The Hyperion Hotel | Los Angeles, CA | Monday Morning Fandom Time
A day after Wesley and Gunn had -- successfully, thank you very much -- retrieved the Nyazian scroll from that man's home, the two of them were working on translating the text at the hotel's front desk when loud voices could be heard from downstairs. As far as Wesley knew, Cordelia and Angel were just sparring as usual, though he thought Fred might have gone down to watch this time, but it certainly shouldn't be an activity that required shouting.
He glanced at Gunn. "Nah, this is on you, man," Gunn said at once.
Wesley sighed, and headed downstairs to investigate.
There, Fred was standing halfway down the stairs, looking gleefully at Angel, who seemed... distinctly less comfortable than usual. There were several flower bouquets on the tables, which, considering the lack of windows in the basement, seemed a bit of an odd choice.
"You've got kyrumption!" Fred was exclaiming to Angel.
"Stop using that word!" Angel insisted, visibly flustered. "I do not have--"
"What's going on down here?" Wesley interrupted.
Angel deflated. "Nothing," he grumbled.
Wes crossed his arms over his chest and said steelily, "I think Fred's been through enough lately without people shouting at her."
Being chased by a misogynistic lunatic with an axe who also happened to be her colleague and friend excused a person from this sort of thing, in Wesley's opinion.
"He didn't mean anything by it," Fred assured him, waving a hand, but Wesley didn't budge.
Finally Angel sighed, "Was there something you wanted?"
"Yes," Wesley said. "Fred, Gunn and I were hoping you could give us a hand with the Nyazian Prohecies. We need someone who can do the math."
Fred's eyes lit up again. "Sure!" she said brightly, and she turned and hurried up the rest of the stairs.
Wesley paused before following her up the stairs. "Who gave you all the flowers?" he asked Angel.
Angel scowled hard. "Nobody."
--
Back upstairs, Wesley was knee-deep in translating while Fred and Cordelia did their own work, Gunn played darts, and Angel was presumably coping downstairs with whatever floraphobia he had suddenly developed.
"So how you doing there, Fred?" Gunn called over from the dartboard -- Wesley's dartboard, to be precise, but who was splitting hairs?
"Oh, it's a simple equation, really," Fred shared brightly. "The ancient Roman calendar has fourteen hundred and sixty-four days in a four-year cycle. The Etruscan, Sumerian, and Druidian each have their own cycles. You work forward from the presumed day of the prophecy under each calendar, factoring in our own three hundred and sixty-five day calendar and accounting for a three day discrepancy for every four years and..." She paused. "Oh. That can't be right. Unless the world ended last March."
Last March, last March... both Sunnydale and LA had been quiet then, Wesley knew that, and the world quite clearly hadn't ended, so it seemed more likely to be a miscalculation than an aversion.
"So," Gunn said, flopping down in a chair, "are we talking Armageddon or a bad house number? Bad event or a bad guy?"
"It's not clear on that," Wesley mused. "It predicts the arrival or arising of the Tro-clan, the person or being that brings about the ruination of mankind."
"So it's a two-for-one," Gunn summarized. "That's nice."
"And I'm not sure on the translation," Wesley continued, tapping his pen against the desk. "Ruination may in fact mean purification. It's purification in Aramaic, ruination in ancient Greek and in the lost Ga-shundi language it means... both."
Bloody languages.
"And," Cordy piped up, apparently paying no mind at all to the fact that Fred was right here and Wesley would prefer not to suffer the most mortifying moment of his life in her presence, "you don't want to make the same mistake twice."
Wesley stilled and looked down at his papers. "No," he said softly.
Silence followed, until Fred interjected, "What mistake?"
Wes thought his face might be turning red, but he responded anyway, albeit more to the scroll in front of him than to Fred. "There was... another prophecy a while back," he said softly. "It seemed to be about Angel and contained the word shanshu, which I thought meant to die and I -- sort of told Angel..."
"That he was going to die," Cordy filled in, either taking pity on him or just not wanting to wait out his hesitation anymore.
"Oh, no," Fred said, eyes going wide.
"Then I found out it also meant to live," Wesley continued, actually managing to look up as far as Fred's neck this time. "It means to die and to live. That some day the vampire in him might die, but the human in him might live."
Fred pondered this. "That... he would someday be like a normal man?" she asked. At Wesley's nod, she let out a giggle. "Wow. What would we ever do if that happened?"
"I'd buy him some plaid shirts and take him to the beach," Cordy piped up immediately. "The boy needs some color."
"I'll pass, but thanks," came a voice from the staircase as Angel made his way up the stairs. "You don't need plaid shirts for that."
Fred smiled at that, before glancing back down at her calculations, finishing off a tidy set of numbers, and nodded. "There. That came out better. Or -- um, 'better.' It's still very preliminary, but - if these calculations are correct, this bad thing should already be here."
The whole office paused to glance around the lobby for an eerily-quiet moment before Fred amended, "Well, I -- I guess not right here, but -- here in LA. Let me run these numbers again."
But it turned out that she didn't have to, in fact, because at that moment, the hotel front door banged open, revealing a familiar blonde figure -- vampiric, well-dressed, with blood on the corner of her mouth and a decidedly unfamiliar bump in her stomach, as if she were... as if she were pregnant.
"Hello, lover," Darla said to Angel, bracing one hand on her stomach and cocking the other on her hip. "Long time no see."
[[also from 3x07 "offspring." nfb, nfi!]]