Buffy saw him first. He stood in the doorway, blinking nervously in the light, an attaché case in one hand and what looked like a cabin trunk behind him that he had evidently dragged all the way to the library. She had never seen anyone quite that impeccably dressed or with their hair that plastered into place who wasn’t…really, really old, but he didn’t look more than few years older than Xander, so was either working for a political candidate or a Mormon. He cleared his throat and when that still didn’t get him a response, essayed: “Is Mr Rupert Giles here?”

Ah, British. Probably not a Mormon then, or did they have Mormons in Britain, and if so, would they sound like this guy? Or would that be ‘chap’? Buffy suspected this person would definitely qualify as a ‘chap’.

Giles looked up from his conversation with Willow and saw the young man standing there. He took off his glasses. “Oh – you must be Wesley?” He caught Buffy’s eye: “The Council have sent Wesley for some…field experience and to be my assistant.”

A Watchery guy then, not a Mormony guy. That actually made more sense with the whole him asking for Giles and being British and wearing a stuffy suit thing.

A smile of sheer relief flickered across the young man’s face and he hurried forward to proffer a hand. “Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Mr Giles. Yes, the Council thought I might be useful. Did they tell you I was coming?”

“They didn’t give any details about when exactly you would be arriving. I’ve been on the phone half a day trying to get some facts out of them so I could meet you at the station. Unmet strangers can too often end up as….”

“Demon kibble,” Buffy helpfully supplied.

“Oh, perhaps I should have phoned from the bus station?” Wesley’s face fell. “I didn’t want to be a nuisance. The Council was very clear that I had to help you, not hinder you. Well, actually that was my father’s phrasing, I think theirs was slightly.…” Becoming aware of everyone looking at him, he blushed, cleared his throat and said, “So, anyway, I’m here now. Demon kibble…? Oh yes, the Hellmouth…I see.”

Buffy couldn’t decide if she most wanted to kick him or give him a cookie. She found herself poised midway between the two. The accent was…grating. She felt half-inclined to go throw a box of tea in the harbour just as a reaction. Of course, it wasn’t actually that different from Giles’s accent, but it wasn’t annoying when Giles did it, well, not most of the time anyway, and even if he was a tad on the stuffy side he was her stuffy Watcher. Come to think of it, this guy was actually Giles’ problem and on another day it might have been quite amusing to watch Giles having to deal with this Watcher Wannabe but not when he’d just lost Jenny and not when they were all in the middle of the psycho funfair that was Angelus’s killing spree.

“Let me get you a cup of tea, Wesley.” Giles pulled out a chair for him. “This is Buffy, Wesley – the Slayer. She can make the introductions.”

Buffy became aware that she was just gawping and quickly sprang forward to hold out a hand. “Yes, I’m Buffy Summers – the Slayer like Giles said.”

He looked at her in surprise. “You’re awfully young. I mean – we know that the Slayer is a teenage girl but somehow the reality is....”

“So are you,” she said pointedly.

He looked a bit affronted, began to draw himself up in the manner of a toad inflating itself to scare off a predator and then deflated, shoulders slumping. “I’ve graduated from the Watcher’s Academy – with honours, actually. But it was felt I needed some experience in the field.” He murmured the last as if he thought this was in some way a failing on his part.

Giles came back out with a cup of tea. “Glad to hear the Council are finally recognizing the need for field experience. The last thing I heard they seemed to think that a few trials in controlled conditions and a lot of written work was enough.”

Giles’ tone was a little brusque and although Wesley flinched from it automatically, Buffy’s sympathy was with Giles. After all he had been through with losing Jenny, the last thing he needed right now was some wet behind the ears eager beaver Junior Watcher sent over by the Council to ask him lots of questions and generally get on his already frayed nerves. It was incidentally the last thing she needed as well. She had caused the person she loved to turn from noble hero in search of redemption to the very thing he most loathed and despised, and who was capable of picking off all her friends one by one before killing her; the last thing she needed was an extra person around to have to bring up to speed on current events.

“I’m Willow.” Willow quickly thrust out a hand.

Wesley looked relieved at the sight of a friendly face. He hurriedly put down his tea, slopping it into the saucer as he did so, then smiled at her gratefully, took her hand and shook it. “Wesley – Wyndam-Pryce.”

“Can I just call you Wesley?”

“Of course.” He was so pathetically pleased to have someone be kind to him that it looked as if Willow was never going to get her hand back again. “Please do. I’d be honoured.”

He positively bloomed in the face of any kind attention. Buffy thought that was just plain weird. Didn’t they have normal people where he came from? (And yes, she could almost hear Cordelia squawking ‘Normal? You think any of you losers are normal?’ in disbelief.)

Xander cleared his throat and Wesley seemed to realize he was still touching Willow and snatched his hand away from her as if she were burning. Giles rolled his eyes and looked even more weary than a minute before. He was already wearing a ‘please don’t show me up in public’ expression but Buffy thought he was going to be out of luck there. Wesley was so obviously what Watchers looked like when just out of their boxes. He was practically still wearing his price tag.

“Xander Harris.” Xander held out a hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Oh, you too.” Wesley had to juggle his attaché case, which he had evidently been in the process of opening, to grab Xander’s hand, and managed to scatter papers all over the floor in the process.

Buffy saw Angel’s face looking up at her and gasped, taking a step back. Willow followed her gaze and also gasped then hurried to help pick up the papers, narrowly missing hitting her head against Wesley’s as he flopped to his knees and hurried to try to scramble the documents back together.

Giles rolled his eyes again and then in a reaching-for-the-last-of-his-patience voice, said, “Let me help you with that, Wesley.” The folder clearly had the words ‘Angelus’ written on it and Giles regarded the younger man narrowly. “Is this why the council sent you? To report back on the Angel situation?”

Wesley looked up at him in confusion in between stuffing pages back into his briefcase. “I wrote a paper on Darla and Angelus for my finals. When they received your last reports they said you might be in need of some assistance at dealing with the current…situation and as I had the most theoretical knowledge about Angelus I was the best person for the job.”

Giles closed his eyes. “The situation is very…delicate, Wesley. It’s not just a case of knowing what Angel – Angelus did when and to whom, it’s a case of anticipating what he’s going to do next and his motives for doing so.”

Wesley sat back on his heels. “That’s why they thought I might be useful – because I’ve studied his patterns of behaviour in the past and have analysed his motives for each of his various killing sprees. For instance, the Valentine’s Day mutilations seem to me to be....”

“We know him,” Buffy said tautly. “Know Angel. Knew him, I mean. He’s not just an old file and lot of dates to us.”

“He was our friend,” Willow added.

Wesley looked shocked by that, mouth opening then closing for a moment in a goldfish-like fashion. “Oh, I see.... There was a reference in Mr Giles’ previous reports to him now having a soul and working for his redemption but we assumed back at the council that this was some kind of elaborate mind game he was playing. In the past he has taken a lot of pleasure in....”

“No,” Buffy said flatly. “He was good. He had a soul. Then he lost his soul because of me, because of....”

“Because of the nature of the curse that returned his soul to him in the first place,” Giles intervened quickly. “It was supposed to make him suffer, when it became a means for him to find happiness, a clause in the curse kicked in and took the soul from him again.”

Wesley looked as if he were having trouble processing that; Buffy thought idly that he should trying processing it when the person who had lost his soul was someone that he loved.

“This is a guy we liked,” Xander spelled it out for him. “Well, actually I never did, but Buffy liked him a lot and Willow and Giles – kind of liked him too.”

“I liked him more than Giles did,” Willow supplied helpfully. “But not as much as Buffy.” She darted Buffy a look full of sympathy and Wesley seemed to get it at last.

“Ahhh...” he said with a mixture of comprehension and regret. He looked across at Buffy and winced. “I probably don’t need to tell you that the Council are unlikely to have ever sanctioned a friendship between a Slayer and a Vampire.”

“He had a soul,” Buffy said tautly. “He was good. Until I....”

Wesley grimaced sympathetically. “Yes, very distressing, I can imagine.”

“I really don’t think you can,” Giles had a definite edge to his voice. “The point is that no one hates Angel – who Angel was when he had a soul – more than his soulless alter ego, Angelus, and he has targeted Buffy and the people around her for…retribution.”

Wesley blinked. “So, you’re saying that Angelus’ main object of vengeance is…his soulled self?”

Buffy also blinked. She hadn’t thought of it like that before. It had felt as if it was all about her. “I suppose.,..”

Wesley looked the way Willow did when she had just worked out something really complicated in a research problem. “Doesn’t that suggest that either the soulled version of Angel still has a consciousness trapped within the soulless one or that Angelus fears or at least believes that his soulled self might one day return? I mean – why carry out vengeance upon someone who effectively no longer exists?”

“Angel isn’t home any more,” Buffy said quietly. “There’s nothing of him left in the person he is now.”

Wesley picked up the folder he’d dropped and put it down on the table at which they had been researching, automatically taking the chair that had belonged to Giles. “Well then, it sounds as if there is a way to reverse it. We know there must be, in fact. Angelus was once a soulless killer entirely devoid of compassion or any glimmering of conscience and yet you say he became a warrior for good?”

Buffy sat down next to him. “He was cursed by gypsies. He had his soul returned to him.”

Wesley frowned. “You know there’s no record of this in the Council file on Angelus. It just says that the trail of bodies dried up. We assumed he was dead. Well, deader than he already was. Dust really.”

It was horrible after what he’d done that the thought of Angel as dust still made her flinch.

Wesley didn’t notice, too wrapped up in his shiny new theory. “Why would the gypsies give him back his soul? If they wanted to punish him, why didn’t they kill him?”

“They wanted him to suffer,” Giles said it so that Buffy wouldn’t have to and she was grateful for that. “Wanted him to remember everything he’d done while cursed with a conscience.”

“So, when he has a soul Angel remembers everything he did without one?”

Buffy nodded. “Everything.”

Wesley tapped Giles’ pencil pensively on the folder. “Then we know that if the situation was repeated, if the soul was returned to him, that the soulled Angel would remember everything the unsoulled Angelus had done, making every action committed by Angelus since he was essentially reborn as a soulless being for the second time something done so that Angel will remember it when he returns.”

“Returns…?” Buffy looked up at him in disbelief.

“There may be a record of the curse somewhere. I wonder if it could be filed under ‘folklore and superstitious rites’ in the Council library?”

Willow said, “You’re saying we could restore Angel?”

Wesley looked up at her in some surprise. “Well, wouldn’t that be the most effective cure for the current problem? It sounds as if the best gaoler of Angelus is Angel. He went from raping, murdering, maiming and torturing every poor creature that he met to ceasing to be a blip on the Council radar. Unless there is now a very effective twelve step program for sadistic vampires that I’m unaware of then he clearly must have been terminated or had a serious change of heart.”

Giles said tersely, “Wesley, you’ve been in this building for ten minutes. I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to see the big picture.”

Wesley flinched from the criticism and then darted a look up at Giles. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to be.... I didn’t mean to....”

“It’s okay,” Willow said hastily, patting his arm. She looked at Buffy. “Isn’t it?”

Buffy wanted to say ‘No, it isn’t and someone tell this bozo to shut up now’ but she didn’t have the heart in the face of Willow’s pleading expression. But it still felt like being stabbed by red hot needles every time she thought about Angel. About what he’d had been. His lips against hers, that look in his eyes.... She turned her head away so no one could see how much everything hurt.

