How To Kill Your Boyfriend In One Hard Lesson Chapter 10, an angel fanfic

Disclaimer: Don't own, etc., etc. Joss Whedon rules supreme and retains pretty much everything. Only written for personal enjoyment and because this plot bunny just wouldn't die, even after some serious staking…

Summary: Occurs after Brother, Unfortunately Mine. Rating 18 for sexual references. The sibling theme is not entirely played out …

HOW TO KILL YOUR (PSYCHO) BOYFRIEND IN ONE HARD LESSON

Chapter 10 – Love Shack

Fred sniggered as Wesley fumbled with the very expensive tumbler lock on his apartment door, a very un-proper curse escaping his lips until he caught it. Pushing open his door, he snagged her wrist and pulled her inside. Fred back-heeled the door shut with authority so that the lock engaged automatically then pressed herself back against the solid wood as Wesley moved in close. She wound her arms around his neck and returned his passionate kiss, smiling inside as she felt his hands slide her dress up, up…

Wesley paused as his fingers caressed cool silk at the top of her warm outer thighs. "You said you weren't wearing underwear."

Fred tugged gently at one earlobe with her teeth. "I lied."

Wesley's fingers tightened and the destroyed silk thong fluttered unnoticed to the floor. Fred deftly unbuckled his belt and drew down his pants' zipper until she freed his straining arousal from his briefs. "Now." She ordered.

Wesley cupped her buttocks, raising her up slightly as she parted her legs so he could ease inside her before gently lowering her back down onto his fully swollen organ. He pressed kisses to her throat and jaw but they were both too excited to last long and he came a few seconds after she did. Breathing heavily he gently slid from her slick heat before nuzzling her neck. "You're a very naughty girl."

"You bet." She kissed him again. It had really turned her on, knowing the effect her words had had on Wesley, making him wait all day. "Besides, we deserve it. We found Dawn's nasty, so yay us!"

Laughing he finally stood back and pinched her backside. "Open the wine, you fiend, then shoo!"

While Fred took care of the wine, Wesley expertly threw together a pasta salad with the speed of someone used to living alone. It was ironic, Fred cooked up all sorts of weird stuff in her lab, and she adored food – she could eat three times her own bodyweight in one sitting – but cooking was as much a mystery to her as Huckstadter's Fractal Geometry & Twelve-Dimensional Space was to Harmony. Pick the culinary cliché of your choice – burn water, etc., - that was Winifred Burkle.

They ate dinner and settled on the couch with the rest of the wine, their conversation inevitably turning to Dawn Summers and by extension, the Scooby Gang.

"I'd like to meet an actual Slayer." Fred admitted. "A reasonably sane one," she amended with a frown, thinking of Dana, and that scary Faith, the Vampire Slayer.

Acutely aware that Fred still retained Angel's false implanted memories, and therefore her memory of meeting Faith was fuzzy (because when the Dark Slayer had come to the hotel to help them recapture Angelus so Willow could re-ensoul him back to being Angel, Faith had had quite a lot of interaction with Connor, who of course had been airbrushed from the picture), Wesley quickly picked up the conversational thread. "Buffy Summers is an extraordinary woman. She didn't just break the Slayer mould, she smashed it and then jumped up and down on the pieces."

"From what I've read of the so-called Slayer Tradition, I don't blame her." Fred scowled. "No offence, Wesley, but I'm reading those web Watcher Diaries like everyone else – in more dimensions than you'd think - and the Slayer's existence was beyond bleak. She had no family; no friend; no lover. She lived and died alone except for her Watcher, who usually did nothing but stand there and tut-tut when she was finally killed."

"Yes, it was wrong. That's why I'm fully behind what Buffy and Giles are trying to do. I was assigned as Faith's Watcher fresh out of the Academy and made a complete balls-up of it. I was greener than Lorne and completely at sea. Giles said I was a blithering idiot and he was right. Faith was in terrible emotional pain, but all I did was spout pompous lectures about the very same 'hallowed' Watcher traditions that helped give each Slayer a life expectancy lower than that of a severely depressed lemming." Wesley told Fred very firmly.

