Shadowed Souls Part 1

by The Cat's Whiskers

Next in The Blood Will Tell Series. In every generation there is the Chosen One. Until Buffy Summers turned the Slayers into a franchise. And did we really expect Evil to simply shrug its shoulders and say, 'Oh well, it was nice while it lasted?

2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Please see Part 1 – Chapter 1

SHADOWED SOULS

Chapter 2

Angel moved over to the long inner wall of the apartment, where the door was, intending to clean up some of the disarray left by Lorne, Gunn and Gru in their search for the curtains. Inside his head, Angel admitted that he was feeling a distinct disquiet over this place that went beyond the initial shock of seeing it decked out like some medieval armoury set piece from a Conan the Barbarian movie. He could see the edges of the wide, cream-coloured vertical blinds poking out from under the hems of the blackout curtains – the Blitz had taught the Brits how to really not let in light. The waxed parquetry floor was constructed from real hardwoods and covered with genuine Chinese and Persian rugs, while the assorted dressers, side-tables and occasional tables were constructed of real wood carved in an attractive Spanish Moor style.

However, all these things, including the kitchen table with it's four chairs and the chrome kitchen décor had an impersonal air about them, and Angel recalled that they had already been in situ when he and the others had helped Wesley move in, which had been the easiest of the house moves. When their new Wolfram & Hart salaries had enabled the gang to move up the property ladder to 'executive condominium' land (except Angel who of course had the Wolfram & Hart penthouse within their office building), Angel had been surprised to discover that Lorne had the most stuff to move, though of course the anagogic demon made a valid point about how hard it was to find furniture that didn't clash with bright green skin, so when he'd got some he'd kept hold of it. They had all helped each other move into their new places, including Angel, since everyone had considerately located a building with good sewer access, but with Wesley they had all just had to bring one large box each and dump it inside the apartment, job done.

Incongruously atop one side-table was a large, brightly floral vase holding silk chrysanthemums that Angel remembered had been a present to Fred from her late grandmother; idly as he replaced some books more tidily on the shelves Angel wondered if Fred had sub-let her own more modest apartment now that she had moved in with Wesley? The point was that all the 'personal personal' touches were Fred's. The apartment was far from barren, almost every shelf and table-top had a variety of knick-knacks, but apart from the androgynous Art Nouveau ornaments that had come with the apartment furniture, everything else was in some way 'work-related'; for instance in this not-properly-closed drawer there was a plastic bag like forensic scientists had, in which resided a blood-stained handkerchief and some sort of lab report, all of which practically screamed mystical workaholic.

That is, mystical, with a capital 'M', Angel realised. Urns; vases; trinkets; those old apothecary shop bottles made of thick clear and green glass that were, in this case, authentic and not tourist-knock-offs; little Chinese secret compartment boxes; framed parchment scripts and maps on the walls…even the things that Angel didn't recognise enough to accurately name still produced a sort of indescribable mystical vibe that those who knew what to look for could see as clearly as a Las Vegas casino billboard. Angel had discovered that even the antique metal knight's helmet, currently resting on a bookshelf, which Lilah had bought for Wesley, was steeped in mystical history – it had been worn by a great Champion of Light knight during the Crusades, who had wiped out entire battalions of demons wholesale.

Angel scowled unhappily. He hadn't even realised that he was going to buy the Hyperion until he found himself writing out a huge cheque. He had only started renovating and refurbishing it – until Spike co-opted it – as a weak way to justify the purchase, but had been amazed at how much satisfaction it gave him to look at a wall he'd just wallpapered; it was an escape, something he could do and do well without worrying about Good versus Evil, Light and Dark, Champions and fighting to the death and all the other crap that his unlife consisted of the other twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes of the day.