“You’re saying, hey presto, someone waves a magic wand and Good Angel is back and we all kiss and make up and everything’s forgotten?” Xander demanded tersely. “He killed someone we care about.”

Wesley looked very deer in headlights. “I – um – I didn’t mean to offend. It’s just that...” He snatched a breath. “The killing stopped, you see.” He gave Xander a pleading look. “And if you were arguing that Angelus would in someway be getting off lightly if we gave him back his soul, if the soulled version of himself is the person Angelus most dislikes, wouldn’t that be the worst punishment for him, to be trapped inside him once again, and it’s already clear that these gypsies – who were clearly very powerful people – felt that the worst punishment for Angel was to give him back his soul.”

“So, you’re saying we should do it because it’s the nastiest thing to do to a vampire?” Buffy demanded.

Wesley flinched from her tone but she wasn’t in the mood to care. “No, I’m saying that it seems to be the best way to stop people being killed while preserving someone who appears to be a potential warrior for good. I imagine a spell of that kind could also be performed at some distance from the subject and so the risk would be a little less than attempting to…stake Angelus, even supposing people who knew him as a…friend were emotionally and physically capable of doing that.”

Buffy looked at Wesley through narrowed eyes. “You know, you’re really starting to annoy me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing away rapidly.

“Buffy,” Giles reproved.

“Didn’t what he say make sense?” Willow pleaded, looking around for support and clearly missing the quiet stability of Oz. “I thought what he said made sense.”

“It made perfect sense,” Buffy retorted. “But it isn’t possible. It’s just a nice theory that would solve all our problems in one stroke and give us back.... Give me back... But it can’t be done. No one knows the curse.”

“Re-research…?” Wesley quavered tentatively. “Couldn’t we…research it…?”

“Research is good,” Willow said quickly. “I’m big with the research love.”

Giles looked at his watch. “It’s getting late. Wesley, why don’t I give you a lift home. We can talk about…research tomorrow.” His grim gaze suggested they would do no such thing but rather that he would give Wesley a sharp lecture in the drive home about butting out of things he only imperfectly understood. Wesley seemed to sense that himself, immediately looking all deer in front of a sixteen-wheeler. Willow gave Buffy a pleading look and then directed one at Giles who did look slightly less grim under the influence of Willow’s irresistible ‘please don’t be mean’ eyes. Buffy almost glowered at the redhead for her typically knee-jerk protective instinct towards the annoying geeky poor widdle Watcher boy whom Buffy could just tell was going to be irritating her beyond all bearing.

Wesley seemed aware of Buffy’s thoughts, gaze darting between Buffy and Giles anxiously. “I’ll go and wait outside then,” he said awkwardly, “so you can bring the car round.

Giles said, “Yes, do that, Wesley,” crisply, without looking up.

Wesley trailed out of the library, starting to drag his big heavy trunk.

“Leave your luggage!” Giles said sharply. “Xander and I will manage it.”

Wesley came back, picked up his attaché case, fumbled the lock closed, winced apologetically at everyone, and then hurried out.

As Buffy rolled her eyes, Willow said hastily, “He’s really not so bad.”

Xander looked accusingly at Giles: “Why do we have to carry his luggage?”

“Can you imagine how long it was going to take someone apparently fashioned entirely from pipe cleaners to haul that suitcase out of here?” Giles countered.

Xander conceded it with a shrug and then looked Giles up and down. “Who knew you were the butch version of Watcher?”

“I think he’s sweet,” Willow insisted doggedly as Giles glared at Xander. “And I think you’re all being very…judgementally and…just plain mean.”

“He is just plain annoying, Will,” Buffy pleaded. She did feel a slight pang of conscience but it really was very slight indeed. “He waltzes in here and starts telling us how to get Angel back before he’s even unpacked his bags. How annoying is that?”

“He was just trying to help.” Willow could be very stubborn in her protection of the underdog sometimes, perhaps through having been an underdog herself for so much of her life.

“I can’t believe there are others like Giles out there.” Xander shook his head. “That’s a truly scary thought.”

“Wesley isn’t like me,” Giles countered shortly.

Buffy looked up. “Giles, he’s like your own personal Mini-me.”

“I’ll have you know that just because some people of similar background may conform to a similar dress code and understand correct diction it does not make them all brothers under the skin.”

“What about under the stuffy suit?” Xander countered. “And the glasses? And the faint odour of Eau de Used Teabag?”

Buffy let the bickering wash over her. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault but Wesley had made her feel as if ants were walking over her skin. It had taken her this long to accept that Angel was gone and the only thing left now was a soulless monster who took pleasure in tormenting her and her friends, and then Wesley waltzed in and started suggesting re-ensouling Angelus as if it was only a case of digging around in a few books, tossing a few herbs about and hey presto! He was just so young, even Willow felt more grown up than he did, and she wasn’t in the mood for babysitting children from some library back in merrie olde Englande when they were here on the front line, on the Hellmouth, having to deal with death every day, their own and the prospect of losing people that they loved. She had died. She had drowned and her heart had stopped beating, and she had known what it was to love someone completely and know that they loved her completely, and she had lost him, and it was her fault; her fault Angel was Angelus and her fault Jenny was dead and Giles had that look in his eyes, and she felt so old and tired and sick of it all and she was only seventeen and it just wasn’t fair.

Willow cleared her throat. “Um…guys…?”

“And another thing, Xander, I’ll thank you to keep in mind when discussing my home country is....”

“Giles!”

For Willow that was actually quite sharp and Giles broke off mid-sentence in sheer surprise. “What is it, Willow?”

She nodded her head pointedly at the cabin trunk. “How long are you going to leave Wesley out there waiting for you to take him to his hotel?”

“He doesn’t have a hotel,” Giles said wearily. “The Council expect me to have him as a house guest as they don’t see the need to pay for his accommodation when I have a house I should of course be delighted to share with a colleague whose company I neither want nor need. I’ve had to give up my study and cram a bed in there.”

“Poor Wesley,” Willow said.

Giles looked hurt. “Because I’m such an ogre?”

“Because he’s a long way from home and he doesn’t know anyone and at least if he was in a hotel room he could just read a book or watch television or something but instead he’s going to have to tippy-toe around you while you grunt at him and make him nervous.”

“I do not ‘grunt’ and I resent – oh, never mind. Let’s just get him home and installed in my study with all my best books and my second best duvet.”

“You know I’d offer to suggest to Mom that we put him up for you,” Buffy observed, “except I don’t want him in my house either. Especially being all…British and eating marmalade and talking about the weather and…stuff.”

“And I’d suggest he came and slept at my place but I didn’t actually dislike the guy enough in our five minutes of interpersonal bonding to inflict my family on him.” Xander’s bright smile had a brittle quality that made Buffy wince inside.

“I’m not allowed boys in my room,” Willow explained. “Or I suppose men either. Even British ones, which would probably be safer on the whole because of....” She turned that into a cough.

Giles gave her a Look that suggested he was going to be waspish and snarky the whole time Wesley was staying with him. Buffy didn’t blame him. They were all feeling as if they had made mistakes at the moment. Giles had permitted a friendship between the Slayer under his care and a notoriously evil vampire and it had culminated in the death of the woman he loved. No doubt he had never been less in the mood for human memos from the Watchers’ Council saying ‘we told you so’.

Nevertheless, she thought she could at least make the effort to say ‘Good night’ to Wesley and remind him about carrying a stake in this town if he planned on going outside after dark; something that at least gave the impression she gave a damn. Xander and Giles carried Wesley’s suitcase between them while Willow murmured reassuring things to Giles about how he might actually like to have some company, especially some British company, and to just think of all the interesting conversations they could have about…cricket or whatever it was British people talked about when they weren’t talking about the weather or the Queen or drinking tea.

They opened the double doors and looked for a moment at the place outside them where they expected Wesley to be standing, and then over at Giles’s car in case Wesley had worked out that it had to belong to Giles – as no self-respecting American would be caught even dead driving anything that lame – but there was no sign of him. Or his briefcase. They stood in silence for a moment, looking around and then looking at each other, and then their expressions of surprise or irritation turned very quickly to anxiety and then Willow’s eyes widened and she said, “Oh no!”

In the same instant Giles said, “Good God, what was I thinking? I can’t believe I....”

Buffy suspected it was a shock to all of them to realize how off their game they were. Just how wrapped up in misery they had become; as if they were so busy wondering which of them Angelus was going to pick off next, trying to protect their houses, their loved ones, their lacerated hearts, that they had somehow forgotten they lived on a Hellmouth, and the High School was a place where vampires came after dark in search of easy pickings. She felt as if she might be about to throw up. “We practically gift-wrapped him for them.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Xander looked around wildly. “Maybe he.... Who am I kidding? What do we do?”

“We find him.” Buffy looked across at Giles. “We find him and we…deal with it.”

“Yes.” Giles looked rocked back on his heels and she could only try to imagine how he was feeling right now, someone entrusted to his care whom he had snapped at and then practically served up to the vampires. And she was the Slayer, she was supposed to protect people like Wesley from vamps, not send him off to play with them because she couldn’t deal with him being a jerk right now.

“Giles.” She put a hand on his arm. “Let’s go and…find him.” Their eyes met and she read in his gaze her own fear that what they found was most probably going to be a corpse. He nodded wordlessly and they headed in what they hoped was the right direction, Wesley’s abandoned cabin trunk the only proof that he had ever even been here.

***

Spike was getting that now familiar sinking feeling. They had been forced to move out of the factory because Angelus’s idea of fun included playing Bait the Psycho Watcher with roses and corpses, and although Spike was a lot more mobile than he wanted to let on to Angelus he certainly wasn’t in tip top physical condition. So, of course this was the time that Angelus decided to start playing with his food. There had been a time when he would have been all for it. A game the four of them could play; all on the hunt together; allies, friends even, as much as Angelus was capable of being friends with anyone. But now Angelus was the enemy. Spike had thought it was the soul that divided them but that had been just self-deception. Angelus being back with them had reminded him what a nasty shit he was and always had been. Right now, the Slayer, the humans, every damned happy meal on legs in Sunnydale, none of them were bothering him as much as his bastard grandsire who took so much pleasure in pointing out that now Spike was in a wheelchair Dru was going to be getting all her jollies from him.

“Daddy’s coming....” Drusilla clapped her hands together and Spike groaned inwardly.

“Hang on while I blow up some balloons. Oh wait – no breath, sorry, no can do.”

“He’s got a present.” She beamed at him cheerfully.

Spike shrugged and reached for his lighter. “What is it this time? Nun? Virgin? Or another of those greasy little kids that taste of ketchup?”

“Virgin.” Drusilla waved a reproving finger. “But not for long. Bad Daddy.”

Spike rolled his eyes at the tedious predictability of the old wanker, and was in the act of lighting a cigarette when Angelus made his usual dramatic entrance, kicking the door open and hauling in his evening’s swag, who appeared to be an insurance salesman, going by the look of him, someone in a tailored suit, still clinging to a briefcase.

“What you got us?” Spike enquired. Tonight’s dinner looked young and fresh enough but a little on the bony side to make a good meal for three.

