Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Part Two

“What are you doing?”

Wesley spun around and found Cordelia standing in his bedroom doorway. “Cordelia, I could have been naked.”

“Seen you naked, no biggie,” she shrugged, coming forward.

“Please be sure to say that in front of any women I might want to impress, won’t you?”

“Just because you can stand upright more or less unaided doesn’t mean you can start getting snippy. Why are you wearing that?”

Wesley looked down at himself in confusion. “It’s my best suit.”

“You are not wearing a suit and tie just because Giles is coming. You’ll just sit there fiddling with your tie and adjusting your cuffs and looking like a schoolboy who has to see the principal.” She thrust a pair of jeans, a t-shirt and a shirt at him. “The underwear you can choose yourself. But this is what’s going on top. Giles is not the boss of you and just because he’s British and can use sarcasm as a lethal weapon that doesn’t mean you have to go all Watcher-retard on us.”

“I like this suit.” He did, too, very much.

“Tough.” Cordelia unknotted his tie. “It comes off now. No party manners for Giles.”

“But, Cordelia…”

“The suit is coming off, contusion boy, either with me in the room tugging at it or you being allowed five minutes of privacy to wriggle out of it into these clothes before I tell Fred you were asking for her and she should step right on in without bothering to knock.”

Wesley felt a little awestruck by the depths of her evil sometimes. “It’s the demon in you, isn’t it?”

She pulled off his tie and tossed it onto the bed. “No, sweetie, the demon part is the good half of me. Now, do I have to go all glowy on your ass or are you going to do as the nice lady who saved your life tells you?”

“I could scream,” he pointed out. “Tell Gunn you’re undressing me against my will.”

“Do it,” she invited. “He can help me get you out of the dorkarama clothes into something that makes you look just a tiny bit cool.”

“What’s wrong with this suit?” He looked at the cuffs, which were impeccably stitched. “It’s a good suit. And this is a good shirt.”

“It looks like a school uniform, dorkus.”

“What’s a dorkus?”

“It’s what happens when a dork and a doofus breed. You know I could just cut you out of that suit. I’m sure I left some scissors around here somewhere…”

“No!” He held up a hand. “I’ll do what you say but only under protest.”

She shoved the jeans, t-shirt and shirt into his arms. “Protest all you like, just make sure you’re wearing these clothes when you come downstairs.”

Then she was gone and Wesley was left sighing and having to laboriously unbutton his shirt and painfully get himself back out of the clothes he had just pulled all those muscles and bruises getting into. All those years of complaining at him that he didn’t own a proper suit and needed to stop wearing cargo pants and corduroy and now she wasn’t letting him wear the one really good suit he owned. Sometimes, he had to admit, he thought Cordelia was the most unreasonable woman on the planet.

Cordelia had cleaned very thoroughly the evening before; after vacuuming up every speck of the vampire Gunn and the Angelus from the other dimension, she had moved onto vacuuming and dusting the rest of the lobby. Angel, Groo and Gunn had been press-ganged into helping her – Groo willingly, Angel and Gunn a great deal less willingly. Lorne, Fred, and Wesley had all been sent to bed as soon as the tacos had been eaten to sleep off their headaches and bruises. No one quite liked to stand up to Cordelia when she was in this mood. Groo had said fondly that he believed her ability to give orders and expect them to be obeyed without question proved that she was indeed a natural born monarch. Gunn and Angel had muttered things under their breath which they had not been unwise enough to repeat when Cordelia had asked them to.

With her willing and not-so-willing helpers’ assistance Cordelia had turned the lobby into a place of shining cleanliness; she had even dusted the books in the office and found a glazier who would come in at short notice and repair the doors of the weapons cabinet.

Angel couldn’t get very excited about Giles and Willow paying a visit. Not that he wasn’t fond of Willow, but he was sure they had every intention of trying to persuade Wesley to leave with them and he knew now that he really didn’t want that to happen. It wasn’t that his pain at losing Connor was any less. He still missed him all the time, still thought he heard him sometimes, automatically making for the stairs until he realized that it couldn’t have been a baby he heard because his baby was lost to a hell dimension. He just didn’t find himself wanting to blame Wesley for it any more. The loss of Connor had subtly evolved in his mind from something that Wesley had traitorously done to him to something that fate and false prophecies and the machinations of lying demons and wronged men had done to both of them. He had already lost his son and nearly lost his friend as well. Enough time had passed and events that had brought it home to him how little he liked the prospect of losing Wesley for good, that he knew he wanted the man to be their researcher again; needed to move onto a place where they could start rebuilding the friendship they had so nearly lost forever. But he couldn’t do that if Giles turned up and dragged Wesley back to England with him.

Perhaps because of Cordelia’s maniacal cleaning, Fred was acting as if Giles and Willow were from Social Services, with the power to take Wesley away from them if they couldn’t prove they were keeping him in a safe and sanitary environment. She had bought bunches of flowers and arranged them around the lobby, while also burning scented candles – that made Angel’s enhanced senses twitch uncomfortably – presumably to overpower the scent of tacos from the night before.

Angel had put up with it until she had started trying to arrange drapes tastefully across the weapons cabinet, whereupon he had gently but firmly removed the material from her hand.

“Giles and Willow know what we do for a living, Fred. Giles is a Watcher. Willow is a witch. The whole demon slaying thing is not going to come as a shock to them.”

She grimaced. “I was just thinking maybe we should…accentuate the non-demony-killing parts of Wesley’s life. Point out what a nice hotel this is. Show them the real marble and the nice carvings. It’s a pity you blew up the elevator because that was all art deco and very impressive.”

Angel looked at her in bewilderment. “Why?”

“I just don’t want them thinking that we don’t know how to take care of Wesley properly.” As Angel rolled his eyes, she explained: “I was thinking of the arguments they might have – about how when Wesley was in Sunnydale he didn’t get hurt at all but since he’s been working with – well, you – he’s been tortured and blown up and shot and had his throat slashed and nearly got lost in another dimension and all.”

“He’s fighting the forces of evil. And anyway he did end up in hospital in Sunnydale.”

“He did?” Fred lit up in relief and then made another face. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I was just thinking we could use that as a counter-argument.”

“Along with the one about us having the better interior design?” Angel loved Fred, he really did, but there were times when he couldn’t help wishing her brain moved in a way that was at least approaching linear.

“I was working on some others as well,” she countered. “You just got me all flustered. How about we tell them the area outside Caritas is an area of mystical convergence so we need a researcher more than they do?”

“Fred, Giles used to live in Sunnydale – he can see your area of mystical convergence and raise you a Hellmouth.”

“So – why don’t we say that we only have an area of mystical convergence that isn’t all that dangerous as long as you don’t open any portals by reading aloud out of interesting-looking books you might find, so Wesley’s much safer here than he would be if they took him back to Sunnydale and their nasty old Hellmouth?”

“Wesley’s not a child. They can’t get a court order to repossess him like…lost luggage…” Angel realized he was coming perilously close to floundering in a morass of mixed metaphors and mentally blamed Fred for that too. He wondered in passing if reality would start bending in an effort to get away from itself if she and Willow were left alone for too long. “He’ll go or he’ll stay. It’s up to him – not Giles.”

“Okay.” Fred edged away. “I’ll just…tidy some more. Not because of… Just because it’s polite when you have callers to make everything as nice as you can.”

As Fred slipped back into the office and started placing yet more vases in front of the odd stains on the walls and trying to train a new pot of ivy around a dent in the bookcase, Gunn appeared at Angel’s side, shaking his head. “You gotta tell me – how many centuries does it take before women start to make sense?”

“I’ll let you know when I do.”

“So, this Giles…? Scary guy?”

Angel shrugged. “Just – British. You know. All quiet and tweedy and sipping his tea but inside they still think they ought to be running the world.”

Gunn looked at him sideways. “You gotta history?”

“You could say that.” Angel looked up. “Wait – you don’t mean… You’re not asking if we dated, are you?”

“You dated?”

“No! I was just – checking you weren’t asking that.”

“I was so not asking that. And can we just establish right now if there’s anyone out there you dated that I wouldn’t want to know about, I don’t ever need to hear about it, okay? And that goes double for Wesley.”

“Are you asking me if I dated Wesley? Or just saying you don’t want to know who Wesley dated either?”

Gunn rubbed his brow. “Okay, let’s start this conversation again. So, you and this Giles guy – do you and him have some kind of history of maybe arguing or not getting along too well from your time in Sunnydale – details of which I really don’t need to know about? Clear enough?”

“I lost my soul in Sunnydale over the whole…”

“Nothing about you achieving perfect happiness is something I need to know about.”

“I was just going to point out that it was with Buffy and not – anyone else. I wasn’t going to give you details.”

“Still thinking about you doing things I don’t want to think about you doing right now. So – can we move on from the perfect happiness thing?”

“I lost my soul. When I was…Angelus, I killed Giles’s girlfriend and tortured him for information. Then I tried to destroy the world.”

“That Angelus – quite the party guy, isn’t he?” Gunn sighed. “So – you and this Giles guy are you cool about what you – about what Angelus did?”

“We…live around it. There are some things you can’t apologize for. Can’t undo.”

“How true.”

They looked around to see Wesley carefully negotiating the stairs, holding on tightly to the banister, but certainly looking stronger than even the day before. Gunn darted up the stairs to give him a hand, putting an arm around his waist to assist him.

Angel and Wesley exchanged a long look, regret in Wesley’s blue eyes at what had happened undisguised. Angel couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be too much of a simplification of his feelings, but he could and did take Wesley’s arm to help him over to the banquette.

“Oh! Wesley!”

Wesley jumped guiltily at Fred’s exclamation. “Yes?”

“I need to get you some tea.” She sped away to where the kettle was while Wesley looked after her in confusion then turned to Gunn for an explanation.

The man waved a hand. “Don’t ask. We have no clue.”

Angel noticed Wesley’s clothes. “Weren’t you going to wear your suit?”

“Cordelia wouldn’t let me.”

“That woman has delusions of grandeur.” Gunn shook his head. “Couple of days as princess of Pylea and she thinks she rules the… Hi, Cordy. My, you’re looking…”

“Like someone who just heard everything you said?”

Gunn said hastily, “I should help Fred with the tea.”

As he sped off, Wesley looked to Angel for an explanation and the vampire shrugged. “Something in the tacos? Contagious insanity? Willow did a spell on them from long distance?”

“Doesn’t he look nice?” Cordelia tugged at Wesley’s shirt to make it fall at a slightly different angle while looking expectantly at Angel. She scrunched Wesley’s hair with her fingers while he flinched in anticipation. “Stop flinching. I’m not hurting you. Angel? Don’t you think Wesley looks nice not wearing his dork suit and wearing the clothes I specially picked out for him?”

“Gunn and I are having a moratorium on noticing how Wesley looks for the next decade or so.”

“Trying to sidestep the pervert factor,” Gunn explained coming out with a cup of tea which he handed to Wesley.

Cordelia was still scrunching Wesley’s hair with her fingers. “Sheesh, you let the least little thing affect you, don’t you? Where’s your hair gel, Angel?”

“I don’t want my hair to look like Angel’s,” Wesley said desperately.

“And I don’t want to share my hair gel with Wesley,” Angel added.

“I’m not going to make it look like you stuck your finger in a light socket, I just want to…” She marched off in search of product and they all heaved a sigh of relief.

Fred hurried out of the office with a cardboard box in her hands. Wesley opened his mouth to offer to carry it for her until he evidently realized that he couldn’t and closed it again sadly. Angel stepped forward to intercept her. Looking inside he saw several magical artefacts, some of the rarer volumes and a few ancient pamphlets on demonic rituals.

“I really don’t think Giles and Willow are going to steal from us, Fred,” he said patiently.

“No, it’s just…” Fred opened one of the books, revealing an engraving depicting people having an orgiastic ritual to the greater glory of Lucifer. “These are the…dirtiest. I don’t want them thinking…”

Angel gazed at the very phallic looking Nirvalan weather lance and raised an eyebrow. “I get your point.”

She lowered her voice: “All of us living here, like this, not married and all… They might… you know…”

Before Angel could come up with a reasonable argument for why Fred should not be hiding all the most pornographic things they possessed under her bed, she had scurried upstairs.

Gunn and Wesley both looked at him for an explanation. Angel shrugged helplessly. “She’s trying to give the hotel a PG rating. In case Giles assumes we’re having evil orgiastic demon-raising Tupperware parties or something...”

“I didn’t know you could use Tupperware for that,” Wesley admitted, sipping his tea –before sloshing into his saucer after uttering a barely stifled yelp when Cordelia stuck her gel-covered fingers into his hair without warning. “Cordelia, you can’t just…”

Angel watched in fascination as Cordelia got Wesley’s new trendy hair style to do presumably newer and even trendier things with the aid of the hair gel, including making various bits of it stick up at the back and criss cross on the top. “Wax would be better but I’m used to working miracles with anything that comes to hand.” She beamed at them triumphantly. “How does he look now?”

Gunn put his head on one side. “With the hair and the designer stubble and the clothes? Like a male model who got mugged on his way to the photo shoot.”

Angel sighed. “Cordelia, what Gunn is trying to point out is that no one is going to be looking at Wesley’s hair when he very obviously got thrown head first into a weapon’s cabinet yesterday.”

Cordelia’s eyes lit up. “Of course! Make up!” She headed off purposefully.

Wesley turned to Angel and Gunn with something approaching desperation in his eyes. “Please. Make her stop.”

“I don’t think we can,” Gunn admitted. “Want to make a run for it?”

“You’re not going anywhere!” Cordelia shouted over her shoulder.

“Is that a demon thing?” Angel asked curiously.

Gunn shook his head. “She could always do that.”

Angel did however put his foot down when Cordelia came back with her make-up compact in her hand. Catching her wrist and saying quietly but firmly, “No.”

“You want him to look he like got thrown head first into a weapons’ cabinet?”

“Not particularly but as he did I can’t see the point in trying to cover it up. They know the work we do here is dangerous.”

“I could say I walked into a door,” Wesley offered. As they all looked at him in disbelief, he blinked. “Well, that does give you a black eye sometimes. I was always walking into doors at school until they realized I was near sighted.”

“Oh yes, do tell them that.” Cordelia rolled her eyes. “That’ll just put their minds at rest in an instant.”

“Put their minds at rest about what?” he asked in confusion.

They all exchanged looks. Angel sighed. “About the beating and starving and locking in closets of you that we all do.”

“What?”

“That they think we do. Think I do anyway.”

Wesley’s confusion showed no signs of abating. “Why did you tell Giles you beat me and starved me and locked me in cupboards?”

“I didn’t. He just…assumed.”

“Why would he assume that?”

“Because I’m the big bad vampire who tried to smother you in the hospital.”

There was an awkward silence in which Cordelia and Gunn both grimaced at one another and Angel and Wesley exchanged another of those long looks that always made Angel feel as if they’d had a three-hour conversation.

Quietly, Wesley said, “I see. And has Giles somehow forgotten that you’re also the big bad vampire who after I stole your son still took me in when I turned up bleeding on your doorstep?”

They exchanged another look. Angel realized how much he would have missed those. Wesley was the only person he’d ever been able to communicate with through something that approximated to telepathy, but they definitely needed eye contact to make it work. Transatlantic phone calls would not have been the same. “What are you going to tell Giles?”

“We already…” Wesley broke off as the doors opened to admit Giles, looking unexpectedly non-tweedy – in fact wearing jeans, a soft mauve sweater and a very nice suede jacket, and Willow looking tired but very pretty in something red and pink and vaguely tasselled that should have clashed with her hair but didn’t.

“See…” Cordelia nudged Wesley in the back. “You didn’t need to wear a suit.”

Willow beamed at Angel, which wrong-footed him more than any glare of disapproval would have done. She came forward and gave him a hug which confused him even more. He’d almost forgotten in his anxiety over this meeting that he and Willow had none of the issues that he and Giles did. She stood back to look him over. “You’re looking very…dark avengery.”

He couldn’t help smiling at her. “And you’re looking very…Willowy.”

She came over to the others, smiling at them all cheerfully, “Hi, Cordy, you’re looking really…great, and Wesley you’re looking really…” She grimaced. “Um…kind of like someone threw you through a window.”

“It was the weapons cabinet,” Fred said, hastily amending. “Not really through it – because it’s up against the wall but sort of into it. But – that hardly ever happens here. It was definitely a one-off.” Seeing Willow’s gently encouraging expression she shot out a hand. “I’m Fred. Short for Winifred. Burkle. I live here, along with Angel – but not with Angel like that because that would just be… Although I did have a crush for a while but I’m so over that now, it was really just a reaction to not living in a cave any more. I live with Charles now. That’s Charles.”

Gunn gave himself a little shake. A common experience Angel had noticed when Fred was allowed to get into full spate. He held out a hand. “Charles Gunn.”

Angel could hear the introductions continuing behind him as Giles came over to him. “Angel.”

“Giles.”

There was a pause before Giles said, “Buffy and Dawn send their regards.”

Angel raised an eyebrow. “What, no hug from Xander?” He became aware of Wesley shifting uncomfortably and knew Wesley was watching his interaction with Giles anxiously. Sighing, Angel decided to play nice to save Wesley’s shattered nerves. He glanced over at him and gave him a reassuring look but Wesley still looked as if only years of being whacked over the knuckles with a ruler by implacable teachers was stopping him from biting his nails right now. Although come to think of it they probably didn’t do that any more. It was almost more scary to think Wesley had grown up the way he had in an era of no corporal punishment than one with the knuckle-rappings and canings of the past.

Wesley tugged at Fred’s sleeve and murmured something to her and she sprang up like someone had run a thousand volts through her, making everyone around her jolt anxiously too. “Tea! I’ll make tea.” She looked at Giles. “You’d like tea, yes?”

Giles looked at her in some perplexity. “Yes, thank you, a cup of tea would be very…” But she had darted into the office.

“She spent five years in a cave,” Gunn explained.

“In my home dimension.” Lorne took a strengthening sip of his sea breeze just at the thought of it. “Pylea isn’t exactly friendly to the humankind.”

“Groo’s from Pylea.” Cordelia pulled him forward proudly, Groo having tried to modestly hang back. “I was made Princess.”

“A life’s ambition realized…” Giles murmured.

Cordelia looked at him narrowly. “So, Giles – are those mid-life crisis clothes or are you just trying really hard to get laid?”

Willow said hastily, “So – has there been any activity that suggests the gateway to the other dimension is still open…?”

Angel decided to leave that explanation to everyone else, moving a little apart to try to calm his jangled nerves. One day he probably would be able to hear the name ‘Buffy’ without it resonating through him like an electric shock. It seemed a little unfair that he was currently suffering from jealousy over Cordelia’s preference for Groo and still feeling like someone had stuck a kopek in his guts and twisted it every time Buffy was mentioned.

Willow was listening wide-eyed to the saga of the visiting Angelus and demon Gunn, while Giles was frowning and taking notes.

“You have a videotape of it? Them coming here? Does it show the portal activity?”

Wesley turned to Gunn with a begging look that no one could possibly have misinterpreted, and Gunn said quickly, “No. Sorry – it – static – interference. Couldn’t really see or hear anything.” Adding sotto voce: ‘Wes, stop with the eyes…’

“The point is they’re dead.” Cordelia took one of the cups from the tray Fred brought out while Giles thanked her gravely for his. “So, the portal going swirly or whooshy or just crackle-a-lot doesn’t really matter any more because they won’t be coming through it. And you’ve got the spell, right? The one that Brain of Britain here decided to use to get himself there. So, can you close it or not?”

“Yes,” Willow said decisively. “I’m sure we can. It’s just a pity about the videotape because it would have been easier if we could have seen if it was kind of whooshy or crackly. Maybe I could run it through my computer and see if I can clean up the images.”

Wesley once again whammied Gunn with the full-on angst eyes and the taller man said hastily, “Tossed it. Sorry. We weren’t sure if it was – carrying different dimension germs or something so we threw it in the incinerator.”

“We did?” Fred looked at him in surprise. Gunn nudged her and jerked his head at Wesley’s angsty face and she hastily amended: “Oh yes, we did. Burned it right up.”

Giles looked around the hotel. “And you people run a detective agency, yes?”

Fred nodded. “We help the helpless and investigate paranormal and demonic happenings.” She held out a fan of cards from the front desk.

“Lot of undercover work is there in your line of business?” Giles enquired dryly, taking the cards. He looked through them all. “Angel, Cordelia Chase, Charles Gunn, Winifred Burkle.”

Cordelia said without a flicker of shame at the falsehood, “Wesley’s are being reprinted – they usually try to put extra ‘h’s in his name but this time they just spelt Pryce with an ‘i’. He hates it when they do that. Worse than when they forget his hyphen. You should see the sulking. And Groo and Lorne aren’t actually on the payroll. Groo’s kind of a freelance champion and Lorne is really a houseguest – on account of us making him homeless by getting his nightclub destroyed.”

“Three times.” Lorne took another sip of his drink. “That’s the point where I decided I could take a hint from the Powers That Whatever You. And, you know – Krevlorneswath of the Deathwok Clan – doesn’t fit so well on a business card– although I’ve always thought it would really look really good picked out in lights.”

Giles handed back the cards to Fred while still looking at Wesley. “So – Wesley…?”

“We’ve already been through this.” Cordelia folded her arms in her best ‘none shall pass’ manner. “Wesley doesn’t want to go back to Sunnydale in this dimension or any other dimension. And I don’t get why people keep trying to take him back there anyway. It’s not like anyone even gave him the time of day when he was there except for me.”

Wesley murmured, “Giles was very patient.”

“I went to see him in the hospital,” Willow protested. “And I made him a get well soon card too. It had a little cricket bat on it and everything.”

Fred beamed at Willow. “That was so sweet.”

“I’m not in Sunnydale any more, Cordelia,” Giles said quietly. “I live in England now. I was only wondering if…”

Angel found he couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Well, Wesley doesn’t want to go there either. And like Cordelia said, why the sudden interest? None of you gave a damn about him when the Council fired him and he had nowhere to go and no money to get there. That six months he was rogue demon hunting his way into a place where he had no food, no sleep, nowhere to stay and a very good chance of getting himself killed, how many times did you try to find him? Or even spare him a thought?”

Giles glared at him. “You have no idea how many thoughts I’ve spared Wesley over the years or how many times I’ve wondered if he knows what a risk he’s taking…”

“I know. Working for the big bad vampire! Once a Council guy, always a Council guy, right, Giles? Well, I’m getting a little sick of everyone looking at me and seeing baby-eating rapist murderer vampire just because in another dimension… Did everyone start edging away from Willow after that vampire version of her turned up in Sunnydale?”

Cordelia said, “Well, let’s be honest, Angel, ordinary Willow wears fluffy pink sweaters, it was a bit of a stretch to start seeing her as evil Willow, mistress of bondage, just because she wriggled her way into a clinging costume for a few hours and pretended to be her evil twin. I mean, Wesley got into those leather pants just fine but that didn’t make him a member of the Village People, did it?”

Wesley blinked. “I thought they – didn’t they make me look sort of rugged and dangerous?”

Cordelia glanced at him. “We weren’t going to tell you but, no, Wes, they made you look like you should have been working Santa Monica Boulevard. Did you really wear those from Sunnydale to Los Angeles without getting your ass pinched?”

Angel nudged her. “Cordy…”

She grimaced. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to…”

“And I see tact is still a strong point.” Willow took a deep breath. “Can we stop with the shouting and the accusing and the general bad vibeyness?”

Lorne nodded. “Thank you for saying it, sweetpea. After yesterday’s bad vibeathon I really don’t need any more hollering and recriminating.”

Angel rolled his eyes. “I’m just sick of people turning up here who don’t even know Wesley the way we do and thinking that they know what’s best for him and that he’s going to be better off with them. Why would he be?”

“Perhaps because we don’t try to smother him with pillows?” Giles suggested.

Angel glowered at him. “You undermined his self-esteem. If you’d been nicer to him in Sunnydale…”

“Can we please not do this?” Wesley looked up at them and at the sight of his various cuts and bruises everyone winced again. “I don’t want to go to England. I don’t want to go to Sunnydale. But I will go absolutely anywhere right now if it means people will stop talking about me as if I’m not here.”

Angel grimaced. “Sorry – we could go outside and talk about you if you like?”

“I’m not here to take Wesley back to England.” Giles glared at Angel. “He and I spoke about this yesterday and he’s already told me he wants to stay here – although why I really can’t imagine.”

“Oh.” Angel looked at Wesley. “I didn’t know you’d spoken to Giles.”

“It was just before Angelus and the other Gunn turned up…” Wesley grimaced. “Sorry.”

Angel turned back to Giles awkwardly. “It’s just – the other Giles was all gung-ho about taking Wesley back with them to their dimension too.”

“Didn’t they have one there?” Willow asked in concern.

“There’s was a bit…dented. They had a Willow, though, and a Xander, and Buffy, and Faith. Just none of…” he gestured awkwardly at his companions, “…us. Faith said she wanted our Wesley for her Watcher but I think she was just hoping he could help out with therapy for their Wesley – and I think it would have traumatized the other Wesley anyway. Seeing another version of yourself – not a nice experience.”

Willow nodded emphatically. “You can say that again. Especially when they’re skanky and evil.”

“I’m not particularly skanky or evil,” Wesley pointed out.

“The other Gunn and Angelus were beyond skanky and evil,” Fred told Willow. “They were the skankiest evillest vampires to ever walk the earth. I really didn’t like them.”

“It’s so good you and Cordy dusted them.”

“I dusted the other me,” Gunn protested.

“Only because we distracted him for you,” Cordelia insisted.

