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Childish Things, Part Four

“Are you tired, Wes?” Angel touched his shoulder gently. “Do you want to get some sleep? Supposing Gunn let’s us get any sleep and doesn’t kick us all night long.”

“Where am I sleeping?” Cordelia demanded.

“We thought you could share with Dawn,” Willow explained. “And Angel, Gunn and Wesley can all share a bed.”

“I want a bath too,” Cordelia’s lower lip began to tremble. “And I want to share with Willow and Tara. Dawn likes Gunn best. Just because he’s all shortassy now.”

“Don’t be difficult, Cordy,” Wesley pleaded, darting an anxious look at Angel. “Buffy and the others are giving up a lot of their time and space to us.”

“But I want to stay with Willow!” Cordelia wailed. “I know Willow. I picked on Willow at school for years. She’s comforting.”

“Let’s get everyone into the bath and then into their jammies,” Buffy suggested getting to her feet. “We can worry about who sleeps where afterwards.”

“We don’t mind.” Willow looked at Tara who quickly nodded. Willow continued swiftly: “We can look after Cordelia. And tomorrow we can take her shopping for shoes.”

Giles personally thought that was a masterstroke on Willow’s part as if the combination of ‘shopping’ and ‘shoes’ didn’t pull Cordelia back from the brink of her temper tantrum, nothing would.

Clearly the words had lost none of their charm as Cordelia went from the edge of tears to the edge of a smile. “Shopping? For shoes?”

“Yes, and we can have ice cream too,” Tara added quickly.

“You two are way too good at this,” Giles observed to Tara who smiled secretively.

“You have to see this!”

The squawk from Dawn made them all rush into the hall, Angel pushing Wesley behind him to keep him safe as Xander did the same with Cordy.

The sight that greeted them was a slightly damp, widely beaming four year old Gunn in his brand new cartoon pyjamas, all warm and contented from the bath, standing at the top of the stairs, holding onto a delighted Dawn’s hand.

“Oh my god,” said Buffy faintly. “He’s so cute.”

“He redefines cute,” Xander admitted.

Willow nodded. “It’s like someone took the cute bar and moved it up to a new Olympic record height.”

Cordelia plucked sulkily at Wesley’s sleeve. “What are we, chopped liver?”

Wesley smiled at her gently. “You have to admit, Gunn does look kind of sweet in his pyjamas.” Seeing her expression he amended hastily, “But not as sweet as you in that angel costume.”

“That would mean so much more if I wasn’t a blur to you right now,” she muttered at him but Giles saw the glimmer of a smile all the same.

“Isn’t he the cutest thing ever?” Dawn demanded.

“It’s just because he’s small,” Angel returned. “No one thinks Gunn’s cute normally.”

“Shows all you know.” Gunn stuck his tongue out at Angel.

“No one’s going to think you’re cute when you’re going through puberty again and are all zits and hormones.”

“Don’t even talk about that.” Buffy told Angel before she headed up the stairs. “Just drink in the cuteness that is Gunn now.”

Cordelia shrugged sulkily. “Watch him clean demon pus out of his ears a few times, then see how cute you think he is.”

“Gunn's going to stay with me tonight,” Dawn explained. “I'm going to read him a story and I think he should have someone with him in case he has nightmares.”

“What story are you planning to read him, Dawnie?” Xander enquired. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue?”

“Sounds cool.” Gunn looked up at Dawn hopefully. “Can we have that one?”

“You can have Winnie the Pooh and like it,” Buffy told him sternly as she picked him up. “And, Dawn, you have to remember that Gunn is a person, not a puppy, which I'm certainly bearing in mind as I tickle him like this…”

As the rest of her sentence was drowned in Gunn’s delighted squeals and giggling, Cordelia looked at Wesley again, “You don’t think Gunn’s cuter than me, do you?”

“No one’s cuter than you, Cord,” Xander told her, picking her up.

“Hey! No touching!” she protested.

“What, you don’t want me to do this…?” Xander tossed her up into the air and then caught her. She shrieked with glee and then told him unconvincingly to put her down right now; clearly nothing other than pleased when he ignored her to toss her up into the air and catch her again while Willow and Tara laughingly remonstrated.

Angel shook his head. “Serves him right if she throws up on him.” He looked down at Wesley. “These people have serious child substitute issues.”