From the looks of this apartment Wesley left work to come to work, and Angel was not happy with how little he knew about his best friend's private life, though of course maybe that was the point…private. But when you were part of Team Angel, privacy, the synonym of which tended to be 'secrets', wasn't really an option. During the time he'd been part of the Sunnydale Scooby Gang himself, Angel had witnessed first hand how one person keeping bits of him or herself back from the others had, bluntly, put the lives of everyone else at risk.

The whole mess with Connor being a case in point; it still niggled at Angel that he and Wesley had never 'officially' reconciled. Wesley had fished him out of the ocean, fed him with his own blood and then simply walked out on Angel Investigations, though the ex-Watcher continued to drop everything and come through whenever the A.I. gang called. Though Angel was down in the hotel basement when Lorne and the gang were preparing to try Lorne's memory-restorative spell, he had overheard every word of Wesley and Gunn's confrontation in his office, including Wesley's final, simple, "'I had my throat cut, and all my friends abandoned me.'"

Wesley had got the sequence of events slightly wrong – in a way, he'd been abandoned first. The former Watcher had desperately searched for weeks to find a way to circumvent the Niiahzian Scroll Prophecy that the 'father would kill the son'; during that time they had all witnessed Wesley begin to look like hell and lose weight with black bags the size of suitcases under his eyes, but not one of them, including Angel himself, had even bothered to take the Englishman by the scruff of the neck, frogmarch him to the nearest comfy chair and demand that he get a bad case of verbal diarrhoea now, which would have saved a lot of trouble.

Angel knew he had acted badly in the situation, especially when his rage for revenge had led to him trying to suffocate Wesley in hospital, proving that I let Lorne's very sound advice go in one ear and out the other, he acknowledged. Wesley had had no intention of handing Connor over to Holtz, he had been taking the child away to raise himself, and Angel knew that he would have protected the boy to the death. It was just easier for everyone to blame Wesley totally rather than admitting that their own personal self-involvement had been a contributing factor.

The closest he and Wesley had come to talking about the whole situation properly was when he had tried, sincerely but clumsily, to tell Wesley he was sorry for Lilah's death. Although he had hated scenting her on Wesley it was not so much the knowing about their dark, destructive affair, but the very real knowledge that Wolfram & Hart through Lilah had much more to offer someone of Wesley's skills than Angel himself. The vampire had known there was a real danger he could get up one sunset and find that Wesley had done a Lindsey MacDonald - ensconced in a corner office, sporting a $5,000 suit, Mulholland Drive address and a rocketing stock portfolio courtesy of his new employers.

Above and beyond that was simple, visceral jealousy – he had scented Wesley's blood, sensed the heat from the man's bruised flesh and thus had known that Lilah was sexually abusing Wesley, known that that it was psychologically a deeply unhealthy relationship he was at least partially responsible for…known there was nothing he could do. When Angelus had been free, one of the things uppermost in the creature's mind was not the intent to kill Wesley, but to punish him with savage sadism for his 'betrayal' in taking the Lilah-bitch to his bed.

Angel's attempts at condolence had nearly crashed and burned when the ex-Watcher had shrugged and retorted that Angel and Lilah were mortal enemies, so "'Why should you care what happened to her?'"; Angel had instinctively answered without thinking, "'Because you did,'" and somehow it had turned out to be the right thing to say. But there had been no further discussion on the subject. Angel suspected that if they ever did hash it out, Wesley would prove to be not as apologetic as Angel would like and probably intractable over whether he would do the same thing again in the circumstances; the vampire got the distinct impression, at least until he had his friends' memories of Connor removed, that Wesley felt he had done the only 'right' thing he could at the time, which definitely made Angel bristle.

Thing was, Angel needed Wesley. He still missed Francis Doyle sometimes, and still half-believed there was something he could have done to prevent Doyle having to make his supreme sacrifice, but he hadn't known the Irish half-demon all that long, or all that well, when Doyle was killed, so their association was nothing more than a brief blip in the action-packed last five years of Angel's existence here in LA. When the Englishman first popped up, Cordelia and Angel had been grieving over Doyle and had, unfairly, blamed Wesley for not being Doyle; instead of taking umbrage, the Englishman had instead seemed to take on an extra inept clumsiness as if trying to make them feel better by showing that he could in no way be as good as their dead friend.