Angelus gave his hapless victim a shove that sent him into the middle of the room and onto his knees. He gazed up at Angelus with wide-eyed wonder, and Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, this was all Angelus needed to prop up his already hugely bloated ego, some guy looking up at him as if he was the scariest baddest vamp in the whole wide world. Angelus gave Spike a smug smile. “Watcher.”

Spike felt an uncomfortable jolt as he tried and failed not to be a little impressed. “Bit young, isn’t he?”

“They decided Rupert the Librarian needed an assistant. Sent him out special delivery nice and fresh, straight from the old country. Your old country, that is.”

Angelus danced up and down the staircase, making a meal of it even though Fred Astaire he so wasn’t, before jumping down to where the Watcher was still on his knees. Drusilla clapped her hands. Sometimes she was way too easily impressed. The Watcher gazed up at Angelus.

“You’re really him.”

Spike frowned. Not just a vampire then, that wasn’t the impressive thing, but being…Angelus? He looked at the face of his grandsire and saw that he wasn’t the only one intrigued. Angelus caught the kneeling Watcher and yanked his head back, the perfect alpha male demonstration of careless strength, the not so subtle threat that a twist of his fingers was all it would take to snap the Junior Watcher’s long slender neck. “Does it speak?”

“You’re him,” the Watcher gasped. “You’re really…Angelus.”

And yes, there was fear there, but wonder too. Angel smiled at him nastily. “Immortal, remember? Or don’t they teach you that at Watcher School?”

“But…I wrote my dissertation about you....”

Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, a fan. Angelus was going to be impossible if someone didn’t snap that little waste of space’s neck soon. Angelus followed the Watcher’s gaze to his briefcase and then abruptly released him, holding out a hand for the briefcase. The Watcher handed it over gingerly, like someone feeding a tiger through the bars. Angelus yanked it open and plucked out the folder on the top, raising an eyebrow as he looked across at Spike. “He’s got a file on me.”

“Just give him a damned autograph and then kill him, will you?” Spike complained. “I’m hungry.”

Drusilla was looking at the new arrival fixedly, and now began to glide around him. He was too busy gazing at Angelus to notice, while Angelus was flicking through his file with every sign of interest.

“He’s not for eating,” Drusilla crooned. “Daddy wants to play with him.”

Spike took refuge in his cigarette. “Great, first he doesn’t feed us then he spoils our appetite with his usual sick fuckery.” That had been different when he’d been a part of it. They’d been a maelstrom, a firestorm; they spun into a town or a city or a quiet little village cowering under a mountain somewhere and turned everything to blood and ashes, and it was wonderful; a party only the four of them could play. He’d revelled in the twisted limitless depths of his grandsire’s imagination in those days. But that had been the past and this was the present and nothing Angelus did now was for Spike’s amusement, only his own.

Drusilla crouched down in front of the Watcher and stroked a finger along his jaw. It was only with the greatest effort that he could drag his gaze from Angelus, who was still avidly reading the contents of the folder that bore his name, but when the boy finally noticed Drusilla, his eyes widened in recognition.

Spike wished afterwards he hadn’t been looking at the Watcher when he did that, when he recognized Drusilla, because if not he wouldn’t have seen the way his gaze showed not what would have been an entirely appropriate gibbering terror, but rather that terrible spasm of sympathy. “Drusilla....”

“You know me?” She brightened at that.

“You’re the poor girl whose family Angelus killed – the girl with second sight. The one he drove mad with his fiendish cruelty.”

Angelus held up a hand in mock humility. “Please, no flattery.”

Drusilla stretched out a finger and stroked it across the Watcher’s mouth. As always when she touched another male, even a pathetic specimen like this one, Spike felt a spasm of jealousy. She whispered: “I’m his masterwork.”

Angelus leant across to gather up a handful of her hair and press it to his lips, glancing across at Spike with sly mockery as he did so. “Yes, you are.”

Drusilla gazed earnestly at the Watcherboy. “You want your Daddy to be proud of you, too, the way my Daddy’s proud of me, but he never will be.”

The Watcher darted a fearful glance up at Angelus, clearly still having to come to terms with the fact that the vampire was real. Angelus was basking in it, Spike could see, the old poof just loving how impressed the dozy little git was. In the past there had been witchhunters and vampire killers in number and their gazes had always been steely with resolve as they encountered them or else full of fear as they were recognized; but it was a while since Angelus had been reminded what a legend he was by someone who really knew his rep. He wished this little runt would stop looking at Angelus like he was Elvis, but the fact he was actually in the same room as the bona fide Scourge of Europe himself was clearly something Watcherboy wasn’t going to get over any time soon.

Drusilla was still stroking a finger across the captive’s lips. “I bet you’d taste sweet. Sweet as honey. Virgins always do.”

“I-I really don’t think that’s any of your....”

As the boy blushed, Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, an untouched, untried, stammery little Watcher with a hard-on for reading about the exploits of the nastiest vampires in the world; no way was Angelus going to kill this one for a week at least, and he’d probably want to keep his skull as an ashtray even then.

Angelus turned the page of what seemed to be the Watcherboy’s essay while the boy himself divided his nervous attention between Angelus and Drusilla, who was now stroking her fingers through his hair with one hand while undoing his tie with the other.

“Wrong date,” Angelus observed.

The boy looked bewildered. “What?”

“We were in Budapest in 1797, not 1796.”

“The church records said that the massacre at the abbey took place in December 1796.”

“Well, they’re wrong. It was January 1797. We spent Christmas in Prague. They just wanted to call it the Christmas Massacre because it sounds catchier. We definitely didn’t get to them until the first week in January.”

The boy actually reached for a pen. Spike shook his head in disbelief. How dumb was this stupid little bleeder? Very dumb evidently, as he was gazing up at Angelus with that same awe and murmuring politely, “Could I…?” Christ, he wanted to annotate his dissertation now?

Angelus was amused by that; really amused. The kind of amused that made Spike uneasy. He could see Angelus deciding this boy just had to become his next project, and whenever Angelus was working on a project everything else went by the board, including basic common sense half the time. Three hours ago he’d been all about trying to end the world using some kind of statue thing, and now he could see the statue was going to be all yesterday’s news and it was going to be Watcherboy all the way. Spike’s eardrums were going to be perforated from the screaming.

Angelus plucked the pen from the boy’s fingers. “I’m going to mark this for you.”

“Thank you,” the boy said lamely.

“Any inaccuracies will have to be punished,” Angelus told him, before slapping the essay down on the desk and sitting down to correct it as if he were the headmaster of some minor public school.

Drusilla’s eyes widened with excitement and she pulled off the boy’s tie. “Ooh, Daddy loves punishing naughty boys and girls. Have you been naughty, Wesley? Is Daddy going to have to give you a spanking?”

“You know my name…?” he said in disbelief.

Spike almost pointed out to him that his name was on his sodding briefcase but Dru was on a roll. She stroked her fingers through his hair again, trying to disorder it, which Spike could understand as that brylcreem was definitely in need of removal. “Course I do. I know lots about you. All that working, working, dark places, not even star shine, crying and crying and crying because Daddy didn’t love you. Such pretty scars inside. Just want someone to love you, don’t you, precious?”

“You understand the concept of love?” He gazed at her intently; still the Watcher, still the curious student. Spike felt an acute spasm of embarrassed identification; thinking of the bespectacled little mummy’s boy he’d once been, writing his poetry and sighing over his Cecily. “Even now? As you are now…?”

“We are love,” Drusilla told him. “And hate. And death. And life. We’re all fallen angels; falling, falling, closer to hell and fires burning bright in the forest of the.... Especially Daddy. Can’t you see his wings? The soul clipped them but now he’s soaring again.”

“Do you remember what he did to your family?”

“Yes.” She put her hands up to her head. “Remember my mummy singing to us, and the little ones eating cake, all so happy we were before he came.”

Watcherboy flinched and Spike flinched along with him, remembering Dru crying over it sometimes, wanting her Mummy to sing her to sleep again, wanting to tell him their names, all the little children who had tasted so sweet to Angelus. When she ate kids these days it was as if she was trying to find that sweetness again; the sweetness of being human somewhere in their marrow.

“But you love him even though he killed them?”

She slapped her hands together. “Daddy takes and Daddy gives. Takes one family, gives another. He let me have my Spikey, my own child, even better than brothers and sisters. All mine he is.”

The Watcher glanced over at Spike and the vampire felt himself catalogued, being slotted into a mental ‘William the Bloody’ folder. Apparently, next to Angelus and Dru, Spike wasn’t so exciting though as he didn’t get the big blue impressed eyes. “What about Darla?” The Watcher looked around in half fearful anticipation and Spike wondered how dumb a human had to be to actually want to meet Darla.

Dru wrinkled her pretty nose. “Turned to dust. Poor grandmummy. He did it, the Angel-beast. The one who locks Daddy away.”

“The souled version of Angelus?” Watcherboy looked across at Angelus and once again did that double take because it was so incredible that he was here in a room with Angelus. Spike felt like throwing something at him. If he hadn’t been tied to the role of sitting in a wheelchair he would have ripped his scrawny little spine out just for the whole fanboy thing. Watcherboy turned back to Drusilla. “Do you remember what it was like to be human?”

She stroked her fingers through his hair tenderly. “Kind to my Spike, you are. And oh how you love Daddy. See you looking at him, wanting him to tell you you’re a good boy. I see it all. So misty, but I see it....”

There was that look on his face again, and what right did that useless little snack-in-waiting have to be pitying his Dru? Spike’s midnight Queen, his princess of the underworld, who could twist off that stuffy little Watcher’s head on a whim. But he did feel oh so sorry for her, it was there in those expressive eyes. Dru put her head on one side and stroked her finger down his chest. “Eyes like little Anne, you have, all big and blue. Bet they taste sweet.” She bent her head and licked his face. He closed his eyes then, so scared that his skin would be salt with it, extra lickable. Dru ran her tongue over her lips. “Daddy’s going to love the taste of you. So frightened. So warm.”

Watcherboy touched her hair, very gently and Spike almost got up and walked across the room just to smack his hand, but the way he was looking up at her, so full of compassion.... Something caught in Spike’s throat and the contradictory urge to kill him and save him hit him again.

“Do they have pictures of me in your books?” Drusilla asked him.

“Yes.”

“Do I look pretty?”

He was still gazing at her. “Not as pretty as you really are.”

She smiled at that. “You think I’m pretty?”

He kept looking at her, that expression of compassion on his face. Spike knew he was terrified, could hear the hammer of his heart, smell the fear on his skin, but the Watcher only nodded. “Very pretty. Would you like me to show you the picture?”

She nodded and he inched towards his briefcase, glancing between Angelus, who was busy marking the Watcher’s essay with lots of self-important scribblings in the margin, and Spike, who shrugged at him as if to say he didn’t give a damn what he did as, unlike Angelus and Dru, he didn’t believe in talking to one’s food.

The Watcher plucked a book out of his briefcase, turned the pages and held it out to her. “There’s a daguerrotype of you.”

She pounced on the picture eagerly, laughing and clapping her hands. “I’m famous!” She snatched up the book and ran across the room to show it to Spike. “Look, Spike, I’m famous! Got my picture in a book....”