It surprised no one that, when bedtime came around, Gunn was carried off by Dawn – albeit after a spirited battle with Buffy. Angel’s hearing was good enough for him to pick up Dawn’s voice reading of the arrival of Tigger in the Hundred Acre Wood. He had waited for Gunn to demand an adult book or to express some boredom at this choice of bedtime reading, but he had seemed entirely enraptured. Angel wondered how long it was since Gunn had known something approximating to ‘normal’ family life. He had been forced to grow up so very fast after the death of his parents, shuffled from shelter to shelter until he had taken to the streets on a self-appointed mission to clean up LA from demons and keep his sister safe. So far he had failed agonizingly at one of those tasks and was probably making less headway than he’d hoped on the other, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that at least a part of him was quite enjoying being too small to have the weight of the world resting on his shoulders. Perhaps he needed a break from being a grown up more than any of them.

Angel didn’t know if the young man he knew as a fearless – and sometimes downright reckless – demon killer had reverted so completely to being a child because of the biological imperative of being crammed into the body of a four-year old, or if the adult part of Gunn had just decided to let go for a while; to indulge himself in a childhood that had happened so long ago in terms of life experience that it must feel almost as distant as Angel’s own. Perhaps the best holiday for a guy with a death-wish and all that anger inside him, was some time being the child he had never had a chance to be, with no responsibilities and an older sister who took care of him.

Cordelia had insisted that she should be allowed to spend the night with Willow and Tara with a view to scoping them out as possible adoptive parents. Angel had counter-insisted that he would launch a vicious custody battle for Cordelia if Willow and Tara attempted to steal her from him but had told Dawn she could keep Gunn for as long as she wanted as long as she didn’t break him by too vigorous tickling. Gunn’s response had been to stick his tongue out at him while cuddling up to Dawn triumphantly.

“You’re going to give him a complex,” Wesley repeated in an urgent whisper.

Angel waved aside his concerns. “Hellbrat knows I love him really. You ready for your bath?”

“I can have a bath myself,” Wesley insisted.

“I know. But let me run it for you…”

Angel had ended up hovering near the bathroom door, which he insisted Wesley left unlocked, occasionally peering in to make sure that Wesley was okay, the little boy his friend had now become solemnly soaping himself and rinsing whenever he looked in, occasionally pausing to gaze mournfully at his stick thin little arms. Angel hadn’t thought of the adult Wesley as having the kind of physique someone would pine after, but child Wesley evidently did, and it was true that adult Wesley, for all his thinness, was perfectly capable of reaching a high shelf, picking up a heavy book, hefting a lethal weapon and decapitating a demon, all things it was now impossible for little Wesley to do.

“Do you need any help washing your hair?” Angel called into him.

Wesley shook his head stubbornly. He eyed up the showerhead, then evidently decided the risk of it spraying water everywhere was too great and settled for upending a jug of water over the shampooed hair, rinsing off the suds thoroughly. Angel felt that tight feeling in his chest give another little spasm, because Wesley was so determined to be good and no trouble, and he couldn’t help wishing it came from a happy place rather than what he feared was probably a trying-to-avert-for-as-long-as-possible-the-moment-when-no-one-would-love-him place.

As Wesley washed himself, Angel could hear Cordelia giggling in Tara and Willow’s room. He suspected that a part of Cordelia, of any size, was desperate for some female companionship. He knew she had grown a lot closer to Wesley and Gunn over the past few months and that the guys, in their way, did try to be good company for her, but he doubted they could hold their own in a conversation about fashion or shoes or – presumably – boys, while even Lorne’s taste was conspicuously different from Cordelia’s. Pride might have prevented her from admitting that she would have liked nothing more than an evening in with other girls talking about something inconsequential rather than another evening spent trying to balance the books, flinching from the aftermath of another vision headache, or out trying not to get herself impaled on demon talons. He knew that she was ashamed of how shallow her interests had been in the past, but that didn’t mean she was now an entirely new human being. She might have a purpose she had never had in the past, but he suspected that there were things she couldn’t discuss with any of them in the way she could with another woman. Not the least of which was probably how annoying they could all be at times just for being male and therefore woefully ignorant on so many matters that another woman would have understood in a word. Being back in Sunnydale was reminding him of a lot of things, not the least of which was how very different Cordelia had been when living here. It was hard to believe that girl, however much she had grown as a person, could really be satisfied spending evening after evening watching the same six movies with Wesley and Gunn, or nights in with a headache and Phantom Dennis.