The last thing he wanted was for Fred to find out how Faith had tortured him after fleeing Sunnydale upon awaking from her coma, and if Fred did, he wanted it clear that he largely had only himself to blame, which might enable him to talk down Illyria if the warrior-demon took issue. Although…Wesley was under no illusions, Faith would have tortured him to death if Angel hadn't…which brought another issue to mind. Angel was still clearly in a huff about the fact that Spike fed directly from Wesley while Angel had his daily mugs, supposedly from the flask in the kitchen that Fred's tests determined was still being doped with Luaric.

Of course he had fed Angel after he rescued Angel from the ocean, but that had been from his arm, not his neck; Angel had never broached the subject of that event since the dark vampire didn't know with absolute certainty exactly which memories his friends retained unaltered and what had been changed or erased altogether, because of course, yet again, Connor had been responsible for Angel being in the ocean. Regardless, Wesley would have to sort the current situation out with Angel soon, because the vampire could romp home with Olympic Gold in Brooding for America -

"You did your best." Fred soothed, then reluctantly placed her empty glass on the table. "I'd better go. The traffic on Belmont's a bitch at this time. I should invent a car that flies, like Marty McFly's DeLorean, right over their heads."

"You should just move in."

The words bypassed Wesley's internal censor and passed his lips before he had chance to realise he'd actually said them aloud. Beside him Fred went very still and Wesley swallowed as his throat suddenly turned drier than the Sahara.

"From tonight?" Fred asked brightly after a heartbeat.

"Yes. W-Whenever you want to." Wesley instantly responded, trying to sound as if he wasn't begging.

"What about the times that Illyria emerges?" Fred asked, very softly.

"Two sex-maniacs for the price of one," Wes joked feebly, "I'm a man; you think I'm about to complain?"

She punched his arm. "You wish. In that case, I bags the rest of this wine, you clean up these plates, sex-slave."

Jumping up, Wesley adopted a grossly hunch-backed posture like Bela Lugosi in a bad 1950s Hammer House of Horror movie, lisping, "Yeth, mithtreth. Ath you command." Taking the plates back into the kitchen, he was able to release the huge, happy smile he couldn't contain, aware that Fred had deliberately given them both space to regain their composure.

What had just happened was far from a minor decision for Fred to make. Wesley had no conflict – he would abide by whatever Fred wished, but she was a prisoner in her own body, subject to the vagaries and whims of Illyria. He knew her greatest fear was that Illyria would seriously injure or kill him, because Fred knew that while ever the demon was in Fred's body, Wesley would never fight back – he had, did and would allow the demon to subjugate his body in whatever way it chose. Since that first night, Illyria was gradually becoming more sexually adventurous and sometimes had left Wesley with faint bruises or scratches that really were nothing to him – he'd had worse; even Lilah had hurt him more. But Fred looked at each bruise with an ocean of guilt brimming in her eyes even though he reassured her they were nothing more than any enthusiastic couple might inadvertently inflict upon each other.

Illyria wasn't the problem as long as he ensured it remained ignorant of him feeding Spike and Angel – keeping Fred clear of the Scroll of Niamh was the real trick. It was too valuable, and fragile, for him to move to Cordy's place, even assuming the Groosalug didn't use it as a tablemat or some similar innocent goof. He needed it ready to hand, because Wesley didn't intend to ever be caught out again.

He had ignored a holed section where considerable text had been lost, leaving a tear in the scroll, the only few words left being, cryptically, 'ancient sovereign' 'chosen vessel' and 'the rebirth'. Wesley would have bet his soul that the missing section had detailed how an ancient Warrior Demon named Illyria would resurrect itself in the body of the 'Mahju's Queen', and in doing so, kill her. If it weren't for that fact that even Fred's neurons were way smarter than anyone else's on the planet, she would have been truly dead.

Fred lacked the in-depth mystical knowledge Wesley had, but it wasn't that great a leap from Mrs Einstein to Willow-ville. She certainly knew enough to figure out what the Scroll of Niamh was and there was too great a chance that it would tear apart both Team Angel and the Scooby Gang. Most prophecies were reassuringly cryptic and vague, whereas the Niamh read like a Watcher's Diary – and unfortunately with about the same amount of subtlety.

Wesley turned back to where Fred was looking at him from the couch, such a look of love in her eyes that for a moment he could barely breathe. Smiling back, without hesitation he let her take his heart from his chest in one hand, and clasp his soul with the other. He walked back to the couch. The first precaution he would take would be to tear off the portion of the scroll that dealt with the Mahju's eventual suicide.

Continued in Chapter 11…