Spike saw a few lines of print: …tragic victim of the notoriously imaginative and sadistic vampire, Angelus…. “That isn’t what she is,” he told the Watcher shortly. “We made our own lives since then. Good lives.” Unlives technically, of course, but who was quibbling?

“What about Miss Edith?” Drusilla waved the doll under the Watcher’s nose. “Have you got a picture of her?”

He shook his head. “No. Is she…significant?”

“She likes watching when they die. They all do. All my pretties.”

The Watcher touched the doll’s hair and then dress and there was that look in his eyes again, the one that made Spike want to snap his neck, rip out his throat, save him from Angelus, he wasn’t even sure which; stupid Watcherboy looking from the calm bisque face of that Victorian doll to the mad beauty of his Drusilla, eyes full of pain because he saw the doll as proof that Drusilla had been little more than a child when Angelus had driven her crazy and stolen her soul. He gave her immortality, you twonk. But it was a change all the same, from someone just seeing her as evil, seeing her as scary; the Watcher didn’t know what he was looking at, but at least he was trying to see the Dru that Spike loved. Trouble was he was coming at it from completely the wrong direction; trying to find the person she wasn’t any more in the free soulless immortal she was now. But Spike knew it all the same, although he would have denied it with his last…well, he didn’t have breath any more, last or otherwise, but he would have denied it all the same, that there was a part of him that remembered how it felt to be human, a part of him that hungered for their warmth, that pulse of their delicious blood beneath their thin skin, maybe part of what made them taste so sweet was their humanity, and maybe he remembered sometimes, maybe Dru did too; maybe they were both as contaminated as the Judge had told them. But you had to understand your prey to catch it, didn’t you? To know them was to eat them.

Dru ran her fingers across the Watcherboy’s chest, brushing the light fuzz of hair there, feeling the warmth of his skin. Spike wanted to lick him, taste him, drink from him and feel that warmth for a moment, that delicious pulse of hot blood from the artery hitting the back of his throat.

“We could get a camera,” Spike offered. “Take some up to date pictures. Maybe take Miss Edith’s too.”

Angelus looked up from his ‘marking’. “Yes, because helping the Watcher’s Council to kill us all is what we’re about now.”

“You’re the one who brought Wesley the Wonder Watcher here, gitface,” Spike snapped.

Angelus rose to his feet, all poised on the balls of his feet, showing off just because he wasn’t in a wheelchair, skipping across the room like the great poof he was to wave that essay under the Watcher’s nose. “Lots of mistakes. I couldn’t give you more than a ‘C’.” He shoved the boy onto his knees. “And show proper respect when you talk to your betters.”

The Watcher looked shocked; he was using some of his brain for fear, certainly, and that overpowering ‘it’s Angelus’ awe, but there was another part that looked confused and…miffed. “Mistakes…?”

“Lots.” Angelus brushed the essay across his mouth, pulling down his lower lip with the stiffness of the paper. “Can’t have that kind of sloppy work going unpunished. I think I’d better punish you.”

Drusilla clapped her hands together in glee. “Spanking!”

“I triple checked every date and place from at least three eyewitness accounts whenever possible,” the Watcher protested and Spike realized that Angelus had stung him by criticizing his essay’s factual content. He shook his head in disbelief. The stupid little git was about to get dragged off by Angelus, probably to have his fingers bitten off one by one before his entrails got pulled out through his eyesockets, and he was whining about Angelus marking down his dissertation.

“Do humans get stupider every generation?” Spike demanded of no one in particular.

Angelus beamed down at the Watcher who still didn’t seem to have realized that his mouth was on a level with the vampire’s crotch even as Angelus stroked a thumb across his mouth salaciously. “Oh, I hope so.” His fingers closed in the Watcher’s hair with casual cruelty and he yanked him to his feet in one smooth motion that made the human yelp with fear and pain.

And then Angelus was smacking him around, just for the fun of it, and Dru was clapping her hands. And the human did all the wrong things, which were all the right things to keep Angelus wanting to extend his about-to-become-very-unpleasant existence for as long as possible, flinching, cringing, bleeding, and then whimpering.

Spike gritted his teeth at the little snatched breaths, and those big shocked eyes because apparently no one had told Watcherboy in all his years of intensive training that vampires could be really mean sometimes, and would not only drink the blood of an infant from its crib, but hit you hard and often for using the English name for a German town when writing your essays about them.

“There. Is. No. ‘i’. In. Hameln. Dumpkopf!”

Watcherboy still didn’t get it, that Angelus was just getting himself turned on by the pleasant warm up of the sound of fist on flesh, too busy making those little whimpering noises that were absolutely the worst thing to do, because now he sounded like a frightened child or a frightened puppy, and if he’d read his reports on Angelus he would know exactly what Angelus liked to do to those things.

Spike looked at Angelus’s groin; not a difficult thing to spot with him wearing those leather pants; fuckin’ exhibitionist; and wheeled himself across the room to where the Watcher was currently cringing, putting up a hand to a cut across his cheek while Angelus doubled his belt and slapped it against the air, enjoying the sounds it made, and Drusilla danced around both of them, clapping her hands because the chaos was like fire to her, and the rising panic in the captive intoxicating as brandy. Brandy.

Spike rolled himself between the stupid little bleeder cringing on the floor and Angelus and said impatiently, “So, can I eat him now? Because you’re just wasting all that perfectly good blood.”

Drusilla giggled. “I told you, he’s not for eating. He’s for playing with. Isn’t he, Daddy?”

Angelus gave her a slow-burning smile and began to run a hand up her thigh; never more than a victim’s flinch away from a hard-on at the best of times and so currently horny as hell. “Sure he is.”

Dru pulled Angelus against her, eyes bright. “Dance with me. Spikey can’t now. Dance with me, Daddy....” And then she was pulling Angelus away, the glance she gave Spike as she did so, scarily sane, and Spike knew he had one shot at this. He pulled the handful of pills out of his pocket, the uppers and downers and the ones that had blurred the pain in his crushed back to dreams of poetry taking flight across rooftops whose chimneys spewed blood-coloured smoke. The ones Dru had stolen for him from the hospital that you should absolutely never combine with each other or alcohol especially not in these kinds of quantities. And then he had a hand across the Watcher’s mouth and was hissing, “Swallow, you stupid little tit” before he yanked out the whisky bottle from its place in his chair and said, “Open wide”, making it sound as dirty as possible.

Angelus looked around and, seeing Spike forcing the neck of the bottle into his prey’s mouth, said, “That better be all you’re planning on shoving down there. This one’s mine.”

“You always were greedy,” Spike retorted, rubbing the Watcher’s throat to make him swallow it, swallow it and keep it down, pills and whiskey, more whiskey, another gulp and another, and Spike’s eyes telling him to keep fuckin’ swallowing unless he wanted to end up another horror story they told little Watchers around the campfire on field trips. Watcherboy kept looking at him in wide-eyed confusion, even as he gulped, swallowed, choked, fought to keep it down and somehow managed it, gaze fixed on William the Bloody Idiot, who had just done something ridiculous for a reason he couldn’t have explained. Why this one? Why, out of all of them, try to make this one’s nightmare easier? What did he care what became of a stupid human with a stupid soul just because he was bookish and earnest and skinny and had taken one look at Drusilla and seen what Spike saw? And was he kind of asking and answering his own questions here?

“What are you doing anyway?” Angelus demanded.

Spike shrugged. “Thought you might want a liqueur after dinner, Your Wankership. You’re the one who taught me about spiking their blood with a nice shot of old scotch to get that burn when you bite ’em.”

“Marinate your own food,” Angelus retorted. And then he was touching Drusilla in places that made Spike want to drive a stake right into his dead heart and she was closing her eyes and whimpering with pleasure, and then Angelus shoved Dru away so she had to hold herself up with Spike’s shoulders, then he was snatching up the coughing Watcher by the hair and dragging him off to his bedroom.

“Miss Edith wanted to watch!” Drusilla protested.

Spike slid a hand up her thigh, still feeling the place where Angelus had touched her, still smelling him on her, that musty arousal that was now all the Watcher’s and good luck to him with that; and he slipped his fingers where Angelus’s had been and she whimpered with pleasure and he closed his eyes and licked her skin and tried not to hear the sounds from Angelus’s bedroom.

***

Wesley woke up drunk. Not just a little drunk; drunker than he had ever been in his life. He tried to focus on his fingers and they blurred at him, shimmering a little like a heat haze and when he tried to take in his surroundings he found that the walls were sliding around in a most unaccountable fashion. He blinked several times, but it didn’t help; there were pillows dissolving in front of him, metal struts merging and separating like ink blot art. Not just drunk then. He appeared to have consumed more alcohol than he had ever encountered in his life and a number of hallucinogenic drugs at the same time. Definitely not a Council party then. Was this how they behaved in Sunnydale?

A hand closed around his throat and pulled him a foot across the bed. Even through the candy-coloured cottonwool and disco mirrorballs in his mind he felt sure that staying a dead weight was definitely the best thing to do, and not struggling, definitely no struggling of any kind. Given how separated he felt from his body, and how slurred everything was, physically and mentally, it was much easier than he might have expected to just let it happen. He wasn’t entirely sure it was happening to him anyway, just to someone in his vicinity who might or might not be borrowing his body for the occasion.

“Morning, sweetheart.”

Wesley gazed into the brown eyes of the Scourge of Europe and thought – given their dependence on something as evanescent as mercury vapour – that the photographic processes from those days, were really extraordinarily accurate. “Angelus....” It came out as a sort of muffled squawk, not just to do with the very strong, very bruising fingers currently around his neck, but due to the soreness of his throat. He seemed to have done a lot of talking recently or – given his present company – screaming. He definitely remembered writing that people who met Angelus in the silence of dark alleyways tended to depart from him with the echoes of their own screams in their ears. Being frightened seemed like an appropriate response then. He needed to remember how to do that. Parts of his body, particularly his spine, made an ineffectual attempt to climb out from under his skin and run away, but it only led to a weird starfish-like lurch that did absolutely nothing to stop the vampire hauling him up against his cool hard chest.

Angelus smiled at him in a way that made Wesley think that he should probably scream again if he’d done any screaming before, but his throat was sore so he just opened his mouth and then closed it a few times.

Angelus was practically purring as he ran a hand through Wesley’s hair. “See, I bet you Watchers tell everyone I’m just a wham, bam, thank you, ma’am kind of guy, but I know how to snuggle.”

Wesley made another sound that came out not unlike ‘Urp!’

“They train you for that too?”

“Iggle?”

“Lying back and thinking of England?”

“Snurg, snigdurkle.”

“Are there any braincells I didn’t fry?” Angelus was unmistakably in a good mood. A hand that was probably not Wesley’s moved down a body that either was or wasn’t Wesley’s and touched him in a place that it probably shouldn’t be touching whoever it belonged to but which he couldn’t summon any strong feelings about one way or another at the moment. The wallpaper was sliding off the walls like blue jam from a spoon. If there was any blue jam, which he was no longer sure about. Wesley tried to look down but he couldn’t remember the movements. Like normal speech, coordination seemed to have deserted him.

“I didn’t even know Watchers could get their voices that high. Did you used to be a choirboy, Wes?”