“You don't know her at all. For months now you haven't cared to. Otherwise you might have realized that our Cordelia has become a very solitary girl. She's not the vain, carefree creature she once was... It's the visions, you see. The visions that were meant to guide you. You could turn away from them. She doesn't have that luxury. She knows and experiences the pain in this city, and because of who she is, she feels compelled to do something about it. It's left her little time for anything else. You'd have known that – if you hadn't had you head firmly up your... place that isn't on top of your neck...”

He got that now, he really did. He still wasn’t certain that he had the right to drag vulnerable humans onto the treadmill of his redemption along with him. He had done terrible things, and if he wanted to atone by trying to do some good to make up for all the evil he had done that was his choice. It felt fitting that the Powers should send him impossible tasks and he should do his best to carry them out, a modern day vampire Hercules, albeit – he liked to think – better groomed, and hopefully a little brighter. But Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn had nothing to atone for. They had made mistakes, certainly, and other people had suffered because of them, but they had never set out to do harm; their mistakes certainly could not compare with his. Doyle had told him that he needed contact with human beings to connect him to the world, and he knew now that he had been right. Separated from them, he became someone else; someone with free rein to deal with evil as he saw fit, certainly, but someone whose moral compass just kept spinning out of control without them to anchor him to magnetic north. There was no question in his mind now that he needed these people and that he was a greater force for good in their company than without it, but did they need the constant danger, physical pain, and emotional stress that went with being his anchors to the human world? He had agonised about that for a long time before he had driven to their new office and asked if he could help.

The fact was they had made their choice. He had given them a way out. He had fired them and freed them from all their obligations to him by acting like the world’s biggest undead asshole. Their response had been to do the same job without him at a considerably higher risk to their own lives. Wesley had almost died, and there must have been other dangers that they’d faced that could have claimed any one of them. He had been very lucky to get them back alive, he knew that, and there wasn’t a day right now when he wasn’t grateful that they had still been there for him to come back to, especially given how close they had all come to losing Wesley. If they were going to fight demons with him or without him it was better if they did it with him, where at least he had a chance to help keep them in one piece while they were doing it.

Glancing back across at Wesley, the boy looked as soaped, rinsed, and ready for bed as one could reasonably expect of anyone who had been six feet two in the morning and was four foot four now. In trying to get used to the places that he now no longer had, he had probably missed a few spots here and there but he was a lot cleaner than any of them usually were by this time of night and was at least unusually free of demon goop. Watching Wesley automatically feel his chin to see if he needed to shave and then grimace at the size of his hand and smoothness of his skin, Angel felt another pang of sympathy for him.

“Can you get out okay?” Angel asked him.

“I'm fine,” Wesley assured him, but when he stood up in the slippery bath he lost his footing and caught his hip hard on the side of the bath. Angel’s attention had been temporarily diverted by the sight of Xander – who he had imagined had gone home hours before – carrying mugs of hot chocolate towards the room shared by Willow, Tara and now Cordelia. He heard the ominous thump of body on porcelain and wheeled around at once.

“Wes…?”

When there was no answer, he hurried into the bathroom to find Wesley biting his lip hard to keep from crying out, tears bright in his eyes.

“Are you okay?” Angel lifted him out of the bath and hastily wrapped him in a towel. “What happened?”

“I slipped.” Wesley looked up at him, eyes still watering. “I was clumsy.”

“Let me see.” Angel anxiously lifted aside the towel and looked at the red mark on Wesley’s hip that was going to be a spectacular bruise in the morning. “Let’s put some arnica on that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wesley said quickly.

“Of course it matters.” Angel wrapped him up more warmly in the towel and sat him on the chair in the bathroom, before going through the cabinet. He wasn’t surprised to find that there was still an array of First Aid equipment there that would not have looked out of place in an ER, including arnica cream, and squeezed some of the cool ointment onto the bruise.

He rubbed Wesley’s hair gently with another towel and then shook out the plain blue PJs that Lorne had bought for Wesley. The green demon had done pretty well, Angel thought, buying Wesley conservative clothes in greys and blues that drew as little attention to their wearer as possible while making sure Cordelia had sweet frocks with frills, and Gunn had tough little kid clothes with plenty of extra seams and pockets and padded elbows and knees, and thick soles with extra grippy rubber grips on his even tougher little trainers. These navy blue cotton pyjamas were very Wesley, and Lorne had even managed to find a narrower than usual cut so they didn’t hang on him too awkwardly. A quick turn up of the pants and a fold back of the sleeves and they almost fitted him. Angel put some tissues into his pocket and promised him again that someone would get him some glasses that fitted him tomorrow.