The truth was that Wesley was invaluable and Angel had rapidly seen that the man's clumsy buffoonery was a self-defence mechanism, a way to make himself inoffensive to whichever 'Alpha male' was currently strutting around baring his teeth, in that case an Angel still grieving and angry over his failure to save Doyle.

Wesley was actually a very dangerous person who had perfected the art of appearing to be totally harmless, which made him even more lethal. What was it Eve had said, "'Willing to sacrifice anything…or anyone…for the greater good.'" That was Wesley, and the things he was willing to sacrifice included himself, without batting an eyelid, as Angel had learned on that rooftop when Wesley confronted his 'father'. But for Angel and Cordelia, Wesley had also proven a welcome link to their lives in Sunnydale, a whimsical reminder of the family and friends they had had to leave behind. Until Gunn, Fred and Lorne had gradually joined Angel Investigations, Angel, Wesley and Cordelia had been the "We Survived Sunnydale" trio. Now that Cordelia had been lost, Wesley was Angel's last shared link with Buffy and the rest of the Sunnydale gang. He was the closest thing Angel had to a best friend, but seemed recently to have adopted the more distant attitude of the General's loyal but not really noticeable second-in-command.

They had been a family at the Hyperion, Angel reminisced wistfully, often staying en masse overnight in the rooms, whereas now everyone scattered like windblown leaves by five-thirty and only meeting up during their daily conferences to sort out business problems; they didn't just chat anymore. For instance, Wesley's pre-preparation showed how used to these migraines he must be, yet he hadn't uttered a word to anyone, just like he had kept the burden of his agonising over Connor hidden for weeks, instead just trying to fob Illyria off with an assurance that he was fine while really he would have spent the day here alone and in agony.

"Alright, what is it?"

Angel had to prevent himself from jumping at the growl right beside him, and looked into the pale, blue-topaz eyes of his grandson.

"You've just gone to Level Four on the Angel Brooding Scale, so I'm intervening." Spike told him in a clear but sub-vocal voice that Angel could hear perfectly but which Wesley wouldn't hear at all.

"Like there's a scale." Angel muttered irritably.

"Beg to differ, O grandsire of mine," Spike shot back, "goes up from Level One to Level Ten, devised and disseminated by our very own Xander Harris. Perceptive bloke, that one."

"Xander? Figures."

"He's my hero. Him and Sleeping Beauty up there," Spike said simply, "…and if you ever tell him that I'll stake you."

"You're serious." Angel realised incredulously; he had known Spike long enough to instantly recognise when the younger vampire was being sarcastic, facetious or malicious, and this wasn't it.

"Hello, evil not stupid. Xander's the greatest of the Scoobies because he's the least of the Scoobies…like Wes." Spike shrugged.

"Why?" Angel asked bluntly, giving the peroxide blond his full attention; for all his sniping at and about his grandson, Angel had never made the mistake of so many others in viewing Spike as enthusiastic but slightly dim.

"'Cause the rest of us all got something to fall back on, but Xander had only himself." Spike absently pulled out his Marlboros and made to light one before he obviously remembered the effect acrid tobacco smoke would have on Wesley, replacing the packet and looking with narrowed eyes around the luxurious but disturbingly decorated apartment.