“Wesley saved me.” Fred looked at Wesley so fondly that Angel wondered not for the first time if she was actually dating the right guy or if some inconvenient light bulb was going to go off at her head at a later date where she suddenly realized Wesley was the one for her. It would probably help if Wesley stopped with the enigmatic broody angsty whumped guy thing and stopped gazing at her with the big blue puppy dog eyes too. As someone who had used the enigmatic broody angsty whumped vampire thing and the big brown puppy dog eyes on more than one occasion himself; he knew how effective a combination they could be. Fred was blissfully unaware of any such thoughts and beamed at Willow. “He was so brave. He stalled them while Lorne helped get me to safety. And then when we got down the fire escape Angel and the others were just coming back. So we made our cunning plan to rescue Wesley and totally dusted the evil bad guys.”

Gunn looked at Lorne. “Still think you should have let me piss on their dust.”

Fred nudged him, saying hastily, “No, we would never do that, because that would just be unsanitary.”

Angel looked at her. “Fred, you do know that Giles and Willow aren’t from the public health department or social services and even if we had rats in the basement they still couldn’t take Wesley out of here without his consent?”

Fred shifted uncomfortably. “I know. I was just… I know.”

Giles drained his tea, looked at Willow and said, “Shall we close that inter-dimensional tear then, Willow?”

“Love to.” She put her teacup back on the tray Fred was still holding, smiled at her, patted her tentatively on the shoulder, said, “Well, it was really nice talking to you all but I really think we need to…go and do witchy portally-closing things now.”

Fred looked at her hopefully. “Will you stay for lunch because we were thinking…?”

“Sorry,” Giles said hastily. “Not this time. On the next visit, perhaps. This way to the basement is it, Angel?”

“I’ll show you.” Realizing that he had been so defensive about them taking Wesley away that he had not exactly been the perfect host, Angel hurried to make amends, sprinting across to hold open the door, then putting on the light, taking Willow’s bag from her and carrying it down into the basement. “It was… Actually, I don’t know where it was. Wesley would probably. Do you want me to…?”

“It’s okay.” Willow held up her hands. “It’s pretty clear where it was. The air’s still fizzing. Why don’t you go and…”

“Let us get on with it,” Giles suggested.

Angel nodded and backed away awkwardly, relieved to sprint back up the stairs and close the door on them. He leant against it and saw everyone was looking equally relieved.

“That could have gone better…” Wesley said faintly.

“I think I liked the other Giles more,” Fred murmured to Gunn. “This one is kind of scary. Is that how Watchers get in this dimension when they get to that age?”

Everyone looked speculatively at Wesley for a moment. Cordelia said, “How many years older than you is Giles, Wesley?”

“About twelve I think.” Wesley looked up at her in confusion. “Why?”

“Just checking.”

“Maybe it’s living on a Hellmouth?” Gunn suggested.

Angel sighed. He knew he’d behaved badly to Giles. He knew Wesley knew it too. He was going to have to make sure those two got some time together before Giles and Willow headed back so Wesley could talk to Giles in peace and without fear of being overheard. Something he would have arranged this time if he hadn’t been feeling so defensive about his actions, their recent history, and the behaviour of the Angelus from the other dimension. He walked over to where the others were still sitting on the banquette and said quietly: “Maybe it’s being responsible for a group of reckless vulnerable teenagers, having your girlfriend murdered by someone you used to trust, being tortured, fired, almost killed about once a month, and then having to watch your Slayer die right in front of you.”

Angel noticed that everyone was staring fixedly behind him with deer-in-headlights expressions and sighed, closing his eyes. Yes, this was definitely not going to be a good day.

“I need to borrow a receptacle of some kind…”

He turned around to find Giles standing there looking grave and thoughtful. Angel nodded. “There are a few things in the kitchen. Come with me and see if there’s anything that would work.”

They walked to the kitchen in silence. When they reached it at the thought of the long walk back also in silence, Angel said, “Willow looks tired.”

Giles looked at him in surprise. “Yes. She’s had a difficult time recently. She was trying to avoid all magic but this was too important to ignore. Wesley is aware that what he did was extraordinarily irresponsible and dangerous, isn’t he?”

“You’ve seen what he looks like and that’s after weeks of healing. He’s never going to try that again. He knows he could have got Fred and Cordy killed. If those two vampires had followed him straight back when his suicide nut kicked in we wouldn’t have been ready for them. He knows that.”

“Are you certain?”

“He’s a smart guy. If I’m capable of working it out, he certainly is, and he would never do anything to risk Cordelia or Fred’s lives. He was prepared to get dragged back to that hellhole basement in the other dimension and go through it all again to save Fred. He knows it would have done worse than kill him. He knows he would have ended up as insane as that other Wesley. But he was still prepared to do it. Wes does the wrong thing sometimes, it’s true, but he doesn’t usually do it for the wrong reasons.”

Giles ran a hand through his hair. “It still makes me extremely nervous to think that he is dabbling in spells as dark and powerful as that one, and I’m not just being paranoid. Willow has been…on the brink of becoming an addict for some time now. I blame myself for not being here, but I felt Buffy needed a chance to reconnect with Dawn, with life, with herself.”

“Has she?”

Giles sighed. “Not yet. So far she’s reconnected with a lot of self-loathing and repressed anger. She’s suffered too many blows in too short a time to keep bouncing back with no emotional scar tissue.”

Angel closed his eyes, thinking of that vibrant innocent girl he’d first seen. “I didn’t exactly help that situation.”

“No, you didn’t. But it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know about the fine print of your curse, you certainly aren’t responsible for the actions of Angelus – in this dimension or any other – and you had nothing to do with Joyce’s death or Buffy’s. She was ripped out of paradise by people who love her and whom she can’t therefore hate for what they did to her. She can’t finish college. She’s trying to take care of a sister with a number of problems of her own, and her taste in boyfriends actually appears to be getting worse.”

“Is she seeing someone?”

“Angel, trust me on this, you really don’t want to know.”

Angel picked up a saucepan and realized that Giles was right – he didn’t. It hurt too much and always would hurt too much to know that Buffy had someone in her life who wasn’t him. “You’re probably right. What are you doing about Willow?”

“Taking her back to England with me. That was partly why I was hoping Wesley…”

“He doesn’t need to go to Spellcasters Anonymous, Giles, I swear. Magic to Wesley is a means to an end. He doesn’t get off on the power kick. He just knows how to say the words to make the spell happen. He was trying to fix something he’d done that turned out wrong. He thought about the consequences first. He swallowed that nut even though it might kill him because he wanted to be sure there was a failsafe. Wesley isn’t reckless and the only thing he possibly needs an intervention about is his antiquarian book buying habit. But Willow sounds as if she definitely needs to go with you.”

“There’s a chance Tara will accompany her. I’ve been having lunch with Tara for the past week or so and she still cares for Willow very much. I know a coven in England that might be able to help Willow to find a way to use her powers that isn’t destructive. They have more knowledge than I do and could help her find the necessary balance within herself to deal with her undoubted magical abilities. I don’t want her to have to act like an alcoholic who can never touch another drink. Without being brutal, she is too useful a tool in the fight against evil. But I’m worried that if she falls back into her previous abuse of magic it could end up possessing her entirely. Dark magic has a will of its own sometimes.”

Angel thought of Buffy alone in Sunnydale without Giles or Willow. “What about Buffy?”

“I’m afraid Buffy is too overwhelmed by her own problems at the moment to be able to help Willow or anyone else.”

“No, I mean – how will she manage without you both?”

“I have every confidence in Buffy’s ability to realize for herself that she needs to reconnect with the people around her.”

“But if you’re not there…”

“You’re not there either.” Giles’ expression was surprisingly gentle. “And for a good reason.” He examined the saucepan dubiously. “I was hoping for something with a closer resemblance to a cauldron.”

“There may be a cooking pot.” Angel opened cupboards and began to search. Over his shoulder, he said, “I can’t imagine you ever – not being good for Buffy.”

“I can assure you that I was not being good for her at all. When you have people on the cusp of childhood and adulthood, forced to shoulder responsibilities and sorrows that would crush someone with many years more experience, it can sometimes be all too easy for them to hang onto some of the behaviour that reassures them they are still children, after all. That probably sounds like a contradiction, but…”

“No, I understand.” Angel looked at Giles with new comprehension, thinking of Wesley and Cordelia with their arms folded in a thoroughly childish fit of indignation about him taking time off from being their surrogate parent to indulge his own emotional immaturity. “I really do. I was kind of a single parent for a while back there.”

“I know.” Giles looked at him compassionately. “I know you lost your child, Angel, and just because I don’t approve of your reaction to that loss does not in any way mean that I don’t appreciate the depth of your grief over…”

“No, I didn’t mean Connor. For once.” He managed a wan smile. “I meant Wes and Cordy. They were sort of my child substitutes for a while. Wes was particularly clingy, needy and in need of therapy but Cordy was as bad as he was about assuming I had nothing better to do than take care of them twenty-four-seven. I’ll never get Wesley to admit it but the best thing I ever did for him – after taking him in and trying to fix his shattered self esteem – was going all darkside on them, firing them, and forcing him to stand on his own two feet. I’m not saying they enjoyed the experience or that there was anything justifiable about my behaviour during that time – but it was what they needed to grow up.”

Giles inclined his head. “They certainly seem grown up now.”

“Cordy knows she has a place in the world. She knows she has something unique that gives her a way to contribute. I know what people see when they look at her – ex-cheerleader, wannabe actress. That’s not even scratching the surface of who she is now. She’s someone who went on carrying the incredibly painful visions from the Powers That Be even though she knew they were killing her because she could save some more lives before her head exploded. She let them make her part demon so she could go on doing good. She may still dress and sound like the biggest bitch in Sunnydale but her actions really do speak louder than her words.”

“What about Wesley?” Giles asked curiously.

“Wesley’s a…work in progress. We have some trust issues to work through but we’re doing that.” Angel sighed. “Giles, if I really thought that he was better off in England…”

Giles held up a hand. “I know. I talked to Wesley. He was very clear about only being able to work through his redemption here. He’s acutely conscious of the wrong he did you and he wants to make amends. And – I do believe that you have all in the past provided him with something that he never knew until he came here.”

Angel frowned. “What’s that?”

“A loving family.” Giles turned away. “I’ve met Wesley’s father. Quite recently. He took my mentioning that I knew his son as a veiled insult. I suspect one needs look no further for Wesley’s self-esteem issues than there.”

“He used to lock him under the stairs.” Angel had always thought he would carry that piece of information to the dust heap with him, but he felt the need to make it clear that they weren’t just being unreasonable; weren’t keeping Wesley from better care than they could provide. “Was always telling him he wasn’t good enough. I don’t think he ever showed him any affection or gave him any praise. Wesley used to get tears in his eyes if Cordy or I said anything kind to him. That isn’t normal in a guy of his age. He’d just – never experienced it before.”

“Well…” Giles half-smiled. “He is English, you know.”

“We make allowances.”

Giles looked at him curiously for a moment. “You don’t sound like someone who hates Wesley.”

Angel wondered what conversation they had just been having where that could still be an issue. “Of course I… You think I hate him?”

“Wesley said you took him in and trusted him and he betrayed you. He said you hated him now. He seemed to think that was no more than he deserved.”

Angel felt his guts twist. “It wasn’t like that. He – was just trying to do the right thing. He was trying to protect the people he cared about. I can’t ever think he made the right choice but he didn’t do it for any reason except to try to save my son and save me from the guilt of having murdered him. I know that. On some level, perhaps I’ve always known it, but you don’t know how it felt, Giles… I worked so hard to keep Connor safe. There was danger all around him and Wesley picks him up and carries him straight into the worst of it. Connor had never known anything except people who loved him and I have to see him carried into a hell dimension by my worst enemy – all because of Wesley. I wanted to hurt Wesley as much as he’d hurt me but I don’t hate him. The person I tried to kill in the hospital – that wasn’t Wesley, that was someone I had to tell myself deserved to pay for all the misery I was feeling; the only person left to make pay for it. I called him ‘Pryce’ for a reason when I was trying to smother him.”

Giles picked up another cooking pot and examined it. “He said some woman called Lilah something likened him to Judas Iscariot. He seemed to think that was a fair comparison as well.”

Angel winced. “She really is a first class bitch. And she had a vested interest in convincing him there was no point in trying to mend fences with us because she wanted to recruit him to Wolfram & Hart.”

“Angel, I have no influence over Wesley and no say in this at all but I do have reservations about him being here on some kind of sufferance – treated like a second-class citizen while he has to Uriah Heep his way around the hotel being grateful for scraps of diluted friendship from people who are never going to fully trust him again. You both seem to think that he betrayed you. If that’s the case then how well are you going to be able to work together?”

Angel leaned against the counter top, looking up at the various pots and pans hanging from their hooks. “I don’t know. But I’d like to give working together again a try and see how it turns out. We have a lot of history and most of it’s good. Same with him and Gunn, him and Cordy, him and Fred, him and Lorne. We’ve been through a lot together. Maybe this is just something else we have to ride out. I used to rip people’s throats out for fun. He doesn’t let that sit between us and fester. I’ll try to do the same about the fact my son is dead because of him.”

“Well, it’s your decision, but I think Wesley is at the end of his rope. After what happened with Connor and then in that other dimension, I think he may be very close to snapping.”

Angel gazed intently into Giles’s face. “What did he say to you?”

“I don’t like betraying his confidence but…people like Wesley and myself, we’re not – terribly well equipped to deal with our emotions. We were brought up to repress them and consequently never found a way to articulate them. To be honest he and I hardly know one another. We spent a few months working together in an atmosphere of mutual irritation, very loosely bound together by a common cause. But he…”

“What?” Angel was seriously concerned now and Giles’s hesitation made his anxiety worse.

Giles took a deep breath. “He broke down, Angel. If he can start crying on the end of the phone to me, I have to think he’s pretty close to the edge. You said it yourself – he hadn’t known a lot of kindness before he came to LA. I think you and Cordelia may have shown him almost too much. Certainly more than he can easily bear to lose. If you really can’t accept him back into the – bosom of your dysfunctional family I think it would be kinder of you to separate the ties between you and…”

“Giles, Angelus and the other Gunn...” Angel broke off not knowing how to proceed. “It was – bad, what they did to him.”

Giles gave him a straight look. “I know what being tortured by Angelus entails, Angel.”

“It was worse than what I did to you.” Angel held his gaze. “Much worse.”

Giles’s eyes widened. “Is Wesley…intact?”

“They didn’t castrate him. They…” Emasculated him by other means. Angel grimaced. No way was he saying that aloud. He picked his words carefully: “You’ve read the file, you know the fun things Angelus used to do to the ones he kept alive. That’s what those two did to him – Angelus and the vampire Gunn from the other dimension. Rinse and repeat. For six days. The fact he’s sane at all is the real miracle here. I’m not surprised he broke down on the phone to you. I’m just amazed he’s coping as well as he is.”

“Good Lord.” Giles removed his glasses and began to clean them, gazing fixedly at the presumably blurry pots and pans as he did so. “I had no idea…”

“Those two weren’t just soulless bloodsuckers, they were sadistic evil monsters who majored in causing pain and degradation and I can never undo what they did to him. I can’t make it go away. I can’t make it not have happened. Any more than I can make what happened to Connor go away, or make what happened in the hospital go away. Everything is new between us because I don’t even know who this version of Wesley is. I’m not sure he does either and the dust hasn’t even settled yet. There are some things you can’t walk away from and be the same person you were before. I can’t be who I was before I lost my son and neither can Wesley. But I know what Angelus is capable of better than anyone else in this dimension. And I’m the person who holds the key to his redemption, because I’m the only person who can tell him that I forgive him.”

“Do you think you ever could?” Giles pressed.

“I think I already have.” Angel tried to shift through his own confusion of emotions. “I think I just needed to find a way to do that which didn’t feel as if it was a betrayal of my son.” He gazed at Giles intently. “Don’t tell anyone else – about Wesley – will you?”

“Certainly not.” Giles looked horrified. “I wouldn’t dream of… I just wish… What a bloody awful mess.”

“Yes.” Angel saw no point in denying it.

“Is he going to have some kind of…therapy?”

Angel shrugged. “We’re his therapy. We took him in. We took care of him. We killed the people who hurt him. Right now, I think that’s probably the best therapy anyone can give him. That and helping him to do normal things. Well…normal by our standards, which means he gets to research gut-ripping demons with six claws and two horns until he’s well enough to get out there and help us fight them again.”

“You don’t think a change of scenery…?”

“I think if he’s left alone he could still fragment. What those two did to him…”

“With all due respect, Angel, I think what those two did to him still doesn’t compare for traumatic value with what you did to him in the hospital.”

Angel only nodded. “I think you’re right. But I don’t think getting away from me is the answer.”

“I suspect you’re probably right. Are you capable of…” Giles cast around for the right words. “I suppose I mean – showing him affection? Can you bring yourself to…? Can you ever treat him like a friend?”

“He is my friend.” Angel sighed. “He’s my friend who stole my son. Just as I’m his friend who tried to kill him. We can’t go back to being who we were before. We have to go forward.” He looked up at Giles and gave him a smile and shrug. “You want to know how this is going to pan out between us, Giles? Well, I’ll tell you when I know myself, because Wesley and I – we’re still learning a bunch of whole new steps…”

Giles and Willow did stay to lunch, and supper, and, it was decided, would be staying overnight. They strengthened the weakened walls between the two dimensions with a spell of – according to Lorne – considerable power. Lorne did a reading for Willow, and Angel’s hearing was good enough to pick up the anagogic demon telling her that she was at a crossroads and he couldn’t make the decision for her, but he saw good things in green fields for her and a certain someone who was so very much in her thoughts, and by the end of the day Willow had told everyone that she was going back to England with Giles to stay at the coven and try to work on gaining control of her magical abilities.

Fred ordered in enough food to feed twenty people at least and they ate together in the dining room. Giles was quiet but subtly different with all of them than before. With Wesley he was extremely gentle and kind. He said nothing to him about the irresponsibility of his actions in attempting such a spell and spent a quiet hour with him examining his books, recommending some other titles that he might find of use, and showing enthusiastic interest in some of his rare volumes. Over supper, he soothed Cordelia’s ruffled feathers by asking her about her visions and her new ‘demonisation’. However, on hearing more of the visions and her recent dalliance with a coma, he became concerned and went into the whole nature of the visions in more depth than any of them had ever done. Angel knew that he had been as guilty as everyone else of simply accepting them as part of the package of his redemption, but now Giles dealt with them as the invasive mind-and-body-altering trauma that they were. He asked Cordelia gravely if she was sure that the Powers were benevolent in their intentions and talked about the Old Ones at considerable length. Wesley fetched the books Giles asked for and they all went through the references together, Giles making a powerful case for the possibility that the Old Ones referenced in so many books and the unseen Powers could be one and the same.

Cordelia had started off a little scornful and defensive but by the end of Giles’ quietly determined exposition was looking seriously concerned. She was proud of the visions and her role in carrying them. From cheerleader to seer was a step of which anyone would be proud. But now for the first time they all looked at Cordelia and found themselves wondering if the people behind the visions were entirely benevolent.

“Perhaps I’m being overly cynical,” Giles explained. “Or it could be my classical education. But Powers – plural – suggests god-like creatures, a pan dimensional pantheon which may have their own weaknesses and rivalries. Glory was a god and her intentions were not benevolent although her power was terrifying. You’re all being very trusting that these creatures do have a clearer view than your own – that they are higher and better than you are because they are clearly creatures of great power. But so were the Old Ones, and they bore a more than passing resemblance to the gods of Mount Olympus – quarrelling fallible deities who liked to use the lowly mortals as pieces on a human chess board.”

“We got you,” Gunn nodded. “We’ve all seen Jason and the Argonauts.”

Fred looked anxious. “But what does that mean? Does it mean the good guys are really bad guys or what…?”

“It means that there were once beings who walked this dimension of great and terrible power and who, for whatever reason, decided to move onto a different or higher plane but who may still take an interest in the happenings of the world, and whose interest may be benevolent or not. Looking at these scrolls Wesley has translated, it seems apparent that Angel has long been of interest to these Powers. That begs the question – how long? Benevolent powers might take pity upon a creature with a great desire to atone for past sins and want to help him in that endeavour.”

“That’s what they’re doing,” Cordelia insisted. “Helping Angel on the path to his redemption – because he’s unique, because he’s the vampire with the soul that is written about in Wesley’s musty old scrolls.”

“But Angel’s existence – the fact that there is a vampire with a soul currently walking the earth able to carry out the apparently benevolent wishes of these mysterious powers – is entirely dependent upon a set of circumstances that came as a result of many cruel deaths – the first of which was Angel’s own. If the Powers have always intended Angel to be their champion in this time and this world, then they must also have been at the very least content to let a history play out in which countless hundreds died terrifying deaths and Angel himself was cursed to carry an appalling burden of guilt just so that he would be prepared to work through his redemption by doing their wishes.”

“Okay,” Gunn nodded. “Now I’m moving on from Ray Harryhausen and I’m thinking ‘Trust No One’.”

Giles sighed. “I don’t wish to undermine the fabric of your belief system or, Angel, to deny you the hope that you will one day find redemption, but I’ve learned to mistrust systems of absolute authority, that hand out orders without explanations and demand sacrifice without justification. Both my grandfathers died in the First World War as the result of questionable military decisions made by men who were safe in their chambers in London at the time men were choking to death on mustard gas and drowning in the mud of Flanders. You are the front line. Cordelia has already allowed these people to alter her for no other purpose than to make it possible for her to continue to carry the burden of visions which, although are undoubtedly helping to avert a number of deaths, could be a smokescreen for a different plan entirely.”

Cordelia looked wretched. “I don’t understand why you think that.”

Giles looked into her eyes. “How many people have these visions saved so far? A hundred?”

“We don’t know,” Wesley explained. “We don’t know how many people would have died if the various demons we’ve destroyed had been permitted to carry out their individual killing sprees. It could be thousands. It could be considerably less.”

Giles looked across at Angel. “And how many did Angelus kill? If these Powers are ageless and omniscient enough to be able to foretell when a demon is going to arise that can kill a dozen or so misguided worshippers, why didn’t they send whoever was their seer or the champion allied with their seer in the eighteenth century to prevent Darla from ever turning you in the first place or at least to stop your killing spree once it was in full spate? That’s a great deal of demon-fuelled misery they didn’t avert right there.”

Angel looked across at Cordelia and felt exactly as she evidently did – as if someone was trying to take his security blanket away – but he couldn’t deny the truth of Giles’ words. “You may have a point.”

Giles took a deep breath. “I hope you’ll forgive me for being so outspoken but you both have your share of arrogance. You’re important, Angel. These Powers tell you so. You’re of such significance that you feature in prophecies, a pan-dimensional law firm with an investment in the apocalypse is trying to control you, and mysterious higher beings have claimed you as their champion. And, Cordelia, you’re not just an ex-cheerleader any more; you’re the carrier of the visions, the woman who tells Angel what the Powers want him to do next. I don’t think it takes a genius to work out that your genuine desires to do good – your willingness to sacrifice yourselves for the greater good and your belief that the greater good in this case involves you passing onto Angel the wisdom of these mysterious Powers and him carrying out their wishes, could be horribly exploited by a being of sufficient power and ambition. You mentioned that Cordelia’s visions were once hijacked by malevolent humans for their own ends. I would like some assurance from someone that the ‘true’ visions come from a source that is indisputably disinterested in anything but the greater good of the human race.”

Evidently seeing he had thoroughly worried them all, Giles grimaced and sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“Complete undermine our belief in everything we hold dear?” Cordelia demanded. “God, Giles, do they hire you out to speak at religious gatherings, too? Do you give pep talks to Catholics about how their god has to really suck or else the Inquisition wouldn’t have happened?”

“I did try that once,” the man deadpanned. “But for some reason they never invited me back.”

Wesley was gazing at the scroll on which the Shanshu prophecy was inscribed with dismay. “But – this is a sacred scroll. It’s cross-referenced in many works. It…” He sighed. “It says things I want to hear. It tells me things I need to believe in. Just like Cordelia with her visions.”

“We have to believe in something.” Angel gazed at Giles, trying to shake off a deep feeling of unease that the man had planted in his breast. “Otherwise – why even bother? Why not just give up now?”

“I suggest you believe in what you’re doing and each other. You are doing good, yes? Keep doing it. Just be sure that what you’re doing is good and that you’re doing it for the right reasons and not as the puppets of someone who has their own reason for wanting to have influence over you.”

“I don’t believe the Powers are evil,” Cordelia said stolidly.

“I’m not saying they are, but I can’t help asking, why, as they could send you a vision when you were in another dimension they couldn’t send you one when you were sunning yourself on a beach in this one? They could have saved Connor from Quor’toth, but they didn’t. I have to wonder why.”

Cordelia opened her mouth to answer and then stopped. “That’s a good point. If they’d shown me Holtz taking him into Quor’toth I could have called Wesley; stopped him getting his throat slit, stopped Justine…”

Angel saw that get through to Cordelia in a way that nothing else had. She had been stubbornly resistant to any suggestion that the Powers could be at fault but this was something she felt deeply – that Connor should have been saved. She turned to Wesley. “Remember when I said that if I ever met them I’d like to punch them in the nose? I’m feeling like that again.”

“Gotta say I’m wondering if Giles has a point,” Gunn observed.

Fred frowned. “I’m wondering why Cordy needs to be part demon. If it is some… If we’re the chess pieces and we’re being moved into position, why does Cordy have to be part demon? Of course, I may as well tell you all – I’m a conspiracy theorist from way back. I find it easier to believe in a Higher Power that’s plotting and laying traps for us than I do in some big glowy omniscient Father Christmas on a cloud.”

“The visions of my princess have saved many lives,” Groo said quietly.

“Maybe the Powers are as fallible as we are.” Wesley was still looking at the scroll he was holding, Angel noticed. He wondered if he ought to ease it out of his hands but Wesley didn’t seem to want to put it down even for an instant. “Maybe they’re trying to help. Maybe they have a plan. Maybe it’s just not a very good plan.” He looked directly at Angel and Angel found himself thinking how men were supposed to fashion their gods in their own images, or that of their authority figures at least. He’d seen it in Ireland, women so in awe of their priest he was more real to them than the god he was supposed to represent, until probably no god could have competed with him for power, for glamour. And how sons were supposed to see the reflection of god in their fathers. Now Wesley was looking at him curiously as he if was measuring him up for something or measuring something up against him.

