(no subject)
Lost and Found, Part Four
The phone was ringing as Angel reached the lobby. Lorne picked it up, saying cheerfully, “Angel Investigations. We help the helpless. How can I help you, cherub?”
Angel wondered in passing if Lorne called everyone who phoned them ‘cherub’ and if so how much business it was costing them.
Lorne glanced across at him. “Yes, he’s here. Mood…? Kind of auto-brood for the most part. With occasional segues into gloomy or morbid.”
Angel took the phone from him. “Thank you, Lorne.”
“It’s Giles. Play nice.”
Angel waited pointedly for Lorne to move away and then put the phone to his ear. “Angel here.”
It was always strange to hear Giles’s voice; he was part of the life that was Buffy; the life he’d had to give up. He was also one of the few people left alive whom Angelus had tortured.
“How’s Wesley?”
Those clipped tones, so dispassionate and British.
No one else would have asked him that straight out of the starting gate. Angel got that Giles sympathized with what Wesley had done; would probably have done the same thing; that he decidedly did not approve of Angel bearing a grudge because a man with his best interests at heart had tried to save his child. Fine. In Giles World, Angel should never have tried to suffocate Wesley, and was being immature or unreasonable in continuing to bear enmity towards him. And there reasoned a guy who had never had a child gaze up at him from the comfort of a crib and who he’d promised he would always keep safe, only to have to watch him whisked into a hell dimension thanks to the intervention of a betraying friend.
Angel gritted his teeth. “As well as can be expected.”
“And how well is that?” Oh, Giles really wasn’t going to let it go, was he?
Angel could feel his brow furrowing with anger; knew Lorne was watching him from a safe distance. “Well, how well did you feel after Angelus tortured you, Giles?”
A silence that was possibly a little shocked. Giles took a moment to recover before saying quietly: “I had friends to take care of me after that unpleasant event.”
“Wesley’s being taken care of.”
“Yes, I can hear you’re welling up with compassion for him.”
Angel counted to ten before managing to say evenly: “Did you get a chance to look at the spell yet?”
“That’s mostly why I’m calling. But first we need to get something else out of the way. If you have no further use for Wesley in Los Angeles then I think it would be better if he came back to England with me. Far too many years have been invested in his training for him to be wasting his time in a country that doesn’t want him.”
“I’m not my Watcher’s keeper, Giles. Wesley can walk out of this hotel as soon as he can…walk out of this hotel.”
“And how soon is that likely to be?”
Angel felt his anger beginning to wind down; the way it kept doing recently, and he almost missed that simplicity of rage; when everything was a white hot blade in his mind. Apart from anything else it did at least help to dull the pain of his grief over Connor. “A few weeks, I would think. He’s in pretty rough shape.”
“Perhaps I should come and fetch him?”
Angel thought about Giles’s car. Thought of it outside the Hyperion. Wesley in the passenger seat; suitcase in the trunk. Giles driving away and taking that particular problem with him. In some ways it was very appealing. Wesley would be out of his hair and Wesley would also be safe from his wrath. And it would probably be good for Wesley to get away from this place of failure and pain as well. He had escaped to the scene of the crime when he’d got away from that other dimension. At the same time he felt a pang; because that would be it then, the story over, and perhaps there was a part of him that wanted them to go through this, come out of the other side. He had thought things were over between them, that they would never see each other again and if they did his only response would be to snap Wesley’s neck. But now they had been forced to interact again, he could see a time when he might be able to, if not forgive him, at least forget about it for a few hours; find some method of co-existing.
He stalled. “Wolfram & Hart offered him a job.”
“What? Did he take it?”
“No. But if they offered him a job it makes sense someone else might. He could start up again by himself, hire some people who don’t have a problem with what he did. Which would be most of the population of this city. He’s been here for three years now. He has a life here.”
Giles was crisp. “You were his life there, Angel. Just as Buffy is my life in Sunnydale. When there was no Buffy there was no reason for me to stay. Wesley needs a cause. You were it. As you are no longer it, he needs to find another one, and for the sake of his mental health I think it would be a better idea if he found it in England.”
Angel could not have said why he liked the sound of this proposal so much less with each passing minute, but he did. “Wesley isn’t who you think he is.”
“No, I was forgetting he’s the evil monster who tried to save your son from being killed and who nearly lost his own life in the process.”
Angel gritted his teeth, knowing there was no way to explain how much it hurt that Wesley had looked him in the eye and lied to him, that all his caring words and support had meant nothing at all. He had trusted Wesley in a way he had never trusted anyone and that was how he’d repaid him. “I mean he’s not the guy you knew. Not…” Helpless. Useless. Pompous. “He’s much more capable.”
“Very capable of getting himself almost killed by you and then brutally tortured in an alternate dimension, as I understand it. He’s a brilliant researcher. Perhaps field work isn’t his forte.”
That stung him and he had no idea why it should but it did. “Wes is good in the field. He can handle himself.”
“Isn’t it all academic now anyway? The point is, you don’t want him, the Council do.”
“The Council fired him,” Angel retorted.
Giles was still crisp. “What do you care?”
“I don’t,” Angel said quickly. “I’m just acknowledging that whatever my personal gripe with Wes might be, he’s an asset in the battle against evil and in my opinion if you take him back to England you’re not using him as effectively as if you let him stay here.”
“So noted. Is there possibility of me being able to talk to him myself?”
Angel looked at the phone. “Not yet. We don’t have phone points in the rooms. It’s an old hotel. He can’t get downstairs yet.”
“And none of you possess a mobile phone of any kind?”
He hated that withering tone Giles used sometimes. No wonder the Irish had never liked the English. “Yes. Okay. I could lend him my cellphone. I’ll tell him you want to talk to him. Just leave it a few days, will you?”
“Why?”
He nearly told him, just spelled it out to stuffy, pompous Giles exactly why talking was a problem for Wesley at the moment. Then he remembered torturing the man; snapping the neck of the woman he loved, and the old familiar guilt kicked in. He sighed. “His throat was…bruised. It still hurts him to talk. Lorne’s been giving him some treatment for it. A couple of days it should be easier for him to talk. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to hear him on a cellphone anyway, he can pretty much only whisper right now.”
“Perhaps I should come up to LA?”
Angel decided to stop being defensive and snappy and look at it from Giles’ point of view. “He’s in no danger from me, Giles, but if you want to visit him you’re welcome to stay here. There are plenty of rooms. Just leave it a few days until he’s had a chance to recover from the worst of it. He’s not really up to seeing anyone right now.”
There was a pause before Giles said, “How bad was it, Angel?”
“Pretty bad.” He didn’t know how to put it. Wesley wouldn’t want Giles or anyone else to know. Giles wouldn’t want to know either. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
“I still don’t understand why he isn’t in a hospital.”
“Because he’s better off here.” Angel waited for a moment and then said again, “What about the spell?”
There was another pause while Giles obviously thought about whether or not to keep arguing for Wesley to be admitted to a hospital but then let it go. Angel suspected he was only letting it go because he was planning to come up here before too long and see how Wesley was for himself. To Giles he presumed Wesley was now the equivalent of a prisoner trapped behind enemy lines. Making Angel the enemy. He didn’t know if that was a human thing, a Watcher thing, or an English thing. When Giles spoke his voice was matter-of-fact, as if they weren’t also having this verbal tussle about What To Do About Wesley. “Well, it’s as you suspected - very dark magic indeed, the kind that he really shouldn’t have been dabbling in.”
“Wes doesn’t ‘dabble’. He knows what he’s doing.” And he had no idea where that came from; the same defensive unreasonable place that his other comments had come from, out of the blue, because who cared what Giles thought of Wesley these days when he was nothing to Angel any more?
It obviously surprised Giles almost as much as it surprised him. There was a longer pause before Giles said, quite gently, “I’m sure he does. But so do I and this is still not a spell I would have any business casting. No one does. It’s fraught with danger. Could cause irreparable damage to the fabric between our reality and a parallel one and runs a serious risk for whoever casts it. It’s magic used by vengeance demons and warlocks, Angel, not Watchers and wizards. Do you have any idea how he ended the spell and found his way back to this reality?”
Angel looked across at Lorne who was hovering shamelessly within earshot. “Did you ask him?”
“Tell Giles it was a geshurnik nut.”
Angel dutifully repeated the information only to have Giles hiss “The bloody fool!” down the phone at him.
“Not recommended by the Watchers’ Council?” Angel essayed.
“Not recommended by anyone human who doesn’t have a death wish. Those things are poisonous to one in fifty - some reports say one in thirty. I need to do some more research, Angel, but so far Willow and I are finding a few things that are worrying.”
“Worrying how exactly?” Angel looked at the pentagram on the floor of his hotel. He probably knew better than anyone how dangerous dark magic didn’t look so bad when you were desperate. He just hadn’t realized how desperate Wesley had been feeling.
“It’s very difficult to punch your way into another reality. It takes a spell of extraordinary power and as I said before it’s not recommended that anyone attempt it. A spell like that, however, leaves a kind of mystical vapour trail, and there’s a chance that someone could, with far greater ease, follow it back to this reality. Essentially, a doorway was created when Wesley cast that spell and although he has been pulled back through it and the door is now closed, it still exists where no doorway existed before. Willow and I want to look into ways of permanently sealing that doorway so nothing from the alternate reality can find its way into this one.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” Angel looked up the stairs. “This nut thing - how does it work?”
“It’s an antidote to a spell. It will undo any spell someone has cast but it has to be ingested by the spell caster. Once the outer husk dissolves and the core of the nut is exposed, the spell is undone.”
“But it’s poisonous?”
“It can be. Taking one as a spell antidote is a little like playing Russian roulette.”