“Have you brushed your teeth?” Angel asked, trying not to enjoy it quite as much as he was, but loving this, he had to admit, all the parental rituals that other people took for granted that were usually denied to him.

Wesley held up his toothbrush and Angel lifted him up so he could look in the mirror. It was strange to see the little boy suspended there as if by magic and Angel had that usual pang when a mirror refused to reflect him. In the past it had made him wonder if there was some connection between looking glasses and God, as if they were disdaining him from some higher command. Sometimes he still remembered the feel of that crucifix sizzling on his skin.

God doesn’t want you, but I still do...

Cordelia was right about that anyway. As stepmothers went, Darla was not a suitable candidate.

Wesley spat delicately into the wash basin, and when Angel set him back down, struggled with the taps before pouring himself a tumbler of water to solemnly rinse. Ritual seemed to be important to the child Wesley had become. Perhaps that was boarding school, or perhaps it had been dinned into him at home, either way it made for a child who was almost too easy, too well behaved, too easy to forget because he would never be any trouble and therefore didn’t need any attention.

“Do you want some hot chocolate?” Angel asked him.

Wesley’s face lit up momentarily and then he shook his head. “We might wake someone up.”

“We can be really quiet,” Angel insisted. “And you’re having a story before bedtime whether you want one or not. I don’t get too many chances to indulge my frustrated parental yearnings so I'm intending to pamper myself.” He gave Wesley’s hair a last rub that made it stick up in a way that Wesley would no doubt have hated if he was aware of it but which Angel found particularly cute, helped him into his sombre tartan robe, the belt of which would have gone around his waist three times with no difficulty, belted it as well as he could and then took his hand.

“Do you really have frustrated parental yearnings?” Wesley asked as they reached the corridor.

Angel tightened his grip on his hand. “Sometimes. It’s like anything you can’t have. You think about it sometimes.”

“But if the Shanshu prophecy is right then maybe you can one day.”

Angel looked down into Wesley’s earnest upturned face, big blue eyes trying to focus on the blur that he must be, and realized that he wanted this more than he’d ever allowed himself to admit; wanted to be human and able to offer Buffy a normal life with normal kids; except she could never be normal either, she had her mythic destiny to fulfil as the saviour of mankind and he had his undead atonement to work through. “Maybe,” he said gently. “But in the meantime, I have the three of you.”

Hearing a giggle from Dawn’s room that proved Gunn was still awake, Angel rolled his eyes and let go of Wesley’s hand.

“He’s just over excited,” Wesley said quickly. “It’s strange being a child again, Angel. He isn’t trying to be naughty.”

Angel opened his mouth to remonstrate and saw Wesley twisting his fingers nervously. “Wes, no one is going to get angry with any of you, okay? Not really angry. Everyone knows this is weird for you.”

“It’s just… He’s only four. I know we remember being grown up, but we don’t feel grown up. Our bodies don’t work like they feel they should do. Everything is in the wrong place and nothing is where it should be, especially us.”

“I know,” Angel said gently. “But he needs to go to sleep so I'm going to tell him that. I'm not going to…” He didn’t know what Wesley thought he was going to do, yell, presumably, or spank, or lock up in the dark. “I'm not going to get cross,” he finished lamely.

Wesley didn’t look very reassured, and he also looked small and thin and damp standing in the corridor by himself. Angel could feel his protective instincts where these three were concerned – already in overdrive after coming so close to losing them all through his own stupidity – crank up another dangerous notch. Angel knocked quietly on Dawn’s door. “Are you decent?”

An outbreak of giggling and then Dawn called back an affirmative. Angel opened the door and looked in at a Gunn who was cuddled up in Dawn’s bed, clutching her teddy bear, sucking his thumb, smears of chocolate on his hands, and silver paper on the bed that revealed they had been having a mini-midnight feast. “Don’t come crying to me if he’s sick on you,” Angel told her.

Gunn just giggled again and cuddled up closer to Dawn who gazed down at him dotingly. She was also wearing pyjamas and looked besotted. “He’s so cute,” she breathed to Angel. “And he can read really well for a four year old.”

“Perhaps because he’s actually twenty-three,” Angel returned.