“Can’t sing.” He was almost certain that was English. Or possibly Flemish. He had not liked Flemish as a class. It had taken place in a cold room on the northern side of the building and the radiators had definitely not been turned on as often as the fees charged by the academy would lead one to expect. He didn’t much care for Flemish art either. He preferred Renaissance. “Is this England?”

“No.” Angelus stroked a finger across his mouth and then slipped his thumb in between Wesley’s lips. “Suck it.”

Wesley had been going to say something else but finding that thumb in his mouth concentrated on gingerly sucking it. It seemed an odd thing to ask someone to do and he wondered if it was something Angelus found comforting. Angelus’s thumb was smooth, uncalloused, and tasted salty. He remembered no record of this behaviour in any of the Council records. They had seemed to suggest he preferred raping, torturing, maiming and murdering to having his digits sucked for comfort. He sucked Angelus’ thumb for some time while the wallpaper continued its surreptitious dissolution and the pillows rocked gently as a pendulum, and then sucked possibly a finger or possibly something else which tasted decidedly…odd. He listened to the sound of distant things ticking and banging, unsure if it was water in the pipes or possibly some machinery of some kind, while Angelus touched someone who might perhaps be him but could just as well be a third party to whom he had no recollection of being introduced. Angelus seemed extremely curious and thorough in his exploration and when Angelus touched them particularly hard or particularly deeply with things that were sharp or hot or long or thick, the person whose body it was definitely made sounds in a language that Wesley did not recognize. There were even flashes of…sensation. But they were so muffled he could not tell if they were meant to be good sensations or bad ones; they were just…feelings. Something buzzed like a trapped wasp for a while and something really tickled and he giggled a lot and tried to wriggle and Angelus laughed as if he was surprised about something. Then he had several bouts of feeling that he wanted to escape from something pressing at him, but on the whole his limbs were so heavy and so remote from him that he had no opinion one way or the other about the ways in which this body, which might or might not be his, was moved around and opened and closed and tied up and untied.

He sobered up enough at one point to find Angelus gazing at him with something that looked oddly like affection and saying, “I think I’ll keep you as a mascot. Send pictures back to the Council. What do you think, Wes?”

Pictures. He remembered a bisque doll with sad eyes and what would almost certainly be real hair. “Miss Edith?”

Angelus smiled and Wesley wondered if he was going to show him his fang face again. He had a feeling that the first time he’d seen it, he might have passed out, and it would be interesting to see it again. “Scrambled Watcher. Perfect. I love it when they break like glass. This is going to hurt. Describe it to me.”

Then there was that strange sensation again that was possibly happening to someone else or to him.

“Odd.”

Angelus beamed. “No one’s ever called it that before. Do you like pain, Wes?”

Wesley tried to remember. “I don’t think... Is this pain? What colours does it...? Too noisy to be....” He tried to remember how to form a sentence but it was too difficult.

Angelus bared his teeth in a smile of absolute satisfaction. “You may turn out to be even better than Dru. Do you remember what we did?”

“Did?”

“You and me. We did lots of things together last night. Things with ice cubes and body parts and things that take batteries. Remember?”

Wesley looked at the wallpaper which was now surreptitiously changing from blue to green. Or had it always been green? “Am I dead?” It occurred to him that he might be a vampire now, which would be terribly useful for writing those essays where you had to imagine what it might be like to be a soulless demon in a particular strategy situation in order to thwart yourself.

“Nope, still warm and sticky, Wes. The way I want you.” The fingers that were or were not Wesley’s touched the body parts that were or were not Wesley’s again, pinching and pulling in a way that made that third party shift uncomfortably or possibly pleasurably. If the wallpaper hadn’t been quite so fascinating, Wesley would have been able to give it more of his attention.

“I’m going to make you stickier now.”

It sounded like a threat but then he lost its echo and it could possibly have been a nice treat he was being offered. Wesley tried to think of sticky things but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t honey. He knew there were pink sticky things that stuck things to other things and that he absolutely wasn’t allowed to have, ever. “What do they call it?”

“This is going to hurt.”

Wesley wondered if Angelus was talking to him or someone else and then something happened that made one of the strange sensations turn up its volume until it was all over the room like white noise and he didn’t know if there was a radio playing much too loud or if there was possibly something hurting him. But then he remembered and said, “Chewing gum!” triumphantly.

Angelus said, “What?” as if Wesley had just told him that two and two absolutely never added up to four.

“Sticky....” Wesley offered.

The wallpaper had changed colour at least three more times before the thought occurred to him that something large and unpleasant being repeatedly thrust in and out of his body might also feel like that radio sounded, but as there seemed no reason for that to happen he concentrated on watching the edge of the pillow change almost imperceptibly from violet to lilac and back again. When it did it three times, he giggled again, and Angelus said something very bad in a language that probably wasn’t Flemish.

***

Spike told himself he was doing this because it was a way of thwarting Angelus. He had to tell himself that because he had no freakin’ clue why else he was doing it except perhaps because he’d started it and now it was a game and if he kept the Watcher alive and more or less intact, he won, but if Angelus made him scream and scream before ripping his throat out, Angelus won. Watcherboy was fucked either way, but Spike didn’t think that was important. He was a soulless serial killer not a soddin’ social worker.

Dru kept whispering nonsense in his ear. “We have to help him. Help him against Daddy so he can help Daddy later. And he can help us. Helps you. Miss Edith says so and although she’s very naughty she sometimes knows....”

So far, he had to say, he was definitely ahead on points. Angelus had done his whole cape flourishing mwahahahah crap and, as far as he could tell, Watcherboy had pretty much giggled his way through it. Spike knew how embarrassing it could be to do something spectacularly evil and not get a fitting reaction. Perhaps he’d overdone it a little on the painkillers, whisky, and happy tablets, but the effect had been pretty bloody funny. On the other side of the bedroom door Watcherboy had certainly made noises, some of them high and some of them loud and most of them quite surprised, but very emphatically not the kind of screaming that people made when they were dying an agonizing death. There had been some whimpering sort of sounds as well as the alto schoolboy line Watcherboy had briefly sung in response to something that made his voice climb higher than K2, and there had been that low rumble of sound from Angelus and some laughter and some very unexpected childish giggling from the Watcher. And this morning, Watcherboy was still alive and – this was the real surprise – intact. Not ‘intact’ as in virgo intacto, of course. If Spike’s ear for a creaking bedspring was still as finely tuned as before his accident, Watcherboy was about three fucks, a vibrator, and some serious fingering, away from being one of those now, but he still had both eyes, both ears, all his fingers, all his toes, two testicles, and each limb in its usual position.

One look at Angelus’s face as the vampire strode out of the bedroom told Spike that maybe those happy tablets had been working even better than he’d thought because Angelus looked in a reasonably good mood and already inclining back to his natural emotional state of smug wankerdom.

And it seemed that Watcherboy’s best defence, next to Spike and his whisky and pills diet, was Watcherboy himself. There was a kind of weird innocence about the scraggly little twerp that was so far carrying him through it. Angelus strode out, all leather trousers and recent orgasm and unbuttoned shirt, alpha male machismo up his bleedin’ wotsit, and Watcherboy toddled out after him, cut, bruised, black eye, fat lip, stinking of come, absently rubbing his bondage-bruised skinny little wrists, wearing a shirt, sort of, and some pants, sort of, barefoot and bed-haired, and…giggling.

Spike openly gawked at that because when warm-blooded breakable humans spent the night with Angelus they tended to come out of his bedroom the next morning one of two ways: dead or wishing they were. If Watcherboy had just been happy and giggly, Angelus would have taken him apart very slowly and with great thoroughness, of course, but he was unpredictably interesting with it. Staggering out unsteadily and looking up at the high ceilings of their ‘borrowed’ house with his mouth open in a groin-aching ‘O’. He turned around, saw Drusilla, and immediately lit up and staggered over to give her a hug as if she were his favourite sister, while she made little crooning noises as she tidied his hair as if he were an errant doll.

“Did you have fun with Daddy?” she asked him.

“Daddy?” He looked at her blankly. “They’re never fun, are they?” When he turned around and saw Angelus, smirking and poncing about, hair-gelled up the wazoo, he did a huge double-take and literally staggered back three paces before saying: “Angelus…!” with just the kind of breathless disbelief and awe that Angelus probably dreamed about while whacking off.

Angelus did his soft shoe shuffle towards him, all Scourge of Europe and pleather pants and Wesley kept on gazing open-mouthed before saying earnestly: “You killed lots of people.”

Angelus gave a supposedly modest shrug that probably didn’t even fool the cockroaches. Wesley began to cast about for something and when Angelus asked him what he was looking for, said over his shoulder: “A crucifix, because – you’re a vampire.”

Angelus glided in front of him. “Do you think I'm going to eat you?”

Wesley looked at him wide-eyed. “Yes, if you’re hungry, I’m sure you will. Would you happen to have a crucifix around here anywhere?”

Angelus was practically beaming at the befuddled boy and Spike just knew he was mentally congratulating himself on his most shining creation. “Not really a decorating choice I’ve ever embraced, Wes.”

“Oh.” Watcherboy cast about in confusion. “Holy water?” Angelus shook his head, still grinning. “What about a stake?”

Angelus produced something from inside his shirt that was stake-length but was made of pink plastic and had a very definitely rounded tip. As Spike rolled his eyes in disgust and Dru giggled behind her hand before waggling her finger at Angelus in mock reproach, Angelus held it out with a flourish. “Will this do?”

Wesley examined the object carefully and then solemnly shook his head. “It has to be made of wood and it needs to have a point on the end so you can….” He mimicked making a staking motion and was visibly distracted, moving his hand backwards and forwards before looking up at Angelus with a smile on his face. “It leaves trails. They’re so pretty....”

Spike figured that anyone with an ego even a notch less gargantuan than Angelus would have worked out that Wesley was pumped full of mind altering drugs at that point, but, no, the vampire was so convinced that he had successfully frightened the Watcher out of his wits that he just smiled indulgently. A smile which only got wider when Watcherboy said: “You were in all our books at school.”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Christ, he’ll be telling you he had your picture inside his locker next.”

Wesley turned around awkwardly as he tried to locate Spike, turning almost a hundred and eighty degrees to his right without success before spinning to his left and then stopping with a lurch. “No, because Angelus is bad,” he explained helpfully.

“You don’t say,” Spike returned, thinking how unbelievably annoying this would be if the scene was just happening, as opposed to him having engineered it. As things were though, he was actually having fun for the first time in a long time. The stakes were as low as they could possibly be. He didn’t give a damn if the Watcherboy lived or died, but it was like picking white or black on the chessboard; it didn’t matter which you chose, just that whatever you chose won. This was the same. He looked across at Angelus. “Are you going to kill the Watchersprog or do I have to do it?”

Wesley blinked at Spike with great concentration for a moment and then pointed at him triumphantly. “William the Bloody!”

Spike looked across at Angelus. “For the love of onion rings and chicken wings will you just off the little bugger already?”

“You tried to kill my father.” Wesley giggled suddenly. “Pity you didn’t try a bit harder.” He clamped a hand across his mouth. “I didn’t say that.” He looked across at Drusilla. “Did I?”

She waggled a finger at him. “Bad Wesley, said naughty things about his Daddy. My Daddy may have to spank you some more.”

“Are we going to eat him or what?” Spike demanded, hoping he had now made it abundantly clear that by keeping Watcherboy alive Angelus would be deeply irritating him.

