see stars, grinding her hips with a precision that proved that whatever muscles those ballet lessons had given Fred, Lilah was in no need of pelvic floor exercises either.
The sex was quick and needy and as passionate as ever. He came gasping with her sprawled across him, head clearing from that lust-blurred daze to wonder if there was something very wrong with having sex with a corpse unless you were already one yourself. As he opened his mouth to ask her, she whispered: “Whatever gets you off, lover…” and disappeared. He looked down at the hand into which he had come and tried to recapture the scent of her perfume, but it was gone, the breeze from the open window chill on the sweat cooling on his skin.
He cleaned himself up in the bathroom, washing his hands with particular care, trying to remember the taste of her on his tongue, but she seemed to have taken that memory with her.
He was embarrassed to find Fred sitting on the bed waiting for him when he got back. “I really don’t like that woman,” she told him. “I mean I’m sorry she’s dead and all. It was terrible what was done to her. But I don’t like her and if I’m honest about it, I will never in a million years understand how you could have sex with her when you knew she was evil. Would you have sex with me if I were evil?”
“You’re not evil.” He sat on the bed next to her.
“Illyria is. And she wears tight-fitting leather, which you boys are supposed to like so much, although frankly I can’t help wondering how she goes to the bathroom.”
“I don’t think she does.” He took her hand in his; worried she might pull it away after his being unfaithful to her with Lilah. “I don’t think she has…bodily functions of any kind.”
“Well then, I guess that explains the outfit.” She kissed him on the lips, her mouth warm against his. “We never made love and now we never will. I’m still a little pissed with you about that.”
“So you said. But we still could…?” he suggested, kissing her back tenderly.
She shook her head. “You don’t have a memory of it. You don’t even have a fantasy of it. Which is kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“I had fantasies,” he insisted.
“About me returning your feelings. About us having a life together. About us having kids and a dog and being happy shiny demon killers all the day long. What about the sweaty naked kind?”
“It felt like an intrusion into your privacy.” He bowed his head. “I didn’t think I had the right.” Especially after I tried to kill you.
She sighed. “And now I’m dead you’d never let yourself think of me that way. Which means we’ll never be able to catch up with the things we missed out on.” She stroked his hair back from his face, luminous brown eyes intent and serious. “Maybe I was afraid of the darkness in you. I wanted you to be the man I thought you were when we first met; the one who was safe and kind and who I could always rely on to do and say the right thing.”
“And then I chased you through the hotel with an axe.”
“Yes.” She kissed him again, with incredible tenderness. “And after that…”
“You fell in love with Gunn.”
“It was always in me, too. I think you recognized something in me that was in you as well – that capacity to be insane, to be cruel when what you really wanted was to be kind. But what I thought I wanted was a man who was reliable all the time – who was sane and wise and safe, and every time I thought you were the one I could trust you did something that frightened me. You took Connor and you didn’t seem to care about Angel even though you’d saved his life, and you didn’t seem to care about…”
“You?” He kissed her again, running his fingers through the silky weight of her curling brown hair. “I always cared about you, Fred. I always cared about Angel, too, and Cordelia and Gunn. I just…what was the point in me wearing my heart on my sleeve when you’d all rejected me?”
“We wasted so much time,” she said sadly. “I spent so long being scared, of the past, of the present, of…”
“Me?”
“When we were in Wolfram & Hart, you seemed so normal and so happy, and I knew somehow there was some reason why you weren’t really that man, but I didn’t remember – none of us did, thanks to Angel – so I thought I was just being foolish, and there you were, and I liked you so much, and yet I kept thinking Knox was somehow…safer.”
“Well, that was ironic.”
“You shot your father in front of me, Wesley. You shot him nine times.”
“He was threatening you.”
“That explained the first bullet. What about the other eight? What about the one when he was lying dead on the ground and yet you kept shooting him anyway?”
He closed his eyes at the memory. “I didn’t know how much anger I had inside until that moment.”
“You can’t blame me for being a little scared of getting involved. I wanted someone safe.”
“Is that what you thought I was? When you decided I was the one you wanted, after all?”
“Cordy was gone and there was so little time and however dangerous some part of you was it had never done me any harm. No, that’s not really how it was at all.”
“How was it then?”
“I can’t tell you things you don’t know and you never did know why I loved you.”
“I wanted to be your knight. I always did. I would have worn your colours into any battle, but in the end I didn’t save you.” He rested his forehead against hers, feeling the warmth of her against his skin.
“I didn’t save you either.”
“You gave me comfort when I was dying.”
“But it was a lie. In the end, all I had to offer you was a lie.”
He opened his eyes and she dissolved in front of him, even though he had been able to touch her and feel her. “It was a beautiful lie,” he said to the darkness. There was no scent of Fred’s perfume either. The room was cold from the breeze that blew in through the open window and smelt only of semen and sweat and the furtive satisfaction a man found with his right hand.
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“I understood it better than you did. You were born to crush, Wesley. And as for Angel, well, he never liked sharing, did he? Don’t try to tell me it’s pure coincidence that the first thing deadboy did when he get out of that cage was come after the woman you’d been sleeping with.”
Trust Lilah to see things as they are, lol. Gawd I miss her. I miss everyone. *sniffles*
Where's Angel? *pouts* No, don't answer that. *g* I'm just enjoying this too much, what with Wesley talking to dead people and all... :)
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I was going... "But she's evil! Wes isn't himself!" and then comes the 'breaking furniture' part and her showing some affection to him... it was amazing. A surprise pairing but one that really worked. They were so hot together... too bad he had to chop off her head... lol. Only on Jossverse... ;)