“But if Wesley hadn’t done that he would never have been able to get back. He wasn’t free to cast any spells. He was tied up in the basement of the Hyperion being…” Angel broke off. “Giles, I need to go. Let me know what you find out.”
“I’ll be sure to keep you informed.” There was a pause before Giles added smoothly, “I know how important that is to you.”
Grimacing, Angel replaced the receiver. He supposed there had to be someone out there who was entirely on Wesley’s side and not at all on his and it made sense it would be Giles. Then he was heading up the stairs two at a time.
There was no Groo in the corridor. Perhaps they’d decided Angel was no longer a threat or perhaps Groo was just taking a break. Angel didn’t care. It just made it easier. He didn’t bother knocking, it was his hotel and Wesley was here on sufferance, being fed and kept warm with food and heating paid for out of his pocket; he figured that was enough civility being shown to someone who had stolen his son.
Wesley started as Angel appeared in the doorway; easing himself into a sitting position and waiting there silently, pressed against the pillows, for Angel to do or say his worst.
Angel went on into the room and closed the door behind him. “That nut thing you took? Why that way of reversing the spell and not a book?”
Wesley blinked at him in confusion. “What?”
“Were you trying to kill yourself or did you know what was waiting for you?”
“No. On both counts.” That hoarse whisper of his made him sound like someone else but when he didn’t make the effort to come across as the new tough Wesley who didn’t care any more what Angel thought of him, he looked just tired and bruised and remarkably like the old Wesley.
“So, why no spell book?”
“I wasn’t sure I’d be in a position to cast a spell and if by some chance that reality turned out to be worse than our own and was one I had somehow created I wanted to be sure it would be undone.” Wesley put a hand to his throat and Angel found himself automatically crossing to the bed and pouring him a glass of water. He handed it to him.
“So, is it undone?”
“Thank you. No. I don’t think I created that reality. I think I accessed it. Apparently parallel universes aren’t just theoretically possible.” Wesley sipped carefully and then looked around for somewhere to put the water.
Angel took the glass from him and put it back on the bedside table. “Still don’t understand why you didn’t think you’d be able to cast a spell if you thought you were coming to an earlier version of this world. What was the problem?”
“The spell not taking me back far enough and you killing me for stealing your son.” Wesley looked up at him defiantly. “But even if I were dead, the nut would have rotted down inside me eventually and the spell would have been undone.”
That hit him harder than he’d expected. He rocked a little and took a step back. “Oh. I see.” He didn’t sit on the bed this time, turning around to find a chair, giving Wesley a few feet of personal space. “Giles wants to take you back to England with him. Deprogram you as a vampire groupie and retrain you as a Watcher.”
Wesley moistened his lips. “I wasn’t aware that being your groupie was part of the job description.”
Angel waved a hand. “Figure of speech.”
“I’d prefer a different one.”
Angel looked him in the eyes. “You’re not in a position to have preferences, Wesley.” It didn’t feel anything like as good as he’d hoped when the man shivered. Angel sighed. “I need to know what was different there from here. I need to know why I turned back into Angelus in that world.”
“I told you, we’re already past that point here.”
Angel gazed at him intently. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because I don’t like being called a liar.”
Angel gritted his teeth. “You are a liar, Wesley. You told me you were taking my son home with you for the night so he could play in the park when you had no intention of ever bringing him back here.”
Wesley faced him unflinchingly. “Would you mind people calling you a serial killer if you hadn’t in fact been one in the past?”
“Okay, I won’t call you a liar. Just tell me.”
“The Wesley in that dimension didn’t take Connor. He told Angel about the prophecy. He thought they could work it out together. The Angel in that reality lost his soul and became evil but disguised it at first. Well enough to fool the Wesley in that reality anyway. He killed Lorne - who overheard him humming. Turned Gunn. Took the other three prisoner. Killed Connor. With the now soulless vampire Gunn’s assistance he murdered Cordelia and Fred and kept the Wesley from that reality a prisoner in the basement. Where he was found and rescued by Giles, who had become concerned when Fred didn’t answer any of her daily emails from Willow - apparently in that reality the two were in regular contact. End of story until I arrived. The rest you know.” Wesley looked around for the water and Angel handed it to him, waiting while Wesley drank, wincing as he swallowed.
Angel shook his head in confusion as he put the glass back down on the table. “It doesn’t make any sense. What triggered me becoming Angelus?”
Wesley looked up at him, eyes a little less bloodshot now, and the left one opening better, but the bruises and shadows underneath them still noticeable. “It wasn’t ‘you’, Angel. It was another version of you in another version of reality.”
Angel abruptly put his hands on the bed head each side of Wesley, making the man press back against the wall as Angel gazed into his eyes. With his mouth only a few inches from Wesley’s, Angel breathed: “So, tell me the truth, Wes. Right now what are you afraid I’m going to do to you? Suffocate you with a pillow or make you bite it?”
Wesley faltered, face paling under his stubble and bruises. He licked his lips and then said hoarsely, “I’m not sure.”
Angel straightened back up and took a step back; hearing the thumping of Wesley’s heart from here and not enjoying playing the bully with this beaten up Wesley anything like as much as he would have thought he would a few days before. “Okay, so let’s drop the bullshit about it not being me. Why didn’t you taking my son turn me into Angelus but you not taking my son made me lose my soul?”
Wesley gazed up at him, swallowing painfully, voice that unfamiliar whispery rasp: “Perhaps because my taking Connor didn’t exactly make you happy.”
Angel thought back to how he’d been feeling the night before that terrible day; talking to Wesley in his bedroom, trying to express just how much Connor meant to him, how joyful it made him to have this gift from the powers, like a form of forgiveness. How perilously close to perfect happiness had he been before his world had gone to hell in a hand basket?
He looked across at Wesley again, really looked at him this time, and couldn’t help seeing the guy who had been his friend, who he’d pulled out of that burning basement, who had been there for him so many times in the past. “What were you planning to do? If the spell had worked the way you hoped and had taken you back to a time before you took Connor, what were you going to do?”
“Tell you.” Wesley looked down at the coverlet as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world, his voice that damaged whisper. “Tell you about going to see Holtz and translating the prophecy. Try to come up with a solution between us.”
Angel thought back to Wesley smiling at him from the bed, talking nonsense, looking so wrecked and so happy at the same time. “You almost told me in this reality.”
Wesley nodded. “Yes. Then the earthquake hit. It was the first of the portents the Loa had told me would let me know when you were going to kill Connor. Earthquake. Fire. Blood.”
Angel remembered the room shaking, the gas oven exploding, the beam falling and Connor trapped on the wrong side of it. Wesley just standing there in shock. Yanking him out of the room to safety and then Wesley gazing up at him as if he’d never seen him before in his life while Angel held Connor tightly and thought how close he’d come to losing him but hadn’t, and how maybe nothing was ever going to be able to hurt Connor, maybe he was still protected by the Powers.
He started to pace around the room, hating the unfairness of it. “Maybe you were right. Maybe he wasn’t meant to be born. Or maybe what I thought was a reward was actually a punishment. Maybe in every single reality I lose him. Maybe all he was ever meant to do was make me feel this bad.”
He turned to find Wesley watching him warily from the bed. “I don’t think Connor was a punishment, Angel.”
“Well, what else was he? You took him from me, Wes. You were my friend and I trusted you and you stole my son. How could that happen unless I was only meant to have Connor for long enough for me to suffer like this when I lost him?”
“I think life is complicated but we all have free will. There were a number of choices I could have made at various points along the path that led to Connor being taken in Quor’Toth. It just happened that the one I chose ended there.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what choice you made, it would still have ended there, did you ever think about that? I killed Holtz’s son. I killed so many men’s sons. I thought I was - not forgiven, never forgiven, but I thought I was being given some time to try to make amends. I thought Buffy was the proof that I could one day make up for what I’d done, and it cost me my soul. I thought Connor was here for a good reason; something wonderful to make up for all the horror Darla and I caused. Something to help make the world a better place.” Angel turned to look at Wesley, still feeling as if the man on the bed could have some of the answers. “But Buffy sent me to hell and you sent my son there. Maybe there is a God, after all, and he hates me.”
“Angel, there isn’t and he doesn’t.” Wesley’s blue eyes were unexpectedly filled with compassion for him; just the way Wesley had always looked at him in the past while trying to make him feel better.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Angel pointed out to him.
“I had no idea making sense was on the agenda for this conversation.”
Angel opened his mouth to retort and realized with a stab of painful disloyalty to Connor that he liked to see that half-smile on Wesley’s face; it made him look more like himself despite the raspy whisper of a voice. “You know there’s a good reason why we Irish never liked you English. You were always namby-pamby land-grabbing pompous little asses.”
“Why would a just god make your infant son pay for the crimes committed by the demon who stole your body?”
“Who said anything about a just god? I was raised as a Catholic, remember? The only God I ever heard tell of handed out punishment unto the seventh generation.”
“I think that was a metaphor for syphilis actually, Angel.”
He looked and sounded like Wes when he spoke like that. Angel couldn’t help a part of him thawing, the old affection he had for this man constantly threatening to break through. “You were the one who told me there was a design and that I had my place in it.”
“I didn’t mean that your place in it was to suffer for all eternity. To have things you wanted more than anything offered to you only to be withdrawn again.”
“But isn’t that what my life is? Whistler showed me Buffy. Said I could help her. Said that was my purpose. I looked at her and I felt something in my soul - a recognition. I knew I was meant to help her, to be with her. Have you seen much of me being with her in the past few years? And the same with Connor. I held him in my arms and I knew there was something better and greater than me that made my life worthwhile after all. And now he’s dead and what was the point in him ever being here if it wasn’t to punish me?”
“I made a mistake.” Wesley gazed up at him. “Connor is dead because I made a mistake.”