“Maybe they want to do good,” Wesley continued thoughtfully. “Want it more than anything else, but aren’t…strategists. Or are strategists but the planning has become so important they’ve forgotten the human cost involved. Or…”

Willow said gently, “I think we should get some sleep.”

Angel noticed Willow looking at Wesley and saw what she was seeing, that they had almost become used to – how wrecked he looked, unshaven and with those shadows under his eyes and the cuts and bruises on his face, how he had to wear his watch above his wrist bone because his arms were so painfully thin it would slide halfway to his elbow if the bone didn’t anchor it in place. He glanced across at Cordelia and saw her running a hand through her hair, not caring that it wasn’t tidy, looking as if she had lost her balance somewhere and was trying to find it. He thought of them the way they had been before Vocah, before the explosion, before the Hyperion, and wondered if it was he or the Powers who had done this to them.

He got to his feet. “Yes, it’s been a long day.”

Gunn was also looking between Cordelia and Wesley. Cordelia said, “But…how can they be…? Why wouldn’t they save Connor…?”

Groo gently put an arm around her and said, “You need to sleep, princess. Would you like me to recite to you the poetry of the Book of Eshermon? I have always found that such verses soothe me after a battle.”

She glanced up at him and said, “I think I just want… He was so small… Why wouldn’t they save a baby from being taken into hell…?”

Giles winced apologetically as she walked away from the table and then turned to Angel who found himself thinking that it would be a huge cosmic joke upon him if the Powers were as fallible as the mythological gods of Mount Olympus; if the model for all those squabbling pantheons were the same Powers he had been blindly following since he arrived in Los Angeles. The ones who had let Doyle go to his death. Who had told Cordelia the back of her skull would blow out if she didn’t give up the visions then showed her a world where although she was famous it was at the expense of Angel’s sanity and Wesley’s left arm. She was only twenty-two still. Doing good was still new to her; still as shiny and bright as it had once been to him, before a hundred years in a hell dimension had knocked some of that conviction out of him; made him realize the true reality of one step forward and fourteen back that seemed to be the dance steps for his life. Not so difficult to manipulate even a smart girl like Cordelia by appealing to her newly-awakened sense of self-sacrifice.

They had all been swift enough to condemn Wesley for allowing himself to be fooled by a fake prophecy but what if Giles was right and they’d all been fooled? If not only the Nyazian scrolls but that other precious roll of parchment Wesley was currently clinging onto so hard was just another lie as well? And Connor? What was Connor? Had he been a reward or a punishment? Or had he been a chance and life was random chaos and Angel had no purpose in the world except to be someone who had killed more people than he could ever atone for and yet to spend his eternity trying anyway?

Giles said, “I’m terribly sorry. I was really just thinking aloud.”

Angel looked up and then looked around the table. Cordelia had gone while he’d been thinking. Gunn had his arm around Fred who was looking pale and shocked, Wesley was still clinging onto that damned scroll. Angel wanted to reach across and yank it out of his hand and throw it across the room, but there was no way to do it that wouldn’t make it look as if it was about him being angry with Wesley when it was all to do with being angry with himself.

Angel got up. “Let’s go to bed. Wes – do you need a hand?” As Wesley continued to look at him blankly, he crossed over to where he was sitting, pulled him to his feet, took the scroll from him and placed it firmly on the table. “You need to sleep.” He pulled Wesley away from the scroll and it was a little like when Wesley had first turned up outside the Hyperion wrapped in that blanket, he was yielding and resistant at the same time, spiky and brittle and bewildered. “You’re tired,” Angel added firmly. “Your legs are like spaghetti.”

Wesley gazed up at him. “But the prophecy…”

“Not now, Wes.” He tightened his grip on him. “Just stop thinking about it, take some painkillers, and get some sleep.” He looked over his shoulder at Giles. “You’ve raised some good points. We can talk about it some more tomorrow. See if we can make some sense of it. Gunn – can you show Giles and Willow to their rooms?” Then he hauled Wesley up the stairs, with him still looking back over his shoulder at the scroll and saying, “But Angel…” while he said, as gently as he could, “Not now, Wes, okay? Not now.”

***

It was ironic that when he’d come to LA full of thoughts of Wesley, when there was that soft tapping on his door in the middle of the night, Giles immediately assumed it was Angel. He didn’t blame the vampire for waking him even though it was – he checked the florescent hands of his watch – three in the morning. Giles had casually tossed a spanner into the works of his cosmic redemption. It was no wonder Angel wanted to talk things over without traumatizing his co-workers.

Except when he opened the door it was Wesley standing there in his pyjamas and his dressing gown, or rather leaning against the wall, holding the scroll and with a pile of books on the floor, looking at Giles anxiously, not the anxious look of someone who had woken someone else up at three in the morning, but of a student with a paper that had to be handed in that wasn’t going well.

Giles said, “Wesley, it’s three in the morning.”

Wesley said, “Will you look at this with me?”

Giles could tell at once that the whole ‘three in the morning’ thing just wasn’t happening for Wesley in this conversation. Sighing, he stepped back and held the door open, letting Wesley carry the scroll over to the bed and place it on the coverlet reverentially before heading back to get the books. Giles held up a hand. “I’ll get them.”

As he carried in the books and placed them on the bed he had been so unwilling to vacate he realized how right Angel had been to tell him some of the details of what had been done to Wesley in that other dimension. There was a terrible danger that if Angel hadn’t told him then Giles would have said something regrettable about Wesley’s behaviour in waking him. As things were he did need to call on his patience but at least there was a great deal more patience to draw upon.

“I was thinking about what you said.” Wesley unrolled the scroll and held it out where Giles could see it. “Did Angel tell you about the other prophecy? The Nyazian scrolls? The one that was a lie? Not just the scrolls but all the commentaries on the scrolls as well. They all confirmed it. They all said the father would kill the son. And it was a lie.”

“Yes, I know.” He’d been told about Sahjahn and his time travelling tricks. Sighing, Giles took the scroll and dutifully began to read it and then shook his head. “Wesley, this is written in several different languages, some of which I don’t recognize. I didn’t do linguistics, remember? I did archaeology.”

“These are the prophecies of Aberjian.” Wesley sat on the bed next to him and pointed to the first line as if that was one at least was easy.

Giles looked at it and turned to Wesley in what he was trying very hard to stop developing into exasperation. “Don’t you have a translation?”

“But I need you to check it for me,” Wesley said as if it were obvious. “And the books.” He pushed a book at Giles. “If Sahjahn could change the commentaries on the Nyazian scrolls then can we trust the books?”

“Is there any evidence that he changed the commentaries? If he changed the original scrolls wouldn’t the time line have adjusted itself?” He thought that might be comforting, that it might in some way preserve the sanctity of the books, but Wesley only looked more anxious.

“So, a demon or Wolfram & Hart would only need to alter the original prophecy and everything else would be falsified?”

“I’m too tired to deal with this now. Can’t we talk about it in the morning?”

Wesley gave him a begging look. “Couldn’t you just look at this part? It’s in Geshundi.” He said ‘Geshundi’ like another scholar might have said ‘French’ to a student of modern languages.

Giles sighed for a lifetime spent with dead languages that had evidently still not been enough. Hurrian he could read, Geshundi he could not. “Isn’t any of it in…Hebrew? Aramaic? Some form of cuneiform?”

“Akkadian.” Wesley’s eyes lit up. “And this line is proto-Tocharian.”

Giles took the scroll from him and examined the lines to which Wesley pointed. “I don’t have my reference books here but it seems to be talking about something that is neither dead nor living undergoing some kind of transformation as a consequence of many battles.”

“Do you think it’s true? Do you think we can trust the books still?” Wesley lowered his voice to a whisper as if he thought they might overhear him. Giles couldn’t decide if Wesley thought his beloved volumes might be planning a coup d’état or was just concerned about hurting their feelings.

“The effort involved in altering the time line as that demon did must have been colossal. I find it hard to believe that would happen too often.” Giles rubbed his temples, feeling a headache begin to throb and having to remind himself firmly as he did so that Wesley was probably a very traumatized young man right now for whom every allowance should be made.

“Perhaps we could check some of the references together?” Wesley opened one and held it out to Giles. There was something exasperating about the trusting way he did that, as if no one could not be pleased to have an ancient volume shoved at them in the wee small hours so that one might get on with the exciting work of cross-referencing.

“You really were an appalling little swot at the Academy, weren’t you, Wesley?” Giles sighed.

Wesley was too busy picking a book for himself to be listening to Giles. He selected a chapter on the habits of phalangoid demons written in Aramaic and invited Giles to cross-reference from an illuminated manuscript written in a form of bastardised Latin-French.

They were halfway through the passage when Giles was saved by, if not the bell, or indeed the cup of tea he was currently gasping for, but at least by an anxious vampire.

“Giles, are you…?” Angel broke off as he saw Wesley sitting on Giles’s bed in his dressing gown. “Wesley…?”

Wesley looked up guiltily. “Oh. We were just… I was thinking about…” As Angel came over Wesley tried to shove the scroll in between two books where it would be less obvious.

Watching them, Giles had to admit that he wasn’t seeing bullying vampire with person he had recently tried to kill, more like child caught reading under the covers by a parent who had already told him twice that he couldn’t stay up any later on a school-night.

Angel plucked the scroll from its not very concealing hiding place and held it up in mild accusation. “Wesley…? Did you wake up Giles to talk about the Shanshu prophecy?”

As Wesley gazed up at Angel guiltily, Giles felt as if he were stuck back in his schooldays, covering for some hapless younger boy who was going to dissolve into a puddle of wet tissue paper if a prefect raised his voice to him. “I wasn’t asleep. It really doesn’t matter.”

Angel sighed. “Wes, you need your sleep and I’m sure Giles does too.”

For the first time it seemed to occur to Wesley that he had been perhaps a little less than considerate in knocking on Giles’s door. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the Prophecies of Aberjian.”

“Well, who hasn’t had that problem?” Giles observed. “Ancient prophecies being the page turners that they are. Personally, I can never take the suspense. Always have to peek at the last prophecy first – see how it ends.”

His humour was entirely wasted on his current audience. Wesley was trying to read one of the open books upside down, head tilting more and more onto one side. Angel tugged absently at Wesley’s dressing gown to cover his chest and the edge of that healing burn Giles could see, re-belting it as if he’d done it a hundred times before. “Let’s get you back to bed, Wes. Let Giles get some sleep.”

“But…” Wesley gazed at the scroll as if were a favourite Famous Five novel and he would now never know if Julian, George, Anne and Timmy managed to rescue Dick from another bunch of dastardly kidnappers.

Angel gently eased Wesley to his feet while giving Giles a begging look. “Perhaps Giles and Willow would be able to stay for an extra day. Do some cross-referencing with you…?”

Giles sighed and capitulated. It seemed to be the only way he was likely to get any sleep tonight. “Gladly.”

Wesley lit up. “Oh, thank you. That would be super.”

“Absolutely – super,” Angel echoed, moving Wesley gently but firmly towards the door while apologetically mouthing the word ‘painkillers’ at Giles as he steered Wesley away.

“Oh, my books…” Wesley gazed at them longingly and Angel tightened his grip on them.

“I’m sure they’ll be safe with Giles.”

“But, perhaps I should just…”

But thankfully, Angel had urged Wesley out of the door and closed the door behind them.

Sighing, Giles belted his own dressing gown more securely in case of wandering females and went downstairs in search of a cup of a tea. He had feared he might find some of the others down there, but the hotel was thankfully quiet and still. He found some Twinings teabags, made himself a cup of hot strong tea, and then made his way back to bed. Shoving the books onto the floor, he climbed under the covers, closed his eyes and hoped he dreamt of something far removed from Sunnydale or the Hyperion.

The next knock on the door was imperious and a great deal less tentative. Giles unwillingly opened his eyes, finding it hard to believe that it was morning already. He still felt washed out and exhausted. Groping for the bedside lamp he switched it on and took a proper look at his watch. Six a.m. Groaning, he got to his feet, pulled on his robe and belted it in exasperation as he crossed to the door.

“Wesley, I really do need more than three hours of sleep before I can tackle ancient cuneiform…” Giles blinked in confusion as he found Cordelia standing outside his door, hands on her hips and a look of grim determination on her face. “Cordelia? Is everything all right?”

“Well, thanks to you coming up here and telling us our lives are a pointless charade, not so much.”

“At no point did I say that your lives were a…”

Cordelia effortlessly overwhelmed him. “I’ve been thinking and I need to go through all our cases. Show them to you. Make you see how much good we’re doing here and if you still think the Powers That Be are the bad guys.”

“I didn’t say the Powers That Be are ‘bad guys’, I just said that you had no actual proof that they were…good guys…” But she had already marched off, evidently expecting him to follow without further delay.

Realizing that any further hope of sleep was now lost, Giles wearily, set about washing, shaving and dressing.

Willow had been allowed to sleep in until nine am when she had been given breakfast by Fred and a pile of folders to examine by Cordelia. Although, in answer to Angel’s enquiry, Cordelia has insisted that Giles’ and Willow’s participation was entirely voluntary, Giles couldn’t say it had felt that way to him and he doubted it felt that way to Willow either.

Giles spent the morning and half of the afternoon going through files with Cordelia. He had heard several references to her chaotic filing system but, as with her SATs, when she had a point she wanted to make she evidently had a mind like a steel trap. Giles wearily read his way through case after case, the folders spreading out from the office to the lobby and the front desk, until they were covering every available surface and sucking everyone in to reading them. Wesley made notes avidly trying to discern a pattern in the people that the Powers chose to save or not to save, and then decided he wanted to do more research about the Old Ones Giles had mentioned and disappeared into his reference books for four hours straight until Gunn physically tugged him back to the banquette and put food into his hand.

“One day, Wes, I’m going to get you to grasp that tea isn’t a food group.”

Wesley gave him a look of disbelief. “Don’t be ridiculous. Next you’ll be telling Fred that tacos aren’t a food group.”

He and Gunn grinned at one another and Giles had his first sense of a tangible connection between these two; the realization that Wesley was not a victim of the force of Angel’s sometimes overwhelming personality and tragic history but had forged friendships with every person in the hotel. Something confirmed a moment later when Fred hugged Wesley from behind, resting her cheek against his, her skin looking pale and smooth against his bruises and stubble. “Now, that’s just crazy talk.” She put her head on one side as she looked at his new hair style and then began to try to get it to stick up in strange ways. “Where’s the hair gel?”

“For the last time, Wesley isn’t borrowing any more of my hair gel,” Angel protested. “He doesn’t even care what he looks like.”

“I know. I’ve seen how he dresses. That’s why he needed an intervention.” Cordelia handed a jar of product to Fred.

Angel said to Wesley, “You’ve been an invalid for way too long. Cordy and Fred are getting institutionalised.”

Gunn watched Fred critically as she basically played with Wesley’s hair. Giles personally wouldn’t have stood a moment of it, but Wesley seemed incapable of standing up to either Cordelia or Fred with any conviction. With Cordelia, she just seemed to overwhelm him by superior force of personality, and when there was any interaction with Fred he just got a hopelessly goopy look on his face and let her do anything she liked. Gunn said, “So, if I grew my hair would you be doing that thing with the hair gel to me? Because I’m thinking if so I’m always going to be bald.”

Cordelia looked up in surprise. “I thought you were bald.”

“Through choice,” Gunn protested. “Wes, don’t let them do that to you if you don’t like it.”

“How would you advise me to stop them?” he enquired reasonably.

“It’s my hair style,” Cordelia insisted. “It just happens to be placed on Wesley’s head but it’s my creation and I have a right to maintain it how I like.”

“Well, buy your own hair gel then,” Angel retorted.

“You’ve got about a year’s supply up there. If you had that much blood in the refrigerator this hotel would have to be re-classified as an abattoir.”

“You went into my room?”

“So what if I did? What are you hiding up there?”

“Nothing.”

“So, what’s the big deal?”

Giles looked across at Willow who was watching Angel and Cordelia as if they were a tennis match. “Are you missing Sunnydale as much as me?”

Mentioning Sunnydale was a mistake, Willow at once looking as sad as he felt. He thought of Buffy, still so cut off from the people around her, unable to connect with Dawn or with life, trudging off to her dead end job, trying not to blame the people who had dragged her out of heaven and yet not able to accept that this was her life again, this was her existence, as the Slayer, alive, with a pulse, and in this world. It felt as if she were counting time until she could die again, and yet he knew that in there somewhere was still the vibrant, witty, focused girl he loved as a daughter. Dawn was taking Buffy’s sense of disconnection as a personal rejection, a consequence of her own birth out of nowhere, just a cosmic tricked played upon them all. That was still how she tended to see herself. And Willow was missing Tara like a physical pain. Willow rallied after a moment though and gave him a faint smile.

“I’m looking forward to seeing England.” She looked across at Wesley. “Is it pretty?”

Wesley had clearly never considered his home country in those terms but after a slight pause for readjustment to that idea, he said, “Yes, some of it is very pretty indeed. It’s small which means you’re never too far from the sea. I can never understand how people in this country can live in the middle without dehydrating to death in a few weeks. I really know Hampshire best – the New Forest is beautiful, especially if you can ride. The woods feel as if they’ve always been like this. And Danebury, of course, and Beacon Hill. There are red kites back around Oxford, so I hear. I’d like to see that. They were only in Wales when I left. And there are castles. I find it odd that there aren’t any castles here. I used to find myself looking out for them and wondering if you’d just misplaced them. I know the Normans never came here, of course, but still…it seems so odd. And no hill forts. No standing stones. It will probably seem very crowded to you and with a very poorly designed traffic system. I don’t miss roundabouts – or trying to negotiate the M25. I miss village cricket matches. I miss how quiet they are, and how civilized. And I miss the way the grass smells after the rain.” He became aware that everyone was looking at him and gave a rather embarrassed shrug. “Sorry, I was…distracted. I think I need to get off the painkillers.”

“Do you want to go with Giles?” Angel asked abruptly. “Just for a visit? See…a cricket match? Eat some…marmite.”

Wesley shook his head. “No, Angel. I want to stay here.”

“I could bring you back some marmite,” Willow told him kindly. “And a cricket ball, if you like.”

“Thank you.” He smiled at her. “I’d like that.”

“We could paint a baseball red for you if you like?” Fred offered.

“Yeah, and put some shoe polish in a jar and tell you it’s marmite,” Gunn added.

“Did the Council ever investigate that claim that the M25 was actually a demonic sigil?” Wesley asked Giles.

“I think they had to declare an open verdict on that, despite all the confirmatory evidence.” Giles saw that Fred was still playing with Wesley’s hair – no doubt she considered it styling, but she just seemed to be squishing her fingers through it to see what that made it do. He had to admit that he had not expected them to be so comfortable with his erstwhile colleague or he with them. Angel had been positively parental when coaxing him back to bed, and Fred and Gunn seemed to treat Wesley like their eccentric older brother; Cordelia like he was her wayward twin. Lorne was gentle with everyone, good natured and indulgent, and it was probably very good for someone like Wesley to be given pet names on such a regular basis by a kind-hearted demon. Groo just appeared to be one of the universe’s natural gentlemen. This was certainly not the scenario Giles had expected to find awaiting him in regard to Wesley when he had contemplated this trip to LA.

Wesley remembered his researching and took the pen from behind his ear, bending back over his notes. Fred did a last few deft squidging motions with her fingers then looked to Cordelia for confirmation she had done it right. Cordelia came over, looked at it critically, and then squished her fingers through it in a way that seemed to undo everything Fred had done completely. However she said, “Yes, Fred, that’s great.”

“Just who are you glamming Wes up for?” Gunn demanded. “Especially when he’s still looking like someone threw him headfirst into the weapons cabinet? Miss Whiplash?”

“I’m practising for when he doesn’t look as if someone threw him into the weapons cabinet,” Cordelia explained.

Wesley looked up from his notes in some alarm. “You can’t make me date.”

“Hey, I’m part demon these days, I can make you do anything.”

“Is that part of the new powers package?”

“Forcing people to go on blind dates? Absolutely. Comes with the glowing and the floating.” She turned to Willow. “So, are Xander and Anya definitely not a couple any more?”

“He’s not dating a vengeance demon.” Angel didn’t even look up from the folder he was reading. “They’re way too flaky. And besides, it’s dangerous.”

“She’s an ex vengeance demon and she co-owns a magic shop that stocks all the very expensive ingredients we use all the time.”

“Don’t we know anyone who owns an axe shop?” Gunn looked up with more interest.

Fred looked thoughtful. “A book shop would be better for Wesley.”

“Ballet dancer!” Gunn sat up straighter. “They’re always pretty and Wes could get us all free tickets to every performance.”

Giles looked at Gunn in surprise and saw that he did not seem to be mocking ballet in any way. Bemused he turned back to Wesley. “Are you sure you don’t want to accompany Willow and I to England, Wesley?”

“We’re just kidding around,” Fred assured Giles hastily. “We wouldn’t really make Wesley date anyone he didn’t want to just to get free stuff or a discount. Well…” She looked at Cordelia in some apprehension. “Charles and I are just kidding around.”

“I don’t want to date anyone. Angel…?”

“You don’t have to date anyone,” Angel assured him, still reading the folder. “Not even if Cordy tells you that you do.”

Wesley gave Cordelia a smug look that was entirely fraternal. She snorted. “Fine. Be Mister Stay At Home. Just don’t start whining to me about your lonely empty life.”

Fred put her arm through Wesley’s and said conspiratorially, “You can always triple date with me and Charles.”

Gunn and Wesley exchanged an awkward look and Gunn said to Giles: “She’s not really saying what it sounds like she’s saying because we don’t…do that here.”

Fred’s eyes widened. “No! We don’t… We definitely don’t. That would just be…” Then she got a far away look in her eyes and said, “Actually, that would be kind of… just from a mathematical viewpoint … and, of course, the I Ching – trying to calculate the permutations and combinations. It would increase the variability factor by a ratio of…”

“Fred…” Gunn gave her a slightly forced smile. “You could stop talking any time now. And before Wes and I die of manly embarrassment would probably be good.”

Cordelia’s smile to Willow was beaming. “See? Never a dull moment here.”

Going through all their files revealed that they had indeed saved a number of lives and that the Powers did seem to be benevolent on the whole although somewhat eccentric in their choice of who was to be saved and who lost. Giles tried to crick his neck back into position as he sat on the floor, looking around at the humans and demons and mixture of the two currently occupying the banquette and the floor in various attitudes that suggested aching limbs and tired eyes. Angel was on the floor with a pile of files next to him, a towering stack of past acts of heroism, innocent victims saved. Giles found it difficult not to try to calculate how high the stack of folders would reach that contained the victims Angelus had killed in the past and was forced to conclude that those Angel had saved still did not even remotely compare in quantity to those that he had murdered.

These ‘Powers’ had warned Cordelia about the Skilosh too late to be of any use to her, but not about Vocah, and, while they had helped Fred out twice, bringing her to Cordelia’s attention five years after her trip to Pylea and again when she was in danger of being decapitated, they had sent Cordelia no warning about Wesley getting blown up, shot, or having his throat slashed.

“Maybe they don’t like me?” Wesley sighed. “Or maybe I’m just not important enough to save.”

“No, you have a very significant role to play in the…” Lorne broke off and then as everyone looked at him, said, “I can’t… I don’t read and tell.”

“I don’t mind.” Wesley gazed at him curiously.

“It could be important.” Angel tossed the folder he’d been reading onto the floor. “If Wesley is just another foot soldier in the battle against good and evil then perhaps the Powers aren’t prepared to intervene, but if as Lorne says he has some very important role to play and they’re not helping him…”

“But he didn’t die,” Cordelia pointed out. “Something else intervened. You or Gunn or something that stopped him dying. Maybe the Powers didn’t need to intervene because they knew none of those attacks on Wesley were going to be fatal.”

Lorne inclined his head. “That makes sense, although we are talking ten minutes to final countdown in the case of that last little brush with the reaper.”

Fred looked around at the scattered files and folders. “Maybe they’re just really disorganized. Maybe saving Wesley was sitting on someone’s desk as a memo but they were out sick that day so no one got around to it. Maybe that’s why it took them five years to get me out of Pylea. Not that I’m complaining or anything but you’ve got to wonder how much of a backlog do these people have?”

“I don’t think I’m important.” Wesley frowned in concentration. “But Connor was. He was mentioned in the Nyazian scrolls, and Sahjahn only admitted to changing the part of the prophecy that said Angel would kill Connor rather than that Connor would kill Sahjahn, that means that the confluence of events that led to Connor’s birth, the birth itself – which happened exactly as was foretold – were all significant events, worthy of being the subject of important prophecies. It makes no sense that Connor should have been born and then just be…lost.” He looked across at Angel. “Like you said, you don’t get half a miracle.”

Angel sighed. “I’ve been thinking about that too, Wes, and maybe the truth was that Connor was evil. Maybe in every dimension he was evil and would have brought great evil on the world. Remember what Gunn said – that maybe stopping the baby being born was the Powers finally stepping up to the plate and doing something? Maybe getting rid of Connor was something they had to do for the good of mankind and they made you their instrument. Maybe the important role you played in the apocalypse was when you averted it by helping to remove Connor from this dimension.”

“No, Angel.” Wesley had been sitting on the banquette but he immediately sank down to his knees beside him. “Connor was good. We know he was good. His soul was strong enough to affect Darla to the point where she could feel love.”

Angel looked very weary. “Maybe it was just a means to get born. Maybe you saved the world from…”

“No.” Wesley spun around to look at the anagogic demon. “Lorne, Connor was good, wasn’t he?”

“Sugar, I didn’t actually ‘read’ Connor on account of him not really being up to giving me a chorus at his age.”

“But you’re empathic – you must have sensed that he was good?”

“Yes, I did.” Lorne nodded. “I loved that little baby, Angel, and I never got anything on my psychic radar suggesting he was anything other than…lovable.”