“No eating the guests, William. Where are your manners?” Angelus purred, still watching Wesley in a manner that was halfway to doting. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t just snap his neck on a whim, of course, but so far, so kind of going to plan.

Drusilla nodded. “Tsk, tsk, William. Very bad. Mustn’t eat the guests or else they can’t come back again or bring us any presents.” She took Wesley’s hand and pulled him into the open space in the middle of the room. “Dance with me, Wesley. Dance a waltz with me. Can you hear the music?”

He listened intently and then shook his head at her solemnly. “No.”

“Then I must sing it for you.” She began to hum the ‘Blue Danube’, a tune Wesley evidently knew as he hummed it along with her, slightly less tunefully than Drusilla, and was waltzing with her soon as well as an inebriated and drug-addled ex-public schoolboy could waltz, which was pretty badly on the whole.

Angelus watched them, still practically purring to himself, and Spike rolled himself over to look up at him. “Are you going to eat him or turn him?”

“Neither.” Angelus kept watching Dru teaching Watcherboy how to waltz, a self-satisfied smile on his face because he had made them what they were, and what they were was crazy as hell and soon to be obedient to his every insane whim.

“Look, mate, family’s family, humans are food. Humans can’t be family.” Spike deliberately didn’t look at Angelus as he said it. Playing the old poof was always a dangerous game but the mood Angelus was in at the moment it might be enough for Spike to state that something was impossible for Angelus to embrace it.

“You can’t believe how warm he is,” Angelus said dreamily. “You can smell it on him – life; feel the blood pumping under his skin.... And I owe the Watcher more than a corpse or someone else he has to stake.”

Spike darted another glance at Drusilla. She looked happy, being twirled around the place by Watcherboy while she hummed Strauss and he tripped over his feet and looked up at the cavernous ceiling of their ‘borrowed’ home as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. If Angelus was planning to send another message to Giles, the previously tweedy and currently psycho Watcher, then Watcher Junior was going to need a lot more pills. Spike figured he had about four days supply and then reality was going to kick in and Angelus was going to lose his temper in a big way. “What are you planning?”

Angelus shrugged. “To have some fun....” And then he was slinking across the room to where Dru was trying to hold Watcherboy up while he made himself dizzy looking at the ceiling lights. He tapped Watcherboy on the shoulder. “Can I cut in?” The boy lurched around the wrong way, trying to see who was there, and Angelus casually grabbed him by the hair, said, “Go play with Uncle Spike” and threw Wesley at him.

Spike swore as the clumsy idiot fell across his knees before slithering to the ground. He shoved him off shortly, “Look where you’re falling, Watcherburger.”

“Can I have him as my own?” Dru pleaded with Angelus as he spun her out of a waltz and into a tango.

“This one’s mine, Dru,” Angelus purred at her as they tangoed across the room. “We can get you another one to play with seeing as Spike’s all broken and useless and can’t get it up for blood nor money.”

“I like this one. He’s pretty.”

Angelus glanced across at Watcherboy who was slowly moving into a sitting position, hindered by his fascination with Spike’s wheelchair. “Isn’t he though?” He raised his voice imperiously: “Feed him, Spike.”

“Are you taking the piss?” Spike demanded. “I don’t feed humans. I feed from them.”

“Just do it.” And there was that look from Angelus that still had the power to give him a bit of jolt; even though those days were long since gone when he was newly reborn and Angelus was this big bad scary showing him the ropes.

Muttering under his breath, Spike grabbed Watcherboy’s shirt and hauled him along behind his wheelchair to the place where he kept his stash of possessions. The boy sat where he was shoved, quite obediently, cross-legged and looking up at Spike in fascination.

“What?” Spike demanded.

“You changed your hair.” Watcherboy made vague hair-related motions with his finger; his own hair sticking up like a little kid’s as he did so.

“Some of us move with the times,” Spike returned.

Watcherboy frowned as he peered at him intently. “Isn’t that punk rock thing a bit…eighties?”

“This look is eternally cool and when I need advice on getting a make over from some tweedy brylcreemed little tosser like you I’ll let you know.” Spike shoved a bar of chocolate at him. “Eat this.” He felt the moment when Angelus’s attention was diverted by Dru and her wandering fingers; Angelus slipped his hands under her dress in response and Spike tried not to let it show how much it sickened him that anyone but him could touch her and she’d welcome it. There was a relationship between sire and child that no one else could understand, he knew that; it was part of why he loved her so completely; it was also unfortunately why she still loved Angelus.

Watcherboy was solemnly unwrapping his chocolate bar. “It’s not Cadbury’s,” he observed.

“It’s Hershey’s. You’re in America now, get used to it.”

Watcherboy sucked on his phallic chocolate bar in a way that was completely unselfconscious. Spike was momentarily distracted by the sight of his mouth working on the chocolate, that little lip lick as he tasted the chocolate curiously, and felt his groin twitch. Watcherboy continued to gaze up at him as if Spike was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. “Did you really kill two Slayers?”

It made a nice change to be looking down at someone after all those sitting at the bottom of a bloody well moments with Angelus he’d had to endure of late. Watcherboy was gazing up at him with absolutely no awareness of his ripped clothes, bruised skin, the smell of recent sex all over him, sucking away on that chocolate bar while inviting Spike to tell him about His Greatest Hits.

“Yeah.” Spike shifted a little uncomfortably. “One in the Boxer rebellion and one in the 70s.”

“Do you have a pen?”

Spike reached around on the debris of his table and then handed one over. “Here you go.”

“And some paper?”

Spike supplied it.

“Thank you.” Watcherboy looked up at him expectantly. “Can you tell me about killing the Slayers, please? It would be very useful for us to know about it.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Watcherboy frowned, looking between pen and paper and then back at Spike. “No, because we’re supposed to stop that happening, you see, and if we knew how you’d done it we might be able to in the future. Professor Graden always used to say that you could learn as much about military strategy from studying defeats as victories.”

“Go on, Spikey,” Angelus called across. “It is your only claim to fame. You may as well tell the one person on the planet who’d actually be impressed.” Then he was biting Drusilla’s neck and she was moaning and arching into the steady rhythm of his sucking and Spike was gripping the arm of his wheelchair so hard it almost splintered.

Under cover of telling Watcherboy about offing the Chinese bint in the Boxer rebellion, Spike sorted through his pills, trying to work out how few he could get away with. The painkillers were important as this boy was definitely too mind scrambled to reason right now; he only wasn’t going to struggle when Angelus was playing with him because it didn’t hurt so there was no reason for him not to stay relaxed, and given Angelus’s bedroom technique that meant a lot of painkillers. It was probably a huge novelty for Angelus to get to fuck a human who wasn’t screaming and bleeding all over the place while he was doing it. It had to be a very long time since he’d had sex with anyone who giggled because it ‘tickled’. He thought there was something deeply perverted about what Angelus was doing with the Watcher, all this snuggly-wuggly crap was just…sick. Raping and killing were honest in their way, but Angelus had always been twisted; Spike was just trying to anticipate his twists, for once, and so far it seemed to be working.

“Drink this.” He handed him the whisky bottle. Watcherboy made a face after the first sip and Spike glared at him, gripping his shoulder tightly. “Do as you’re told.”

Watcherboy gulped down the whisky, pulling a lot of faces as he did so, and then gasped, hissing: “We’re not allowed!”

Spike held him by the jaw and clamped the palm that contained the tablets across his mouth. “Swallow,” he ordered, turning into game face for emphasize. Watcherboy gazed into his yellow eyes, shocked, and obediently swallowed. Spike pushed the bottle back between his lips. “Now, drink.”

More grimacing, more swallowing, then reproachful blue eyes looking at him. “I’ll get a detention.”

“Not if you hand in this essay.” Spike changed back out of game face and tapped the piece of paper upon which Wesley had been scribbling. “You’ll get an ‘A’ for that.”

Watcherboy brightened and Spike kept telling him what had happened to those two Slayers while he diligently wrote it all down, although not in English, Spike noticed after a moment. “What language is that?”

“Code,” the Watcher explained. “Because what you’re telling me is top secret because it’s about Slayers and it can’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“Sweetheart....”

They both looked up to find Angelus smiling down at Watcherboy like a predator with a particularly tasty prey. “We are the wrong hands.”

Angelus casually yanked Spike’s wheelchair around and gave it a shove and then as Spike scrambled to spin his wheelchair back round to see what was going on, Angelus sank into a crouch in front of the big-eyed Watcher who looked up at him in the usual awe but with a hint of reproach. “William the Bloody was telling me about killing Slayers. He said I’d get an ‘A’.”

Angelus took the paper from the Watcher and looked at it. “Well, I doubt anything Spike tells you is going to be much use to anyone.” He crumpled the paper up and tossed it at Spike who could only grit his teeth as it bounced off his cheekbone. “You’ve got an essay to rewrite, remember?”

Watcherboy looked helplessly after his notes and then back at Angelus. “You gave me a ‘C’.”

Angelus grinned delightedly. “Well, I am a blood-sucking fiend.”

“But I’ve never got a ‘C’ before. A ‘B’ minus once but I had flu and there were special circumstances. I got an ‘A’ in the exam.” Watcherboy’s lower lip was practically quivering.

“Stop whining,” Angelus told him. “Rewrite it and maybe I’ll give you an ‘A’.”

Watcherboy brightened at that prospect, gazing up at Angelus with a lot more hope.

“Supposing I don’t decide to pull out your spine or skin you alive first,” Angelus shrugged.

Watcherboy looked up at him wide-eyed and Spike thought the chances of Angelus offing the human had probably just shrunk even more; no way was he going to give up the prospect of someone giving him the ‘but you’re really Angelus’ eyes fifteen times a day.

“I could rewrite it now,” Watcherboy offered meekly. “I can write very fast.”

It was Spike’s turn for his jaw to drop as Angelus reached out and ruffled the Watcher’s hair. “Good boy. Off you go.”

As Wesley scrambled off to the table where his folder on Angelus was still sitting, the vampire watched him go benevolently. “I’m thinking of adopting,” he announced.

“Still think you should eat him or turn him,” Spike muttered.

Angelus watched Watcherboy hunting around in his briefcase for pens and paper, then abruptly spun Spike’s wheelchair around, trying to make him dizzy, while Spike hung on grimly. When Angelus finally let it come to a stop, he grinned at Spike smugly. “You’re just jealous because you don’t have a pet human of your own to play with.”

“When I play with them they stay dead,” Spike retorted.

“But then how can they tell anyone what you did to them?” Angelus countered. As Dru slinked over to them, he wrapped his arms around her. “You like my pet, don’t you?”

“I love him.” She flexed her blood red fingernails. “So sweet and new. I bet he tastes like honey.”

Angelus stroked a finger across her mouth. “No tasting, Dru. He’s too breakable. We’re keeping this one whole. You look after him for me while I go and fetch us some supper. Don’t let mean old Spike eat his eyeballs. And I mean it about the no tasting.” He slipped a hand down her bodice and she giggled with pleasure. Spike closed his eyes and thought about Angelus burning alive, slowly if possible, before turning into a big pile of dust, the bastard.


