Crazy Madcap Redemption - 10
Okay kids! This chapter finally answers a question many have been asking in comments. Special Delivery for Winifred Burkle: One stone sarcophagus!
Previous Parts in Memories
Chapter Ten: Shells
Fred screeched when she stepped into the lab and saw a giant stone sarcophagus filling up most of the walkway between the lab benches.
A hand flat against her chest, she swallowed. “What is that?”
Knox looked up cheerfully from his workbench. “I couldn't find any invoice on it. I thought maybe you went crazy on eBay.”
“Was it addressed to me?”
“Yeah. No return address, if you’re curious. I’ve already started scanning. Everything is bouncing off of it, which doesn’t thrill me.”
Fred felt that ‘black cat walked down my spine’ level of spooked: warnings about coffins and presents haunting her. “Throw this in quarantine. Full containment. No one goes near it without hazmat level A suits.”
Knox stood, blinking. “You want to treat this as a vapor threat? I set my coffee on that!”
“I just. I dunno. I have a bad feeling about this. A real, real, bad feeling. So let’s just play it paranoid, okay? And try to find out where it came from!” She backed toward the door, looking at the coffin like it might leap at her.
Knox followed her. “Wait a minute. I mean, come on, you’re not even going to look at it?” He rocked on his heels. “Cool old sarcophagus. Lunch at ‘Mi Pueblo’ says it’s a mummy.”
The lure of tacos clearly was swaying her judgment. “I don’t know.” She grimaced, tilting her head at the ominous stone coffin. “Drusilla told me I’d be getting a coffin in the mail. Is that weird? She said if I opened it, well, that part was kind of vague and weird, but I got the ‘bad bad things’ gist.”
“Oh come on, we eat prophecies and visions for breakfast and re-write them before lunch. What harm could just a teeny peek do?” He clapped his hands. “Tell you what, we won’t open it. I mean, hey! I’m with you on that. We’ll just examine and record the external carvings.”
“Yes,” Fred said, “in nice, air-tight hazmat suits.” She turned to go once again and was shocked when Knox’s hand closed on her wrist, hard and insistent.
“I can’t let you lock it away,” he said.
***
Spike jogged, following Angel through the corridors of Wolfram and Hart with a cardboard box in his hands full of frilly belongings, a blonde curly-haired doll right on top.
“It’s been days, Angelus, and you know how she is when you leave her alone!”
“It’s not my call. I’m not the science department, and I’m not the psychiatry department.” He turned and continued walking backward. “And I’m certainly not the patience department. Keep pestering me and I’m going to be the kick scrawny vampire ass department.”
Spike set down his box. “Who are you calling ‘scrawny’, wide load?”
Gunn stepped out of an office to see the two vampires squaring off. “Hey,” he raised his hands. “Calm down, guys.”
“Forehead here is keeping me away from my girl,” Spike said. He advanced on Angel, chin out. “Which I suppose I should have seen coming. Is this really about helping her, or are you helping yourself to a little playtime, ‘daddy’?”
Angel glared, eyes hard black coals, unable to speak at the accusation.
“Easy. It’s not her we’re worried about, man, it’s you.”
Spike whirled on Gunn. “You, too? You’re in on this?”
“Spike, she’s crazy, she’s part of your past, and I don’t have to remind you what your past was like, do I? We just don’t think it’s a good idea, you spending lots of time with her.” Gunn tried to look placating.
“I’m not permitted to see her, either,” Angel said.
“You’re all barmier than she is! What kind of ‘therapy’ is it to keep her from any friendly faces? You want to drive her to kill again, is that it?”
“What? Spike, I was dealing with Dru while you were still breathing…”
Gunn held up a hand to stop Angel. When he had both vampire’s attention, he nodded, once, and turned to Spike with eyebrows raised, lawyer-mode full on, “Have you considered the moral and legal implications of a sexual relationship with someone not completely in their right mind?”
“What the bleedin’ hell are you saying, Charlie-boy?”
“There is a concern about consent.”
“Consent!”
Angel grabbed Spike’s arm before he swung. “Listen to the man…”
“I’ll show you ‘consent’…”
“I’m just stating…”
All three men were silenced by a sudden cry coming from the lab.
***
Fred screamed.
“It’s because I love you. You’re perfect.” Knox had Fred’s arm locked with his, struggling and slipping on the floor as he dragged her toward the sarcophagus.