“You can love something that’s evil. Maybe Connor had the ability to make people love him without actually being good.”

“Cordelia…” Wesley gave her a begging look. “Tell Angel.”

She looked stricken. “I don’t know. I was so sure but… Why didn’t the Powers save him? I keep thinking about it. They only needed to send me one lousy vision and none of this needed to happen, so why didn’t they?”

“Well, I know,” Wesley insisted. “Connor was good. He was born for a purpose. He was meant to do good. That’s why he was given to you. That’s why Darla killed herself so that he could live.”

Angel took Wesley by the shoulders and squeezed them gently. “Wes, I’m trying to tell you that you may have saved the world.”

“I didn’t. Connor was good. He had a purpose here. He was supposed to fulfil some destiny that would have made the world a better place.”

“Why do you believe that? So you can beat yourself up some more about what happened?”

“Because he was your son.” Wesley gazed at him as if he could will Angel to believe him just by not breaking eye contact. “And when I held him I knew it was true. He wasn’t your punishment, Angel. He was meant to be your reward. I’m sure of it.”

Angel sighed. “You don’t know it. And neither do I. All we know is that the Powers didn’t save him. And, Wes, what you keep missing is that no one the planet thinks I deserve a reward except you and Cordelia – and – okay – Fred because she’s soft-hearted.”

“You didn’t kill those people. Angelus did. You’re having to carry the burden for his crimes. Why shouldn’t you get a reward?”

“They’re my crimes.”

“No, they’re not. They never were. I told Holtz that but he was as stubborn as…you are. I could sing for Lorne. He could read me and see if the part I was supposed to play in averting the apocalypse had already…” Apparently noticing for the first time that day the painful rasping of his throat, Wesley put a hand up to his scar self-consciously. “Perhaps I could hum?”

“Perhaps it’s better we don’t know.” Gunn looked up. “I don’t want to think that Angel’s son was evil, and I don’t want to think that Wesley robbed the world of the new Messiah or something. Seems to me there’s no answer to that question that isn’t lose-lose for those of us who are left. Whatever Connor was or was meant to do here he’s gone now. We need to move on.”

Cordelia shrugged. “Out of the mouths of bald men with axes…”

“I know this is none of my business,” Giles put in quietly, “but I have to agree with Gunn. Whatever you choose to believe is going to hurt someone in this room. As to your mysterious Powers, I have to say that although their process of inflicting the visions upon their chosen seer seems to me to be arbitrary, arrogant and dangerous, the visions themselves seem to have saved a number of lives. Just be careful.”

“Careful of what?” Cordelia pressed. “You keep making these vague warnings and head shakings and giving me a migraine and making Wesley go all squirrelly over his musty old scrolls again and you’re about as useful as a mouldy fortune cookie about giving us some specifics!”

Giles took a deep breath. “Letting them give you some aspect of a demon – their choice and without any input from you into the matter except for your consent – and a consent obtained it seems to me after the most blatant and manipulative emotional blackmail I’ve ever encountered – is a step further than I would have advised you to take. If they can send you the visions, I find it hard to believe they couldn’t find a way to control the impact they had upon the subject. Instead they created a situation where you were suffering actual neurological damage and told that you could only survive if you gave up the visions, but instead of just taking them away from you before they killed you, they chose to show you a dystopia where Angel was insane and Wesley was maimed, while giving you the illusion of choice in the matter. I’m not denying that your actions were selfless, Cordelia, and indeed heroic, but I’m still concerned that…”

Cordelia clasped her hands to her head and clearly only with great difficulty resisted the urge to rock. “What. Are. You. Saying. And I mean in ten words or less, Giles!”

“They manipulated you into a situation where you agreed to let them ‘demonise’ you.”

Cordelia glared at him. “That’s fourteen words.”

“Just be certain that you being made part demon is really a method to help you bear the burden of the visions rather than the visions being a method by which to get you to consent to being demonised.”

“You think I’m dangerous?” she demanded.

“I think you have no idea what they did to you or why. And I wouldn’t accept the next gift horse they give you without taking a damned good look in its mouth.” Giles looked around at them all. “These visions from the Powers – I know they give you a means to help people and they’re certainly useful, but you could do good without them. You have the resources and the intelligence and the fighting skills to find out where there are dangerous demons at work and do your part in defeating them even if you never get another direct message from the Powers That Be.”

Cordelia sighed and looked across at Fred. “You wouldn’t know it from the tweedy thing he used to have going but Giles actually has a big problem with authority figures. He went way off the rails when he was rebelling.”

Giles rolled his eyes. “Fine. Be like that. Let these mysterious Powers put you in and out of comas and give you horns and a tail, Cordelia. It’s entirely your decision.”

“Watchers rebel?” Fred looked at Wesley in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I,” Wesley assured her. “The Council omitted to tell me it was an option and I omitted to do it. I think I still have it pencilled in for a later date. Buy milk. Learn jujitsu. Have teenage rebellion.”

Fred giggled at him while Wesley grinned back at her and Giles thought again that there was definitely trouble ahead for those two unless the males in that girl’s life could get sufficiently inebriated to embrace her threesome idea.

Gunn leant across to press his fist against Wesley’s. “Soon as you’re better again, English, we’ll take you out and do something about that rebelling thing.”

“Oh, can I do my Marlon Brando impression?”

“Not in public. But you can wear your leather jacket as long as you don’t wear the leather pants.”

Cordelia nodded sagely and mouthed: ‘Santa Monica Boulevard’ at Willow.

“Can I go on the back of Wesley’s motorbike?” Fred brightened at the idea.

“Only if you’re not going to find it more of a turn-on than my truck,” Gunn insisted.

Cordelia looked at Fred sideways. “You find Gunn’s truck sexy?”

“You don’t?” Fred countered innocently.

“No way. Angel’s convertible maybe because at least it has a back seat but… Are you telling me that you and Gunn – in the front seat of his truck…? Because…ewww!”

Angel and Wesley exchanged a look to match Cordelia’s ‘ewww’. “From now on we take my car or your bike,” Angel assured the Englishman.

Giles rose to his feet. “Well, not that this visit hasn’t been very…educational, but I really think Willow and I need to be heading back now.”

Wesley looked up at him reproachfully. “But I thought we were going to research the Old Ones some more?”

“We’ll do that with you, Wesley,” Fred reassured him.

“Oh yeah – let me at those research books,” Gunn groaned.

Giles drew on the last of his patience. “I’ll email you all the references I have to them and we can discuss it over the phone in more detail in a week or so when Willow and I are in England. I’ll see what references I can find at the Council headquarters. Cordelia, I’ll ask for photocopies of all the reference material they have on seers and visionaries as well and send it to Wesley as long with the information on the Old Ones.”

“That would be wonderful.” Wesley brightened considerably, proceeding to give Giles the email address of everyone in the company so there could be no danger of him forgetting to send the information.

Giles was surprised that Wesley took a moment to talk to Willow by herself, taking her hands in his at one point and finishing with her standing on tiptoe to kiss him on the forehead. Then Lorne whisked her to one side and wrapped his arms around her in what looked like a slow waltz to some music he was humming to her. He whispered in her ear urgently and she smiled in relief. Giles heard her say:

“Are you sure?”

“Just get on that plane, sugar. Sometimes a place that used to be good for us, there comes a time when it’s not where we need to be. And you know – Hellmouths, they take a toll, especially on those of us attuned to the astral plane.”

“I feel so bad about leaving Buffy and Dawn and Xander. They’re all so unhappy.”

“And I’m sorry for that, sweetie, but you need to trust me on this, Sunnydale is really not where you need to be right now.”

“What about Tara?” Willow matched her steps to Lorne’s as he continued to dance music that only they seemed able to hear.

“Haven’t read her. Can’t tell you. But I can see happiness for a certain red-headed witch who’s not a million miles away from me right now as long as she gets on that plane with Giles.”

Giles shook Angel gravely by the hand and said again quietly how sorry he was for the loss of his son. Angel nodded. “Thank you. And thank you for your help, Giles. I appreciate you and Willow coming up here.” He glanced over at Wesley. “We’ll take care of him, I promise. Just – don’t tell his father…anything.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Giles assured him. “And I’ll be discreet in all the research I do. I see from your files that Cordelia’s link to the Powers have already made her a target for kidnap once. I’ll be careful not to mention her name to anyone in the Council.”

“Thank you.” Angel looked at him for a moment longer. “You’ll tell Buffy…? Tell her I was thinking of her.”

“I’ll tell her. Cordelia, always a pleasure to see you again. Take care of yourself.” He nodded to Gunn, Fred, Lorne and Groo. “It was…fascinating to meet you all. Thank you so much for the tea, Winifred.”

Fred bounced up a little anxiously. “So, you think Wesley’s okay here with us?”

Giles almost smiled but her eyes were so serious that he restricted himself to a grave nod. “I can think of no place where he would be better off.”

Fred turned around with a beaming smile of triumph to Gunn and Cordelia. Giles wondered if she had still not quite grasped that he didn’t actually have any power to remove Wesley from their care. The report he had received from Lorne when he had heard about what had happened with Connor and Wesley being in the hospital had given him the impression that not only was Wesley persona non grata at the Hyperion, he had become such a non-person that it was not even permitted to mention his name in Angel’s hearing. And these same people who were now clearly so genuinely fond of his ex-colleague had, at the time, seemed to feel that hell would have frozen over before any of them wanted to see him again. Clearly life moved fast in Los Angeles. Thinking of the terrible things that had evidently been done to Wesley in that other dimension he had to sigh inside at the thought that Wesley would probably think even that had been worth it just to be accepted back into the bosom of his adopted family. It was pathetic and borderline tragic, but Giles couldn’t exactly blame him. He did, however, blame Wesley’s father and just hoped he didn’t run into him in the Council library in London or the urge to tell him what he thought of his child-rearing abilities might be impossible to suppress.

“Goodbye, Giles.” He turned to find Wesley proffering a hand.

He shook it warmly. “Goodbye, Wesley. Take care of yourself, won’t you?”

“And you.” Wesley half-smiled. “Sorry about – waking you last night. And – thank you – especially for not giving me the lecture burning a hole in your tongue.”

Giles also smiled. “I’m glad my heroic self-restraint didn’t go unnoticed. I’ll do some research in London and send you what I have. And you might want to think about visiting that coven I mentioned, at some point. It’s a fascinating place. Very restful, and as you evidently couldn’t have cast such a spell without considerable inherent magical ability you might want to work on that some more in the future – in controlled circumstances, of course.”

Wesley smiled at that ‘controlled circumstances’ and nodded. “We don’t get those here either. But, I’ll think about it. Thank you again, Giles. Please give my best wishes to everyone in Sunnydale. I really do appreciate them not actually killing me when I was there, despite grave provocation.”

Giles patted him very gently on the shoulder and made to pick up Willow’s bag but Gunn was already holding it up. “I got it.” Willow disentangled herself from hugs with Cordelia and Fred, then Angel and Lorne, and finally it was time to go.

Gunn held open the doors for them and walked them to the Giles’s car. “Wes better or worse than you were expecting?” he asked quietly.

“A great deal better,” Giles reassured him. “Bruises heal. Being cast out by all the people who love you…a very different kettle of fish. I didn’t expect him to have been taken back by you all so…wholeheartedly.”

“Probably wouldn’t have happened so fast if he hadn’t pulled that dumb stunt with the spell but as he did…” Gunn shrugged. “There ain’t anyone left here who doesn’t think he paid way more than enough for what he did. Anyway, we’re all screw-ups here. Or crazy. Or both. All got our mistakes to atone for. That’s why we do what we do. Let’s face it – would anyone sane live like this?”

Giles thought about his own life for the past few years, then inclined his head in acknowledgement. “Absolutely. Nothing odd about it at all. Take care, Gunn. I’ll be in touch. Perhaps you could persuade Wesley not to mix his painkillers with whatever it is he’s mixing them with, and…” He didn’t know how to warn him about the possible problem that might lie ahead of them if Fred’s subconscious feelings for Wesley became known to her or to Gunn. “Forgive him any other stupid things he may do.”

Gunn shrugged. “Saved him from bleeding to death twice. Can’t do that and not feel like cutting a guy a little slack.”

“Here.” Giles turned to find Cordelia proffering a fan of business cards. “You can hand them out to people if you hear of any work we can do. I’ll send you one of Wesley’s as soon as…”

Giles held up the one of Wesley’s that he and Willow had found on the floor of the basement. “You must have dropped a couple when throwing them into the incinerator, Cordelia.”

She acknowledged it with a grimace. “Okay, you got me.” She met Giles’s gaze for a moment and then said, “I’m only going to say this once, but I’ll think about what you said about the Powers. You’re probably wrong – being a Watcher and a librarian and all, not to mention – British, but there’s just a slight chance you may be right so I’ll – think about it.”

He nodded. “That’s all I want you to do, Cordelia.”

“I’m grateful to you for taking an interest.” She gritted her teeth. “But tell anyone I said that and I’ll tell the world you and Ethan Rayne used to do the nasty in the back of your Reliant Robin.”

Giles recoiled in horror. “I have never owned, driven or so much as been a passenger in a Reliant Robin. A brief flirtation with a Morris Traveller, perhaps, but, really, even I have some standards.”

“Well, don’t think I wouldn’t do it. I have a rep to maintain.” She turned to kiss Willow again, saying quietly, “I hope it works out for you with the mojo controlling thing but if it doesn’t you’ll just have to move in here with us, okay? We’ll take anyone.”

“That’s actually…comforting,” Willow admitted.

“Email me from London,” Cordelia told her firmly. “Let me know you got there okay. And don’t forget to mention the weather. I’ve bet Wesley ten bucks it will be raining as the plane touches down.”

Giles got into the car, switched on the ignition and looked past Gunn to see Angel standing in the shadows watching him, looking noble and subtly tragic, but his arm was around Wesley, steadying him, Fred had her hand on Wesley’s other arm, standing on tip toe to give them a last beaming smile, and the green horned demon was waving to them, red eyes kind as they looked at Willow, the other Pylean, Groo, nodding to them with a gesture of respect from one warrior to another.

When he had walked into the lobby of the Hyperion, Giles thought he had never seen a more unlikely group of misfits, but now they just looked like a…family. A family of which Wesley seemed to be a valuable member.

“He’ll be fine.” Gunn bent down to speak to Giles through the open window.

“Yes.” Giles nodded to them all one last time before he pulled out into the traffic. “I really think he will.”

***

A month later…

The air felt thick with anticipation. Wesley had noticed it when they came back from destroying that nest of Raptoran demons which had been feeding off the homeless. A low hum in the atmosphere that had made Lorne flinch and clutch his horns and Groo observe that if this were Pylea he would expect there to be slarkanik lighting the sky very soon. Fred had explained what a thunderstorm actually was and how lightning was formed until Gunn’s eyes had started to glaze over, and he and Angel had barely troubled to hide their relief when a phone call from some of Gunn’s old crew meant they had to pick up their swords, axes, and crossbows and go straight back out again.

Although Wesley was now fully recovered (from his perspective) or still convalescent (everyone else’s perspective), Angel had insisted that he should sit this next battle out, as they needed to know if there was likely to be a colony of Raptorans in the area or if that one nest was the sum total of those particularly nasty demons currently terrorising LA.

“You hit the books, English.” Gunn patted him on the shoulder gently – Gunn not yet having got out of the habit first formed when Wesley had been shot in front of him of handling him as if he were made of cracked porcelain. “We’ll hit the vamps.”

“I wish you’d stop treating me like an invalid,” Wesley protested.

Angel had also patted him – very gently – on the shoulder. “We’re not, Wes, we’re just treating you like the resident researcher, so go – research.”

He had researched Raptorans until he could have delivered a paper on them, and learned that, amongst other very unpleasant things, they were viciously territorial, making it unlikely that there was another nest in the vicinity. Fred had gone out to buy food with Cordelia, and Lorne and Groo were reminiscing upstairs about the good old days of Pylea, which seemed to involve Lorne playing Groo most of his Aretha Franklin collection, presumably to point out all the ways in which this world was better than the one they’d left. Having personally spent most of his time on Pylea being chained up, starved, threatened with execution or having to make one soul-stripping decision after another, Wesley agreed with Lorne all the way. He was glad that they had done their bit to try to make Pylea a more equal and tolerant place but equally glad that they would never ever have to go back there.

The air crackled and Wesley felt all the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The atmosphere was electrified; sizzling with a surface tension that brought him to his feet as if he were being pulled by invisible strings. With his heart pounding automatically in response he had to remind himself that not only was the tear between his dimension and that other one sealed closed but that the Angelus and Gunn from that world were dead and dusted and could never hurt anyone in this world or any other ever again.

The nightmares were still visiting him; waking in the darkness, gasping for breath from a panic attack as he felt hands holding him down, struggling against bonds that only dug deeper into his flesh; waking to a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and a heart pounding as if it were trying to escape his chest. He had to make a conscious effort not to pacify Angel or Gunn if their mood turned dark. The first time they’d argued after he’d come back from that other world; both of them made short-tempered by stinging wounds from a fight they’d almost lost, he’d been inwardly cringing. As Gunn had turned to demand Wesley’s opinion on the best way to tackle the demons they’d just had so much trouble killing, Wesley had been unable to stop a flinch. That had at least ended the argument but the look in Gunn and Angel’s eyes as Wesley ducked away from Gunn’s hand had felt more painful than the backhand his subconscious had been expecting.

“I’m sorry…” he’d breathed; seared by their expression of shocked hurt.

“No, man, I’m sorry.” Gunn had crouched down next to him, as if he were someone who had to be approached cautiously now, like a wounded animal. “I’m not him.”

“I know. I know. It was just… I’m sorry.”

After that Angel and Gunn had tip-toed around him for three days, and been so self-consciously polite and equable to one another it was almost funny. Almost.

Left to his own devices he would have taken refuge from the nightmares in insomnia and whisky – his stand-bys of the past. But Fred had decided that the best cure for trouble sleeping was to help her with her paper on P-Dimensional Subspace; a subject he understood only very imperfectly – even after her long and quite confusing explanations – and which did indeed leave him completely exhausted and Fred beaming triumphantly as he slumped into unconsciousness.

“And people say astrophysics is all just theory and no practical use…” he had heard her murmur as she kissed his forehead goodnight. Even knowing that she loved another man and saw him as a brother did not undermine his pleasure in the realization that even if he had not won her heart he had genuinely regained her friendship.

Cordelia had insisted that what he needed to help him relax was a massage; something that had felt so good that Angel had come in to find out what on earth Cordy was doing to Wesley to make him sound like that. He had indeed fallen into a deep and dreamless rest afterwards that had carried him through until morning. Lorne had mixed him a potion, which he said would help with the nightmares, and Groo had diffidently suggested that he taught him a Pylean technique of meditation that would lower his heart rate and relax his tension. Gunn had insisted that the best cure for nightmares was to play a lot of Risk before sleeping and they had tried that out for several nights running. The methods hadn’t always worked – the nightmares had still come, although with less and less frequency as the days wore on – but the intent behind them and the kindness shown to him by the others, those had proven armour enough that even when he woke up, sweat-soaked and shaking, it took him a shorter and shorter amount of time of deep breathing and Pylean mantra intoning before he could go back to sleep.

Angel was the one who had come into his room after a particularly bad nightmare and sat on his bed for a while before saying: “What happened to you in that place – that’s not the kind of thing one just gets over in a week or a month or even a year. It’s going to stay with you. It’s going to come back when you don’t expect it and when you thought it was in the past now. The point is that it’s okay to not be over it. It’s okay to wake up screaming sometimes. The only person who expects you to just carry on as if nothing happened – is you.”

“I just want to put it behind me.” Wesley had known that Angel would be able to hear his heartbeat, and how he was still jangling like a wind-chime in a hurricane at Angel being this close to him when it was only a few minutes since he had felt Angelus pinning him to the floor.

“You will.” Angel had touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Just not…straight away.”

“They’re both dust, it’s not as if they can…”

“Yeah and the subconscious mind is full of reasoned arguments like that at four in the morning. Give it time, Wes. And I’m next door if you want someone to talk to. Trust me, after a century and a half of murder and mayhem and another century in a hell dimension, I know all about nightmares.”

He had tentatively suggested that perhaps he should move back to his own flat but had been overruled so strongly by everyone present that he hadn’t like to bring it up again. It wasn’t clear if him returning to his own home was a problem because he would at once lapse into magic-dabbling depressive patterns of behaviour or because Cordelia and Fred liked having someone to fuss over and try out their cooking on who was too polite to refuse.

Giles was emailing him quite regularly from England, putting in little warnings here and there about Wesley allowing himself to become a ‘second-class citizen’ of Angel Investigations. ‘Make sure they don’t start treating you like an indentured slave’ the man had cautioned in his last email. Angel had read it over his shoulder and snorted.

“Wesley’s my faithful servant, Giles. I’m allowed to treat him like an indentured slave.” Seeing Wesley’s expression, Angel had rolled his eyes. “Joke, Wes.” His frown had followed quickly. “We don’t treat you like that, do we? Cause I remember Giles always expecting everyone to just drop everything and pick up the research books just because he said so – and not big on the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as I recall, but we don’t do that…do we?”

Wesley had been saved from answering by Cordelia striding into the office, saying: “Hit the books, Wes. Big, really big, two-headed, kind of gnarly-looking. Carries an axe with a symbol on it like this.” As she turned his hand over and drew the symbol on his palm with a felt-tip pen, she became aware of Wesley and Angel’s expressions and looked at them in confusion. “What? Were you having a coffee break or something? Did I mention that this demon was big…?” He and Angel had immediately started researching while Cordelia yelled for Gunn and Fred to come and help, and the conversation had – thankfully – been terminated.

Another crackle rippled through the Hyperion. It really did feel as if the hotel was under a cloud bank with an electrical storm building static from every stone. He marked the place in the book he was reading, checked that he was still wearing the wrist strapping which held that discreet but extremely sharp stake, slipped a knife into his other sleeve, and walked out into the lobby.

There were still the faint markings of the pentagram on the floor, a blood-coloured reminder of Angel’s loss. Wesley never looked at it without thinking of Connor and how desperately Angel had tried to get him back. Even now he still felt as if there was nothing he wouldn’t do to give Angel back his son, but there was nothing to be done. Angel had made him give him his word that he would never try to alter time or events with magic again, and there was no other method by which a dead baby could be brought back to life.

Wesley was walking towards the pentagram when the air crackled again, a sizzle that made him flinch and duck, luckily as it turned out, as that was the only thing that saved him when the grey-scaled hell beast fell out of a tear in the air twenty feet above the floor and landed already flailing its dagger-sharp tail. The tail passed over Wesley’s head by a whisker, and he stumbled backwards in disbelief. The creature turned and snarled at him, drool shining on its long thin fangs. As it lunged at him, something fell from the rip in the air above them, a solid bundle, the size of a small canoe, but wrapped entirely in stitched skins, which made the beast hesitate for a moment, before it recovered its balance and then lunged forward a second time. As it did so a human figure fell out of the same crackle of blood-stained light and landed, perfectly balanced on the soles of his feet, slicing off the creature’s head with one swish of his sword arm.

Wesley gazed up at him in disbelief. A teenage boy; slender, handsome, blue-eyed, clad in animal skins and with unkempt hair but evidently not yet old enough to need to shave. He felt instinctively that there had probably never been anything so dangerous in the hotel. Something confirmed as the boy lunged forward, grabbed him by the throat and yanked him back against him, hissing, “Is he here?”

He found himself gazing at the head of the beast whose eyes were fixed on them in death, its severed neck still leaking greenish gore onto the tiled floor. Behind him he could almost hear the rapid pounding of the boy’s heart, and could certainly feel the strength of the fingers around his neck. It reminded him of when Angel had grabbed him in their first offices – the same sensation of being held by a hungry prey animal, being entirely at its mercy. “Who?” he asked with difficulty.

“The vampire.”

“Angel?” Wesley twisted around to try to see the boy’s face again, and felt the knife sting his neck, blood begin to trickle. “You’re looking for Angel?”

The boy sniffed Wesley, adding to the feeling he was being held by an animal, then murmured in some confusion, “I know your scent. I remember your scent.” He tightened his grip. “You’re human.”

Wesley swallowed. “Yes.”

“But you serve him? You belong to him?”

“I work with him.”

“Do you fear him?”

“No.” Wesley managed to get another look at the boy and although his eyes were blue there was something in them that was very familiar. The boy smelt of blood and sweat and anger and there was a light that looked very close to insanity in his eyes; and then Wesley realized it was grief, the red rims to the eyes, the shadows beneath them; a grief so overpowering that it became a kind of madness. Then he knew. “You’re him. You’re Connor.”

The grip tightened to the point where breathing became impossible. “Don’t call me that. That was his name for me.”

Wesley thought he might pass out, but not from the constriction of his windpipe, his heart began to pound, not just in his chest, the pulse of it audible throughout his whole body, in his veins, in his brain. It hurt too much to bear. He couldn’t stand this terrible shard of hope, so agonizingly intense. He closed his eyes.

Connor shook him, releasing the grip on his throat a fraction. “Why aren’t you fighting?”

Wesley opened his eyes. “What?”

“You have a knife. I can smell the metal. Why don’t you use it?”

Wesley gazed up at him, drinking him in. He remembered the baby so clearly but he couldn’t have been certain from his appearance that this was that baby grown up, he just knew it. Every cell in his body knew it. “Because you’re his son.”

“No.” Connor abruptly pushed him away and Wesley slammed onto the floor, sliding along it. “This is the only father I’ve ever needed.”

Wesley realized he was lying next to the canoe-shaped bundle stitched into those uncured animal skins; except it was corpse-shaped and the skins were cured, it was what within them that was smelling like that. He snatched a breath. “Holtz?”

“My father.” Connor was a bleak portrait of misery and rage as he gazed at the stitched bundle.