Spike wasn’t sure what was the weirdest part about the rest of that day; the way Watcherboy could concentrate so diligently on his essay while in a vampire hideout or the way Angelus let him just get on with it. Even knowing the human was stuffed full of mind-altering drugs it still seemed pretty fucked up to him. Angelus went hunting and brought them a girl who was still warm; Spike and Dru drained her between them while Watcherboy cross-referenced like a…Watcher. He didn’t even notice her corpse arriving or leaving.

Angelus went hunting again and came back smelling of blood and satisfaction, the spattered death throes of a paramedic all over his shirt, and carrying a crate of refrigerated blood. Spike drank deeply and thought about how much he hated blood out of a bag, so different from a warm delicious meal that came directly from the vein, perfectly spiced with fear. But Dru clapped her hands and told Angelus how clever he was and insisted they had a picnic on the floor and that all her dolls should be invited.

Angelus wiped the blood from a pizza box with his sleeve, ordered Wesley to sit in the circle with them and tossed him the pizza. Watcherboy bemusedly examined the food and pronounced it cold and not the topping he liked best. Spike waited breathlessly for Angelus to snap the boy’s neck for insolence but Angelus only smiled indulgently and told him to eat up. Watcherboy managed one slice before his mind wandered but Spike guessed that was enough to keep him alive.

Then Angelus insisted they needed to do the laundry, reminding Spike of what a pernickety old poof he really was, always having to wash blood out of his shirts when everyone knew you just stole some more. “This is silk,” Angelus insisted when Spike pointed that out. He turned to the Watcherboy. “You know how to use a washing machine, don’t you?”

Watcherboy nodded and was sent off with an armful of clothes to do the washing. All the doors and windows were locked, so it wasn’t as if he could just leave, but Spike still thought Angelus was taking a risk. When he hadn’t come back after half an hour, Angelus strolled off to look for him and came back after about five minutes, leading him by the hand. “He was watching the clothes,” he explained, still indulgently.

“They went round and round,” Wesley explained.

Drusilla touched his nose with her fingertip. “I like that, too.”

“I like the red clothes best,” he added.

She beamed at him. “They’re mine.”

Angelus turned on him slowly while Spike waited for the inevitable mangling and screaming. “You put all the different colours in together?”

Watcherboy nodded. “Yes.”

Angelus hit him with casual brutality, smacking him into the nearest wall, and, as he crumpled and slid down it, turned to look at Spike and Drusilla. “You just can’t get the help these days.”

“He’s a fuckin’ loony tune,” Spike pointed out. “What do you expect?”

“He’s trainable.” Angelus reached out and grabbed the dazed Watcher by the collar and yanked him back to his feet, intoning clearly: “Wash. Dark. Colours. Separately.”

Spike said: “Does this mean you’ve got pink underwear now because if so I’m buying the little tit a drink.”

Wesley was feeling his aching face tentatively, looking at the blood from his bleeding mouth which was now on his sleeve in some confusion. He looked up at Angelus in shock. “You hit me.”

Angelus pointed at himself. “Scourge of Europe, remember?”

Watcherboy continued to give Angelus reproachful looks from under his girly eyelashes, a hint of a pout around his pretty mouth, but for some reason instead of ripping his throat out, Angelus just spun him around, patted him on the ass indulgently, gave him a shove, and told him to go and give Miss Edith some pizza.

While Angelus danced with Drusilla to some more of her mental mood music, Spike managed to shove a few more pills and a couple more gulps of whisky down the boy’s throat before Angelus hauled him off to show him some more of the games vampires could play in the bedroom. In a few minutes the Watcher was singing that alto line again and he shook his head in disbelief. Fifteen decades of raping and torturing and Angelus decided now was the time to introduce a guy to his prostate gland.

“Daddy likes new things.” Drusilla wrapped her arms around Spike’s neck and sat on his lap.

“Never thought he’d get bored with listening to people screaming.” Spike kissed her and marvelled at it all over again, how much he loved her, how she was everything to him; how he only existed because of her.

Drusilla put her head on one side to listen. “It’s almost like screaming.”

“I didn’t know a bloke’s voice could go that high.”

“He doesn’t understand.” Drusilla began to sway backwards and forwards on Spike’s lap. “Doesn’t know why things are feeling all warm and tingly in his tummy.”

“Don’t think it’s his tummy Angelus is exploring right now, pet.”

“He thinks it’s to do with the wallpaper. He thinks it’s funny.”

A giggle from the room confirmed the still scary accuracy of her fragmentary powers.

“Angelus doesn’t know why he thinks it’s funny. He doesn’t know whether to spank him for being a naughty boy for not screaming or make him laugh some more.”

Hysterical giggling from behind the door seemed to settle that one. Spike shook his head in disbelief. “Angelus is in there…tickling his little human pet?”

Drusilla beamed at him and confided in a whisper: “I can control him with my super mind powers.”

“If you say so, love.”

Drusilla kissed Spike tenderly and whispered in his ear. “I know he saves you. If he isn’t there to save you, they’ll stake you. We have to keep him alive, Spikey. Have to save him from Daddy.”

“Daddy’s going to eat him, pet,” Spike pointed out. “Sooner or later, it’s going to happen.”

“He loves Daddy. I see it.”

“Then Angelus must turn him.”

She shook her head. “Wants him warm, always. Wants to keep him breakable. Daddy loves him. But only if Daddy doesn’t eat him first.”

Spike tried to make sense of what she was telling him. He could understand the snugglefest she was seeing taking place if Angelus turned the Watcher into his youngest child, and if it stopped Angelus putting his hands all over his Dru because he was playing with the new boy instead Spike had no problem with that. But, however addled the Watcher’s mind was from a combination of shock, drugs, and booze, he couldn’t see him falling in love with the Scourge of Europe while still in possession of a soul.

Dru’s eyes widened. “Daddy’s going to kill him very soon. But then he won’t be there to save you, just a stain on the floor and all quiet and you taken from me.” She gripped his shoulders. “Can’t lose you, Spike. You’re mine. They said I could have something of my own.”

“You’ve got me and I’m not going anywhere,” Spike insisted.

“Going straight to hell if we can’t save the boy from Daddy.”

He gazed into her eyes and saw that disconcerting sanity that occasionally peeked out from behind the madness. She was probably right. She never saw the whole picture and she couldn’t always explain what she saw but she certainly had the Sight. Not for the first time he had a terrible pang for the way things had been, when they were a family, Darla and Angelus the psychotic parents, and he and Dru the crazy happy children. They had ripped their way through Europe, dancing from massacre to slaughter, the air thick with blood and screaming; and life had been one long beautiful party. Everything ruined by Angelus and his abandonment of them.

“Wish the old wanker would just fuck off again,” Spike muttered.

Drusilla gave him a look of reproach, resting her forehead against his. “You’re a bad grandchild.”

“Love you, pet, not him. Always love you.” He closed his eyes as he felt the chill perfection of his skin against his.

“We have to save the little Watcher,” she whispered tenderly in his ear.

“Kept him alive this long, haven’t we?”

“Need to give him back before Daddy breaks him.”

“Give him back?” He imagined trying to send a Watcher via parcel post to England. “Where?”

“Give him back to the other one like him. The handsome one with all the books.”

Spike looked at her in disbelief. “You think the Slayer’s poncy Watcher is handsome?”

“Eyes like emeralds, he has. Ever so handsome.”

“Remind me to kill him next time I see him,” Spike protested, aggrieved.

“The boy’s handsome too. He has brown eyes like Daddy. Did a naughty spell to make me want him. Still do....” She licked her lips, swaying again, and Spike could feel how aroused she was; he hoped it was sitting on his lap making her horny and not thoughts of Xander Harris, Rupert the Librarian, or freaking Angelus.

“I’m handsome,” Spike reminded her.

She kissed him hard and then bit him harder, sucking the blood from his neck and then he didn’t care who Angelus killed or when or how as long as he didn’t interrupt them.

***

Buffy knew that Giles hadn’t slept. The signs were easy enough to recognize because she hadn’t slept either. Giles was, if the truth were told, pretty much a basketcase. After Jenny’s death he had gone brittle and angry and his eyes had looked old, almost overnight, and she’d realized how young he had looked before, but this had crushed him, as if he had no fight left to deal with this, just this frantic searching which was the only thing stopping him from collapsing. She was almost afraid to find Wesley’s body, even though at least then the horror of thinking of him being tortured all the time would be over and they would know the worst. But she was afraid the only thing keeping Giles going at the moment was the search and when that ended there would be…nothing. Because it was their fault. There was nothing she could say to console him when Giles murmured the words she was also always thinking. They had sent Wesley out to wait for them because he was too shiny and new and enthusiastic and untouched and they had lost people they loved and they weren’t in the mood for innocence. And he had paid the price they had wished on him. They had wanted him to know what it was like to live on a Hellmouth and to look into the place where the soulless kept their hunger and thanks to them he had found out.

They were both sure it was Angelus, even though he hadn’t sent them a note yet, or a finger, or an artfully arranged corpse, it was just so much the kind of thing he would do.

Several times a day they told each other that of course the world didn’t revolve around Angelus. There were plenty of other vampires in Sunnydale. When they weren’t doing that Willow or Xander were doing it for them. Oz hadn’t wasted breath on pointless statements like that, he was just with Willow all the time, every minute when she wasn’t actually in her house to which Angel’s invitation had been revoked and she was therefore technically safe. He was watchful and quiet, as always, but also edgy, all of them edgy as they waited for what felt like an agonisingly slow countdown to reach zero. Zero was when they found Wesley and knew there was no more hope because he was now a corpse or a vampire or technically both.

Every time Buffy closed her eyes she saw the new assistant Watcher standing in the doorway trying to get up the courage to speak to them, all new and shiny and hoping they’d like him. Then she would flinch and open her eyes and see that look on Giles’s face and know he was thinking exactly the same thing.

They had been all over the factory, searching for hidden cellars, secret passageways, anywhere in that burning ruin where vampires might be hiding out. Then they had started searching other warehouses and factories, night and day, realizing as they did so just how big Sunnydale was and how small one person became, even a person six feet tall, when you were trying to find him and the person who had taken him didn’t want him to be found.

They had been searching all day again today. Cordelia had joined them. She had said something a few days before about letting Buffy clear up her own messes for a change and then yesterday she had walked into the library and found Buffy crying and Willow trying to comfort her and she had looked as shocked as if someone had slapped her, and when they had geared up for another search she had been waiting for them in the corridor saying she didn’t have anything better to do anyway and she would be on Xander’s team.

Then when it got dark they had gone to Giles’ place so they could do the usual phone around of lying to everyone’s parents about where they were spending the evening. Cordelia had just suggested that maybe if Oz sniffed some of Wesley’s clothes from his suitcase he could track him that way and Xander had looked aghast and Buffy had murmured that sometimes Cordelia amazed even her and Oz had said simply that his super werewolf tracking powers actually only worked for Willow, and then he and Willow had kissed pretty sappily and Buffy had thought about Angel and it had been all she could do not to start crying again.

Giles had just said very tautly: “Shall we get on?” when there was the thumping on the door they had all subconsciously been waiting for.

Buffy dug her fingernails into her palms and looked across at Giles. It felt like the end of hope and the only question was if there was going to be a whole body out there or…parts. She wondered dully if there was going to be videotape; Angelus embracing the technology of the modern era as he let her and Giles know just how very long it had taken the new arrival to die.