“This is going on your review.” Fred elbowed him hard; gaining a temporary respite she hollered, “Help! Is there no help in this building?”
A flurry of footsteps rained down the corridor. The door burst open and three men only took a moment to stare in confusion before Angel had Knox by the throat, against the wall. “What are you doing?”
Spike led Fred to a stool, carefully examining the bruises on her arm. Fred waved him away. “He went nuts. He wanted me to touch the sarcophagus. Wait - don’t!” She held her uninjured arm out to stop Gunn.
Gunn held both hands up. “Okay. No one touches.”
“It’s nothing,” Knox gasped, trying not to sound hysterical and failing. “It’s an artifact. Just look at it. What… what harm could it do?”
“I do know something that causes harm - hurting Fred,” Angel said, shaking him.
“Woah. Hey, hey, easy, big guy!”
Fred looked earnestly into Spike’s eyes. “Drusilla told me I’d receive a coffin, and if I opened it, something bad would happen, I’d be hollowed out, or something.”
“You did right, pet. Never fool with one of Dru’s visions. They have a nasty habit of coming true.”
“It would make you a god,” Knox pleaded. “It’s wonderful… destined.”
Angel threw him to the floor. “Spike, take Mr. Destined to a holding cell. Let’s get this coffin quarantined. No one so much as breathes on it.”
***
A man in a blue-grey shirt with a shiny black belt and baton delivered a cardboard box full of music, scarves, a hairbrush and a doll. These were Drusilla's things, he said, from home.
Her head hurt. The blood they fed her in cups was thick, tepid, and tasted of medicine.
And then the doctor had insisted in asking her again and again about her sisters until she couldn’t duck under or around the question but had to answer it and she cried.
No sisters. No family. No Spike. A box of things was hardly solace. She lay on the narrow bed and stared at the camera in the ceiling, wondering who watched and why they hated her so.
***
Here’s a little fact they don’t teach you on TV: torture doesn’t yield answers. In fact, all you can do torturing someone is get them to tell you what they think you want to hear. There’s no more surety that it’s the truth than if you just asked them. Less, even.
So Spike took the request that he ‘get information’ out of Knox for what it really was: a useless exercise to keep him busy.
He tried not to think that they’d chosen him for this job because they mistook black leather for ruthlessness and considered His Poufiness to have a shinier soul. Oh sure, have Spike do the torture. Even when he’d had no soul he’d felt like a pretender holding hot pokers, like he was playing a role written for someone else.
Still, he entered the room with one of Angel’s more wicked-looking daggers in hand, cleaning his fingernails with it. “Let’s get a few things straight, Knoxie: I never liked you even when I thought your biggest crime was being a nerd. Fred, on the other hand, was the only person on this green earth who tried to get me back from my non-corporeal hell. So when I say I have no patience…”
“I’ll tell you everything.” Knox bore the eager smile of a missionary on a fresh doorstep, despite his hands being bound tightly behind the hard metal chair. “I chose Fred because I love her. She’s strong and smart and beautiful. No one less could be special enough to be the vessel for my god.”
Spike sighed and twirled his knife. The little shit wasn’t even letting him intimidate him properly. He jabbed the point into the arm-rest of Knox’s chair, close to where his arm wrapped around the back to be tied. “And this God?”
“Illyria. One of the old ones from the Deeper Well. Ruler of the Primordium.”
“Would have done what to Fred?”
“Illyria would take her body as a vessel to live in. Fred would be replaced - extinguished, sacrificed.”
Spike set his hands on the arm-rests and sighed. “And I’m keeping you alive, because?”
Knox opened and closed his mouth. He frowned and looked to the side. “Huh. Guess maybe I shouldn’t talk? Because then you’d want to keep me for questioning.”
“Well it would make this interrogation session a lot more fun for me,” Spike said, glaring at him.
The little prick smiled shakily. “It doesn’t matter. Illyria’s coming was foretold. This is all destined to take place. You think I was hurting Fred, but there’s nothing farther from the truth. She would be immortalized, her image the face of a god!”
Spike straightened. “Well, Poindexter, if it’s such a marvelous fate why didn’t you take it yourself?”
Knox’s shoulders rose as far as the bonds allowed and he gave the embarrassed smile of the knowingly hypocritical.
“Yeah, all right. I’ve had about enough of this. One last question before I lamp you and call it a night - who helped you? Don’t tell me you did it all on your own, genius boy that you are.”