“But it was the same in that other world. You made a different choice there but the end result was even worse. You believe in higher powers, don’t you, Wes? You must do or you wouldn’t believe in prophecies. They send Cordy the visions. They pretend to be helping me find redemption. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just part of making me suffer.”
“Maybe you’re paranoid,” Wesley countered.
“Maybe you can’t read a message when it’s right in front of you in letters of holy fire. You tried to change what you’d done, to undo me losing my son - do you want to talk about how that turned out?” Wesley flinched and Angel sat down on the bed, sighing. “Wes, if the Powers didn’t want you to try to change what happened to Connor how much clearer a message could they have sent you? Or do you think being chained up in a basement for six days as the plaything of two sadistic vampires is a good conduct prize?”
“I used the wrong spell. Or if you want to be Catholic about it, I’m not allowed to change what I did because I have to live with it as part of my penance.”
Angel reached across and moved the sheet down so he could look at Wesley’s body; the fading bites and bruises discolouring his skin, the now rather grubby bandages. He thought about the videotape he’d watched and closed his eyes. “Wes, I believe in paying for past sins. I’m still Catholic enough for that. I can’t forgive you for taking Connor, but I can tell you that I think you’ve suffered way more than enough for doing it. And I don’t ever want you trying that spell again.”
“I wouldn’t try that spell again.”
“Or any other spell to try and change what happened. You’re only alive this time by the skin of your teeth.”
“And Connor is dead.”
“Giles says you could have opened a door into another reality. What if you screw up and you end up getting this world sucked into a hell dimension? I used some dark magic to try to get him back and now so have you. We can’t do it again.” He gazed into Wesley’s face intently. “He was my son and I loved him more than anything in the world but he’s gone now. I live with mistakes I can’t ever fix every day. You’re going to have to do the same. I killed a lot of babies in my time. You’ve only killed one so far. If I can try to make amends for all the ones I killed; you can try to make amends for the one you killed. And I don’t mean the grand gesture that gets you sucked into another reality and tortured half to death, I mean getting up every morning and trying to do some good.”
Wesley swallowed hard and dropped his gaze and it was so hard not to feel those old emotions - protective and compassionate. “I could be lying,” Wesley said hoarsely. “About what happened in that other dimension.”
“You don’t tell lies to help yourself. You never have.” Angel got to his feet. “Do you want that shower?”
Wesley looked up at him in surprise. “Yes, please.”
“I’ll get some fresh bandages afterwards. I should change these sheets too.” Angel was almost glad to have something to do that wasn’t just about anger and grief. “Maybe a bath would be easier. You can sit down in it. I’ll run you a bath.”
Wesley kept gazing up at him in confusion. Angel thought about his baby and that empty cot. Thought about that videotape. Thought about Wesley in that hospital bed and the pillow pressing down on his face. “It’s going to take a while,” he said quietly, not looking at him as he moved towards the bathroom. “You know that, right?”
“Yes.” Wesley pulled the sheet up a little higher. “I know.”
Angel wondered if Wesley thought he meant running the bath or repairing their friendship - supposing it was possible to repair something so utterly wrecked.
He wondered which one he meant himself.
On some level he supposed this was another power trip; and the evidence that he liked power trips was what he was examining right now. Wesley couldn’t really hide it - or anything else - from him at the moment. But he wasn’t exactly getting off on the proof that without a soul he was an inventive sadist, or on this cataloguing of Wesley’s wounds.
Like the way Wesley’s chest hair was missing. It had been sparse before but there had been some of it; now there were shiny red patches of skin and those small circular burns, they went well with the smaller burns, the marks from lighted cigarette ends being held against the skin and the marks where they’d spread-eagled Wesley supine on that stinking mattress in the basement and dropped lighted matches on him. And on some level what had those two been except nasty little boys revelling in their own strength? It didn’t exactly take a lot of mental agility to hold down someone weaker and hurt him. No doubt Angelus would claim it was an art form - torture without maiming; the maximum pain for the minimum serious injury. He’d even signed his name with a flourish, that elegant ‘A’ he’d cut into Wesley’s skin. The vampire Gunn’s branded ‘G’ was crude by comparison.
He knew Wesley didn’t want to be alone with him and particularly not alone with him in the bathroom with Wesley naked and Angel looking. But even leaving aside the balance of power issues, Wesley wasn’t well enough to take a bath without supervision. So he had run the water, tested it, added more cold because even though Wesley was skin-deep dirty he was also covered in all those little cuts and burns and bites that weren’t going to be able to take really hot water touching them without hurting like hell; then escorted Wesley over to it and helped him to get in and sit down.
Wesley was sitting sort of hunched, knees up, arms around them, head lowered, trying not to act coy yet still having the body language of a teenage nun. He was clearly uncomfortable with having Angel around, which was only one of the reasons why Angel was currently sitting on the edge of his bath with a sponge in his hand.
He’d peeled off the bandages carefully, dumping them, all those soiled pieces of lint, mirror images of wounds now a few days further down the path of healing. Most of it was superficial, it was true; surface cuts and bruises and burns and welts; the lasting damage was more likely to be psychological; being made a victim for so long and so completely was bound to leave all kinds of mental scarring.
Sitting on the edge of the bath he began to sponge Wesley clean; justifying it to the angry murderous part of himself by pointing out that Wesley really didn’t like him doing it and it was a form of intimidation, and to the caring friend part of himself by pointing out that Wesley was too muscle torn and bruised to be able to sponge himself, and that Angel could see the wounds on his back more easily and so avoid them.
“I need to wash your hair.” He didn’t mention how dirty Wesley’s hair was, what unmentionable substances it was sticky with, or how there were dried flakes of cream-coloured residue in all kinds of places they had no business being, like behind his ears.
Wesley just nodded, hunching up a bit more. Angel ran the hand spray, testing it carefully to make sure it wasn’t too hot and then began to wet his hair, wondering if Angelus had water-tortured him; held his head under the water in one of the upstairs bathrooms of that other Hyperion. If they’d taken him from room to room or just kept him in the basement. The videotape had only shown the basement but perhaps that was where those home movie fans had set up the camera. And it had only shown four hours, of course, out of a possible hundred and forty four… He couldn’t stop the shudder then, knowing how much pain Angelus could inflict in a fraction of that time.
Wesley looked up at him in confusion. “What is it?”
“Close your eyes.” He saw a flicker of panic in those blue eyes and added quietly: “So the shampoo doesn’t get in them, Wes.”
“Oh.” Wesley snatched a breath and then closed his eyes. His nerves were on edge; Angel could feel that in the accelerated beat of his heart.
He wet his hair thoroughly and then reached for the shampoo, hoping it wouldn’t sting any of the cuts on his back, focusing on what needed to be done as if Wesley wasn’t someone he’d recently tried to kill, as if doing this wasn’t reminding him of bathing Connor and the baby gurgling at him delightedly. He shampooed his hair; worked it in carefully, lathered, rinsed, repeated, just like it said on the bottle, keeping the spray ready in one hand to rinse away any white foam that might sting those open cuts. Wesley submitted to it, not really having any choice in the matter. It kept the balance of power between them weighted on Angel’s side; kept Wesley guessing; that helped offset some of his feeling of betrayal at being here in this bathroom with the man who had stolen his son. It wasn’t as if Wesley was enjoying the experience in any way. Wesley jumped like a nervous cat when Angel lathered his hands and began to soap his back; shuddering with reaction as hard male hands touched his skin. He was like someone in the dentist’s chair who’d had his nerve touched by the drill one too many times.
Hearing the hitch of Wesley’s breath, the flinch as Angel sponged his shoulders, Angel said, “Am I hurting you?”
“No.” A small hoarse gasp of a reply.
“Just scaring you.”
Wesley looked up at him in mingled apology and something that looked a lot more like submission than defiance. Being here, like this, stripped and exposed and wet, seemed to be giving him too many flashbacks for him to hang onto his brittle coping façade. For all the bruises and the stubble and the shadows under them, the eyes were too much Wesley’s eyes; the hero-worshipping boy looking up to him a little shyly and hoping he wasn’t going to be yelled at or fired or told he was doing something wrong; and his friend’s eyes, the man who had grown into a leader and yet still devoted himself to Angel’s cause, who told him he was unique as a rare book - the highest praise Wesley, the bibliophile, could bestow. This was the person whose body was an emaciated welted mess of recent pain; deep inside him something still shivering faintly with the shock of all the horror he’d experienced; as if a part of him were still in denial.
Angel tossed the sponge into the bath and handed him the hand spray. “Here, you deal with those hard-to-reach places while I change the sheets.”
“Angel, you don’t need to…” Wesley swallowed. “I can do it myself.”
“Yeah. But I can do it more easily.” He went back into the bedroom, not exactly surprised to see that the door he’d closed had been pushed open a crack. He wondered how many of them were out there monitoring the situation; Lorne would have followed him up, perhaps fetching some reinforcements on the way. Groo? Cordy? Gunn? Everyone was still trying to protect Fred from the Too Much Information monster and naked Wesley would definitely come under that category.
He thought about humming while he stripped the bed to give an impression of enigmatic insouciance but realized in time that it would just give Lorne a chance to read how conflicted he was. The bed linen stank of the events of that other dimension; Wesley had carried the stench home with him along with the mental and physical wounds and that video record of his degradation. It had seeped into Angel’s sheets, like a crime coming home to rest, blood and the various bodily fluids that had been smeared on him. He couldn’t help breathing it in as he wrenched the sheets from the mattress; and it still smelt as if he and Gunn were the ones that had done this.