Wesley sat up cautiously. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Connor sprang at him and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head back and holding the blade to his neck once more. “Don’t lie to me. He was your enemy. Enemy of the one you serve.”

“I’m still sorry for your loss. He kept you alive.” His head was still reeling from it. “Holtz kept you alive in Quor’toth.”

Connor pulled his head back even further so Wesley had no option but to look into his eyes. He ran the blade along the scar at Wesley’s neck. “Who did this?”

Gazing at him, Wesley realized he didn’t care if he lived or died, not because he had nothing left to live for but because although he could never give this boy back his childhood or give Angel back his first steps or his first words, he could at least die knowing that Angel still had a living son after all. “The woman who took you from me to give you to Holtz.”

Connor bent his head and licked the scar curiously. There was nothing salacious about it, this time, nothing like Angelus working his tongue between the tender edges of the wound to suck the blood from it, so corrupted and so cruel; it was more like being examined by something wild. Something pure. Wesley closed his eyes and Connor licked the wound again and then sniffed him closely. “Is that why I know your scent?”

“I used to hold you. We all did. Cordelia used to feed you. Lorne used to sing you lullabies. I…I never held you very well.”

Connor’s fingers were still tight in his hair. “Use the knife.”

“No.” Wesley let it slip down his sleeve and tossed it away, sliding it across the floor until it hit the stairs with a dull ring.

Connor yanked his head back again and Wesley gazed into his eyes. They were like Darla’s, clear and blue, but the grief in them, that was all Angel. He had never seen anything as beautiful in his life. He was a condemned man’s last sunset, last sunrise, rain after a ten year drought, the first light after an eternity in darkness.

“Why do you look at me like that?” Connor demanded angrily.

Wesley could feel the hysteria bubbling in his chest. He couldn’t help smiling, that silly grin that would probably get him killed. “You’re Connor. You’re alive.” The laughter couldn’t be repressed, a spasm through his body. “You’re alive.”

Connor frowned at him. “Are you insane? Is that why you serve a demon?”

“Angel has a soul. I work for him because he does good.” He kept drinking him in. Angel’s son. Connor. Not dead. Not dead because of him. Alive because of Holtz. Back from Quor’toth. He couldn’t stop the laughter bubbling up again. “It’s true then. You don’t get half a miracle. Life really is funny and beautiful, after all.”

“If you serve a demon you’re no better than a demon yourself,” Connor told him fiercely. “I should kill you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Wesley admitted.

“Then fight me!” Connor grabbed Wesley’s wrist and yanked back the sleeve to reveal the stake in its strapping. “Why do you carry this if you serve a vampire?”

“We also kill vampires – and demons. We just don’t kill good demons or vampires with a soul – like your father.”

“Don’t call him that!”

“Why are you here, Connor?” Wesley asked him gently.

“Don’t call me that!”

Wesley took the vicious jolting from Connor’s angry shake without a protest. He honestly didn’t care. Connor could bounce him off the walls if he wanted to as long as he stayed alive and in one piece. “I don’t know what else to call you. I don’t know what Holtz named you. I only know what Angel named you, when he lured everyone away so we could take you to the hospital and get you checked up. When Gunn bought you a pushchair. Do you remember any of it? The lullabies Lorne used to sing to you? A normal child wouldn’t be able to, of course, but you were always special.”

“You’re nothing more than a dream.” Connor looked around the hotel as if he feared it was a trap. “All of you are just a dream I once had.” But when he inhaled Wesley’s scent again, it was with a hint of longing. “And I’m not special. I’m cursed.”

“You’re a miracle.” Wesley was still drinking him in. “That’s how you survived. That’s how you came back. Those creatures that attacked Fred, they were running away from you, weren’t they? Like that beast there…” He nodded at the headless corpse still oozing green blood onto the floor. “Because you’re like Angel. You kill monsters and demons to protect those who can’t defend themselves.”

Connor slammed him down onto the floor and knelt on him, putting the tip of his blade to his throat. “You can defend yourself, demon-lover. Now, do it, or I’ll slit you open and let you bleed.”

“Been there, done that,” Wesley told him hoarsely. “Do you want to die because of your grief? Because Holtz is dead? Or did you come here to look for your father? To find the family you lost?”

“He’s not my father.” Connor pushed the blade under Wesley’s jaw. “You’re not my family.”

“Wesley!”

He had closed his eyes as the blade began to cut into his skin, but now he opened them to see Angel and Gunn coming into the lobby, weapons raised. “It’s Connor!” he shouted. “Angel, it’s Connor.”

He saw Angel stagger, looking as if someone had just run a blade straight through him, and Wesley recognized it so well, that agonizing shiver of hope, but then he took another step. “Stop doing that to Wesley.”

“He could stop me himself,” Connor hissed angrily. “But he won’t do it.” He glared into Wesley’s eyes. “Kill me or I’ll cut your head off.”

“Then you’ll have to cut my head off.” Wesley felt curiously calm. Connor was as unpredictable as a wolf with its paw in a gin trap. The boy crackled with the same intensity as the hell dimension from which he had escaped. He suspected he was steeped in it; drenched in the darkness of that dark world; but inside him he knew there was the core of something good and perfect and pure – like the soul inside Angel that was his true heart, buried in him so deeply even the demon couldn’t touch it.

“Why don’t you do it?” Connor slammed his head down onto the floor.

“Because you’re Angel’s son.” Wesley kept gazing up at him. “And you’re here because you want back the family you lost. The family I stole you from.”

“I’m here to bury my father,” Connor hissed.

“You could have buried him on Quor’toth. You’re here because Angel’s here.”

“I’m here to kill him.”

“No.” Wesley still felt calm despite the blood trickling down his throat. “You’re not a killer.”

“Connor…” Angel was approaching cautiously. “Wesley’s human. Like Holtz. Like you.” Connor spun around and fired a stake at Angel who knocked it out of the way on reflex. As Gunn ran forward with his axe, raised, Angel grabbed him by the shoulder. “He’s my son.”

“Then tell him to get the hell away from Wesley.”

Wesley had to repress another giggle that was trying to bubble up as he looked up at Angel. “He’s alive, Angel. Connor’s alive.”

“Let’s try to keep everyone like that.” Angel stepped forward cautiously. “Connor, you don’t want to do this.”

“You have no idea what I want!” the boy shouted angrily.

“You want to lay Holtz to rest somewhere where it’s green and quiet.”

That knocked the breath out of the boy more effectively than a punch. He gasped and then slowly got to his feet, still standing over Wesley who made no move to get up. Connor looked at Angel with extraordinary dignity. “He wanted to be burned, so his ashes could find their way back to England.”

“We can do that for him.” Angel was still approaching cautiously, despite Gunn trying to pull him back.

“I will kill you,” Connor warned him. “Your slave is right. I kill demons like you.”

“He’s not my slave, he’s my friend.” Angel held up his hands. “And he’s human, Connor, so let him go.”

Connor abruptly sank down to sit astride his captive and held the knife to Wesley’s scar. “Will you kill me if I slash his throat?”

“No.” Wesley gazed up at him. “No one here will kill you, whatever you do.”

“Speak for yourself,” Gunn said between his teeth.

Connor bent and inhaled Wesley’s scent again and Wesley saw the tears glint briefly in the boy’s eyes. “You sound like him but you don’t smell like him. You smell like my dreams.” He licked the blood from Wesley’s neck carefully. “You taste of salt and sorrow. Is that what he does? The one you call my father? Does he drink from you?”

“No.” Wesley gazed up at him unblinkingly. “He drinks pigs’ blood. He never drinks from us.”

Connor yanked up Wesley’s sleeve. “You’re lying. I can see his teethmarks on you.”

“Not his. Another vampire. Who did drink from me.”

Connor gazed intently into Wesley’s eyes. “How did it feel? When the beast was drinking from you?”

“Quiet. Cold. There was less pain than I expected but it felt as if the tide was going out for the last time. I always thought I could hear the sea but I think it was just the way my heartbeat sounded in my ears as it slowed. Afterwards, my veins ached for days. It hurt when they bit me twice in the same place but the first time, I hardly felt it.”

“Connor…” Angel advanced another cautious pace.

Connor glanced up at the vampire. “I’ll kill him if you try to touch me.” As that froze Angel and Gunn in their tracks he glared at Wesley. “Why don’t you try to fight?”

“I’ve hurt you enough for one lifetime.” Wesley still felt curiously calm. It wasn’t unpleasant, really. He was comfortable enough on his back to warrant a very dirty joke if he couldn’t keep the hysteria bubbling up again, and Connor wasn’t heavy, and, for all his threats to kill him, he was sitting on him quite considerately. It certainly didn’t hurt the way it had when Faith had slammed her wiry dangerous body down onto his lap in a way that had bruised his testicles for a week.

“When did you hurt me?” Connor demanded.

Wesley looked into his eyes. “When I stole you from the father who loved you and let Justine take you from me and give you to Holtz.”

“You want to die,” the boy hissed.

“No. I just hate the way lies taste on my tongue.”

“Wes…” Angel grimaced.

“What’s all the hub-bub about, my demon-killing munchkins? Did you – oh holy hostage situation, Batman… Who’s Stig of the Dump and what’s his beef with Wesley?”

Wesley looked up curiously to see Lorne and Groo standing at the foot of the stairs. That was good. That would mean if Connor made a dash for it, Groo might be able to at least delay him getting through the doors to the garden.

“We brought tacos and fish sticks and Dodger dogs. Cordelia said you’d never be able to finish it all but I know how you all get when you’ve been killing demons and… Why is that boy sitting on top of Wesley?”

Wesley turned his head the other way to see Fred and Cordelia coming in the front door, their hands full of bags of food. Connor sniffed the air, looking nervously from the women to Groo and Lorne. His eyes narrowed as he focused on Lorne. “Filthy demon.”

“Hey…” Lorne looked affronted. “That’s rich coming from Jungle Boy, stranger to soap and water, to someone who’s just flossed for the second time today.”

Wesley felt another giggle in danger of bubbling up. He gestured vaguely with his fingers. “Connor meet Lorne and Groo. Cordelia and Fred meet Connor. He’s just dropped in from Quor’toth for afternoon tea.”

“Keep it together, Wes,” Angel warned.

“Connor…?” Cordelia ran forward, dropping the food heedlessly. Wesley saw the boy’s head snap round as he caught the scent of it.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

Connor slammed him down onto the floor again. “I will kill you.”

“Take it easy, Junior,” Gunn said shortly. “No one here is doing you any harm, least of all Wes. ‘Cept if you stick that knife in him again in which case we may have to rethink that ‘no hurting Angel’s long lost kid’ policy.”

“But he’s…” Fred stumbled as she came forward. “Connor was a baby. He can’t be Connor. He’s…not a baby.”

“Time passes differently in some hell dimensions,” Wesley explained, still feeling oddly comfortable on the floor with Connor’s bony knees digging into his ribcage. “For instance when Angel was sent to hell for what was a hundred years in that dimension it was only a matter of months in Sunnydale. In Quor’toth time evidently moved at a much faster rate than here.”

“Don’t you ever stop talking?” Connor demanded, holding the knife to his throat again. “I could cut out your tongue.”

“Don’t do that,” Angel said hastily. “Connor, please let Wesley go. He’s not a demon and…”

“But I am.” Cordelia stepped forward, voice calm. “Part demon anyway. So is Groo. And Lorne’s all demon. Wesley, Fred and Gunn are human, and Angel’s a vampire. But it doesn’t matter if someone is a demon or human, it just matters what they do, what they are. And we’re all good here. All of us.”

“Do you know what I am?” Connor demanded angrily. “I’m the son of two demons. That makes me a monster.”

“No, Connor,” said Cordelia gently. “It makes you a miracle. It also makes you anything you want to be. Just like the rest of us. The only ones who don’t have a choice are those who don’t have a soul. And you do.”

Connor sprang at her so fast that no one could react in time; knife already plunging towards her heart when Cordelia caught his wrist and held it, the blade a fraction from her skin. For a moment they struggled and then Cordelia began to glow, a light enveloping her and gradually engulfing Connor as well.

Angel had sprung forward to help her but as the light flared, he was held back. Wesley felt strong hands grab him under the arms and pull him to his feet; holding him up as he swayed. He knew vaguely that it was Gunn holding him and he was safe, but he was too distracted to give either of those ideas his full attention. He flinched as the light from Cordelia became dazzling and saw everyone else ducking his or her head. And then the light faded and the knife fell to the floor with a clatter and then somehow Connor was in Cordelia’s arms sobbing, and she was rocking him gently, stroking his hair and telling him that everything was okay now, it really was.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she whispered to him soothingly. “Let it all go. All that world. You don’t need it any more. You’re home now, Connor. You’re finally back where you’re supposed to be.” She looked over his head at Wesley and smiled at him and then at Angel who looked pretty close to tears of relief himself. “Back home with us.”

***

They burned Holtz’s body in a quiet clearing on soft grass and beneath tall trees, the sound of water close by. His ashes rose and scattered, flickering like fireflies as they glowed and then were whisked away by the heated air. Connor wept, the tears on his skin glittering in the firelight. Wesley bowed his head respectfully, and inwardly felt only relief that Holtz was dead. He liked to believe that the man had found redemption through Connor; in being given back the son of his enemy to replace the one that Angelus had murdered found that there was something greater than vengeance, but he didn’t trust what Holtz had become. The man had walked into Caritas, seen for himself that there were four humans in the place he was about to torch, two of them unarmed women, and done it anyway. Had he accompanied Connor back to this world as a living man instead of a corpse, Wesley suspected he would have found a way to do Angel more harm somehow. But as things were his death had afforded Connor the excuse to punch his way back into his home dimension, to visit the father he claimed to deny. Wesley knew Angel was the real reason Connor was here, and he knew that if Connor spent time with him he would come to see his nobility and goodness.

Thinking of Holtz’s ashes trying to find their way back to England and the overgrown graves of his wife and children had made Wesley think of it too, that green and pleasant land to which he had no desire to return. Tara had gone with Willow and Giles and apparently the two witches were making great progress at the coven Giles had recommended, Willow learning to control her power so that she was in charge of the magic within her and not the other way around. In their absence, Buffy had been shot by a gunman who had apparently attended High School with her. He had been arrested but Buffy had undergone six hours of surgery before she had been saved. Xander and Dawn had sat out those lonely hours clinging to each other in the waiting room.

“Been there, done that…” Gunn and Cordelia had exchanged a glance before looking across at Wesley.

The gunman was being charged with the murder of an ex-girlfriend and the attempted murder of Buffy. Two of his friends were currently being held on charges of conspiracy to commit murder but seemed likely to get suspended sentences.

Her close brush with death seemed to have given Buffy back the vital spark Giles had so missed seeing in her. It had made her decide that she did want to live after all, and the world was a far more beautiful place than she remembered it being. Giles, Willow and Tara were going to fly back to Sunnydale for a reappraisal of their lives, and there was talk of leaving the Hellmouth to its own devices for a while, perhaps even taking a group holiday. Buffy had spoken to Angel on the phone for the first time in a long time and sounded ‘connected’ as he put it, stronger, more vivid, not that exhausted wraith Giles had described. He had told her about Connor and she had said she’d like to meet him, like to visit all of them, just not yet quite yet. In a few months perhaps. It was the first time in a very long time that Wesley had seen Angel put the phone down after a conversation with Buffy and smile.

For the moment Connor was being cared for equally by all of them. Angel was afraid of pushing himself on the boy, trying to make him acknowledge a relationship he was sure Connor disliked, and so hung back, giving Connor soulful looks from the across the lobby and beaming like an overgrown schoolboy every time Connor grudgingly admitted that he wouldn’t mind another training session.

Fred had taken it upon herself to introduce him to all the different foods Los Angeles had to offer. Cordelia had taken charge of buying him some clothes, and Gunn and Groo helped him with his weapons training. Wesley had been excused training with Connor on the grounds that he was still recovering, but, although he had strongly refuted that he was not back to normal fitness, after seeing the way Connor threw Gunn and Groo around he had decided there were worse things than convalescence. Angel had been forced to take over the training sessions, as the humans were just getting too badly bruised, and had come up with a scenario where the others took it in turns to be play vampires and vulnerable humans, so that Connor could not just attack everything in sight but had to learn how to switch from protective to offensive within seconds. Wesley had been delighted to see Angel and Connor fighting together as he knew from past sessions with Gunn that, whatever gulf of differences appeared to exist between you, once thrown into a combat situation a few times – or even a simulated combat situation – you simply became allies. The man whose culture you didn’t understand metamorphosing into the man who had your back when that last vampire attacked.

Connor had also learned that humans were far more breakable and bruiseable than he was, and was now taking care to pull his punches; he had also been completely thrown by the concept that vampires could be women, despite having known it intellectually. When Cordelia or Fred played the vampires his natural chivalry put them at a serious advantage, and it had taken him a while to overcome that. As Wesley had pointed out to Angel there were worse faults a boy of his age could have, but they decided that Buffy really did need to come and pay a visit so he could find out all about females of the species occasionally being a great deal deadlier than the male.

Connor regarded Lorne with deep hostility until the day he heard Lorne humming the lullaby he had used to sing to him. He charged into the green demon’s room to find Lorne packing his suitcases while looking sadly at a teddy bear, the discovery of which had sparked the lullaby.

“Sing that again,” Connor demanded breathlessly.

Lorne looked at him in surprise. “What do you want?”

“Please – sing it again, that music you were singing before. Please…”

It was certainly the first time Connor had said ‘please’ to Lorne, or anything that wasn’t prefaced by a muttered ‘filthy demon’. Lorne did as he asked and Connor sank onto his bed, taking the teddy bear from him and gazing at it fixedly. “That music was in my dream.”

“Not a dream, hellspawn, just your super-charged memory going back a little further than most of us can manage. I used to sing you to sleep with it.”

Connor gazed up at Lorne with something that was almost apology in his eyes. “The demons on Quor’toth – they don’t sing lullabies.” He noticed the suitcase. “You’re leaving? Why?”

“Well, one guess why, Junior demon killer who calls me ‘filthy demon’ every time he sees me. I don’t want a stake in the back. Quite apart from the imminent death part, I can never get blood out of silk.”

Connor began to unpack the suitcase. “No. You’re one of the pieces of the puzzle in my mind. You’re the music that I used to hear. I used to look for it. I thought it was playing on Quor’toth. It took me many years to realize it was only a memory.”

“Oh, I know how that feels.” Lorne opened his mouth to protest about the forced unpacking and then shrugged. “Music in your mind when you don’t know where it comes from? There wasn’t any music on Pylea either. That’s why I came here. There shouldn’t be any worlds without music.”

Connor looked up at him in surprise. “I suppose that’s why I came here too. To look for the music in my mind.”

Lorne shrugged. “And it turns out all the time it was filthy demon music, after all.”

“It made me feel safe.” Connor looked at the teddy bear again. “Whenever I heard the music in my memory, I knew that I was safe.”

Lorne took a deep breath and then decided to be as big a demon as he was. “You ever heard Aretha, sugarplum? Because, I’m thinking until you have, your life hasn’t really started…”

So, Lorne had stayed and become Connor’s official guide to all things musical in his new world. Wesley had suggested perhaps letting him follow the score of Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ while it was playing so he could see for himself how the notes represented the sounds made by the different instruments but everyone had looked at him as if he were slightly insane. Lorne had countered by suggesting that they dusted off the piano in one of those cobwebby back rooms and showed Connor how music was made in a much more real and immediate kind of way. They had done so and Connor had enjoyed himself immensely. Wesley feared it was only a matter of time before he asked for a guitar. He had unfortunately inherited Angel’s singing voice so they were all rather dreading that day.

By a process – as far as Wesley could tell – of no one else wanting the job, Wesley had been given the role of Connor’s tutor. Angel would hover around, looking over his shoulder and asking how Connor was doing, did he understand things, how well could he read? And Wesley would try to reassure him that Connor was very intelligent, had been well taught by Holtz, had old-fashioned views about science and geography and the like, of course, but Fred was teaching him maths and science while Wesley was working on his English and history and – most importantly – ethics. They had a lot of discussions about philosophy and theology, and some spirited arguments about it, too, as Wesley often didn’t agree with Holtz, and so far all of Connor’s opinions came directly from Holtz.

Connor had demanded to see the full history of all Angel’s past crimes, of course. Wesley had stared him down on that one and handed him an assignment on vampires which he gave him a week to complete, detailing all the different theories various scholars had come up with over the centuries explaining exactly what happened when a human was turned into a vampire. Showing the ingenuity of all teenagers, Connor had gone directly to the source, and asked Angel to tell him exactly how it felt when one became a vampire, if you had the memories of the person you’d been before, why didn’t you have the same morality, the same compassion, the same feelings of attachment to the humans you had loved when your heart had still had a rhythm?

“Because you’re not really who you were…” Angel explained. “You look the same way and you have those memories but all the things that bind you to humanity, the things that made you who you were, they’re not a part of you any more. You don’t feel pity or remorse or compassion or love or tenderness. You just feel the hunger all the time, the hunger for blood and pain and the suffering of others. You feel more alive than you ever did before, so free because you don’t have all those petty little spasms of conscience that make being human such a misery… but you’re dead, you’re dead inside, because all those things that make you human, they’re the only things that matter, and being human it’s a gift you never even think about until you don’t have it any more…”

Only after Connor had handed in his paper – with lots of inkblots and so many loops and swirls from his copperplate handwriting that Wesley decided Cordelia definitely needed to step up those typing lessons – did Wesley agree to discuss Angelus with him. Wesley had certainly given him more assistance with the assignment than he would have done with a boy of Connor’s age who had a more ‘normal’ upbringing, giving him the pages in the books he wanted him to reference rather than just a bibliography, but Connor had at least read the chapters he’d given him and seemed to have thought about the different theories in some detail. He’d also added a conclusion about the importance of the human soul that was half Holtzian eighteenth century Christianity and half completely Connor. He had touched briefly on free will and how there was still no proof that an evil creature had no choice but to be evil but that if someone who had never committed a truly evil act before they became a vampire acted evil afterwards then it seemed to be the fault of the vampire nature, not the original human. He had concluded that as a vampire was a demon inhabiting a human corpse then it was entirely a demon, as the human had no control over what was done with its dead body.

Wesley had read it with close attention while Connor fidgeted anxiously in the doorway. Wesley had made mild questioning comments in the margins whenever he found a piece of lazy thinking or something that felt as if it had come from Holtz unquestioningly instead of directly from Connor, but he had also gone out of his way to find things to praise, relieved that Connor did indeed have a good mind and a knack of expressing himself clearly and intelligently that truly merited praise.

He had finished with a summary of the reasons why Connor’s essay was well-reasoned but asked him to consider other questions in the future. Was it possible that the natural human condition tended towards evil, for instance? Did becoming a vampire free up a human to indulge himself in cruelty which he would otherwise be unable to enjoy because of the promptings of his conscience? Were the rules of God and Man that humankind had dreamt up to keep itself in check the only thing preventing every human from acting like a soulless vampire? Was it their feeling of disassociation from society and humanity that gave vampires their feelings of superiority? And how had both vampirism and the thin veneer of civilization that bound society together been addressed in human literature? Then he had handed Connor a copy of Dracula and Lord of the Flies and asked him to write about how reading them had made him feel about the questions they’d been discussing.

After a few weeks of getting Connor to ask himself questions about the nature of good and evil and nudging towards him a place where he could accept that life was not perhaps quite as black and white as Holtz had painted it to him, he told him that he could read everything Wesley had on Angelus – on condition that he first read through all the Angel Investigations files first so he could see for himself the difference in the way a vampire functioned with and without a soul.

Wesley had done his best to make it appear that this was just part of their philosophy lessons – the best example they had to hand to see the result of the soul in action. But inwardly he was crossing every finger and toe he possessed that he was handling this situation correctly. He wanted above all things for Connor to see the good in Angel and to allow himself to love his father without feeling that he was betraying Holtz. To be able to do that Connor needed to see that the demon who had murdered Holtz’s family was not the father who had held Connor in his arms as a baby.

Connor read through both files with interest and then looked up at Wesley. “You always want me to tell you what I think but you never tell me what you think.”

“Okay.” Wesley took a chair and sat on it. “What do you want to ask me?”

“What do you think the relationship is between what my father is now and what he was before?”

For a moment Wesley thought Connor was asking him some philosophical question about Holtz’s place in the afterlife, and whether or not he had won himself a place in heaven, but then he realized he meant Angel. He had to think that was a good sign in itself.

“I think that just as the demon who killed the human being that Angel used to be had access to his memories without ever having lived his life, so Angel has access to the memories of being Angelus without being the person who performed those deeds. I think that the person he is now was born when Angelus, the vampire, had Liam’s human soul forced back inside him. I think that who Angel is now is neither Angelus nor Liam but a third and separate entity who shares their memories.”

“What else do you think?” Connor pressed.

Wesley shrugged. “That Angel is noble and good and has done more to make the world a better place for humanity than anyone else I know.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me that?”

“You didn’t ask.”

Connor put his head on one side. “You’re a strange man.”

Dryly, Wesley said, “Thank you.”

He was surprised to see Connor smile. After a pause the boy said, “Could you kill Angelus? If he came back?”

“If he was threatening Fred or Cordelia, yes.”

Connor examined him closely. “What if he was threatening you?”

Wesley had to stop and think about that one. He remembered Angelus in that darkened office advancing towards him, and in between the fear, the terrible anxiety for Cordelia and Miss Lowell the realization that Angel was still in there somewhere; that this was the moment Angel had told them to be ready for and he wasn’t, because there was a stake in that drawer and he was trying to think of every way he could not to have to pick it up. “I – don’t know. Angel does so much good. More than I ever could. He has an eternity in which to assist mankind – and there’s the prophecies and…”

Connor patted Wesley gently on the shoulder. “It’s okay. He’s told me what to do. If he turns, stand behind me. I’ll do what has to be done.”