Knox started laughing.
Spike kicked the git across the room - the chair made a nice loud sound as it hit the wall and the boy screamed, probably had at least sprained a shoulder on impact. Disgusted, Spike walked out of the room.
***
Spike didn’t get all the details from what the others had found out, but Angel slipped into brogue a bit, which wasn’t a good sign. They just met in the hallway, all on their way from one task or another.
Wesley ran into the hall with a bunch of papers in his fist. “It was held up in customs. Someone at this firm signed the release order. I don’t know who yet.”
Gunn fell against the wall like he’d been shot. “Oh god.”
“Got something you want to share with the rest of the class, Charlie-boy?”
Angel held up one hand - the other was on his forehead rubbing tension from his creased brow. “Witch-hunting accomplices takes a back seat to getting this dangerous thing out of here. Harmony? Is the plane ready yet?”
“They’re loading the scary thing now.” Harmony stood behind her desk. “So twenty minutes?”
“Were are you going?” Wes asked.
“Back where this thing came from: the Deeper Well. Spike, want to take a trip back to the homeland?”
Spike considered it. “Hours in a plane with you just to deliver a giant stone box? Rather not, Peaches. Got my princess to look after.”
“Oh god!” Harmony jumped up again. “That was security. Some idiot left Knox with a knife. He’s escaped.”
Gunn, Wes, and Angel all glared at Spike, who rolled his eyes skyward and cursed. Wordlessly they split, running in opposite directions.
***
It was a quiet gathering at the Cat and Fiddle. They were all there - all of Team Angel but the boss man himself. It took a full round before talking started. They were stunned. It was a familiar feeling to Spike, that feeling you get when a bullet hits the tree next to your head or the stake lands in your gut rather than your heart.
They’d dodged fate, and were waiting for the bill to come.
Knox was found in the cargo bay of the private jet, in the process of ripping the air-tight plastic away from Illyria’s coffin. He was confined right there and was even now winging his way to England with Angel, to face some sort of mystical whatever in the “Deeper Well” whatever that was.
Gunn kept shaking his head, repeating, “What almost happened. What I almost let happen.”
“Knox,” Fred would say. “I trusted him! He was so nice.”
Spike didn’t have attention for elder gods or avoided disasters. His eyes were on his untouched beer, his mind on Dru, who he hadn’t seen in days now, and who could be suffering an initiative-like experience, for all the window-dressing Wolfram and Hart added.
Wesley had been sitting very close to Fred, and hardly taking his eyes off of her. For him, at least, one possible result of the release of this Ill-whatever-a, was clear.
“So, Wes,” Spike said, forcing a smile to his face. “Gonna be a while before you let her out of your sight?”
Wesley almost blushed, the old boy, and picked up his beer to hide it. “Yes. Well, I’m just relieved no one was hurt.”
“Except Knox,” Fred said. And grimaced. “But he can be hurt the little… little… jerk!”
“Harsh words,” Lorne said, raising his glass. “I’m so sorry, Freddles. I should have read it. All I saw when he sang ‘Black is Black’ was awkwardness and a terrible habit of flattening high notes.” Lorne rolled his eyes in silent testimony to hundreds of painfully mangled pop songs.
Fred had snuggled into Wes’s side, his arm was over her shoulders now and he was looking down at her fondly, exuberantly happy.
Spike decided that he’d waited long enough for politeness’ sake. He pushed his beer away. “Like you all to remember it was my girl saved our bacon here. Might even have saved Fred’s life.”
“Yes, remarkable,” Wes said. “A seer of that ability could be invaluable to us.”
Lorne muttered, “She beat my little green socks.”
“I think it’s great,” Fred said. “We gain a future-seeing person, and, well, gosh, if a couple can stay together a century, break up, have one of them gain a soul and save the world an’ all and still end up back together? Well, that says something.”
“I want to see her,” Spike said. “I want to know how she’s doing. What she’s doing. You all are going on about this silly sarcophagus like it was the near end of the world. Dru’s world is ending. I can’t let them hurt her.”
“We’re not,” Fred said, a little too emphatically - she was starting to feel the effects of the alcohol.
“How do I know that? Why won’t they bloody let me see her?”
“Oh they will - I mean, we will.” Fred squeezed Wes’s hand. “If I say it’s okay it’s okay, isn’t it?”