Giles picked up a stake and no one said anything as he went to the door. Willow opened her mouth to say something which Buffy was sure would have been about being careful but then closed it again as Giles yanked open the door. Buffy looked at him, just at him, at his hair, and the ear piece of his glasses, and his reflection in the mirror that was right by the door, so she could learn the truth filtered through his reaction to it. So she saw him look and flinch and knew Wesley was outside the door and then saw Giles frown and step forward and Oz say: “It could be a trap.”

Xander said breathlessly, “In the war they rigged up boobytraps in people.”

But Giles had already stepped outside and Buffy was running after him, which was when she saw Wesley, who was slumped in a wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, with his briefcase and a carrier bag hung from the top of it. The carrier bag said ‘Sunnydale Pizzas. We deliver to your door.’ She remembered a pizza delivery boy had gone missing again. They often went missing. It was one of the many high risk jobs in Sunnydale that didn’t pay danger money. She was afraid to look at Wesley in case he was dead.

Giles said: “He’s breathing.”

“Not dead,” Willow gasped. “He’s not dead.”

“Or undead,” Xander held the door open wider.

Buffy just watched as Giles grabbed the wheelchair and wheeled Wesley into the house and then Buffy was closing the door and putting across every lock and every bolt even though it wasn’t necessary because no vampire could cross the threshold without an invitation anyway, but perhaps it was as much about keeping Wesley in so he couldn’t just wander off and get himself caught again. She realized she was very angry with him about that now that he was back and alive and please God whole and she would tell him never ever ever to do that again if he was still capable of comprehending human speech; right after she had hugged him and gone down on her knees and given thanks that she didn’t have someone else’s blood on her hands.

Cordelia tactlessly said to Oz: “So, is he bleeding?”

And Buffy didn’t even protest, just looked at Oz too and he said, “Not really.” And she gasped with relief.

She stumbled after them to find Giles crouched down by the man in the wheelchair, gently turning his head to the light and she saw the bruise on his jaw that explained why he was unconscious. Xander switched on all the lights in the living room so they could see him better and Buffy saw there were a lot of bruises on his forehead and cheekbones and that livid one on his jaw, and a few cuts, and, when Xander breathlessly checked, he had bruises all round his wrists but he had all of his fingers, every single one.

Giles seemed to be thinking the same way, tilting his head back and lifting his eyelids very carefully and then feeling his neck before darting a quick look at her. “He appears to be…unconscious, presumably from a blow.” He touched his jaw gently. “This looks the most recent and would certainly be enough to lay anyone out.”

“So we take him to the hospital, right?” Xander was already picking up the phone. “Get him checked out?”

“It’s a public building,” Buffy said at once. “Vampires can enter hospitals. Angelus can....”

Giles grimaced. “Let’s check if he really needs medical attention....”

Xander said, “Giles, I think we all know he didn’t just take off for a few days because he had a hot date. If he’s been partying with vampires then the chances are that he needs to be in a hospital. We can always keep guard outside his room.”

Giles pulled back the blanket wrapped around Wesley and then hastily folded it back again.

“What is it?” Buffy sprang forward. “They cut out his heart, didn’t they? Or....” She had a sudden horrible thought about what they might have cut off. She could imagine Angelus doing that and then keeping the victim alive afterwards so he had to go through life maimed and no longer entirely a man. “Oh god, Angelus didn’t cut off....”

“No, he’s quite…intact. He’s just not…wearing anything,” Giles said awkwardly.

“Oh.” She took a step back. “That’s.... So, what do we…?”

Giles turned to Xander. “I think perhaps you and I had better see if we can get him into bed and take a look at him. I can call a doctor to attend to him here if it appears to be necessary.”

“I still think we should take him to the hospital but if you, as an uptight British guy, would rather manhandle a naked colleague than risk him being snatched by Angelus again, I bow to your superior paranoia.”

“I’ll help.” Oz stepped forward, too, and then Buffy had to watch as Wesley was wheeled into the little study room next to the sitting room that Giles had made into a guest room for Wesley with such an ill grace all those lifetimes ago. She imagined the three of them awkwardly lifting Wesley onto the bed and covering him up with Giles’s second-best duvet, and then realized they wouldn’t just do that. They would be checking for injuries while Wesley was unconscious and couldn’t get embarrassed and there were no girls looking on, because when it came to naked Watchers she was apparently not the Slayer any more, but just someone of the gender that didn’t get to look at them. And she was grateful to them for that; for letting her be the girl here for a moment because if Angelus had carved or burned his initials on Wesley somewhere she didn’t want to see it.

“We should make tea,” Willow said. “Giles will need tea and Wesley, if – when – he wakes up, he’ll need tea too.”

“They must have done something to him,” Cordelia said thoughtfully. “Probably something…fiendish that doesn’t leave marks. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in taking him and then giving him back, so....” She noticed Buffy and Willow’s expressions and said: “What? You must have been thinking it too.”

“Maybe they gave him back because they…had a change of heart....” Willow swallowed. “Maybe they…were going somewhere else and they didn’t have room for him in their Demonmobile.”

There was an awkward silence as Cordelia looked between them and then said: “Yeah, sure, that works.” What made it worse was that she wasn’t being sarcastic but just trying to make them feel better.

They made tea and then sat there and watched it cool and Cordelia ate some cookies and when Buffy looked at her, said “What?” and then Willow sipped her tea nervously and finally the door opened and Giles, Xander and Oz came out looking grim but not so grim that Wesley was going to die in five minutes or anything and Buffy rose to her feet and said, “Well?”

Xander, Giles and Oz all failed to make any kind of eye contact with one another and then Giles took off his glasses to say: “Well, he seems to be unconscious from a blow to the jaw as we surmised, but he doesn’t appear to have any life-threatening injuries, just some cuts and bruises. He seems to have been tied up – he has bruising on his wrists – and he’s certainly a little dehydrated but there are no bites and I think he’s going to be okay – physically, that is.”

“What about mentally?” Buffy demanded.

“Too early to say,” Giles admitted. “He may been subjected to some kind of spell or curse. I think it’s a case of waiting until he wakes up and then…seeing how he is.”

“So he could be completely whacko then?” Cordelia enquired. As everyone looked at her, she said: “What? Just because none of you have the guts to say it doesn’t mean you’re not all thinking it. Why would the vampires give him back unless they were done with him and why would they be done with him unless they’d drunk all his blood – which they haven’t, or killed him – which they haven’t, or done something to him so horrible that they want us to work out what it is?”

“Or another reason that we can’t think of at the moment,” Willow retorted fiercely, looking at Buffy with anxious eyes.

“Why don’t you all go home and get some sleep?” Giles suggested. “I can take care of Wesley tonight and you can come around tomorrow and see how he is.”

Buffy made to protest but Giles gave her a gentle look. “This may not be over but either way he’s here, he’s safe, he’s alive, and there’s really nothing more you can do for him tonight. With Angelus out there, we all need to be as alert as possible and you, as the Slayer, need to be more alert than any of us, so, Buffy, as your Watcher, I am asking you to please get a good night’s sleep.” Giles’s eyes looked tired but kind and she could see relief in them as well as sadness that wasn’t all about Jenny. She wondered how he could do that, warm and chill her in the same moment.

She nodded. “Okay. Call if you need anything. Guys, let me walk you to your car, just in case....”

No one needed to hear the ‘A’ word to know what that ‘just in case’ referred to. As they walked outside, she took Xander’s sleeve and said, “Tell me. Please, Xander, please. I need to know.”

Xander looked at her sideways and said: “Buff, he looks okay. He’s got a lot of bruises and a few cuts and welts. He’s been smacked around a little. Apart from that he seems…intact, just like Giles said.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” She could see it in his face and it was in Oz too. The way Xander and Oz weren’t looking at each other, hadn’t looked at each other, she now realized, as they came out of that little room; Giles hadn’t either, they’d all been very careful not to make any kind of eye contact.

“If there was,” Xander also said that very quietly and very carefully, “there would probably be a good reason for it that had nothing to do with you and everything to do with Wesley being entitled to some privacy.” He met her eye then and added: “Don’t you think that when a guy gets delivered to the doorstep of people he barely even knows wearing nothing but a blanket and some bruises that he has an extra need for privacy?”

She stepped back because there was something very…grown up about Xander right now, and he had his fist clenched in that way he did when he was shocked and angry and trying not to show it anywhere else. She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

He nodded back. “Okay then. See you back here tomorrow at ten a.m. and fingers crossed Wesley is awake by then and can tell us what…we’re up against.”

They said their goodbyes and Buffy went home feeling mostly relieved. Almost entirely relieved, in fact, and thinking about how she might actually be able to sleep tonight because, whatever else he was, Wesley was alive, and had all his limbs and fingers and toes and internal organs and skin and both eyes and ears and his tongue, at least she assumed Giles had checked that he still had his tongue. She explained to her mother that they’d decided against studying at Willow’s in the end because they were just so tired and she was just going to turn in. But as soon as she was in her room she snatched up the phone and called Giles who said wearily: “Buffy, he’s still unconscious” before she’d even opened her mouth.

For once she didn’t care about being predictable. “Did you check to see if he still has a tongue?”

Giles paused only for a moment before saying: “Yes, actually, and he does.”

“I just thought… Angelus likes to....”

“Try to get some sleep, Buffy. Wesley’s alive and in – ”

“One piece. I know. I’ve been telling myself that and I just wish I could stop wondering why he’s in one piece. It’s like I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I know. But you still need your sleep.”

“What about you?” she asked gently. “Don’t you need your sleep?”

“I – um – I think I need to sit up with Wesley for a while....”

He sounded so close to tears that she felt them spring into her own eyes, thinking of Jenny and Angel, Angel, Angel, who was gone now, and she wasn’t allowed to mourn when it was his face and his hands and his body and oh god, his body, that was why Giles and Xander and Oz had looked like that, so sad and so angry and so shocked, and why Xander had just grown up in front of her, because Wesley was older than them and it could have been them, so easily, but it had been Wesley and he was going to have to live with it when he woke up. Giles, of course, was living with it right now.

“Giles, it wasn’t your fault,” Buffy gasped out. “Anything that was…done to Wesley by – by Angelus, it wasn’t your fault.”

“I think it was my fault, Buffy, a little.” Giles sounded sad and regretful; a sigh in his voice. “And there’s absolutely nothing I can do to undo what I did to contribute towards Wesley being captured but I can take care of him now he’s free again and I intend to do that.”

“Try to get some sleep,” she whispered.

“Soon,” he promised, but she knew he meant not that night, because that night he was going to watch over Wesley and probably tell him how sorry he was.

“I’m sorry too,” she breathed.

“He wasn’t your responsibility. He was mine,” Giles told her gently. “I’m just grateful he’s still alive. Now do try to sleep and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She put down the phone after saying her muted ‘Goodnight’ and then laid her head on the pillow, looking at the open window and thinking about Angel appearing right there and her being unkind to him and telling him he’d disturbed a really good dream, even though it was a nightmare. “I’m sorry....” she whispered and she couldn’t have said herself if she was apologising to Angel for her part in turning him into Angelus or apologising to Wesley for what Angelus had done to him. She just knew she was more sorry than she could ever say.

***