'Like Denis Thatcher used to say when he was asked about being married to Britain's first woman Prime Minister: "'I'm always present, but never there.'" That's Xander. Always the guy in the background, at the edge of the photograph, the one nobody ever really notices. Buffy was the Slayer, you were the vampire with the super-senses and strength – and The Soul, natch. Giles had his Watcher training and was more sorcerer than adviser, with the Mark of Eyghon an' all, 'cause even though he renounced it, you can't go through something like that without it leaving scars. Willow was a genius and a witch, Oz was her male counterpart – genius with the super-strength of being a werewolf. Cordelia was rich and had more balls than most guys I know. Faith, Slayer; Tara, witch; Anyanka, demoness. Xander was just the Other One – he had no special powers, no deep well of supernatural inner fortitude, no brilliant intellect. He just kept turning up to fight evil with the rest of 'em. He's also the only one of us to have held down a steady job."

"I never even thought about it." Angel confessed softly.

Spike smiled, "Me neither, till that summer, forty-seven days when Buffy…was dead. I fought with the Scooby Gang, and Xander was The Guy, but nobody ever seemed to realise it. Everyone else was putting their Stratospheric IQs through college, honing their mystical powers, fighting the good fight. Xander…I can see why he got made foreman at the construction site so quick, he's good at it. He just kept going to work and paying Dawn's bills, and when Buffy came back he just carried on in the background while everyone else did their I'm-a-Champion-To-Save-The-World riff. He paid the bills, bought the groceries, kept the Potentials in chocolate and hankies. Xander Harris is the greatest of us all, 'cause he has saved the world, and he's done it without anything other than himself to lean on."

"And you think Wesley's the same?"

Spike shook his head, "Not exactly, but near enough as damn it. You have the vampire super-powers. Cordelia was the vision girl. Lorne had the demonic power plus the link to the PTBs as a convenient back-up to your Pylean Princess. Gunn had brains as well as brawn, and could have your back in a real fight, with The Groosalug as handy skilled-warrior sidekick Number Two and fellow Champion of Light. Fred's IQ was so high it was in orbit with Mir and she's no slouch in the mystical whammy department – she takes longer than Wes' 'cause she don't speak so many other-dimensional languages, but give her a computer, ten minutes and access to a website like Demons, Demons, Demons and she can usually hit the mother lode."

"So what's Wesley's bête noir?"

Spike paused and fiddled with the cigarette lighter in his other pocket, then quoted: "'Lord, give us the ability to see ourselves as others see us.'"

"Shakespeare?" hazarded Angel.

"Burns, but no way am I attempting that accent. The modern corollary is the Anorexia Nervosa syndrome. Size eight beanpole girlie looks in the mirror, but she sees a 20 stone monster with Dolly Parton tits. We look at Wesley and see a savvy fighter who's also way smarter than us but without the arrogant 'tude, plus massive dollops of courage, loyalty, dedication and a nice line in sharp humour. He looks in the mirror and stills sees the pastel-wearing, fashion-victim über-nerd with all the battle skills and hand-eye co-ordination of a fence post, who washed up dumped by the Watchers Council in LA and only avoided Skid Row 'cause the Vampire With The Soul took on a charity case."

"He's a size eight beanpole who thinks he's a twenty stone freak with Dolly Parton tits." Angel repeated; only Spike could sum up the complex, confounding and contradictory state of Wesley Wyndham-Pryce's knotted psyche in one basic, blunt but crystal-clear sentence. "Damn it, Spike, I get that…I've known for a while that Wesley's got some knots in his brainbox, and considering how cyborg Roger fooled Wesley so completely I think we can take him as a pretty accurate representation of the cheerful soul that is Wesley's so-called father. It's part of the reason I hated his thing with Lilah so much, she…"

"Hurt him, like Drusilla did me, for her pleasure." Spike said, his voice dropping so low even Angel had to strain to hear it.

"Yeah. I wanted to kill her for what she was doing to him, and I wanted kick Wesley's ass for letting her do it to him. But, you know, I thought it was all Lilah…what she did to him, how she treated him. But this apartment...Doesn't it…?"

"…practically scream 'unhealthy obsession'?" Spike finished. "Oh yeah, in spades. First three nights when I was crashing here even I couldn't sleep 'cause of the in-your-face serial killer motif, and I am one."