Wesley didn’t know if that was a good sign or not, or what to make of Connor’s fascination with the Doximoll incident. Connor reread that file again now and after demanding that Wesley clarified a few things about what had happened, what exactly had been said and done, went off to talk to Angel about it, cornering the vampire in his room where he had sneaked off to try to drink some blood unseen.

“Did you want to say those things to Wesley and Cordelia when you were…you…?”

“No.” Angel looked surprised at the question. “I didn’t.”

“But you hadn’t really lost your soul, you just thought you had. So Angelus couldn’t really have been there, could he?”

“It felt as if he was.” Angel sat down on the bed with a sigh.

“Do you think you want to do bad things but you have to stop yourself all the time?”

“I’m not sure. I remember doing them. I remember enjoying them. But I hate myself for doing them and for enjoying them.”

Connor sat on the bed next to him. “Wesley says the person who committed those crimes wasn’t you.”

“That’s what Wesley believes.”

“What do you believe?”

Angel looked at his hands. “I know the demon is still in me. I’m not human. I’m a vampire. I can access that demon to make myself stronger, to heal faster, to jump higher, kill better. Angelus is always with me. He’s always there. I just can’t afford to let him take control.”

Connor considered that for a long moment. “But what about the humans with souls who commit murders? Do they have demons inside them as well?”

“I think there is darkness in every one. I think there was a darkness in me before I became Angelus. Maybe if someone had a completely pure soul a vampire wouldn’t be able to make it like itself. I don’t know. I don’t have any more answers than some of the people who wrote those books.”

Connor sighed. “Wesley says you’re good.”

“Wesley believes that. Wesley believes a lot of things. He’s a clever guy but he’s not right about everything. And in the end it doesn’t matter what anyone else believes, it’s what you believe that counts.”

“I think you killed a lot of people. I think you’ve saved a lot of people. I think the world doesn’t make any kind of sense. And if the soul is our connection to God and now you have one why can’t you touch a crucifix without it burning you?”

“Because I’m still a demon? Or because I believe it can hurt me? Because I believe God hates me? Because he really does?” Angel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“The vampires who fed on Wesley? Who were they? What happened to them? Why didn’t they kill him?”

“They didn’t kill him because they liked hurting him too much to want to give that up. They came here after him, and Cordelia and Fred and Gunn killed them.”

“If they’d turned him into a vampire what would you have done?”

Angel closed his eyes. “When your mother was turned into a vampire I thought if I staked her it would give her some peace, stop her killing again. But now I wonder if I’d done that would I have sent her to hell? She would have died damned. The way she died, she was sharing your soul. Maybe she didn’t go to hell this time. If they’d turned Wesley and I killed him would I be condemning him to hell? Should I try to get his soul back? And if I did that, then I’d be condemning him to a life like this, drinking blood, living in the shadows, spurned by humanity, but wanting to help them, and the hunger with you all the time…”

“Would you do it?” Connor demanded. “And if he was dying, if there was no other way to save him, would you make him like you?”

Angel grimaced. “I don’t know, Connor. And I really don’t want to think about it.”

“Wesley said vampires think they’re better than humans. Don’t you think that?”

“No.” Angel looked aghast. “Of course not. Maybe vampires only tell themselves that to block out how cold they feel.”

“I think there’s a darkness in me,” Connor said thoughtfully. “I enjoyed killing on Quor’toth.”

Angel looked into his eyes. “Did you enjoy hurting Wesley? When you cut him with the knife and he bled did you enjoy that?”

Connor frowned. “No. I don’t think so. I remember being angry with him because he wouldn’t fight back and I wanted to kill someone because my father was dead.” He looked at Angel sideways. “Both of them, actually.”

“If you’d been a vampire it wouldn’t have mattered if he fought back or not, you would still have gone on hurting him. That’s the difference between being angry and grieving and not having a soul. I hurt him too when I was angry and grieving. I tried to kill him.”

Connor half-smiled. “No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“If you’d tried to kill him he’d be dead.”

Wesley heard that as he came to look for Connor, for a moment he stood in the corridor outside Angel’s room, knowing Angel could hear his heartbeat and Connor could probably pick up his scent. For a second he was back in that hospital with the pillow over his head and Angel screaming all that hate and anger at him.

“I was lucky,” Angel said quietly. “There are some things you can never put right again. If Gunn hadn’t been there… It’s too easy for people like us to kill, Connor. Because we’re stronger and faster and we’re harder to really injure. But that just means we have to be extra careful, because it’s something you can’t ever undo, you can’t ever take it back. You just have to live with it, even when you can’t live with it, but you don’t have the choice not to because there’s no way to make amends if you’re dead.”

Wesley knocked on the door. “Connor, you left half my files scattered over the office floor and Fred wants to show you how gravity works.”

Connor sprang to his feet. “I know how gravity works. She told me all about Isaac Newton yesterday.”

Wesley shrugged. “I suspect this lesson will involve eating large quantities of tacos and then dropping things from a great height to see what kind of a splat they make.”

“Cool!” Connor slapped Wesley on the shoulder as he went past. “I can pick up those files later, yes?”

“No,” Wesley assured him. “You can pick them up now and put them back in the right order.”

Rolling his eyes and muttering something under his breath about the anal retentiveness of certain skinny white Englishmen that sounded as if it was copied verbatim from Gunn, Connor sped off at a sprint before leaping gracefully over the banister to land in the lobby with perfect balance. Wesley and Angel both watched him springing over to where Fred and Gunn were waiting for him.

“You’re really going to let him touch your files?” Angel enquired in surprise. “Because last time I checked he learned his filing system from Cordelia.”

“Good point.” Wesley darted to the head of the stairs and hastily shouted down to Connor that he could leave the files, just this once, as he didn’t want to stop Fred getting her lunch.

“Did someone say lunch?” Cordelia appeared from the office, looking very over-dressed for filing and with Groo on her arm. “How about we take Connor somewhere swankier than Taco Bell? I was just thinking I haven’t really shown Groo any of the nice places in LA, only the – alleys that smell of urine and have rats in them, which all those squishy demons seem to like so much. Lorne? Do you want to come with us for lunch?”

“No, thank you, pumpkin,” Lorne assured her. “I’m planning to take Junior out to some sleazy demon bars later this week and need to pace myself hangover wise.”

“You’re planning to what…?” Angel demanded.

Connor waved a hand at him. “Cool it, Dad. Gunn’s coming too. They’re going to show me the seamy side of LA.”

Angel started at that ‘Dad’ but managed to get his voice under control enough to say: “And this is supposed to reassure me, why exactly…?”

“Can we argue about it later?” Connor pleaded. “My stomach’s rumbling and you know how dangerous Fred gets when she’s hungry.”

Angel waited until they were outside of the doors and definitely out of earshot before he grabbed Wesley by the shoulders. “He called me ‘Dad’.”

“I know.” Wesley beamed back at him.

Then Angel enveloped him in a hug that made his ribs ache but not with pain. “We got him back, Wes,” he breathed. “We got him back.”

Wesley looked after the departing group in happy bewilderment. Connor was play-punching Gunn in the ribs and Fred was pretending to pull his ear in reprimand. Cordelia was laughing at something Groo had said. “I never thought for a minute that… I really think we did, Angel. I think he wants to be here.” He looked at his watch. “I have to go to my place – I have some books I think he’d find interesting and I need to get some more clothes.”

“You should give up that apartment,” Angel said unexpectedly.

Wesley gaped at him. “What?”

“Well, we have a limited income. It doesn’t make any sense for you to be paying rent for an apartment when we’re already paying rent on this place and there are all these rooms standing empty. I know Cordy needs her own place because of Groo and – Dennis and being a girl and everything but as Fred and Gunn and Connor and Lorne are already here and you…”

“…have no life?”

“Exactly.”

“I – don’t know what to say.”

“I’m suggesting you move in, Wes, not that we get married and buy a dog.”

Wesley feigned disappointment. “We can’t have a dog?”

“Look, if you hate the idea of not being able to get away from the rest of us...”

“Oh, I definitely hate that idea,” Wesley assured him. “But you’re right about the limited resources. And I suppose we do make ourselves vulnerable by having separate places...” He remembered the knife flashing, the sensation of the blade cutting his throat, that second when he didn’t realize what had happened until the pain hit and he felt the blood spilling. He didn’t even know he was stumbling until Angel caught him by the arms and held him steady.

“Wes…?”

He collected himself with an effort. “Groo escorts Cordelia home and I hope the visions would warn her if she were in any serious danger, but perhaps it might be more cost-effective for me to move in here, and it would solve that problem of the books I want always either being in the office when I’m home or at home when I’m in the office.”

“I could come with you now. Help you get stuff?” Angel suggested.

“It would make more sense for Gunn to take me in his truck. And there is the whole – daylight issue as well.”

Angel seemed to notice the sunshine for the first time. “Oh yes. Okay. But do it soon.”

Wesley frowned at him. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Angel sighed. “No, yes… It’s just – Wolfram & Hart were sniffing around your place a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to ask Gunn some questions when he was picking up some of your stuff. It’s probably nothing but I’d feel happier if you were staying here every evening and not going off by yourself to an empty apartment.” There was a pause before Angel said intently, “I don’t want anything else happening to you. Connor isn’t the only one I just got back.”

Wesley was terribly touched by that; so much so that he had to hastily drop his gaze so Angel wouldn’t see how moved he was by the vampire’s renewed declaration of friendship. “I’ll just grab a few things for now and get Gunn to help me move out on the weekend.”

Angel nodded. “Okay. Now, come and pick out a room.”

“I like the one I have.” They were standing outside it, by chance. It was next to Angel’s. Wesley opened the door so they could both look inside.

“Really?” Angel looked at him in surprise. “But don’t you have…bad associations with it? I was thinking you could have the bigger one over the hall.”

“I like this one. And it has good associations.”

“It does?” Angel peered in through the doorway and Wesley could see him remembering tossing Wesley roughly onto the bed and all those bouts of having his bandages changed, the painful limps across the room, the chilly sessions sitting in the bath while Angel washed dried semen out of his hair.

“I remember people I care for very much bringing me soup and ice cream, and another person trying not to hurt me when he changed my dressings even though I’d just lost him the only child he’d ever have.” Wesley risked meeting Angel’s eyes. “I want to keep this room.”

“I sort of think of it as yours now anyway.” Angel looked around the room with more interest. “We could repaint it if you like. Put some of your swords on the wall. Get you a better bookcase.”

“I have bookcases.”

“Okay, let’s work out where your furniture would go…” Angel pulled him into the room, excited by the project now Wesley had consented to it, examining the tiling in the bathroom with a critical eye in case it didn’t measure up. Wesley had forgotten how childish Angel could be about new enthusiasms. Perhaps because he’d had to be so restrained about Connor coming back, and not show any of the joy he was feeling too obviously in case it looked as if he were taking the boy’s acceptance for granted, he had clearly decided to channel his enthusiasm into decorating Wesley’s room as well. He demanded that everyone chipped in the moment the others came back, and worked out the best colour for the walls, curtains and carpets that Wesley was already perfectly satisfied with exactly the way they were.

Looking at paint colours and peering into abandoned rooms for furniture that could be moved to Wesley’s bedroom inevitably led to Connor pointing out which colours he liked best and which pieces of furniture he preferred, and by the time the sun was going down, Connor had unconsciously made it clear to everyone in the hotel that he now thought of the Hyperion as home.

They waited for him to head off to the bathroom with reasonable restraint and then met up in the hallway to give in and in Cordelia and Fred’s case utter barely muted squeals of relief. Cordelia hugged Fred and swung her around while Gunn, Angel and Wesley thumped one another in a manly way and Groo solemnly shook hands with Lorne.

“Okay, so his idea of home decorating is that from now on we cut the heads off every demon we kill so he can stuff and mount them and stick them on his wall, but, hey, it’s still an indication he wants to stay here, right?” Cordelia demanded breathlessly.

Gunn nodded. “Damned straight. No one bags a moth-eaten tigerskin for his bedroom if he’s not planning to stick around. You’re not going to let him have that in there though, are you, Angel, because that thing is probably harbouring all kinds of nasties?”

“Of course, if you don’t he may think it’s a reasonable idea to drop into the zoo one night and pull a Mowgli,” Cordelia pointed out.

Wesley frowned. “Didn’t Mowgli kill Shere Khan by tricking him into a gully and then getting a lot of cattle to stampede over him? I’m not sure it would actually be possible to replicate those circumstances in Los…” Seeing everyone looking at him with pitying expressions, he cleared his throat. “Not being strictly literal with the Mowgli references then? I see.”

Cordelia looked at Lorne. “Next time we go shopping one of us really needs to buy Wesley a life.”

“Top of my shopping list, princess,” the demon assured her.

Wesley looked at his watch. “Well, if you’ve all quite finished insulting me, I really do need to go and pick up a few things from my flat. Try not to do anything wonderfully exciting while I’m not here, will you?”

“Hah.” Cordelia poked him in the chest. “Don’t think we couldn’t if we wanted to. We’re just – pacing ourselves. Just because all you’ve seen us doing is the whole brain-melting tedium and constant poverty interspersed with moments of bone-shattering terror and near-death trauma, doesn’t mean we couldn’t be having a really fun time if we wanted to.”

Wesley was still grinning about that as he went down to the basement where his motorbike was standing next to Angel’s car. Gunn had brought it over for him a few weeks before, omitting to tell Wesley until he’d had the fun of riding around on it for a few hours that he’d never actually passed a test for driving a motorcycle, particularly not a high-powered Triumph. Thinking of that, Wesley examined it for new scratches and had to admit that he couldn’t actually see any despite Gunn telling him terrible things about taking it over loose gravel at high speed. He took off his glasses to put on the helmet and then almost jumped out of his skin as a familiar female voice drawled lazily:

“Why, Mr Wyndam-Pryce, you’re beautiful.”

He spun around with his heart hammering to see Lilah Morgan, wearing something tailored and no doubt expensive. She lazily picked a stray thread from her dark silk jacket and then glanced up at him in a way that he had to admit, if only in the privacy of his head, did light something of a fire in his loins.

“Can I help you?” he enquired frostily, hastily putting on his glasses and hoping they bestowed him with some dignity as he did so.

“Actually, I’m here to help you.” She stepped forward and he had to admit that she really was a striking-looking woman. “Don’t go to your apartment alone.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you think?” As he continued to stare a challenge, she sighed impatiently. “Our seers say you’ve learned how to hop dimensions. That makes you a wizard of considerable power. That, combined with the inside information you have on Angel Investigations, just makes you way too kidnappable to resist.” She moved in closer and he felt her breath tickle his stubble. “And they wouldn’t even want to do anything fun with you, it would be all…drugs and hypnotism and lots of the wrong kinds of pain.”

“There are right kinds of pain?”

She smiled at him seductively. “Oh, you’re just begging me to demonstrate that one, aren’t you?”

He stepped back. “I’ve really had enough pain to last me a lifetime, Ms Morgan.”

“So formal. And here was I thinking that you and I were on the fast track to some really good meaningless sex before you pulled that little disappearing act. Still wondering how exactly you did that, I have to say. Leave one place, turn up in another six days later with no visible trail between the two. Neat trick if you can do it.”

He thought of that stinking basement in the other dimension and shuddered. “Trust me, you really wouldn’t want to learn that one.”

“You went after him, didn’t you?” She closed the distance between them and if it had been anyone but Lilah Morgan he would have said that was compassion in her eyes. “Connor?”

“I never left the city.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. He had stayed in Los Angeles throughout his little visit to another dimension.

She inclined her head, smiling. “Kind of an odd coincidence, isn’t it? You vanish in a big crackle of inter-dimensional activity and the next time our seers pick up anything it’s all happening here, and lo and behold there’s a teenage boy in Angel’s hotel that the Texas twiglet is calling ‘Connor’.”

“I can assure you that I have never been to Quor’toth and have no idea of how to get there.”

Lilah widened her eyes mockingly. “Scout’s honour, Mr Wyndam-Pryce?”

He made the scout salute. “Absolutely.”

She laughed. “I actually believe you.”

“Tell Linwood and his hired thugs that I don’t know how to get to Quor’toth or any other demon dimension he may have pencilled in for his summer holidays this year.”

“Go to your apartment alone and you’ll be telling him yourself. Probably over and over and over again. In between the writhing and screaming.”

He shuddered before he could stop himself and she narrowed her eyes, again that flicker of something that could almost have been human empathy in her gaze. “It really wasn’t Disneyworld you visited, was it?”

“It was nowhere that was useful to Wolfram & Hart unless you consider the basement of the Hyperion an area of outstanding natural beauty.”

Her eyes widened. “Is that it? Angel brought you here? He…? What did he do to you?”

“Nothing. And Angel didn’t bring me here. I just tried something that didn’t work and this was where I ended up, only not in the shape in which I’d left.”

She looked relieved and then mocking. “Oh, and the noble hero just had to disappoint everyone by going all goody-goody again and taking you in, didn’t he?”

Wesley shrugged. “What can I say? Once a champion, always a champion.”

“So you’ve kissed and made up with the Gang of…how many of you are there now?”

“Sorry, Lilah, you’ll have to stake us out in the old fashioned way to work that one out. We removed the security cameras.”

“I know. Why do you think I’m risking my life warning you about the welcoming committee at your apartment? Which, you still haven’t thanked me for, I notice.”

“He’ll send you some flowers.”

They both jumped as Angel and Gunn stepped out of the shadows, Gunn holding an axe in a way that was certainly not subtle.

Lilah glanced dismissively at Angel. “I’m expecting a little more than that for saving his life. Which is what I’m doing, by the way. At least the bits of his life that don’t involve lots of pain and suffering, not to mention hallucinogenic drugs.”

“Why are you doing that again?” Gunn enquired. “Cause I’m thinking ‘goodness of your heart’ probably not the reason.”

She shrugged. “Office politics. I want Linwood’s job. I’d do it better than he does and I’m much smarter. Just making sure that when the annual review comes up he has a few more blots on his copybook.” She glanced at Wesley. “And maybe I have a preference for you keeping that big brain in that handsome head of yours.” She looked him up and down in a way that was simultaneously insultingly obvious and annoyingly arousing. “And flowers aren’t going to cut it for this favour. For this you owe me a nooner.”

And then she was gone and Wesley found himself looking between Angel and Gunn in confusion. “What’s a nooner?”

Angel and Gunn exchanged what looked like a pas devant les enfants glance. “Something that makes it possible Lilah, the evil lying bitch lawyer, may actually be telling the truth this time, on account of her having her own entirely selfish motives for keeping you in one piece,” Gunn conceded with a shrug.

“One working piece.” Angel and Gunn exchanged another glance and then looked at Wesley curiously.

“I knew she wanted to get groiny with him.” Cordelia’s sudden appearance made Wesley jump nervously. “First Angel and now Wesley. You wouldn’t think it to look at her shoes, but that woman really has no standards.”

Angel and Wesley exchanged a mutually insulted glance but before either of them could formulate a protest Cordelia had already moved on briskly to her next sentence: “So, what’s the plan? I’m presuming that sending Wesley off to get kidnapped for his…big mojo is probably not on the agenda?”

“I’d say keeping Wesley away from his apartment at all costs was more what we had in mind.” Angel frowned. “Linwood has every reason to be…”

“Screw Linwood,” Gunn put in. “Sounds as if Lilah’s going to be there waiting for him with a butterfly net every day Linwood and his goons aren’t. Wes definitely needs to be confined to quarters until further notice.”

“Do I get a say in this?” Wesley demanded.

Angel, Gunn and Cordelia all said ‘No’ with equal firmness.

“Because it occurs to me,” he continued, ignoring them, “that this is most likely a ploy to capture Connor. Lilah comes here to send all of you on a wild goose chase to my flat while Wolfram & Hart storm the hotel and steal Connor. Doesn’t that seem like the most likely explanation to you?”

Angel shook his head. “Wes, Lilah can’t make her pupils dilate at will or send out ‘mate with me now’ pheromones just to please her boss. I’m not saying that every word out of her mouth wasn’t a lie, but the naked lust – that was genuine.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Cordelia assured him. “She’s expecting to collect on that nooner.”

“But Connor…”

“Isn’t the only valuable thing in this hotel.” Angel squeezed Wesley’s shoulder briefly and although it was annoying and patronising of them for to all be dismissing his comments, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant to be considered valuable.

They returned to the lobby to discuss Lilah’s visit, Wesley checking outside to see if there was any sign of a Wolfram & Hart SWAT team arriving to grab Angel’s son, while the others planned without him. He returned to the lobby to find Angel and Gunn nodding decisively at one another in a way that made him distinctly nervous.

Wesley looked between them. “I suppose recent events have rendered it impossible for me to point out that you, Angel, could never strategize your way out of a wet paper bag?”

Angel looked him up and down. “This coming from the guy who took a wrong turn to an alternate dimension last time he tried to alter time?”

Wesley sighed. “I knew it. Gunn, just remember the deep thought that went into Angel’s cunning plan to get you both into Wolfram & Hart.”

“Hey, smartass, Fred and I came up with this strategy.” Cordelia handed out weapons as she spoke. “You really think we’d let Gunn and Angel out there using a plan Mr Walking Real Fast and Use Myself As Human Bait Boy had dreamed up?”

Relieved, he nodded. “Okay, what is the plan then?”

He wasn’t terribly impressed with Cordelia and Fred’s plan either but he had to reluctantly concede that it was probably the best idea. Angel and Gunn were going over to Wesley’s apartment, armed with tranquilliser darts and large frightening weapons, and Angel was going to scare the stuffing out of anyone he found there who worked for Wolfram & Hart, making it very clear in the process that Wesley was off-limits and that if Wesley disappeared or was even a few minutes late coming home from the hot dog stand, Angel was going to hold Linwood personally responsible. Connor, of course, wanted to accompany them, something which made Wesley protest loudly that taking Connor into a situation where there were people already in place in kidnap mode was just insane, which only made Connor even more determined to go until Fred pointed out that if the Wolfram & Hart kidnappers split their forces and Lilah’s warning had in fact been a feint then while Angel, Connor and Gunn were all out of the hotel, the bad guys could rush into the Hyperion and grab Wesley from there. This, of course, also applied to Connor – the more likely subject for a kidnap attempt in Wesley’s opinion. But it certainly convinced Connor as an argument, and he conceded that Fred, Cordelia, and Wesley would be better protected by him and Groo than Groo alone. Wesley strongly objected to being classified along with the girls who needed to be protected as he was almost back to full fitness and was actually a demon hunter, thank you very much.

“Would that be a rogue demon hunter, Wes?” Cordy enquired with a straight face. “Because I’m still not too clear on what those old rogue demons actually are. Are they the ones with really bad table manners?”

“Well, having seen you attempt to eat linguine, I suppose you’re the person best placed to answer that…”

“Children…” Angel sighed. “Can we save the immature squabbling until after the evil kidnappers have been vanquished? Connor, stop teasing Wesley and give him the flame thrower. Cordelia, don’t you think someone chosen by the Powers That Be to bear a sacred trust should be above sticking her tongue out? Connor, I’m trusting you to keep them all safe, okay? Groo, can you guard the garden entrance with Wes? Cordy, you, Lorne, and Fred keep watch – obviously until people attack – whereupon hitting them with large heavy objects would probably be a good plan. Connor, don’t kill anyone human unless they really piss you off.”

“Angel…” Wesley protested, thinking of several weeks’ worth of ethical debates going west in a few careless words.

Angel rolled his eyes. “Okay, don’t kill anyone human unless Uncle Wesley or Aunt Cordy say you can. Gunn, let’s go and frighten some lawyers.”

“I’m all over that idea.”

As they departed jauntily on their mission, Connor turned to Wesley and Cordelia. “You do know I’m not going to call you ‘Uncle Wesley’ or ‘Aunt Cordelia’ – ever, don’t you?”

“Thank god for small mercies,” Wesley observed with feeling.

“Damned straight.” Cordelia raised her sword and they waited.

And waited. And waited.

After an hour and a half of waiting, Groo was the only one who wasn’t fidgeting as if he had inadvertently sat down upon an ants’ nest. He, in fact, seemed mildly surprised by their impatience. “Was it not sometimes necessary to keep absolutely still in the scum pits of Quor’toth?”

“We didn’t have scum pits.” Connor tossed his axe from hand to hand restlessly. “And on Quor’toth it was usually safer to keep moving. Are these people coming or not?”

“Not.”

Wesley spun around to find Angel and Gunn stepping through the basement door, and just for a second, his mind froze, even though he knew this Gunn was human and this Angel had a soul, for a moment his instincts were stronger than his reason, and the fear jolted through him.

Gunn didn’t notice anything, grinning from ear to ear as he swung his axe in his hand. “Not a feint and obviously not coming here as Lilah certainly told the truth about the evil kidnappers at Wes’s place. You should have been there. It was fun. Angel vamped out and I can tell you there was a lot of screaming, possibly some panty-wetting too.”

“Are you hurt?” Fred went forward anxiously.

Gunn waved a dismissive hand. “Few cuts and bruises and pulled muscles but I’m too pumped up to feel anything right now. Can you believe those sons-of-bitches were really going to snatch Wes? Had hypodermics there and everything, not to mention the whole van with men in white coats and trolley to strap him…”

Angel had already dropped his sword and started sprinting. He caught Wesley under the arms as the lobby performed a pirouette. “Easy, Wes.”

“Just…feel a little…”

“Are you going to faint like a girl?” The words were all the old Cordelia but the expression in her eyes was a hundred percent anxiety.

Wesley found a smile from somewhere. “I thought it would make a change from screaming like one.”

Angel and Connor helped him over to the banquette in the lobby and sat him down on it. Connor looked at him anxiously. “Why has he gone that colour? What are we supposed to do? Does he need smelling salts? Or should I slap him?”

“No, thank you.” Wesley held up a hand. “I wouldn’t hate a glass of…”

But Fred was already putting one between his fingers. “Have you got it?”