Even as he dumped the dirty linen and tucked in the fresh sheets, he kept seeing the bruises and cuts and burns, and it didn’t help that he’d also seen the video tape of Angelus with a cigarette between his fingers, blowing on the tip to make it flare orange before he pressed it into vulnerable skin, that expression on his face, concentration and a mild gratification at the way the body twisted in pain, the skin sizzled, and Gunn with a knife, slicing shallowly before licking off the blood, then slicing again, and again, letting the blood build up before he ran his tongue across Wesley’s wounds; a good flow that Angel could almost taste in the back of his throat; the two of them smiling at one another in smug satisfaction over Wesley’s shivering, sweat-drenched, shock-shuddering body.
With Wesley naked in the bathtub there had been no escaping any of it. He’d looked at the bruises, the earlier ones starting to fade slightly, the later ones still blossoming through the shades of mauve, blue, and yellow ringing Wesley’s painfully thin wrists, and seen the cords cutting into his skin, his body twisting in helpless reaction, unable to bite down the cry of pain as Angelus sank his teeth into his thigh, or prized him open, or brought that belt down across his naked skin just for the fun of watching Wesley jolt in reaction.
They had done that to his friend; not for a few hours, like Faith; not for any purpose except that they enjoyed it; done it for days; trapped Wesley in that fire and blood nightmare where the only thing that ever followed pain was more pain, rape and torture and burnings and beatings; like an Inquisition victim that refused to confess. He wanted to stake them. No, that wasn’t entirely honest. He wanted to torture them first. He had his own demon, after all, he was the mirror image of that Angelus in the other world, of his own Angelus in this one, and he hadn’t entirely lost his willingness to inflict pain. So he wanted to stick a knife in that vampire Gunn’s guts and twist it slowly, wanted to break that other Angelus’s legs and toss him into a pit with a bunch of hungry dogs. And do it at night so he’d be alive for hours. Then he wanted to stake them. Or cut off their heads. Or set them on fire. And he couldn’t even admit it and so let some of the steam threatening to blow off the top of his head find a release. He wasn’t supposed to care, after all.
He channelled his rage into the wholly unsuitable task of straightening pillows and changing every single piece of linen so that nothing that had touched the body they had touched before their traces were washed from it remained. He even wrestled with the duvet cover, though he hated those things, missing the simplicity of blankets, changing that too, then gave him a coverlet so it looked like an old-fashioned bed, still, the kind that Angel preferred. Only after he’d finished did he realize he’d not only changed Wesley’s bed linen, he’d upgraded it. Done what he would have done if they’d still been friends, and given him the Egyptian cotton sheets and pillowcases; the red tasselled coverlet with the mirrors sewn into the crimson cloth.
On some level he didn’t want to access, in some part of his mind he didn’t want to visit, he knew that what Wesley had done when he stole Connor had come from a place of loyalty not betrayal. That it had been an act of love. Angel had always told him that he had to be willing to accept what Angel truly was; to keep a stake in a drawer; to protect the public from what he could become. Wesley had given up everything to try to save Angel’s son and it had almost cost him his life. And he had been staggeringly incompetent about it; but then he’d been running on no sleep and a nervous breakdown. Angel had stood there and watched him having the breakdown right in front of him, trying to help him and never glimpsing even for an instant the true cause of Wesley’s shadowed eyes and hysterical laughter. He’d had to make the Wesley who’d taken Connor someone else, a stranger he didn’t know, a monster he could kill with impunity; but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t witnessed half the steps that had taken Wesley to that place; finding him asleep at his desk, aware of Wesley locked into that office checking and rechecking his findings, more and more ground down and solitary and looking as if the weight of the world were resting on his shoulders. The uncomfortable truth was that the Wesley he had loved and trusted had done this; the Wesley who loved him enough to risk everything to try to save him from carrying the guilt of his son’s murder.
There was no way back for the Angel in that other dimension; he realized that too; there were crimes you could never come back from; the murder of innocents and family was terrible enough, but he had turned Gunn into the thing he most hated; killed Lorne, killed Groo; bestially murdered Cordelia and Fred, tortured two Wesleys half to death, and snapped the neck of his own son. Giving that Angel back his soul would be an act of cruelty only another Angelus could enjoy. The stake was the only thing left for him. Well, the hideous torture and then the stake were still looking good. He pulled back the coverlet and spread a clean towel on the bed so the ointment and opened cuts could ooze onto something that was easier to wash than his sheets.
Angel went back to the bathroom and found Wesley trying to sponge himself while also trying not to wince at how much it hurt. He flinched when Angel appeared on the periphery of his vision; a microsecond of sheer panic followed by that look of apology and embarrassment. Angel took the hand spray from him, squeezed shower gel onto his shoulders and then rinsed it off with the spray; repeating the process on his back and chest and those thighs with the bite wounds marking them; until Wesley began to smell less like a victim and more like - bizarrely - apricots and peaches.
“Who bought this wussy showergel anyway?” Angel looked at it in confusion.
Wesley glanced up at him, still trying to assess his mood. “I think it’s Cordelia’s. Apparently this shower has the best pressure.”
“You’re going to smell like a girl.” He finished rinsing him off then sniffed him again, Wesley flinching as he did so. “Yep. You smell like a girl. Which is still an improvement.”
“Can I go home?”
Angel was wrong footed by that, feeling stung until he realized how absurd that was. He regarded Wesley gravely. “No. You’re not well enough to go home. How would you buy groceries? You can’t walk further than ten feet. If by some miracle you made it downstairs and stepped outside your apartment building everyone would stare at you. A child of six could mug you with a water pistol. And what if you passed out and hit your head?”
“I’m not your problem.”
Angel kept gazing at him. “Yes, you are, Wes. Taking my son made you my problem. And even if I wanted to dump you in the nearest garbage disposal, Cordy and Fred and Gunn and Lorne all have different ideas. Just because it’s called ‘Angel Investigations’ doesn’t mean I get the casting vote. This is a democracy.” Something you could have remembered before you decided you were the only guy qualified to decide what had to be done about that prophecy.
“I thought it was more of a benevolent tyranny.”
Angel darted a look at him and once again there was his friend looking at him; under the cuts and bruises; behind the raspy voice and haunted eyes, there was a man he recognized. “Well, right now I’m benevolently tyrannizing your skinny English ass back to bed. You want to formulate an escape plan, you need to talk to the others; maybe they can smuggle you out in a laundry basket.”
“My last bid for freedom didn’t really go too well.”
He didn’t know if Wesley was throwing a challenge at him or just insisting Angel kept it at the forefront of his mind, that he was talking to the man who had taken Connor, so there would be no remembering it later, no sudden withdrawal of civilities, renewal of hostilities. No, Wesley, I haven’t forgotten.
“Well, that was back in the day when I let you use the front door. Now you have to state your reason for leaving in triplicate and apply three weeks in advance. All part of the whole ‘trying to avoid being stabbed in the back by my trusted friends’ new office policy.”
He almost admired and almost disliked Wesley for not flinching at that. The man just gazed at him before saying hoarsely, “Is that what I was?”
Angel returned his gaze unblinkingly. “You know that’s what you were. Do you think anyone else would have been able to walk out of here with my son in his arms? That’s what you took advantage of.”
Wesley dropped his gaze. “That would explain why it was such an easy decision to make.”
Angel left a few seconds before answering, trying to find a place of calm between that pendulum swing of recrimination and anger and something beginning to tug at him that felt like a traitorous impulse to forgive. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
Wesley gripped the edge of the bath, trying to get enough purchase to stand upright; doggedly stubborn about it. Angel stepped back and let him try; watched as Wesley lurched and staggered to his feet, then turned pale and flinched from what was clearly a very loud hissing in his ears. He’d caught his elbow before he could stop himself, holding him steady for the moment he needed to snatch a breath and the dizziness to pass. Angel snagged a towel from the radiator and wrapped it around his waist, knotting it above the bruise over his left hipbone; the towel went around him easily with room to spare. He put an arm around his back and lifted him out of the bath then set him on his feet because it was basically just easier, and the same went for helping him into the bedroom.
Wesley looked at the made bed and said hoarsely: “Coals of fire?”
Angel felt an unwilling spasm of liking for this new in-your-face Wesley. He wondered if it was as much of an act as that pompous little know-it-all thing he’d had going in Sunnydale to hide his deep-seated insecurities; if this was Wesley’s way of preventing himself from falling on his knees and begging for forgiveness. There was something in the tilt of his head that said he was damned well not going to ask any of them to forgive him for something that he thought he’d been morally justified in doing. And as long as he didn’t come right out and articulate that, Angel could probably keep the anger with him under control and even - yes, there it was again - feel that little twinge of admiration for this Daniel in the lion’s den.
“Yeah. I changed the bed linen to make you feel bad. Is it working?”
Wesley looked at him sideways, an under the eyelashes glance that was unexpectedly vulnerable, as was that whispered: “Yes.”
Angel automatically tightened his grip on his shoulders and found himself helping him to the bed with a gentleness that probably surprised both of them.
“I’ll get the first aid kit.” He didn’t meet Wesley’s eye.
“You don’t have to. I’m - healing.”
Angel still kept his gaze averted. “I’ll be right back.” As he headed for the door he heard a scrambling sound of people who had evidently been peering through the crack scattering into other rooms so he wouldn’t see them.
“Angel…”
How many times had he heard Wes say his name? It still had power to move him; still made his name sound like someone who had all the answers, who could solve any problem.
“You don’t have to say it,” Angel said, not looking back.
“Thank you.”
He’d said it anyway. So softly perhaps only someone with vampire hearing could pick it up. Angel wondered how words could still have so much power between them; after the lies and the betrayal and the pillow how could two words still matter? But they did. He snatched a breath he didn’t need and opened the door into the corridor. Almost against his will he found himself saying, “You’re welcome.”