Wes smiled weakly. “Who am I to stand in the way of romance?”
Continued -->
Previous Parts in Memories
Chapter Ten: Shells
Fred screeched when she stepped into the lab and saw a giant stone sarcophagus filling up most of the walkway between the lab benches.
A hand flat against her chest, she swallowed. “What is that?”
Knox looked up cheerfully from his workbench. “I couldn't find any invoice on it. I thought maybe you went crazy on eBay.”
“Was it addressed to me?”
“Yeah. No return address, if you’re curious. I’ve already started scanning. Everything is bouncing off of it, which doesn’t thrill me.”
Fred felt that ‘black cat walked down my spine’ level of spooked: warnings about coffins and presents haunting her. “Throw this in quarantine. Full containment. No one goes near it without hazmat level A suits.”
Knox stood, blinking. “You want to treat this as a vapor threat? I set my coffee on that!”
“I just. I dunno. I have a bad feeling about this. A real, real, bad feeling. So let’s just play it paranoid, okay? And try to find out where it came from!” She backed toward the door, looking at the coffin like it might leap at her.
Knox followed her. “Wait a minute. I mean, come on, you’re not even going to look at it?” He rocked on his heels. “Cool old sarcophagus. Lunch at ‘Mi Pueblo’ says it’s a mummy.”
The lure of tacos clearly was swaying her judgment. “I don’t know.” She grimaced, tilting her head at the ominous stone coffin. “Drusilla told me I’d be getting a coffin in the mail. Is that weird? She said if I opened it, well, that part was kind of vague and weird, but I got the ‘bad bad things’ gist.”
“Oh come on, we eat prophecies and visions for breakfast and re-write them before lunch. What harm could just a teeny peek do?” He clapped his hands. “Tell you what, we won’t open it. I mean, hey! I’m with you on that. We’ll just examine and record the external carvings.”
“Yes,” Fred said, “in nice, air-tight hazmat suits.” She turned to go once again and was shocked when Knox’s hand closed on her wrist, hard and insistent.
“I can’t let you lock it away,” he said.
***
Spike jogged, following Angel through the corridors of Wolfram and Hart with a cardboard box in his hands full of frilly belongings, a blonde curly-haired doll right on top.
“It’s been days, Angelus, and you know how she is when you leave her alone!”
“It’s not my call. I’m not the science department, and I’m not the psychiatry department.” He turned and continued walking backward. “And I’m certainly not the patience department. Keep pestering me and I’m going to be the kick scrawny vampire ass department.”
Spike set down his box. “Who are you calling ‘scrawny’, wide load?”
Gunn stepped out of an office to see the two vampires squaring off. “Hey,” he raised his hands. “Calm down, guys.”
“Forehead here is keeping me away from my girl,” Spike said. He advanced on Angel, chin out. “Which I suppose I should have seen coming. Is this really about helping her, or are you helping yourself to a little playtime, ‘daddy’?”
Angel glared, eyes hard black coals, unable to speak at the accusation.
“Easy. It’s not her we’re worried about, man, it’s you.”
Spike whirled on Gunn. “You, too? You’re in on this?”
“Spike, she’s crazy, she’s part of your past, and I don’t have to remind you what your past was like, do I? We just don’t think it’s a good idea, you spending lots of time with her.” Gunn tried to look placating.
“I’m not permitted to see her, either,” Angel said.
“You’re all barmier than she is! What kind of ‘therapy’ is it to keep her from any friendly faces? You want to drive her to kill again, is that it?”
“What? Spike, I was dealing with Dru while you were still breathing…”
Gunn held up a hand to stop Angel. When he had both vampire’s attention, he nodded, once, and turned to Spike with eyebrows raised, lawyer-mode full on, “Have you considered the moral and legal implications of a sexual relationship with someone not completely in their right mind?”
“What the bleedin’ hell are you saying, Charlie-boy?”
“There is a concern about consent.”
“Consent!”
Angel grabbed Spike’s arm before he swung. “Listen to the man…”
“I’ll show you ‘consent’…”
“I’m just stating…”
All three men were silenced by a sudden cry coming from the lab.
***
Fred screamed.
“It’s because I love you. You’re perfect.” Knox had Fred’s arm locked with his, struggling and slipping on the floor as he dragged her toward the sarcophagus.
“This is going on your review.” Fred elbowed him hard; gaining a temporary respite she hollered, “Help! Is there no help in this building?”