He nodded. “Thank you.” He sipped the water carefully, the world receding from that greyed out hissing place to something that came in more colour than monochrome. “I’m sorry it was just the… I hadn’t expected…”

“Angel and Gunn to come home all blood-spattered and bragging?” Cordelia demanded, sitting down next to him and taking his hand in hers. “Yeah, that shocked me too, cause it’s not as if they don’t do that every day.” She was still smiling at him, but there was that concern in her eyes that made him feel simultaneously anxious and warmed to the bone.

“I’m sorry,” Angel said penitently. “We should have thought how it would look to you – come in the other way.”

“No, it’s…” Wesley looked up at him. “I don’t why I… I was so sure it was a feint and it’s just the first time I’d seen you and Gunn…”

“Oh, damn.” Gunn bowed his head. “They came in that way, didn’t they? Vampy and Skanky from the other dimension – up from the damned basement.”

Connor looked between them in shock. “The vampires who hurt Wesley – they looked like you?”

“It was another world,” Wesley said quickly. “Things happened differently there. It’s not relevant to this dimension.” He focused on Angel’s red-spattered shirt. “You’re bleeding.”

The vampire shrugged. “They squeezed off a couple of shots. Nothing serious. But, they won’t be trying the kidnap thing again. I told them you were under my protection and if anything happened to you I was going to personally take it out of Linwood’s skin, piece by piece. I think they got the message.”

“Thank you.” Wesley looked up at him in relief. “Both of you.”

“Kind of figured we owed you one,” Gunn grimaced. “On the cosmic karma scale.”

“And you do owe Lilah one,” Angel admitted. “They had a whole special ops team there to grab you and they meant business.”

“Why didn’t you tell me the vampires who hurt him looked like you?” Connor demanded of Angel.

“I thought you knew,” Angel admitted. “You mentioned the vampires who hurt Wes, I figured he must have told you about it.”

“All he told me was that it wasn’t you who fed from him.”

“It wasn’t. Gunn and Angel didn’t do anything to me. They just share a physical resemblance to the vampires that did.” He winced at the blood on Angel’s shirt. “Shouldn’t we bandage that up? Or are you trying to look extra stoic in front of your son?”

“Well, I was,” Angel protested, “but as you’ve blown that now I may as well bitch and whine as much as usual.” He took a seat next to Wesley as Cordelia and Fred went off to fetch the bandages, not because, as they pointed out, the men were any less capable of doctoring themselves but because they were extra pathetically whiny unless they got female attention after being damaged in a fight. “So, what are you going to do about that nooner you owe Lilah?” Angel enquired.

Wesley looked at the rips in Gunn’s clothes, the bloodstains on Angel’s shirt. “Well, I do apparently owe her my gratitude.”

“It wasn’t your gratitude she was eyeing up back there.” Cordelia set the first aid kit down on the banquette. “Shirts off, manly warriors. Prepare to get the antiseptic where it hurts.”

“Maybe this is the time to tell you that on account of wanting to set Connor a good example, you’re not allowed to have girls in your room.”

“What?” Wesley looked at him in disbelief.

“House rule.” Angel shrugged. “I run a clean hotel.”

“Except for the demon pus we never managed to get out of room 109,” Fred said brightly. She looked at Gunn appreciatively as he pulled his ripped sweatshirt over his head, revealing some exciting looking cuts and bruises and some impressive lean musculature. “I’m so glad I’m allowed boys in my room.”

“Sorry, Fred,” Angel deadpanned. “From now on I’ve decided you have to live like a nun so that Connor will grow up in an atmosphere of virtue and contemplation and – what are you doing with that crucifix?”

Fred held it up threateningly. “I’m just pointing out that anyone who comes between a Texan girl and her man can expect to feel the pointy end of a stake or the sizzling side of a cross.”

“If Fred’s allowed to have boys in her room I think I should be, too.” Wesley realized that had come out wrong. “Girls, I mean. Be allowed to have girls in my room.”

“Well, you can’t.” Angel shrugged. “Not while Lilah’s after your virtue. Nothing that woman wanted to do to you in bed would be a fit thing to have happening under my roof.”

Wesley had a brief flashback to Lilah eyeing him up in the car park. Damn. Definitely a blatant, unsubtle and positively insulting…sexy, really, really sexy come-on... “I might be able to obtain inside information on Wolfram & Hart.”

Cordelia patted his shoulder. “Gee, Wes, there’s no sacrifice you’re not prepared to make for the cause, is there?”

“I’m with Angel,” Gunn said in disgust. “No way do I want to be getting sweaty and naked in the same hotel as Lilah’s getting sweaty and naked with Wes cause that would just be…yeuch.”

“Does Wesley not now owe this woman a debt of honour?” Groo enquired.

Wesley held up a hand. “See, Groo thinks I owe Lilah a debt of honour. And Groo is never wrong.”

“He wanted Angel to paint his bedroom in summer splendour,” Fred pointed out.

“Except perhaps in the matter of some minor decorating decisions of no particular consequence.”

“Lilah would want to handcuff you to the bed and then…” Cordelia narrowed her eyes. “I’m just turning you on now, aren’t I?”

Wesley collected himself with an effort. “Handcuffs, you say? Shocking.” Memories of the cuffs clicking closed, the chain being wrapped around a pipe, jolted through him, but he dismissed it quickly. There was just that lingering chill, as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun. Then he thought about a woman – any woman – seeing him naked, seeing his scars, asking him about them. And Lilah would ask about them. She’d trace them with a manicured forefinger and whisper hotly in his ear that there was nothing like the signs of past torture to turn on a lawyer. He snatched a breath. “Actually… I think Angel may have a point about the enforced celibacy, at least for a while. I’m not really up to…dating.”

“Of course you’re not, pumpkin,” Lorne said tactfully. “You need to move in first, get settled, let Cordelia and I do something about your wardrobe. Like – burning all your clothes, for instance.”

“Teaching him to dance,” Cordelia added. “That would be another kindness to any women he might be planning to date.”

Wesley gave them both what he hoped was a quelling glance. “I would like to send Lilah some flowers though, if there’s a way to do it that won’t get her killed.”

“Information would probably be more use to her.” Angel tossed a wallet to Wesley which was intercepted in mid-air by Connor. “Took it from Linwood. You could always take her out to lunch tomorrow and give that to her. It has some interesting business cards she may find useful. Just resist the urge to put out however much she come hithers you.”

Connor sniffed the wallet curiously before tossing it to Wesley. “But if this woman you speak of is going to win power and influence for herself in the place of your enemies wouldn’t it be a good idea if Wesley did…”

“Give it up for the cause?” Cordelia enquired. “I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re actually desperate enough yet to start prostituting ourselves for information. Personally, I’m not even sold on the lunch idea. What if she drugs his food?”

“Fred and I can keep an eye out from a discreet distance.” Gunn looked plaintively at the bandages that weren’t being applied to his wounds.

Wesley reached for the bandages. “I think you can all back off and admit that it’s none of your business. At the very least I certainly owe her a nice lunch in a half-decent restaurant.”

“Is talking about lunch in swanky restaurants making anyone else hungry?” Fred had picked up the antiseptic ointment but now she put it down again.

“Now you come to mention it…” Cordelia rose to her feet while Angel pointed at the bullet holes in his chest pathetically. She tossed a bandage to Wesley. “Wes, you can patch these two up, can’t you? Lorne, Groo, want to accompany Fred and I to a place that sells large quantities of cheap hot food?”

“You sold me, sugar pie, especially if it means I don’t have to watch these two bleeding on the marble again.”

“It is always an honour to accompany my princess anywhere.” Groo bowed politely and Cordy beamed at him.

Fred kissed Gunn consolingly on the forehead. “Now, you know you’re always ravenous after you get to kill something. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back with lots of food.”

Then they were gone and Angel and Gunn were exchanging hurt ‘the women of our dreams don’t love us’ looks.

“But we didn’t get to kill anything!” Angel protested. “We only got to – bruise and frighten them a little.”

“Never mind.” Wesley picked up the ointment and handed Connor a bandage. “I dab, you wrap. Which reminds me – I need to show you some books on Ancient Egyptian culture. I think you’ll find it fascinating. One of the most interesting things in my opinion is the different approach to the anthropomorphisation of animals. Whereas in western culture we tend to attribute certain characteristics to animals – cunning for foxes, courage for lions and so on, and those attributes are consistent in the most ancient mythology and children’s books written many thousands of years later, the Ancient Egyptians could have two different gods represented by the same bird or animal that displayed entirely opposite characteristics. For instance…” He noticed that Angel and Connor were rolling their eyes at one another and sighed. “Fine, no lessons outside of school hours.”

“We brought your books,” Gunn offered in consolation. “They’re in the basement. I didn’t let Angel bleed on them.” As Wesley carefully stuck on the sterile gauze with elastic adhesive, Gunn added, “And you dress wounds way better than Cordy does too.”

“It’s easier when you’ve had them yourself.” Wesley winced at the bruising on Gunn’s ribs. “Are you sure nothing’s broken?”

“Don’t think so. Wouldn’t hate a painkiller or six though.”

Connor’s attempt to dress Angel’s wounds was much more slapdash. He smeared Neosporin across them thickly and then applied the gauze with rather too much force before having some trouble with the sticky tape. Wesley left him to it and went off to make Angel and Gunn cups of tea so they could take their painkillers. When he got back, Angel was protesting that he thought Connor had really done enough nursing for one day and he should let Wesley finish up.

“He won’t learn if you don’t let him practice, Angel,” Wesley pointed out, handing Gunn his tea and the extra strength Tylenol.

“Well, he can practice on the next person who gets injured.” Angel took the bandage out of Connor’s hands and gave it to Wesley. “He’s enjoying this way too much.”

Wesley sighed but took the bandage and gently strapped up Angel’s ribs while Connor watched critically.

“So, you don’t pull it so tight then…?”

“No, because on a human that would cut off the blood flow, not to mention causing them considerable pain, and I always find it best to treat Angel as if he were any other human, except for the not panicking and rushing him to the emergency room when he staggers in bleeding from several different wounds that would actually well – kill any other human.”

“But he’s not any other human,” Connor pointed out.

Wesley applied another piece of antiseptic gauze to Angel’s third bullet wound. “No, most people don’t have a destiny that is recorded in sacred texts. Just the two of you.”

Connor exchanged a glance with Angel that was proud and fond. Not looking up from his bandaging, Wesley said, “Connor, could you get Angel some blood? You need to pour it from one of the packs in the fridge into one of the plastic beakers – not a metal one and definitely not a mug any of the rest of us use – and put it in the microwave for one minute. Do you remember how to use the microwave?”

“Of course. Cordy says I’m already way better at using technology than he is.” Connor jerked a thumb at Angel and set off at a sprint.

“So is a two year old with impaired motor skills and ADD,” Gunn pointed out.

“Wes, I was trying to keep him from the whole…blood-drinking creature of the night thing…” Angel murmured.

“I know.” Wesley stuck the last piece of waterproof tape around the gauze and then looked up at him calmly. “But he needs to accept you for what you are, Angel. Or rather you need to realize that he has accepted you for what you are.”

Connor bounced back out of the kitchen carrying the beaker, before Wesley had finished clearing up the first aid supplies.

“Here you are.” He thrust it at Angel and watched curiously.

Nervously, Angel sipped at the blood and then as his hunger kicked in, gulped and swallowed.

“What does it taste like?” Connor demanded.

“You should try some.” Wesley packed the last of the supplies away neatly. “We all have. Well, except for Gunn, who’s squeamish, but then he’s frightened of rats.”

Angel grimaced. “Ugh, remember that time Cordy drank it straight out of the fridge? That was gross.”

“Time of the month?” Gunn asked sympathetically.

“Demon pregnancy,” Wesley explained.

“Let me try it.” Connor held out a hand and Angel handed the beaker to him. Connor took a gulp of blood, savoured it for a moment and then swallowed. He shrugged. “It’s not so bad – kind of salty.” He offered the beaker to Gunn who shook his head.

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Wesley?” Connor offered it.

Wesley took it from him and handed it back to Angel. “Once was enough for me. I found the thickness of the liquid difficult to deal with. Too much like school gravy. I kept thinking someone was going to make me eat all my Brussels sprouts.”

Angel finished the blood in a few gulps and Connor took the beaker from him. “Do you need more? Wesley says it helps you to heal faster.”

Angel looked at him in surprise. “Well, if you don’t mind, I...”

“Sure.” The boy gave him a cheerful smile and headed off to refill the beaker.

Angel looked at Wesley in surprise. “He seems…okay about it.”

“Angel, your son grew up in a hell dimension and was raised by an eighteenth century vampire hunter. Is it really so surprising that he can take a little blood drinking in his stride? Connor’s a very intelligent boy with a strong desire to do good and a craving for family as strong as…your own.” He looked at the doors of the hotel. “Wolfram & Hart probably are going to come after him at some point.”

“Let them come.” Angel flexed his bandaged arm. “With you, me, Connor, Gunn and Groo here, not to mention Lorne’s empathy, Cordy’s demon glowy powers and Fred’s super-charged science brain, they’re going to have a hard time trying to get any of us. As long as we stick together.” He looked at Wesley intently.

Wesley nodded. “Good point.”

“And we can do a lot more good together than we can separated.”

Wesley looked up at Angel in surprise. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”

“Kind of not an option any more, Wes.” Gunn handed him his keys. “Your place is pretty much trashed. I think you can wave goodbye to your security deposit. But the books are fine. So are the weapons. The couch is kind of…icky though.”

“Hey, they shot me three times, I had to bleed somewhere,” Angel protested.

“Some of the furniture is sort of…” Gunn turned to Angel. “What’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Kindling.” Angel picked up his tea and gazed at it. “Didn’t we use to drink coffee before Wesley came back here?”

“It’s insidious.” Gunn shrugged. “Fred’s started wanting marmalade on her toast in the mornings. And Groo asked for a ‘biscuit’ with his tea yesterday.”

Wesley smiled smugly. “At last, civilization comes to Los Angeles.” He looked at the keys. “‘Kindling’? Really?”

“We stopped you being kidnapped,” Gunn offered in mitigation.

“Well, that was… I do appreciate that.” Wesley thought of hypodermics and restraints and men in white coats torturing him politely with long pointed objects, and shuddered. “Really appreciate that.”

“Tomorrow we can start decorating Wesley’s room.” Connor patted him on the back and handed Angel another beaker of blood.

“The room I like exactly the way it is now?”

“That’s the one.” When Connor beamed at him like that, Wesley could definitely see the family resemblance to Angel.

“And – even better than that, now I’m living here permanently, we can step up your lessons considerably. Work on that Latin and Greek a lot more.”

Connor’s face fell and he turned to Angel. “We really need to drum up more business. Help more…helpless.”

“Definitely. We’ve got all these extra mouths to feed now.”

“Plus, it keeps Wesley busy researching.”

Wesley looked at Angel. “You do want Connor to get into Oxford, don’t you?”

“Notre Dame.”

“But that’s an American university, Angel, you can’t possibly want him to go there. I was thinking perhaps…Balliol. Its medieval library is really outstanding, and it has an excellent cricket team.”

“He’s American.”

“Only – technically. His father’s Irish.”

“His mother was American and he was born in America.”

“But in an area of mystical convergence.”

“How do you get from being born in an alley in Los Angeles to two undead parents, neither of whom are English, to Connor having to go to Oxford and play cricket?”

Wesley shrugged. “Well, of course, if you want the boy raised as a complete philistine…”

“Notre Dame is a great college!”

“Gunn, they’re scaring me.” Connor looked between them as if he thought they might be about to sprout two heads.

“That’s just what having two parents is like, kid.” Gunn put an arm around Connor’s shoulders. “Only you got really lucky, and you have…how many is it now? Seven?”

“None of you are old enough to be my parents except for Angel. You get annoying older sibling privileges and nothing else. Except for Wesley, who I’ll grudgingly accept as a mom-substitute.”

Wesley rose to his feet. “Where did I put that flame thrower…?”

“I’m not sure, but I know I’d really like to see you handle it…”

They all wheeled around as Lilah walked down the stairs into the lobby, immaculate as always. She smiled at Angel. “You know the last few times I was in here you were either being tortured or torturing someone. Both of those are always such a good look for you.”

Angel bared his teeth at her in something approaching a smile and held up his beaker of blood. “Lilah. What a not pleasant surprise.”

While Connor looked at her with frank curiosity, Lilah looked Wesley up and down again. “Do I get that thank you now?”

Wesley inclined his head. “Thank you. I’m grateful for the warning. However – spotty your motives for helping us may be, the assistance is still appreciated.”

“Lose the ‘us’, handsome. I wouldn’t step across the road to help the rest of the goody-goodys but you’re a special case.” Lilah walked around him while Wesley made no attempt to hide his irritation at her blatantly checking him out. Wesley tossed her the wallet Angel had given him.

“A present from Linwood. It may be of some use to you.”

She caught it effortlessly. “It may be at that. But don’t you think saving you from being horribly tortured merits…?”

“I was going to suggest lunch at a place of your choice.”

Lilah smiled seductively. “How about breakfast in bed?”

Gunn raised his eyebrows while Angel rolled his eyes. “Subtle, Lilah.”

“She’s very pretty,” Connor observed to Gunn.

Lilah glanced over at him. “Is this the back-from-hell-spawn?”

“I’m Connor.” He held out a hand as Fred had instructed him to do when meeting new people.

She shook it, smiling at him widely. “Lilah Morgan. I had high hopes of vivisecting you when you were a baby, but unfortunately for my promotion prospects Daniel Holtz ruined that dream by carrying you into Quor’toth.”

“He’s dead now.” Wesley had to admire the way Connor said that without a visible flicker of emotion, despite the turmoil he was undoubtedly feeling inside. “So, why do you particularly want to do sex with Wesley?”

She shrugged. “He’s so wonderfully incorruptible and I’ve always liked a challenge. And I like the way he looks.” She glanced across at Wesley again in a blatantly undressing him with her eyes way. “Ever seen a present in a really special wrapping and just been itching to take it home and get all the ribbons and paper off…?”

“Can you not discuss your sexual fantasies in front of my son?” Angel demanded.

“I’d much rather be discussing them with Wesley over lunch.” Lilah turned back to Wesley. “So, tomorrow? I’ll pick you up at twelve. You may as well say yes. I’d hate to have to send in an extraction team.”

“Try it.” Angel picked up an axe. “See how many pieces of them you got back.”

“Ooh…” She beamed at Wesley. “He’s protective, isn’t he? Does that mean that if we do lunch I’ll not only be getting my next stab at corrupting you, I’ll also be annoying soul boy?”

“You do that just by existing, Lilah,” Angel assured her.

Wesley held up a hand. “I’ll be glad to have lunch with you, Lilah. Thank you for your help today. Twelve o’clock tomorrow will be fine.”

She nodded and stepped back. “And we’ll just both take it as read that science geek girl will have Macgyvered some super-duper tracer to stick to you so I can’t kidnap you for my own evil purposes and we both know that and yadda yadda. I hate having to state the obvious.”

“And yet you do it so often.” Angel folded his arms. “Any particular reason why you’re still here?”

“The warm fuzzy welcome was just so hard to resist. You know, every time I look at you I can’t help thinking the first time I saw you – that was really your perfect setting – stuck in a pit fighting for your life like an animal…”

Wesley took Lilah’s arm and walked her to the door. “Thank you again, Lilah. I’ll see you tomorrow at noon.”

She looked him up and down again, smiled in a way that left him breathless and said, “I’ll look forward to it.”

As Wesley headed back for the banquette, Gunn was nodding to Connor. “And that was your first catfight. There’s sometimes more hair pulling but otherwise that’s pretty typical.”

Connor was still watching the way Lilah moved in that tight skirt and high-heeled shoes. “She’s very…attractive.”

“You know all those medieval texts Wesley was telling you were full of misogynist claptrap, with Lucifer always appearing in the guide of a beautiful women to try to steal the virtue of the loyal knights and drag them down to hell…? Women like Lilah are the reason those stories exist.”

Wesley sighed. “She did do us a favour, Angel. And in her own way I think she is…honourable.”

“Well, have sex with her in someone else’s hotel or we’ll have to fumigate your room.”

Gunn nodded at Angel while addressing Connor. “The post-catfight flouncing and pouting is also pretty typical.”

“I’m not flouncing,” Angel retorted. “I just object to the woman who tried to cut up my son putting the moves on my friends.”

Connor looked at Wesley with his head on one side. “I think she just likes him. She smells different when she’s near him and her body temperature rises when she touches him. That’s because of the wanting to do sex with him part, yes?”

Gunn raised an eyebrow. “That’s a sneaky talent to have. It’s going to be difficult for a girl to play hard to get with you, isn’t it?”

“Okay, why was Lilah, the queen bitch of the universe, just here?”

They looked up to see Cordelia at the head of the returning party, all of them carrying bags full of spicy-smelling food.

“She wants to do sex with Wesley,” Connor explained. “She’s having lunch with him tomorrow.”

“Promise me you’ll shower before you come back here – and I mean six times at least.” Cordelia handed him a bag of food. “Oh, and ask her where she got those shoes.”

“This was so not how I wanted my son to find out about the birds and the bees,” Angel muttered sulkily.

Connor was already searching for chicken wings. “Oh, that’s okay, I already heard Gunn and Fred. Fred’s kind of noisy.”

There was a moment of awkward silence before Angel cleared his throat. “Um – Connor – we don’t usually discuss…”

“I know.” Connor grinned at him as he bit off a mouthful of chicken wing. “I just think Fred looks cute when she blushes.”

Cordelia looked between her and Gunn. “Hey, so does Gunn.”

Fred narrowed her eyes. “Connor, I can do things with electricity that will make your hair stand on end for a month.”

Connor held up his hands. “Sorry.”

Gunn looked across at Wesley. “You’ll be giving him extra homework for that, right?”

“It’s a promise,” Wesley assured him, handing food around.

Lorne sat down next to him and held up a glass he had managed to replenish already. “To a new world, sugarplums. To friendships reforged and heirs restored and most of all to not being more than usually dead for another whole long day.”

Wesley held up his tea and Angel leant forward to touch his beaker of blood against Wesley’s cup and Lorne’s glass. Gazing into Wesley’s eyes, Angel said with a smile that warmed Wesley all the way through, “I can drink to that.”

***

Two months later in a Sunnydale in a different reality…

Giles watched from the kitchen with Buffy as Faith went about setting up the afternoon’s lesson. He and Buffy were pretending to be preparing an early supper, of course, something they could all enjoy before the two Slayers went out on patrol, but in reality they were watching. Buffy, because she was trying to learn how to do what Faith did, and Giles because he couldn’t help himself; he felt so acutely protective of Wesley and his progress that it was difficult for him to share his care and education without constantly hovering, and yet he knew there were things that Faith could offer that he could not.

Right now, Faith was unrecognisable from the woman who gave vampires that chilling smile before the staked them. She was wrinkling her nose at the man sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Okay – so, today we’re practising weapons recognition. What I’m going to do is make a big crash, okay? Really big noise. And I’m telling you now that even though it sounds scary, it isn’t because it’s just me doing…this…”

Giles winced instinctively as Faith upended a bag full of weapons onto the floor with a sound like several tin trays being hurled into a dustbin and then vigorously shaken. He tended to keep things quiet around Wesley, as did Willow and Xander. It was just their approach. Just as they handled him gently and didn’t say ‘boo’ to him when they came up behind him. Or tickle him. Faith was the wild card with her own approach to rehabilitation.

Wesley hunched up his shoulders and pulled a face at the hideous crashing noise but he smiled tentatively after a minute because Faith was crouching in front of him, grinning at him. She ruffled his hair. “See, sometimes you gotta be noisy. It’s good for the soul.”

“Giles says…”

“Giles is a librarian. You remember what that is?”

Wesley sat up straighter when he answered a question. Faith had teased him about it. She had tried to make him bend to one side or slouch and then tickled him mercilessly and he had giggled a lot but when she asked the next question he still straightened his spine and set his shoulders back. He did it now.

“Someone who cares about books. And the order they go on the shelves.”

“And you remember the notice in the library when we went there the other day?”

“It said we had to be quiet.”

“That’s why Giles thinks everything should be quiet all the time. Too much time spent in libraries.”

“I like libraries.”

“Of course you do. You’re a Watcher. They all like libraries. And tea. And wearing corduroy.” She tugged at his shirt. “Who picked this out for you?”

“I picked it.” He smiled up at her. Faith was the other person in the world who made him feel completely safe. Faith and Giles were the hundred percenters. Willow was about ninety-five percent because of the magic which sometimes made her eyes go black. Xander around the same because Wesley had seen him get drunk once, and people slurring their words worried him a little. Buffy was about ninety percent because of the arguments with Dawn; Dawn around the same because of the arguments with Buffy. But they all made him feel degrees of safe and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t make him light up with pleasure when they arrived at Giles’ door.

“You have cra-crummy Watcher taste. I’m going to get you a stud for this ear…” She tugged it. “And buy you some tight jeans and a sexy t-shirt and make you come out dancing. One of those shirts that don’t cover your tummy. Not that you have a tummy, Skinny-ribs.”

Wesley giggled again because she was tickling him where his imaginary sexy t-shirt would come. He curled up when she tickled him, all boneless and childlike. Sometimes it made Giles smile and sometimes it just made him want to weep.

“Not skinny…” He pretended to pout, looking at her from under his eyelashes.

“Are too skinny.” She picked up an axe. “You ready for today’s lesson?”

He sat up straighter, legs crossed, looking as if he were going to do yoga. He liked lessons. Loved to learn. Was so proud of each new thing he grasped. “Yes.”

“You have to go through all these weapons and put them in piles. Put the ones that look like each other in the same pile. So, where would you put this one?” She handed him the axe and he placed it carefully on his right side. “And this one?” She handed him a crossbow. He took it and compared it gravely with the axe and then put it on his left side. “And what about this one?” That was harder, as it was a sword, and so had a handle and then a sharp metallic edge, but its shape was different and after a moment’s consideration, Wesley put that in a third pile in front of his crossed legs. He looked to her for a reaction and she gave him a half-smile. “Okay, pretty smart so far, but we’ve got a lot of weapons here. What about this one?” Another sword, but shorter than the others. Wesley took it from her and compared it to the crossbow then the axe and then the sword, he held it over the sword, the handle the same but the blade shorter and after a moment’s consideration placed it tentatively between the sword and the axe.