***
The phone was ringing as Angel reached the lobby. Lorne picked it up, saying cheerfully, “Angel Investigations. We help the helpless. How can I help you, cherub?”
Angel wondered in passing if Lorne called everyone who phoned them ‘cherub’ and if so how much business it was costing them.
Lorne glanced across at him. “Yes, he’s here. Mood…? Kind of auto-brood for the most part. With occasional segues into gloomy or morbid.”
Angel took the phone from him. “Thank you, Lorne.”
“It’s Giles. Play nice.”
Angel waited pointedly for Lorne to move away and then put the phone to his ear. “Angel here.”
It was always strange to hear Giles’s voice; he was part of the life that was Buffy; the life he’d had to give up. He was also one of the few people left alive whom Angelus had tortured.
“How’s Wesley?”
Those clipped tones, so dispassionate and British.
No one else would have asked him that straight out of the starting gate. Angel got that Giles sympathized with what Wesley had done; would probably have done the same thing; that he decidedly did not approve of Angel bearing a grudge because a man with his best interests at heart had tried to save his child. Fine. In Giles World, Angel should never have tried to suffocate Wesley, and was being immature or unreasonable in continuing to bear enmity towards him. And there reasoned a guy who had never had a child gaze up at him from the comfort of a crib and who he’d promised he would always keep safe, only to have to watch him whisked into a hell dimension thanks to the intervention of a betraying friend.
Angel gritted his teeth. “As well as can be expected.”
“And how well is that?” Oh, Giles really wasn’t going to let it go, was he?
Angel could feel his brow furrowing with anger; knew Lorne was watching him from a safe distance. “Well, how well did you feel after Angelus tortured you, Giles?”
A silence that was possibly a little shocked. Giles took a moment to recover before saying quietly: “I had friends to take care of me after that unpleasant event.”
“Wesley’s being taken care of.”
“Yes, I can hear you’re welling up with compassion for him.”
Angel counted to ten before managing to say evenly: “Did you get a chance to look at the spell yet?”
“That’s mostly why I’m calling. But first we need to get something else out of the way. If you have no further use for Wesley in Los Angeles then I think it would be better if he came back to England with me. Far too many years have been invested in his training for him to be wasting his time in a country that doesn’t want him.”
“I’m not my Watcher’s keeper, Giles. Wesley can walk out of this hotel as soon as he can…walk out of this hotel.”
“And how soon is that likely to be?”
Angel felt his anger beginning to wind down; the way it kept doing recently, and he almost missed that simplicity of rage; when everything was a white hot blade in his mind. Apart from anything else it did at least help to dull the pain of his grief over Connor. “A few weeks, I would think. He’s in pretty rough shape.”
“Perhaps I should come and fetch him?”
Angel thought about Giles’s car. Thought of it outside the Hyperion. Wesley in the passenger seat; suitcase in the trunk. Giles driving away and taking that particular problem with him. In some ways it was very appealing. Wesley would be out of his hair and Wesley would also be safe from his wrath. And it would probably be good for Wesley to get away from this place of failure and pain as well. He had escaped to the scene of the crime when he’d got away from that other dimension. At the same time he felt a pang; because that would be it then, the story over, and perhaps there was a part of him that wanted them to go through this, come out of the other side. He had thought things were over between them, that they would never see each other again and if they did his only response would be to snap Wesley’s neck. But now they had been forced to interact again, he could see a time when he might be able to, if not forgive him, at least forget about it for a few hours; find some method of co-existing.
He stalled. “Wolfram & Hart offered him a job.”
“What? Did he take it?”
“No. But if they offered him a job it makes sense someone else might. He could start up again by himself, hire some people who don’t have a problem with what he did. Which would be most of the population of this city. He’s been here for three years now. He has a life here.”
Giles was crisp. “You were his life there, Angel. Just as Buffy is my life in Sunnydale. When there was no Buffy there was no reason for me to stay. Wesley needs a cause. You were it. As you are no longer it, he needs to find another one, and for the sake of his mental health I think it would be a better idea if he found it in England.”
Angel could not have said why he liked the sound of this proposal so much less with each passing minute, but he did. “Wesley isn’t who you think he is.”
“No, I was forgetting he’s the evil monster who tried to save your son from being killed and who nearly lost his own life in the process.”
Angel gritted his teeth, knowing there was no way to explain how much it hurt that Wesley had looked him in the eye and lied to him, that all his caring words and support had meant nothing at all. He had trusted Wesley in a way he had never trusted anyone and that was how he’d repaid him. “I mean he’s not the guy you knew. Not…” Helpless. Useless. Pompous. “He’s much more capable.”
“Very capable of getting himself almost killed by you and then brutally tortured in an alternate dimension, as I understand it. He’s a brilliant researcher. Perhaps field work isn’t his forte.”
That stung him and he had no idea why it should but it did. “Wes is good in the field. He can handle himself.”
“Isn’t it all academic now anyway? The point is, you don’t want him, the Council do.”
“The Council fired him,” Angel retorted.
Giles was still crisp. “What do you care?”
“I don’t,” Angel said quickly. “I’m just acknowledging that whatever my personal gripe with Wes might be, he’s an asset in the battle against evil and in my opinion if you take him back to England you’re not using him as effectively as if you let him stay here.”
“So noted. Is there possibility of me being able to talk to him myself?”
Angel looked at the phone. “Not yet. We don’t have phone points in the rooms. It’s an old hotel. He can’t get downstairs yet.”
“And none of you possess a mobile phone of any kind?”
He hated that withering tone Giles used sometimes. No wonder the Irish had never liked the English. “Yes. Okay. I could lend him my cellphone. I’ll tell him you want to talk to him. Just leave it a few days, will you?”
“Why?”
He nearly told him, just spelled it out to stuffy, pompous Giles exactly why talking was a problem for Wesley at the moment. Then he remembered torturing the man; snapping the neck of the woman he loved, and the old familiar guilt kicked in. He sighed. “His throat was…bruised. It still hurts him to talk. Lorne’s been giving him some treatment for it. A couple of days it should be easier for him to talk. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to hear him on a cellphone anyway, he can pretty much only whisper right now.”
“Perhaps I should come up to LA?”
Angel decided to stop being defensive and snappy and look at it from Giles’ point of view. “He’s in no danger from me, Giles, but if you want to visit him you’re welcome to stay here. There are plenty of rooms. Just leave it a few days until he’s had a chance to recover from the worst of it. He’s not really up to seeing anyone right now.”
There was a pause before Giles said, “How bad was it, Angel?”
“Pretty bad.” He didn’t know how to put it. Wesley wouldn’t want Giles or anyone else to know. Giles wouldn’t want to know either. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
“I still don’t understand why he isn’t in a hospital.”
“Because he’s better off here.” Angel waited for a moment and then said again, “What about the spell?”
There was another pause while Giles obviously thought about whether or not to keep arguing for Wesley to be admitted to a hospital but then let it go. Angel suspected he was only letting it go because he was planning to come up here before too long and see how Wesley was for himself. To Giles he presumed Wesley was now the equivalent of a prisoner trapped behind enemy lines. Making Angel the enemy. He didn’t know if that was a human thing, a Watcher thing, or an English thing. When Giles spoke his voice was matter-of-fact, as if they weren’t also having this verbal tussle about What To Do About Wesley. “Well, it’s as you suspected - very dark magic indeed, the kind that he really shouldn’t have been dabbling in.”
“Wes doesn’t ‘dabble’. He knows what he’s doing.” And he had no idea where that came from; the same defensive unreasonable place that his other comments had come from, out of the blue, because who cared what Giles thought of Wesley these days when he was nothing to Angel any more?
It obviously surprised Giles almost as much as it surprised him. There was a longer pause before Giles said, quite gently, “I’m sure he does. But so do I and this is still not a spell I would have any business casting. No one does. It’s fraught with danger. Could cause irreparable damage to the fabric between our reality and a parallel one and runs a serious risk for whoever casts it. It’s magic used by vengeance demons and warlocks, Angel, not Watchers and wizards. Do you have any idea how he ended the spell and found his way back to this reality?”
Angel looked across at Lorne who was hovering shamelessly within earshot. “Did you ask him?”
“Tell Giles it was a geshurnik nut.”
Angel dutifully repeated the information only to have Giles hiss “The bloody fool!” down the phone at him.
“Not recommended by the Watchers’ Council?” Angel essayed.
“Not recommended by anyone human who doesn’t have a death wish. Those things are poisonous to one in fifty - some reports say one in thirty. I need to do some more research, Angel, but so far Willow and I are finding a few things that are worrying.”
“Worrying how exactly?” Angel looked at the pentagram on the floor of his hotel. He probably knew better than anyone how dangerous dark magic didn’t look so bad when you were desperate. He just hadn’t realized how desperate Wesley had been feeling.
“It’s very difficult to punch your way into another reality. It takes a spell of extraordinary power and as I said before it’s not recommended that anyone attempt it. A spell like that, however, leaves a kind of mystical vapour trail, and there’s a chance that someone could, with far greater ease, follow it back to this reality. Essentially, a doorway was created when Wesley cast that spell and although he has been pulled back through it and the door is now closed, it still exists where no doorway existed before. Willow and I want to look into ways of permanently sealing that doorway so nothing from the alternate reality can find its way into this one.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” Angel looked up the stairs. “This nut thing - how does it work?”
“It’s an antidote to a spell. It will undo any spell someone has cast but it has to be ingested by the spell caster. Once the outer husk dissolves and the core of the nut is exposed, the spell is undone.”
“But it’s poisonous?”
“It can be. Taking one as a spell antidote is a little like playing Russian roulette.”