Gunn sucked his thumb at him in a way that denoted contempt and dismissal. Angel rolled his eyes and turned to Dawn. “Tell me this isn’t a schoolnight for you?”

“Buffy said I could skip school tomorrow on account of being sick.”

“I suppose wanting to play with Gunn all day could be considered a form of illness,” Angel said dryly. “Just don’t let him get overtired or he’ll throw a tantrum.”

“You wouldn’t throw a tantrum, would you?” Dawn looked dotingly at Gunn who gazed back at her with a blink blink of innocence out of big brown eyes that Angel couldn’t believe would fool anyone with a ‘y’ chromosome – although it seemed to work perfectly on Dawn.

“Not unless it was cute,” Gunn took his thumb out of his mouth to say.

“I bet he throws the cutest tantrums,” she sighed.

“We’d better find a way to reverse this because if he stays a kid you are laying up so much trouble for yourself for later, Dawn.” Shaking his head, Angel started to back out of the door. He turned around in time to see Xander tip-toeing out of Willow’s room with the now empty mugs on his tray. Still not attuned to there being people below chest height, he backed straight into Wesley, stumbled, and dropped the tray, crockery smashing everywhere.

Wesley backed into the wall, saying rapidly, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry…”

Xander looked up at him in shock from amidst the broken crockery. “It’s okay, Wesley,” he said at once. “My fault. I didn’t see you there. Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

“The cups are broken,” Wesley said faintly. He dropped down onto his hands and knees and began to stack the smashed pieces onto the tray.

When the door opened and Buffy came out of her room the look he gave her was one of sheer panic. “Is everyone okay?” she enquired.

“I dropped the tray,” Xander told her quickly. “My fault. Sorry. Go back to bed.” He turned back to where Wesley was snatching up the broken crockery rapidly while trying to mop at the spilled cocoa dregs with the handkerchief from his pocket, still saying ‘sorry’ over and over as he did so. “Wesley, it’s okay. It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault. Hey…” Xander caught his wrist gently, and took the crockery from his fingers. “This is sharp you could cut yourself. Let me do it.”

Angel stepped back into Dawn’s room, leaving the door open a crack and putting a finger to his lips to Dawn and Gunn to be quiet, which, somewhat to his surprise, they obeyed.

Buffy hurried down the corridor in her pyjamas and robe. “Are you okay, Wesley?” she asked anxiously. “Did you get knocked over?”

“The cups are broken,” he repeated in a small voice.

“They were old cups,” she told him. “We didn’t even like those cups, and we have other cups. Better cups. Some of them with handles. Do you want some hot chocolate? I want hot chocolate.”

“Me too.” Xander stacked the rest of the broken crockery onto the tray, stood up and held out a hand to Wesley. “Want to come and help us drink our hot chocolate?”

Wesley looked around. “I think I should wait for Angel.”

“It’s not a very big house,” Buffy told him gently. “I'm sure Angel will be able to find us in the kitchen.” She also held out a hand to Wesley. “Come on. Hot chocolate is like Disney films, you have to have a child around as an alibi for indulging yourself. Did you get Disney films in England? I'm not sure Giles knows who Mickey Mouse is…”

Angel watched as she coaxed Wesley to come with her, Xander, while juggling the tray and broken crockery, took his other hand. Wesley tentatively murmured that he liked Fantasia but hadn’t seen it in years and Buffy promised to let him watch it with Gunn tomorrow.

“…You can act long suffering, if you like. I used to do that with Dawn all the time when she was watching some cartoon I thought I was too old to enjoy but which I really wanted to see.”

“Now Dawn does that with me,” Xander explained.

“Do you like marshmallows?” Buffy added as they went down the stairs. “I'm feeling a midnight feast craving coming on…”

Angel waved goodnight to Dawn and Gunn, the latter, he noted, now having to fight to keep his eyes open and already starting to slump sleepily against Dawn. “Sweet dreams,” he told her.

She cuddled down in the bed, pulling Gunn up against her as if he were a teddy bear and Angel backed out of their room and closed the door quietly. He wondered exactly how she and Gunn were ever going to be able to look each other in the eye if he did turn back into his usual shape again. Gunn wasn’t incoherent and clumsy around women the way Wesley was, but he was thoroughly gentlemanly and only mildly flirtatious. Angel suspected he was going to be mortified about the barefaced cheek of spoilt Child Gunn once he was Adult Gunn again. But given what a brat Child Gunn was, Angel also kind of thought he had it coming.