A flurry of footsteps rained down the corridor. The door burst open and three men only took a moment to stare in confusion before Angel had Knox by the throat, against the wall. “What are you doing?”
Spike led Fred to a stool, carefully examining the bruises on her arm. Fred waved him away. “He went nuts. He wanted me to touch the sarcophagus. Wait - don’t!” She held her uninjured arm out to stop Gunn.
Gunn held both hands up. “Okay. No one touches.”
“It’s nothing,” Knox gasped, trying not to sound hysterical and failing. “It’s an artifact. Just look at it. What… what harm could it do?”
“I do know something that causes harm - hurting Fred,” Angel said, shaking him.
“Woah. Hey, hey, easy, big guy!”
Fred looked earnestly into Spike’s eyes. “Drusilla told me I’d receive a coffin, and if I opened it, something bad would happen, I’d be hollowed out, or something.”
“You did right, pet. Never fool with one of Dru’s visions. They have a nasty habit of coming true.”
“It would make you a god,” Knox pleaded. “It’s wonderful… destined.”
Angel threw him to the floor. “Spike, take Mr. Destined to a holding cell. Let’s get this coffin quarantined. No one so much as breathes on it.”
***
A man in a blue-grey shirt with a shiny black belt and baton delivered a cardboard box full of music, scarves, a hairbrush and a doll. These were Drusilla's things, he said, from home.
Her head hurt. The blood they fed her in cups was thick, tepid, and tasted of medicine.
And then the doctor had insisted in asking her again and again about her sisters until she couldn’t duck under or around the question but had to answer it and she cried.
No sisters. No family. No Spike. A box of things was hardly solace. She lay on the narrow bed and stared at the camera in the ceiling, wondering who watched and why they hated her so.
***
Here’s a little fact they don’t teach you on TV: torture doesn’t yield answers. In fact, all you can do torturing someone is get them to tell you what they think you want to hear. There’s no more surety that it’s the truth than if you just asked them. Less, even.
So Spike took the request that he ‘get information’ out of Knox for what it really was: a useless exercise to keep him busy.
He tried not to think that they’d chosen him for this job because they mistook black leather for ruthlessness and considered His Poufiness to have a shinier soul. Oh sure, have Spike do the torture. Even when he’d had no soul he’d felt like a pretender holding hot pokers, like he was playing a role written for someone else.
Still, he entered the room with one of Angel’s more wicked-looking daggers in hand, cleaning his fingernails with it. “Let’s get a few things straight, Knoxie: I never liked you even when I thought your biggest crime was being a nerd. Fred, on the other hand, was the only person on this green earth who tried to get me back from my non-corporeal hell. So when I say I have no patience…”
“I’ll tell you everything.” Knox bore the eager smile of a missionary on a fresh doorstep, despite his hands being bound tightly behind the hard metal chair. “I chose Fred because I love her. She’s strong and smart and beautiful. No one less could be special enough to be the vessel for my god.”
Spike sighed and twirled his knife. The little shit wasn’t even letting him intimidate him properly. He jabbed the point into the arm-rest of Knox’s chair, close to where his arm wrapped around the back to be tied. “And this God?”
“Illyria. One of the old ones from the Deeper Well. Ruler of the Primordium.”
“Would have done what to Fred?”
“Illyria would take her body as a vessel to live in. Fred would be replaced - extinguished, sacrificed.”
Spike set his hands on the arm-rests and sighed. “And I’m keeping you alive, because?”
Knox opened and closed his mouth. He frowned and looked to the side. “Huh. Guess maybe I shouldn’t talk? Because then you’d want to keep me for questioning.”
“Well it would make this interrogation session a lot more fun for me,” Spike said, glaring at him.
The little prick smiled shakily. “It doesn’t matter. Illyria’s coming was foretold. This is all destined to take place. You think I was hurting Fred, but there’s nothing farther from the truth. She would be immortalized, her image the face of a god!”
Spike straightened. “Well, Poindexter, if it’s such a marvelous fate why didn’t you take it yourself?”
Knox’s shoulders rose as far as the bonds allowed and he gave the embarrassed smile of the knowingly hypocritical.
“Yeah, all right. I’ve had about enough of this. One last question before I lamp you and call it a night - who helped you? Don’t tell me you did it all on your own, genius boy that you are.”
Knox started laughing.