“But if Wesley hadn’t done that he would never have been able to get back. He wasn’t free to cast any spells. He was tied up in the basement of the Hyperion being…” Angel broke off. “Giles, I need to go. Let me know what you find out.”
“I’ll be sure to keep you informed.” There was a pause before Giles added smoothly, “I know how important that is to you.”
Grimacing, Angel replaced the receiver. He supposed there had to be someone out there who was entirely on Wesley’s side and not at all on his and it made sense it would be Giles. Then he was heading up the stairs two at a time.
There was no Groo in the corridor. Perhaps they’d decided Angel was no longer a threat or perhaps Groo was just taking a break. Angel didn’t care. It just made it easier. He didn’t bother knocking, it was his hotel and Wesley was here on sufferance, being fed and kept warm with food and heating paid for out of his pocket; he figured that was enough civility being shown to someone who had stolen his son.
Wesley started as Angel appeared in the doorway; easing himself into a sitting position and waiting there silently, pressed against the pillows, for Angel to do or say his worst.
Angel went on into the room and closed the door behind him. “That nut thing you took? Why that way of reversing the spell and not a book?”
Wesley blinked at him in confusion. “What?”
“Were you trying to kill yourself or did you know what was waiting for you?”
“No. On both counts.” That hoarse whisper of his made him sound like someone else but when he didn’t make the effort to come across as the new tough Wesley who didn’t care any more what Angel thought of him, he looked just tired and bruised and remarkably like the old Wesley.
“So, why no spell book?”
“I wasn’t sure I’d be in a position to cast a spell and if by some chance that reality turned out to be worse than our own and was one I had somehow created I wanted to be sure it would be undone.” Wesley put a hand to his throat and Angel found himself automatically crossing to the bed and pouring him a glass of water. He handed it to him.
“So, is it undone?”
“Thank you. No. I don’t think I created that reality. I think I accessed it. Apparently parallel universes aren’t just theoretically possible.” Wesley sipped carefully and then looked around for somewhere to put the water.
Angel took the glass from him and put it back on the bedside table. “Still don’t understand why you didn’t think you’d be able to cast a spell if you thought you were coming to an earlier version of this world. What was the problem?”
“The spell not taking me back far enough and you killing me for stealing your son.” Wesley looked up at him defiantly. “But even if I were dead, the nut would have rotted down inside me eventually and the spell would have been undone.”
That hit him harder than he’d expected. He rocked a little and took a step back. “Oh. I see.” He didn’t sit on the bed this time, turning around to find a chair, giving Wesley a few feet of personal space. “Giles wants to take you back to England with him. Deprogram you as a vampire groupie and retrain you as a Watcher.”
Wesley moistened his lips. “I wasn’t aware that being your groupie was part of the job description.”
Angel waved a hand. “Figure of speech.”
“I’d prefer a different one.”
Angel looked him in the eyes. “You’re not in a position to have preferences, Wesley.” It didn’t feel anything like as good as he’d hoped when the man shivered. Angel sighed. “I need to know what was different there from here. I need to know why I turned back into Angelus in that world.”
“I told you, we’re already past that point here.”
Angel gazed at him intently. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because I don’t like being called a liar.”
Angel gritted his teeth. “You are a liar, Wesley. You told me you were taking my son home with you for the night so he could play in the park when you had no intention of ever bringing him back here.”
Wesley faced him unflinchingly. “Would you mind people calling you a serial killer if you hadn’t in fact been one in the past?”
“Okay, I won’t call you a liar. Just tell me.”
“The Wesley in that dimension didn’t take Connor. He told Angel about the prophecy. He thought they could work it out together. The Angel in that reality lost his soul and became evil but disguised it at first. Well enough to fool the Wesley in that reality anyway. He killed Lorne - who overheard him humming. Turned Gunn. Took the other three prisoner. Killed Connor. With the now soulless vampire Gunn’s assistance he murdered Cordelia and Fred and kept the Wesley from that reality a prisoner in the basement. Where he was found and rescued by Giles, who had become concerned when Fred didn’t answer any of her daily emails from Willow - apparently in that reality the two were in regular contact. End of story until I arrived. The rest you know.” Wesley looked around for the water and Angel handed it to him, waiting while Wesley drank, wincing as he swallowed.
Angel shook his head in confusion as he put the glass back down on the table. “It doesn’t make any sense. What triggered me becoming Angelus?”
Wesley looked up at him, eyes a little less bloodshot now, and the left one opening better, but the bruises and shadows underneath them still noticeable. “It wasn’t ‘you’, Angel. It was another version of you in another version of reality.”
Angel abruptly put his hands on the bed head each side of Wesley, making the man press back against the wall as Angel gazed into his eyes. With his mouth only a few inches from Wesley’s, Angel breathed: “So, tell me the truth, Wes. Right now what are you afraid I’m going to do to you? Suffocate you with a pillow or make you bite it?”
Wesley faltered, face paling under his stubble and bruises. He licked his lips and then said hoarsely, “I’m not sure.”
Angel straightened back up and took a step back; hearing the thumping of Wesley’s heart from here and not enjoying playing the bully with this beaten up Wesley anything like as much as he would have thought he would a few days before. “Okay, so let’s drop the bullshit about it not being me. Why didn’t you taking my son turn me into Angelus but you not taking my son made me lose my soul?”
Wesley gazed up at him, swallowing painfully, voice that unfamiliar whispery rasp: “Perhaps because my taking Connor didn’t exactly make you happy.”
Angel thought back to how he’d been feeling the night before that terrible day; talking to Wesley in his bedroom, trying to express just how much Connor meant to him, how joyful it made him to have this gift from the powers, like a form of forgiveness. How perilously close to perfect happiness had he been before his world had gone to hell in a hand basket?
He looked across at Wesley again, really looked at him this time, and couldn’t help seeing the guy who had been his friend, who he’d pulled out of that burning basement, who had been there for him so many times in the past. “What were you planning to do? If the spell had worked the way you hoped and had taken you back to a time before you took Connor, what were you going to do?”
“Tell you.” Wesley looked down at the coverlet as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world, his voice that damaged whisper. “Tell you about going to see Holtz and translating the prophecy. Try to come up with a solution between us.”
Angel thought back to Wesley smiling at him from the bed, talking nonsense, looking so wrecked and so happy at the same time. “You almost told me in this reality.”
Wesley nodded. “Yes. Then the earthquake hit. It was the first of the portents the Loa had told me would let me know when you were going to kill Connor. Earthquake. Fire. Blood.”
Angel remembered the room shaking, the gas oven exploding, the beam falling and Connor trapped on the wrong side of it. Wesley just standing there in shock. Yanking him out of the room to safety and then Wesley gazing up at him as if he’d never seen him before in his life while Angel held Connor tightly and thought how close he’d come to losing him but hadn’t, and how maybe nothing was ever going to be able to hurt Connor, maybe he was still protected by the Powers.
He started to pace around the room, hating the unfairness of it. “Maybe you were right. Maybe he wasn’t meant to be born. Or maybe what I thought was a reward was actually a punishment. Maybe in every single reality I lose him. Maybe all he was ever meant to do was make me feel this bad.”
He turned to find Wesley watching him warily from the bed. “I don’t think Connor was a punishment, Angel.”
“Well, what else was he? You took him from me, Wes. You were my friend and I trusted you and you stole my son. How could that happen unless I was only meant to have Connor for long enough for me to suffer like this when I lost him?”
“I think life is complicated but we all have free will. There were a number of choices I could have made at various points along the path that led to Connor being taken in Quor’Toth. It just happened that the one I chose ended there.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what choice you made, it would still have ended there, did you ever think about that? I killed Holtz’s son. I killed so many men’s sons. I thought I was - not forgiven, never forgiven, but I thought I was being given some time to try to make amends. I thought Buffy was the proof that I could one day make up for what I’d done, and it cost me my soul. I thought Connor was here for a good reason; something wonderful to make up for all the horror Darla and I caused. Something to help make the world a better place.” Angel turned to look at Wesley, still feeling as if the man on the bed could have some of the answers. “But Buffy sent me to hell and you sent my son there. Maybe there is a God, after all, and he hates me.”
“Angel, there isn’t and he doesn’t.” Wesley’s blue eyes were unexpectedly filled with compassion for him; just the way Wesley had always looked at him in the past while trying to make him feel better.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Angel pointed out to him.
“I had no idea making sense was on the agenda for this conversation.”
Angel opened his mouth to retort and realized with a stab of painful disloyalty to Connor that he liked to see that half-smile on Wesley’s face; it made him look more like himself despite the raspy whisper of a voice. “You know there’s a good reason why we Irish never liked you English. You were always namby-pamby land-grabbing pompous little asses.”
“Why would a just god make your infant son pay for the crimes committed by the demon who stole your body?”
“Who said anything about a just god? I was raised as a Catholic, remember? The only God I ever heard tell of handed out punishment unto the seventh generation.”
“I think that was a metaphor for syphilis actually, Angel.”
He looked and sounded like Wes when he spoke like that. Angel couldn’t help a part of him thawing, the old affection he had for this man constantly threatening to break through. “You were the one who told me there was a design and that I had my place in it.”
“I didn’t mean that your place in it was to suffer for all eternity. To have things you wanted more than anything offered to you only to be withdrawn again.”
“But isn’t that what my life is? Whistler showed me Buffy. Said I could help her. Said that was my purpose. I looked at her and I felt something in my soul - a recognition. I knew I was meant to help her, to be with her. Have you seen much of me being with her in the past few years? And the same with Connor. I held him in my arms and I knew there was something better and greater than me that made my life worthwhile after all. And now he’s dead and what was the point in him ever being here if it wasn’t to punish me?”
“I made a mistake.” Wesley gazed up at him. “Connor is dead because I made a mistake.”