“Now, you pick one.” As he reached across and then hesitated, looking up at her for advice, she shook her head, still smiling at him. “No, Wes, you’ve got to choose yourself. And it doesn’t matter which one you choose first because you’re going to have to put every single one into a pile.”

“All of them?” He looked at the pile wide-eyed; expression so trusting and earnest that it was very difficult to believe he would be thirty before many months were past.

“Every single one. And I’m not going to help. You have to do it yourself. And then do you know what you have to do?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you when we get there. Right now, you have to put them in piles. Do you want some tea?”

He smiled. “Yes, please.”

“You drink too much tea, you know that?”

“I like it.”

“I like sex with bikers. Don’t see me doing that every hour on the hour, do you?”

He giggled again and darted a look at where Giles might be watching them. Giles wasn’t sure how Wesley had ended him up perceiving him as the disapproving adult and Faith as the naughty friend, but he always did that, looked to see if Giles was going to tell anyone off. Faith got to her feet and ruffled his hair again. Wesley rolled his eyes at her and combed it carefully with his fingers, then leant forward to pick the next weapon, eyes alight with interest now as he compared and contrasted.

“You’re so patient,” Buffy murmured as Faith came into the kitchen. “I wish I was as patient with Dawn.”

Faith shrugged. “He’s my Watcher. Least he’s going to be once I get him retrained. I’m going to enter him for the Watcher Olympics and he’s going to kick the ass of every crabby old fart Quentin Travers thinks is better than him.”

“There isn’t a Watcher Olympics, Faith,” Giles pointed out, handing her a cup of tea for herself. “Apart from that I see no flaw in your plan whatsoever.”

She looked at the cup and shook her head fondly. “Still trying to push those teabags on the unsuspecting, G-Man? You hang around outside playgrounds with free samples?”

“Constantly,” he assured her. “I’m fully intending to have a Darjeeling and Rich Tea biscuit habit formed in every first grader in town by the end of the year.”

They all craned their necks to see how Wesley was doing. He had six piles now: Axes, crossbows, long swords, short swords, daggers, and stakes. Faith had been careful to remove anything that didn’t fall into one of those categories before she started this exercise, not wanting him confused by scimitars or throwing discs; they could come later when he had gained in confidence.

“That’s my boy,” Faith murmured.

Faith and Giles shared most of Wesley’s care between them, but everyone had chipped in: Buffy, Willow, Xander, Dawn. Dawn had spent hours with him going through her old books, reading him stories, doing simple sums with him with candy or cookies: ‘Okay. How many sweets do we have? Four? I make it that too. Now you eat one. Pick any one you like. That one? What colour is that one? Yes, you do know, you’re just teasing me. Is it pink? Is it yellow? Is it sky-blue-orange with polka dots? That’s right, it’s red. No, you have to eat it and you can talk with your mouth full because Giles isn’t here to tell you that you can’t. So, how many are there left? Three. Yes! And what colour are they…?’ Giles had loved Dawn like a daughter for a very long time now; or remembered loving her as a daughter anyway; but he wasn’t sure that he ever loved her with quite the same acute intensity as when she was being so endlessly patient with Wesley.

Faith carried the two cups of tea back into the room. “I’m only drinking this to keep you company. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start eating cucumber sandwiches and having a funny accent like you and Giles.”

“Don’t have a funny accent.” Wesley said it casually as he picked up the next weapon; gaining in confidence now, especially when he had an axe then a stake and then a crossbow; things that were nothing like each other and easy to categorize. “We just talk properly.” He darted her a look from under his eyelashes as he said that to see if she was going to be angry or if it was as funny to her as he thought it was.

“Making fun of the Americans now, eh?” She tugged at his t-shirt. “Who is going to have to pay for that with a jumbo sized tickling later?”

“I’ll tell Giles,” he said, grinning at her.

“Giles won’t save you. He’s going to watch some boring film with sub-titles. It’ll be just you and me. Okay, and Xander.”

“Xander’s coming?” Wesley looked up in surprised pleasure. “Tonight?”

“Yes, if you’re good, and do all your lessons. Maybe he will and maybe he’ll bring you some of those pancakes you like.”

Wesley quickly put stakes with stakes, axes with axes and swords with swords, then looked up her a little anxiously to see if he’d done it right.

She examined his piles carefully and then nodded. “That looks okay to me. Do you know what they’re called?”

“Big sword. Not so big sword. Knife. What’s that one?”

“You tell me.” She hefted the weapons book onto his lap. “Look it up.”

He looked down at the book, opened it, and then said, “I don’t know how. I look up words with Giles. He writes them down and then I look for them in the index – which is usually at the back but sometimes at the front if you can’t find it at the back.”

“Okay. Well, you turn the pages where the pictures are. Can you find the pictures?”

Wesley turned the pages very carefully. Giles had never said anything to him about books being fragile or needing to be handled with care, but he had either picked up Giles’ anxiety about them or else it was just something inherent to Wesley; even a Wesley who was having to relearn everything from scratch. He found the illustrations at last, colour plates in the centre and examined them with interest. He sometimes forgot what he was looking up, not through a lack of concentration skills – Giles thought he had excellent concentration skills – but because everything was so fascinating to him. After five minutes of him not turning a page as he avidly read what was written under each one, Faith said, “And what are you doing right now, Wes?”

He looked up guiltily. “Looking up weapons.”

“Which weapons?”

“The ones here…” He looked between the ones in the piles and the ones on the page a little sheepishly. “Which aren’t like these.”

“So…” She gave him a little nudge and he smiled and turned the page.

“Giles let’s me take my time.”

“Giles is as bad as you are. Some of us don’t have all the time in the world. You found them yet?” As he got to the page, she put her hand across the word underneath. “So, before you look, do you remember?”

“It's a crossbow but I still don't know why it's not a crucifix bow?”

“Because it's a crossbow.”

“But you said that a piece of wood that shape was a crucifix.”

“It is. But it’s a cross, too. Tell me what a crucifix can do?”

“It scares off vampires.”

“And what don’t we do with vampires? Ever?”

“Invite them in.” Wesley looked solemn. That one had been repeated to him several times with great intensity. He knew this was an important lesson; probably the most important lesson.

“And how do we know someone is a vampire just by looking at them?”

“We don’t.”

“So, what does that mean? If the doorbell rings and there’s someone standing outside the door who we don’t recognize…?”

“We never invite them in. We ask them to wait outside and we go and find Giles or you or Buffy or Willow or Xander and tell them someone is at the door.”

She ruffled his hair again. “That’s my boy. Drink your tea, it’ll get cold. And what does that mean? Knowing that we never invite them into this house?”

“That vampires can’t ever come here or hurt any of us as long as we’re in the house.” Wesley smiled when he said that. That was his safety blanket. The one they always gave back to him after telling him about how dangerous vampires were and how they could hurt him and how careful he had to be and why Buffy and Faith had to go out every night and fight them – that as long as he was in this house they could never come inside and hurt him or anyone else who was in the house with him.

“So – what’s this weapon called?”

“Crossbow.”

She took her hand off the lettering. “You know how to spell that?”

“Yes.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s easy.”

“Okay, smarty pants, because you’re going to have to do that soon. What’s this one called? If you don’t remember, look for the picture.”

Wesley did so and then said triumphantly: “Axe.”

“That’s right. And this one?”

“It’s a stake you kill vampires with, not a steak you eat.”

“And you know how to spell one from the other?”

Wesley nodded. “A stake you kill vampires with has a-k-e because it makes vampires achey when you kill them.” He grinned at her triumphantly, teasing her and knowing it.

“That’s one of Dawn’s isn’t it? How many dumb little sayings is she going to make you learn?”

“Giles has sayings too but he calls them mnemonics. He says it comes from mnemonikos, which is Greek, which comes from mnemon for mindful, which comes from mnasthai, to remember. We wrote mnemonikos in Greek.” He smiled at her triumphantly and Giles also smiled faintly at the memory of that lesson, Wesley’s fascination with those other alphabets, the different shapes the words made upon the page.

Faith gazed at him levelly. “I love Giles, I swear, but if you spend too much time with him you are never going to get laid. Okay.” Faith reached behind her and handed him a marker pen and a stack of scrap paper. “You need to write down what’s in each pile and then put the piece of paper on top of the pile.”

“Just the names of the weapons or how many there are as well?”

“Names and numbers, Watcher boy.

He smiled because that was a bit more difficult and he liked things that were a challenge. He wrote very neatly, copying exactly from the book and had a good visual eye for script, Giles had already noticed that; copperplate or cuneiform, if he was copying he could copy both equally well.

“So, what else did you do with Giles today?” Faith leaned against the couch from her position on the floor, drinking her tea as she watched him writing the labels for each pile.

“Copying passages. There was one about a cult of vampires with two swords, and one about some demons who pass on an aspect of themselves if they bleed on you. And another one.” He frowned, trying to remember. “Oh yes, one about different dimensions. Did you know there were hell dimensions?” He looked up from his writing.

“I heard about that.”

“Can we fall into them? If we were just going to the shops to buy something? Could we just trip and be in a hell dimension?”

“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “It’s difficult to get to one of those places. You can’t do it by accident.”

His face cleared and Giles thought that, once again, Faith the impetuous instinctive teacher had headed off a nightmare that he, the anxious father figure, might have unconsciously caused. It was very difficult to try to tutor a fragile newly-seared-clean mind about the world in which they lived without laying up pockets of dark matter; nightmarish ideas and images to haunt him through his already sometimes tangled dreams.

Wesley frowned over his counting. “What comes after twenty-seven?”

“What comes after seven?”

“Eight.”

“So, why do you think it would be any different if there’s a twenty in front of it?”

Wesley thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “Oh. That makes sense.”

“Most things do.” She grinned at him. “Except for our lives.”

He reached behind him and held up the disreputable-looking soft toy rabbit the sweet but eccentric Fred from the other dimension had given him. “Feigenbaum controls the chaos.”

Faith leaned forward to pluck the rabbit from his fingers and regarded it critically. “Well, I don’t think he’s controlling it as well as he should be.”

Wesley glanced up at her from his calculations. “We haven’t fallen into a hell dimension, have we? You should thank him for that.”

“Thank you, Feigenbaum. You’re doing a bang-up job.” Faith solemnly shook his paw and then rolled her eyes. “What am I doing? You are not going to turn me as sappy as Xander.”

“Will you read to me?”

Wesley loved to be read to. Even though he was learning to read again himself at great speed and seemed to be able to learn several languages at once, there was something about being read to that made him happier than any book he read himself.

Faith narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t do the bedtime story thing. That’s Giles and Xander’s job.”

“Yes, you do.” Wesley frowned in confusion. “You’ve read to me lots of…”

Faith scuttled across the room to clamp a hand across his mouth, repeating firmly: “I don’t do the bedtime story thing.”

He gazed at her for a moment and then as she took her hand away said gravely, “So – lying then?”

“Damned right.” She thumped him gently on the arm. “That’s one of the things we always lie about. I am not being nailed for the sappy stuff.”

“If you read to me now it wouldn’t be bedtime and so it wouldn’t be sappy, would it?” he suggested.

“Don’t get cute with me.” She gave him Feigenbaum and checked his work with the weapons. “Okay. You got the names right. You got the numbers right. You are a good Watcher.”

He smiled at the praise, even half-joking praise like that, positively lit up because Faith had told him he was good.

She reached up and stroked his hair back, then took a comb out of her back pocket and with a few deft strokes tidied the hair she had earlier disordered. “I need to get you a better haircut. And we have got to do something about these garage sale clothes.” She looked into his eyes. “And you are a good Watcher, Wes. And by the time Giles and I have finished training you, you’re going to be the best Watcher ever in the history of Watcherdom.”

He positively beamed at that and then looked uncertain and anxious in case it wasn’t true. Faith put her arms around him and pulled him in against her and just for a second Giles saw the bleak misery wash across her face because the man she had known in the past – got drunk with and shared confidences with and gone on patrol with – was gone forever; but there was this other Wesley here now and there was a fierce tenderness upon her face when she held him that was unlike any other expression he had ever seen flicker across her mobile countenance. She rubbed his back gently – none of them could bear to touch him anything but gently, too mentally scarred still by what they had brought back from the Hyperion, all those wounds he hadn’t even noticed any more because what he had witnessed had been so terrible even razor blades and cigarettes held against his skin were nothing by comparison.

He loved to be held but he didn’t know how to ask to be held, which was why Faith, of all people, she who was the most uncomfortable person Giles had ever met with physical or emotional intimacy, the girl brought up in a trailer by a drunken mother and a succession of white trash boyfriends whom Giles very much feared had probably molested her on more than one occasion, had been forced to re-educate herself as someone who touched others. She was now someone who ruffled Wesley’s hair and hugged him and rubbed his back and held him when those strange inexplicable nightmares came back to haunt him. He had panic attacks sometimes and didn’t know why. But he never screamed or did anything audible to alert them. He would just go rigid and shake. Faith had developed something uncannily like a sixth sense where they were concerned. They could be talking in the kitchen having left him happily looking at books or interesting artefacts when she would suddenly sprint to where he was. By the time Giles and the others followed her in confusion, Wesley would be in her arms with her rocking him and rubbing his back and telling him that he was safe, he was absolutely safe and she was never ever going to let anything bad happen to him. Giles didn’t know if he was the brother she had admitted she had spent her childhood wishing for or the child she would probably never have, but whatever else Wesley was now, he was certainly her Achilles heel and her burden and without a doubt her most precious possession.

She eased him back away from her gently, rubbing his upper arms with light reassuring strokes. “Do you want me to read to you now?”

He lit up. “Now? Really?” He glanced out of the window. “Even though it’s still light?”

“Couch looks comfy enough. Be a while until Xander gets here, and Buffy and Giles haven’t finished making supper yet. What do you want to read?”

He darted across to his bookcase; the one that had looked so incongruous to Giles at first in the middle of his familiar home but which he now just accepted as part of the new order of things; that mixture of picture books and Dorling Kindersley guides and then first readers and now worn paperbacks and old hardbacks. Wesley plucked a book from it and held it up so Faith could see it.

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, could you be any sappier? I can’t read a girls’ book.”

“Xander reads me girls’ books.”

“Well, Xander is way girlier than me. And you’re going to grow up girlier than him at this rate.”

Giles wondered if she’d noticed herself doing that; talking as if Wesley was a child. He supposed she meant grown up mentally, which was the process they were nurturing and observing at the moment in many ways, teaching him how to read and write and do arithmetic.

Wesley never cared what Faith said to him. He was sensitive and easy to crush in many ways; Giles spent a lot of time picking his words with care so as to keep his fragile self-esteem buoyant, but with Faith that didn’t seem to apply. Wesley knew she loved him. He knew it completely and he knew it apparently with every molecule in his being. She could tell him he looked like day old camel dung and he’d still know it was a joke. So, now he just beamed at her, even though if Giles had said the same thing in far more tactful words Wesley would have been upset or hurt or angry or sulky. “Nothing wrong with being girly.” Wesley pushed the book at her. “Slayers are girly.”

“No, we’re girls. Not girly. Girly is wanting someone to read A Little Princess to you for the twenty-seventh-millionth time.” But she was doing it, miraculously enough, she was settling herself on the couch so he could settle next to her, and she was opening the book at the first page and holding it out so he could read it with her and check that she wasn’t missing anything out. And she would show him the pictures and ask him questions throughout to make sure he was understanding everything – which he was now; not surprising really. Willow had explained it by saying Wesley was like a computer hard-drive that had been reformatted. Everything had been wiped but the memory and hard drive capacity were the same as they’d always been. Wesley still had a swift agile hungry mind; he just didn’t have his accumulation of nearly three decades of experience to draw upon.

Xander kept trying to find a silver lining, saying that Wesley would be able to read every Agatha Christie again and not know who the murderer was, and Giles was trying to make himself think that way as well, all those things that were new to him and exciting and fresh and fascinating. Otherwise he would have to break down and cry about what had been done to this brilliant young man more than his customary once a week.

He felt a gentle pressure on his arm and turned around to see Buffy there. She said gently, “He really is happy, Giles.”

“I know.” He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “It’s just… Those poor women…and all that knowledge… All that suffering, for nothing, to no purpose at all – the corpses of his friends used to make such a mockery of everything they must have held so dear.”

“That’s why it’s good he doesn’t remember,” she said softly. “It’s good that all he knows is this.” She spread out her hands to encapsulate the house, the people that he knew now, his life.

Giles knew she mourned Angel still. That she had fits of heartbroken weeping in the middle of the night, but she didn’t regret that Angelus was dead; she might be selfish, she had said, one night, but not so selfish that she wanted Angel to have to wake up to the memory of killing his own child, of raping Cordelia and Fred to death. Angel would never have to deal with any of that. Angel’s last moment upon this earth had been spent in a state of perfect happiness, knowing that his son was going to grow up to be a hero, and that all of his friends loved him absolutely. Everything from them on had been Angelus. But that didn’t mean she didn’t miss him, every single day. Giles was relieved, all the same, that it had not been him and Faith who had fired the bolts that turned Angelus to dust.

Giles thought about Wesley’s life, and this time made himself do as Xander did and not weep for what was gone but think about what it must be like for him to have so many new books to read and new things to learn and to be surrounded by people who loved him as much as they all did. Even more than they had done before, if he was honest, because in the past Wesley had been someone who presented a version of himself to them that had been likeable enough certainly and had won their genuine affection and respect, but now what they got was undisguised and innocent and trusted them all absolutely, and they loved him unconditionally with varying degrees of Faith’s passionate protective adoration.

Giles drew in a deep breath. “I wonder if he’d like a dog? I’ve found several references to dogs being sensitive to certain dangerous demon species that might pass for human with the right glamour. And for tracking, a dog could be invaluable.”

“And puppies are cute and Wesley would love it.” Buffy lit up. “The only problem would be that you’d have Xander, Willow and Dawn as permanent house guests too.”

Giles managed a proper smile this time. “There are worse fates. We could discuss it with Xander and the others, perhaps, when Faith takes Wesley to the library tomorrow. Try to pick a breed that would be suitable for Slayer duties and…amenable to…”

“Being spoilt rotten?”

“That too.”

Buffy said quietly, “He’s going to be okay, Giles. He’s not going to be who he was before, but he’s going to be someone who’s happy and relatively sane and who is safe with us. How many people can you say that about? I’m the girl with the prophetic dreams, remember? And I know in my heart that Wesley is going to be okay.”

Giles looked across at where Faith had her arm around him, Wesley bent over so that even though he was so much taller than her, he could rest his head on her chest; her fingers idly tousling his hair. He wondered if it was some kind of residual fear that made Wesley need to hear a heartbeat, and which made him so aware of heartbeats and pulses and the warmth of skin. Sometimes he was even soothed by the ticking of a watch. Giles had found it odd at first, disconcerting, to have someone who, whatever he was mentally was also a grown man, needed to press so closely against him and listen to his heartbeat, but he was used to it now. They all were; would absently hold out their wrists for him to feel the pulse or listen to the tick of their watches; would arrange themselves on the sofa so that he could hear their heartbeat easily. Wesley was listening to Faith’s heartbeat as he read the book, gaze darting along the print at a much swifter rate than even the last time they had read this story together.

He was learning at such a rate and was being taught with so much kindness – mistakes were being made, Giles had no doubt of that as they were all beginners in many ways but he hoped that their good intentions would outweigh any number of tactical stumbles – that it was not difficult to imagine that in a few years time Wesley would be to all outward appearances a perfectly ‘normal’ thirty-something. Someone who could be told the truth about what had happened to him in the past. It occurred to him that when that time came, they would all probably – in between congratulating themselves and Wesley upon this achievement – feel a pang of regret for these early days of stumbling along the path of discovery together.

At present each day seemed a little newer because so many things were exciting to Wesley. Old books Giles had almost forgotten about suddenly a source of another’s enthusiasm. He had almost forgotten how wonderful old leather smelt, how clever it was, the way a book was bound, the stitching and the glue, and the smell of the paper. All things Wesley revelled in, so excited by the different textures and scents of them. And food. All those foodstuffs they never really thought about that Wesley found so fascinating: the sticky and sweet and icy and spicy. The way different languages were written, what a pretty shape an ampersand made upon the page, how exciting it was to look at a cylinder seal and know someone must have truly been alive all those centuries ago to make these actual markings. Electricity and steam engines and fossils and popcorn and okapis. All those kings and queens and what had become of them. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Dinosaurs and sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. The difference between fantasy and reality and how some things that pretended to be real were illusions and some things that looked too fantastical to be real were entirely three-dimensional. It was all exciting to Wesley, and it was impossible to stand on the brink of someone else’s excitement and not be a little effected by it also. So, they were already a little less jaded than they’d been before, more emotionally open with each other because they could be nothing else with Wesley, minds stimulated by more than just the ever-present daily battle with the forces of darkness. Thinking of things he might want to see, places he might like to visit, books he might want to read, food he might want to taste; thinking of new ways to explain things, new ways of looking; rediscovering music and art and literature and natural history and ancient history and even sunsets and sunrises because the sun had been rising every day before but it was different somehow when one decided to drive Wesley up to a viewpoint so he could watch it come up. Or when he discovered pictures or descriptions of places one or more of you had always intended to visit to which that there was now an excuse to go because it would be so wonderful for Wesley to see the pyramids, to see the Grand Canyon, to visit the ocean so he could watch the sun sinking into the sea.

They had taken on this mind-wrecked body-ravaged refugee from a tragedy and he had made their lives better. Giles realized that quite suddenly; that it wasn’t just that Wesley would one day be okay, was indeed already okay, was excited and stimulated and fascinated by the world around him and knew himself to be safe and loved and of vital importance to every single person that ever crossed the threshold to the small kingdom that was his home; but that they were all different because of him. Faith had a purpose she had never had before; not just the slave to a mythic destiny but the protector of this fascinating human being who certainly loved her as no one else ever had or perhaps ever would. And Giles felt as if some part of him – a small part but there nevertheless – that had been left unfulfilled by helping Buffy in her work when she was never going to be interested in the whys and wherefores of the research, only the results – was being satisfied every day with these quiet lessons with Wesley. And Dawn had started to sit in on some of them, asking very humbly if they would mind if she also copied out the passages in cuneiform and Aramaic and listened to the explanations of how the different languages had evolved. Just in case she went insane and decided to become a Watcher herself some day. There was a spring in Xander’s step Giles hadn’t seen before as well; frustrated parenting instincts finally getting an outlet with someone that didn’t feel smothered by his attention, and because Xander had never really had enough love, and Wesley undoubtedly loved him. The world had too often reflected back to Xander that he was unimportant; not the one chosen, not the one necessary. What Wesley reflected back to Xander was that he was a good man who made someone who had been horribly traumatized smile with relief when he saw him, and who felt better when he was around and missed him when he left.

And Willow’s fascination with magic had been – not curtailed really, just moderated a little – by Wesley’s equal interest in it. It was as if answering his questions about the way magic worked, explaining to him the way magic demanded balance, how dangerous it could be, how one always had to be aware that one was dealing with a natural force, as potentially powerful as a lightning strike, had made her realize it also in a way she had never done before. She did smaller magic now and seemed to think long and hard about whether each spell was necessary, what it would take from her, the surrounding environment, if it would in any way cause another small imbalance to the cosmos. She had promised him they could do some very small spells together but only if he promised her faithfully that he would never do any spells without her or Giles with him. He was a quick study and repeated it back to her so often – how dangerous it was, what damage it could do, why one must always be very careful and never use magic frivolously – that she seemed to recognize and understand those truths in a way she never truly had before. Giles had noticed she had started meeting Tara for coffee again and that when he saw Tara in the street now she was smiling a lot more often; a reconciliation something that seemed to be very much on the cards.

Their good deed to a friend they had barely seen for a few years had turned into something that had benefited all of them; even Buffy smiled more now, could not go from being gentle and quiet and patient with Wesley to being intolerant and uncaring with her sister, while Dawn seemed less inclined to mope these days, never lacking a focus or diversion because Wesley would always enjoy another lesson or to be read to or to try a science experiment or painting or clay modelling or anything at all that Dawn might want to do. Having someone who was never too busy to play with her and was always happy to see her had done wonders for Dawn’s feeling of being unwanted. Giles had to admit, if only in the privacy of his own head, that it had done a great deal to alter his feeling of being redundant as well. None of them had ever been so needed as they were by this extremely fragile fellow human being, and yet taking care of Wesley rarely felt like a chore and so often seemed to repay their time and trouble tenfold.

“You do believe me, don’t you?” Buffy asked tentatively. “That Wesley is going to be okay? You know I wouldn’t say it unless I truly believed it.”

Giles smiled at her and this time there was no need for subterfuge or eye avoidance. “I believe you, Buffy. And I think you’re absolutely right.” He looked back into the sitting room where Faith was just turning the page, Wesley listening to her heartbeat as he followed the story with rapt attention, her fingers still gently disarranging his hair. “I think he’s going to be okay too. Perhaps better than okay.” And perhaps all of us are going to be better than okay because of Wesley too. Or perhaps Feigenbaum really is the Master of Chaos and we owe it all to a lop-eared stuffed bunny rabbit. But either way, I think that out of that terrible tragedy, that pointlessly cruel loss of valuable life, something rather important is taking place. I believe that every one of us values every hour of every day in a way we never did before and I think I know now that the world is a wonderful, impossible, terrible and fascinating place and we should never take it or our place in it for granted.

He would tell Buffy some or all of what he was thinking later, the way he always did with her eventually. But for now he just felt lighter, not just his heart, but as if some leaden weight upon his soul, that had perhaps been there since Jenny’s death, had finally been lifted. Although all he said aloud was, “Oh look, there’s Xander coming. I think he’s brought pancakes.”

The End