Spike kicked the git across the room - the chair made a nice loud sound as it hit the wall and the boy screamed, probably had at least sprained a shoulder on impact. Disgusted, Spike walked out of the room.
***
Spike didn’t get all the details from what the others had found out, but Angel slipped into brogue a bit, which wasn’t a good sign. They just met in the hallway, all on their way from one task or another.
Wesley ran into the hall with a bunch of papers in his fist. “It was held up in customs. Someone at this firm signed the release order. I don’t know who yet.”
Gunn fell against the wall like he’d been shot. “Oh god.”
“Got something you want to share with the rest of the class, Charlie-boy?”
Angel held up one hand - the other was on his forehead rubbing tension from his creased brow. “Witch-hunting accomplices takes a back seat to getting this dangerous thing out of here. Harmony? Is the plane ready yet?”
“They’re loading the scary thing now.” Harmony stood behind her desk. “So twenty minutes?”
“Were are you going?” Wes asked.
“Back where this thing came from: the Deeper Well. Spike, want to take a trip back to the homeland?”
Spike considered it. “Hours in a plane with you just to deliver a giant stone box? Rather not, Peaches. Got my princess to look after.”
“Oh god!” Harmony jumped up again. “That was security. Some idiot left Knox with a knife. He’s escaped.”
Gunn, Wes, and Angel all glared at Spike, who rolled his eyes skyward and cursed. Wordlessly they split, running in opposite directions.
***
It was a quiet gathering at the Cat and Fiddle. They were all there - all of Team Angel but the boss man himself. It took a full round before talking started. They were stunned. It was a familiar feeling to Spike, that feeling you get when a bullet hits the tree next to your head or the stake lands in your gut rather than your heart.
They’d dodged fate, and were waiting for the bill to come.
Knox was found in the cargo bay of the private jet, in the process of ripping the air-tight plastic away from Illyria’s coffin. He was confined right there and was even now winging his way to England with Angel, to face some sort of mystical whatever in the “Deeper Well” whatever that was.
Gunn kept shaking his head, repeating, “What almost happened. What I almost let happen.”
“Knox,” Fred would say. “I trusted him! He was so nice.”
Spike didn’t have attention for elder gods or avoided disasters. His eyes were on his untouched beer, his mind on Dru, who he hadn’t seen in days now, and who could be suffering an initiative-like experience, for all the window-dressing Wolfram and Hart added.
Wesley had been sitting very close to Fred, and hardly taking his eyes off of her. For him, at least, one possible result of the release of this Ill-whatever-a, was clear.
“So, Wes,” Spike said, forcing a smile to his face. “Gonna be a while before you let her out of your sight?”
Wesley almost blushed, the old boy, and picked up his beer to hide it. “Yes. Well, I’m just relieved no one was hurt.”
“Except Knox,” Fred said. And grimaced. “But he can be hurt the little… little… jerk!”
“Harsh words,” Lorne said, raising his glass. “I’m so sorry, Freddles. I should have read it. All I saw when he sang ‘Black is Black’ was awkwardness and a terrible habit of flattening high notes.” Lorne rolled his eyes in silent testimony to hundreds of painfully mangled pop songs.
Fred had snuggled into Wes’s side, his arm was over her shoulders now and he was looking down at her fondly, exuberantly happy.
Spike decided that he’d waited long enough for politeness’ sake. He pushed his beer away. “Like you all to remember it was my girl saved our bacon here. Might even have saved Fred’s life.”
“Yes, remarkable,” Wes said. “A seer of that ability could be invaluable to us.”
Lorne muttered, “She beat my little green socks.”
“I think it’s great,” Fred said. “We gain a future-seeing person, and, well, gosh, if a couple can stay together a century, break up, have one of them gain a soul and save the world an’ all and still end up back together? Well, that says something.”
“I want to see her,” Spike said. “I want to know how she’s doing. What she’s doing. You all are going on about this silly sarcophagus like it was the near end of the world. Dru’s world is ending. I can’t let them hurt her.”
“We’re not,” Fred said, a little too emphatically - she was starting to feel the effects of the alcohol.
“How do I know that? Why won’t they bloody let me see her?”
“Oh they will - I mean, we will.” Fred squeezed Wes’s hand. “If I say it’s okay it’s okay, isn’t it?”
Wes smiled weakly. “Who am I to stand in the way of romance?”
Continued -->