“But it was the same in that other world. You made a different choice there but the end result was even worse. You believe in higher powers, don’t you, Wes? You must do or you wouldn’t believe in prophecies. They send Cordy the visions. They pretend to be helping me find redemption. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just part of making me suffer.”
“Maybe you’re paranoid,” Wesley countered.
“Maybe you can’t read a message when it’s right in front of you in letters of holy fire. You tried to change what you’d done, to undo me losing my son - do you want to talk about how that turned out?” Wesley flinched and Angel sat down on the bed, sighing. “Wes, if the Powers didn’t want you to try to change what happened to Connor how much clearer a message could they have sent you? Or do you think being chained up in a basement for six days as the plaything of two sadistic vampires is a good conduct prize?”
“I used the wrong spell. Or if you want to be Catholic about it, I’m not allowed to change what I did because I have to live with it as part of my penance.”
Angel reached across and moved the sheet down so he could look at Wesley’s body; the fading bites and bruises discolouring his skin, the now rather grubby bandages. He thought about the videotape he’d watched and closed his eyes. “Wes, I believe in paying for past sins. I’m still Catholic enough for that. I can’t forgive you for taking Connor, but I can tell you that I think you’ve suffered way more than enough for doing it. And I don’t ever want you trying that spell again.”
“I wouldn’t try that spell again.”
“Or any other spell to try and change what happened. You’re only alive this time by the skin of your teeth.”
“And Connor is dead.”
“Giles says you could have opened a door into another reality. What if you screw up and you end up getting this world sucked into a hell dimension? I used some dark magic to try to get him back and now so have you. We can’t do it again.” He gazed into Wesley’s face intently. “He was my son and I loved him more than anything in the world but he’s gone now. I live with mistakes I can’t ever fix every day. You’re going to have to do the same. I killed a lot of babies in my time. You’ve only killed one so far. If I can try to make amends for all the ones I killed; you can try to make amends for the one you killed. And I don’t mean the grand gesture that gets you sucked into another reality and tortured half to death, I mean getting up every morning and trying to do some good.”
Wesley swallowed hard and dropped his gaze and it was so hard not to feel those old emotions - protective and compassionate. “I could be lying,” Wesley said hoarsely. “About what happened in that other dimension.”
“You don’t tell lies to help yourself. You never have.” Angel got to his feet. “Do you want that shower?”
Wesley looked up at him in surprise. “Yes, please.”
“I’ll get some fresh bandages afterwards. I should change these sheets too.” Angel was almost glad to have something to do that wasn’t just about anger and grief. “Maybe a bath would be easier. You can sit down in it. I’ll run you a bath.”
Wesley kept gazing up at him in confusion. Angel thought about his baby and that empty cot. Thought about that videotape. Thought about Wesley in that hospital bed and the pillow pressing down on his face. “It’s going to take a while,” he said quietly, not looking at him as he moved towards the bathroom. “You know that, right?”
“Yes.” Wesley pulled the sheet up a little higher. “I know.”
Angel wondered if Wesley thought he meant running the bath or repairing their friendship - supposing it was possible to repair something so utterly wrecked.
He wondered which one he meant himself.
On some level he supposed this was another power trip; and the evidence that he liked power trips was what he was examining right now. Wesley couldn’t really hide it - or anything else - from him at the moment. But he wasn’t exactly getting off on the proof that without a soul he was an inventive sadist, or on this cataloguing of Wesley’s wounds.
Like the way Wesley’s chest hair was missing. It had been sparse before but there had been some of it; now there were shiny red patches of skin and those small circular burns, they went well with the smaller burns, the marks from lighted cigarette ends being held against the skin and the marks where they’d spread-eagled Wesley supine on that stinking mattress in the basement and dropped lighted matches on him. And on some level what had those two been except nasty little boys revelling in their own strength? It didn’t exactly take a lot of mental agility to hold down someone weaker and hurt him. No doubt Angelus would claim it was an art form - torture without maiming; the maximum pain for the minimum serious injury. He’d even signed his name with a flourish, that elegant ‘A’ he’d cut into Wesley’s skin. The vampire Gunn’s branded ‘G’ was crude by comparison.
He knew Wesley didn’t want to be alone with him and particularly not alone with him in the bathroom with Wesley naked and Angel looking. But even leaving aside the balance of power issues, Wesley wasn’t well enough to take a bath without supervision. So he had run the water, tested it, added more cold because even though Wesley was skin-deep dirty he was also covered in all those little cuts and burns and bites that weren’t going to be able to take really hot water touching them without hurting like hell; then escorted Wesley over to it and helped him to get in and sit down.
Wesley was sitting sort of hunched, knees up, arms around them, head lowered, trying not to act coy yet still having the body language of a teenage nun. He was clearly uncomfortable with having Angel around, which was only one of the reasons why Angel was currently sitting on the edge of his bath with a sponge in his hand.
He’d peeled off the bandages carefully, dumping them, all those soiled pieces of lint, mirror images of wounds now a few days further down the path of healing. Most of it was superficial, it was true; surface cuts and bruises and burns and welts; the lasting damage was more likely to be psychological; being made a victim for so long and so completely was bound to leave all kinds of mental scarring.
Sitting on the edge of the bath he began to sponge Wesley clean; justifying it to the angry murderous part of himself by pointing out that Wesley really didn’t like him doing it and it was a form of intimidation, and to the caring friend part of himself by pointing out that Wesley was too muscle torn and bruised to be able to sponge himself, and that Angel could see the wounds on his back more easily and so avoid them.
“I need to wash your hair.” He didn’t mention how dirty Wesley’s hair was, what unmentionable substances it was sticky with, or how there were dried flakes of cream-coloured residue in all kinds of places they had no business being, like behind his ears.
Wesley just nodded, hunching up a bit more. Angel ran the hand spray, testing it carefully to make sure it wasn’t too hot and then began to wet his hair, wondering if Angelus had water-tortured him; held his head under the water in one of the upstairs bathrooms of that other Hyperion. If they’d taken him from room to room or just kept him in the basement. The videotape had only shown the basement but perhaps that was where those home movie fans had set up the camera. And it had only shown four hours, of course, out of a possible hundred and forty four… He couldn’t stop the shudder then, knowing how much pain Angelus could inflict in a fraction of that time.
Wesley looked up at him in confusion. “What is it?”
“Close your eyes.” He saw a flicker of panic in those blue eyes and added quietly: “So the shampoo doesn’t get in them, Wes.”
“Oh.” Wesley snatched a breath and then closed his eyes. His nerves were on edge; Angel could feel that in the accelerated beat of his heart.
He wet his hair thoroughly and then reached for the shampoo, hoping it wouldn’t sting any of the cuts on his back, focusing on what needed to be done as if Wesley wasn’t someone he’d recently tried to kill, as if doing this wasn’t reminding him of bathing Connor and the baby gurgling at him delightedly. He shampooed his hair; worked it in carefully, lathered, rinsed, repeated, just like it said on the bottle, keeping the spray ready in one hand to rinse away any white foam that might sting those open cuts. Wesley submitted to it, not really having any choice in the matter. It kept the balance of power between them weighted on Angel’s side; kept Wesley guessing; that helped offset some of his feeling of betrayal at being here in this bathroom with the man who had stolen his son. It wasn’t as if Wesley was enjoying the experience in any way. Wesley jumped like a nervous cat when Angel lathered his hands and began to soap his back; shuddering with reaction as hard male hands touched his skin. He was like someone in the dentist’s chair who’d had his nerve touched by the drill one too many times.
Hearing the hitch of Wesley’s breath, the flinch as Angel sponged his shoulders, Angel said, “Am I hurting you?”
“No.” A small hoarse gasp of a reply.
“Just scaring you.”
Wesley looked up at him in mingled apology and something that looked a lot more like submission than defiance. Being here, like this, stripped and exposed and wet, seemed to be giving him too many flashbacks for him to hang onto his brittle coping façade. For all the bruises and the stubble and the shadows under them, the eyes were too much Wesley’s eyes; the hero-worshipping boy looking up to him a little shyly and hoping he wasn’t going to be yelled at or fired or told he was doing something wrong; and his friend’s eyes, the man who had grown into a leader and yet still devoted himself to Angel’s cause, who told him he was unique as a rare book - the highest praise Wesley, the bibliophile, could bestow. This was the person whose body was an emaciated welted mess of recent pain; deep inside him something still shivering faintly with the shock of all the horror he’d experienced; as if a part of him were still in denial.
Angel tossed the sponge into the bath and handed him the hand spray. “Here, you deal with those hard-to-reach places while I change the sheets.”
“Angel, you don’t need to…” Wesley swallowed. “I can do it myself.”
“Yeah. But I can do it more easily.” He went back into the bedroom, not exactly surprised to see that the door he’d closed had been pushed open a crack. He wondered how many of them were out there monitoring the situation; Lorne would have followed him up, perhaps fetching some reinforcements on the way. Groo? Cordy? Gunn? Everyone was still trying to protect Fred from the Too Much Information monster and naked Wesley would definitely come under that category.
He thought about humming while he stripped the bed to give an impression of enigmatic insouciance but realized in time that it would just give Lorne a chance to read how conflicted he was. The bed linen stank of the events of that other dimension; Wesley had carried the stench home with him along with the mental and physical wounds and that video record of his degradation. It had seeped into Angel’s sheets, like a crime coming home to rest, blood and the various bodily fluids that had been smeared on him. He couldn’t help breathing it in as he wrenched the sheets from the mattress; and it still smelt as if he and Gunn were the ones that had done this.
Even as he dumped the dirty linen and tucked in the fresh sheets, he kept seeing the bruises and cuts and burns, and it didn’t help that he’d also seen the video tape of Angelus with a cigarette between his fingers, blowing on the tip to make it flare orange before he pressed it into vulnerable skin, that expression on his face, concentration and a mild gratification at the way the body twisted in pain, the skin sizzled, and Gunn with a knife, slicing shallowly before licking off the blood, then slicing again, and again, letting the blood build up before he ran his tongue across Wesley’s wounds; a good flow that Angel could almost taste in the back of his throat; the two of them smiling at one another in smug satisfaction over Wesley’s shivering, sweat-drenched, shock-shuddering body.
With Wesley naked in the bathtub there had been no escaping any of it. He’d looked at the bruises, the earlier ones starting to fade slightly, the later ones still blossoming through the shades of mauve, blue, and yellow ringing Wesley’s painfully thin wrists, and seen the cords cutting into his skin, his body twisting in helpless reaction, unable to bite down the cry of pain as Angelus sank his teeth into his thigh, or prized him open, or brought that belt down across his naked skin just for the fun of watching Wesley jolt in reaction.
They had done that to his friend; not for a few hours, like Faith; not for any purpose except that they enjoyed it; done it for days; trapped Wesley in that fire and blood nightmare where the only thing that ever followed pain was more pain, rape and torture and burnings and beatings; like an Inquisition victim that refused to confess. He wanted to stake them. No, that wasn’t entirely honest. He wanted to torture them first. He had his own demon, after all, he was the mirror image of that Angelus in the other world, of his own Angelus in this one, and he hadn’t entirely lost his willingness to inflict pain. So he wanted to stick a knife in that vampire Gunn’s guts and twist it slowly, wanted to break that other Angelus’s legs and toss him into a pit with a bunch of hungry dogs. And do it at night so he’d be alive for hours. Then he wanted to stake them. Or cut off their heads. Or set them on fire. And he couldn’t even admit it and so let some of the steam threatening to blow off the top of his head find a release. He wasn’t supposed to care, after all.
He channelled his rage into the wholly unsuitable task of straightening pillows and changing every single piece of linen so that nothing that had touched the body they had touched before their traces were washed from it remained. He even wrestled with the duvet cover, though he hated those things, missing the simplicity of blankets, changing that too, then gave him a coverlet so it looked like an old-fashioned bed, still, the kind that Angel preferred. Only after he’d finished did he realize he’d not only changed Wesley’s bed linen, he’d upgraded it. Done what he would have done if they’d still been friends, and given him the Egyptian cotton sheets and pillowcases; the red tasselled coverlet with the mirrors sewn into the crimson cloth.
On some level he didn’t want to access, in some part of his mind he didn’t want to visit, he knew that what Wesley had done when he stole Connor had come from a place of loyalty not betrayal. That it had been an act of love. Angel had always told him that he had to be willing to accept what Angel truly was; to keep a stake in a drawer; to protect the public from what he could become. Wesley had given up everything to try to save Angel’s son and it had almost cost him his life. And he had been staggeringly incompetent about it; but then he’d been running on no sleep and a nervous breakdown. Angel had stood there and watched him having the breakdown right in front of him, trying to help him and never glimpsing even for an instant the true cause of Wesley’s shadowed eyes and hysterical laughter. He’d had to make the Wesley who’d taken Connor someone else, a stranger he didn’t know, a monster he could kill with impunity; but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t witnessed half the steps that had taken Wesley to that place; finding him asleep at his desk, aware of Wesley locked into that office checking and rechecking his findings, more and more ground down and solitary and looking as if the weight of the world were resting on his shoulders. The uncomfortable truth was that the Wesley he had loved and trusted had done this; the Wesley who loved him enough to risk everything to try to save him from carrying the guilt of his son’s murder.
There was no way back for the Angel in that other dimension; he realized that too; there were crimes you could never come back from; the murder of innocents and family was terrible enough, but he had turned Gunn into the thing he most hated; killed Lorne, killed Groo; bestially murdered Cordelia and Fred, tortured two Wesleys half to death, and snapped the neck of his own son. Giving that Angel back his soul would be an act of cruelty only another Angelus could enjoy. The stake was the only thing left for him. Well, the hideous torture and then the stake were still looking good. He pulled back the coverlet and spread a clean towel on the bed so the ointment and opened cuts could ooze onto something that was easier to wash than his sheets.
Angel went back to the bathroom and found Wesley trying to sponge himself while also trying not to wince at how much it hurt. He flinched when Angel appeared on the periphery of his vision; a microsecond of sheer panic followed by that look of apology and embarrassment. Angel took the hand spray from him, squeezed shower gel onto his shoulders and then rinsed it off with the spray; repeating the process on his back and chest and those thighs with the bite wounds marking them; until Wesley began to smell less like a victim and more like - bizarrely - apricots and peaches.
“Who bought this wussy showergel anyway?” Angel looked at it in confusion.
Wesley glanced up at him, still trying to assess his mood. “I think it’s Cordelia’s. Apparently this shower has the best pressure.”
“You’re going to smell like a girl.” He finished rinsing him off then sniffed him again, Wesley flinching as he did so. “Yep. You smell like a girl. Which is still an improvement.”
“Can I go home?”
Angel was wrong footed by that, feeling stung until he realized how absurd that was. He regarded Wesley gravely. “No. You’re not well enough to go home. How would you buy groceries? You can’t walk further than ten feet. If by some miracle you made it downstairs and stepped outside your apartment building everyone would stare at you. A child of six could mug you with a water pistol. And what if you passed out and hit your head?”
“I’m not your problem.”
Angel kept gazing at him. “Yes, you are, Wes. Taking my son made you my problem. And even if I wanted to dump you in the nearest garbage disposal, Cordy and Fred and Gunn and Lorne all have different ideas. Just because it’s called ‘Angel Investigations’ doesn’t mean I get the casting vote. This is a democracy.” Something you could have remembered before you decided you were the only guy qualified to decide what had to be done about that prophecy.
“I thought it was more of a benevolent tyranny.”
Angel darted a look at him and once again there was his friend looking at him; under the cuts and bruises; behind the raspy voice and haunted eyes, there was a man he recognized. “Well, right now I’m benevolently tyrannizing your skinny English ass back to bed. You want to formulate an escape plan, you need to talk to the others; maybe they can smuggle you out in a laundry basket.”
“My last bid for freedom didn’t really go too well.”
He didn’t know if Wesley was throwing a challenge at him or just insisting Angel kept it at the forefront of his mind, that he was talking to the man who had taken Connor, so there would be no remembering it later, no sudden withdrawal of civilities, renewal of hostilities. No, Wesley, I haven’t forgotten.
“Well, that was back in the day when I let you use the front door. Now you have to state your reason for leaving in triplicate and apply three weeks in advance. All part of the whole ‘trying to avoid being stabbed in the back by my trusted friends’ new office policy.”
He almost admired and almost disliked Wesley for not flinching at that. The man just gazed at him before saying hoarsely, “Is that what I was?”
Angel returned his gaze unblinkingly. “You know that’s what you were. Do you think anyone else would have been able to walk out of here with my son in his arms? That’s what you took advantage of.”
Wesley dropped his gaze. “That would explain why it was such an easy decision to make.”
Angel left a few seconds before answering, trying to find a place of calm between that pendulum swing of recrimination and anger and something beginning to tug at him that felt like a traitorous impulse to forgive. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
Wesley gripped the edge of the bath, trying to get enough purchase to stand upright; doggedly stubborn about it. Angel stepped back and let him try; watched as Wesley lurched and staggered to his feet, then turned pale and flinched from what was clearly a very loud hissing in his ears. He’d caught his elbow before he could stop himself, holding him steady for the moment he needed to snatch a breath and the dizziness to pass. Angel snagged a towel from the radiator and wrapped it around his waist, knotting it above the bruise over his left hipbone; the towel went around him easily with room to spare. He put an arm around his back and lifted him out of the bath then set him on his feet because it was basically just easier, and the same went for helping him into the bedroom.
Wesley looked at the made bed and said hoarsely: “Coals of fire?”
Angel felt an unwilling spasm of liking for this new in-your-face Wesley. He wondered if it was as much of an act as that pompous little know-it-all thing he’d had going in Sunnydale to hide his deep-seated insecurities; if this was Wesley’s way of preventing himself from falling on his knees and begging for forgiveness. There was something in the tilt of his head that said he was damned well not going to ask any of them to forgive him for something that he thought he’d been morally justified in doing. And as long as he didn’t come right out and articulate that, Angel could probably keep the anger with him under control and even - yes, there it was again - feel that little twinge of admiration for this Daniel in the lion’s den.
“Yeah. I changed the bed linen to make you feel bad. Is it working?”
Wesley looked at him sideways, an under the eyelashes glance that was unexpectedly vulnerable, as was that whispered: “Yes.”
Angel automatically tightened his grip on his shoulders and found himself helping him to the bed with a gentleness that probably surprised both of them.
“I’ll get the first aid kit.” He didn’t meet Wesley’s eye.
“You don’t have to. I’m - healing.”
Angel still kept his gaze averted. “I’ll be right back.” As he headed for the door he heard a scrambling sound of people who had evidently been peering through the crack scattering into other rooms so he wouldn’t see them.
“Angel…”
How many times had he heard Wes say his name? It still had power to move him; still made his name sound like someone who had all the answers, who could solve any problem.
“You don’t have to say it,” Angel said, not looking back.
“Thank you.”
He’d said it anyway. So softly perhaps only someone with vampire hearing could pick it up. Angel wondered how words could still have so much power between them; after the lies and the betrayal and the pillow how could two words still matter? But they did. He snatched a breath he didn’t need and opened the door into the corridor. Almost against his will he found himself saying, “You’re welcome.”
***