"I know how hard Wesley tries to help me." Angel put in earnestly, feeling guilty over having seemed to criticise his friend non-stop for the past five minutes. "I'd be lost without him and I appreciate everything he does to help me with this redemption gig, but what I hate is that he seems to…I don't know…he loses all sense of self-preservation when it comes to helping me. I hate the fact that he throws himself headlong into the fire for me without any regard for the fact that he's gonna get burned." Angel waved an angry arm around this apartment. "I want Wesley to have a life outside the Great Quest To Make Angel A Real Little Boy, and this place clearly shows he doesn't have one, as well as just being way too paranoid for good mental health."

Spike assessed his grandfather shrewdly. "Being that important in someone else's life is scary," he pointed out, "and a hell of a responsibility. It's like how movie stars freak out when they get a fan who knows every miniscule detail of their lives from birth; to be the object of that much single-minded devotion and investment of emotion will always be a burden to anyone with enough integrity of character to try to live up to it."

Angel gave Spike a sidelong look, "You admitting I have good points?"

"A good point, and I suppose after two and a half centuries you had to do something right." Spike back-pedalled loftily, ignored his grandfather's smirk. "I'm going to check on our boy."

As the blond vampire expected, Angel was on his heels. "What about that cloth you had Illyria soak?"

"Hm? Oh just to give her something to do. It won't help. Same with Harmony and the painkillers, though they will help eventually. It'll probably be another half an hour or so before Wesley will be able to take them without puking them straight back up."

Moving up the staircase in the total silence only their kind could achieve, the two vampires looked at the still figure in the bed. Wesley remained absolutely still, and though Angel could detect the very tiniest relaxation of his facial muscles, the Englishman's face was still contorted in pain and he was perspiring heavily; underneath the coverings, Angel could tell that Wesley's fists seemed to be tightly clenched. The bedding would need to be changed again, but again Wesley had clearly anticipated such a contingency, for instead the normal one or two spare sets of bedclothes, there were four of identical patterns.

Drawing Spike back down the staircase two or three steps, Angel dropped his voice to the level just below the threshold of human hearing. "Were your migraines this bad?"

"Yeah." Spike's mouth thinned into an unhappy line. "That's how I started writing my poetry. Mum had an indoor bathroom put in our London townhouse when I was still in leading-strings." His smile was sweet in reminiscence. "Big claw-footed free-standing bath you could've washed a regiment in, huge washbasin and jug I couldn't even lift until I was eight, big white tiles on the floor. Mum had her dressing table put in there, one of those big ones with the central mirror and two side-ones, you know? She used to let me stand on a stool and help her brush her hair, soft it was…smelled of tea roses with a hint of peppermint…our bathroom was talked about for months amongst the London toffsback in 1859, I can tell you."

Angel waited patiently, only too aware of how precious such memories were. He remembered everything about his life – being Liam, being Angelus, being Angel – all his crimes, the rapes and tortures and murders, but not faces. He had never even thought about his mother, father and little sister Kathy until 1898, when the Roma cursed him with a soul, only to discover with despair that he couldn't quite recall their images with true sharpness, couldn't be certain whether his mother had had blue eyes or green. The features of his family, his victims, his friends, his enemies…after a while all became blurred and slightly indistinct.

Though he had recognised Holtz instantly when he saw the man after Sahjhan raised the vampire hunter in LA, Angel's recollections of the man who had pursued him so terribly had been out-of-focus. Francis Doyle had been dead only five years, but already his facial structure was becoming indistinct in Angel's mind, only his bright blue eyes remaining clear. Darla, Cordelia, even Connor, not gone but lost to him, was getting hazy round the edges. It was the ultimate twist of the knife – you avoided thinking of loved ones lost because it was too painful, only to find when you finally did try that their images had faded in your mind like an old photograph exposed to direct sunlight for too long.

"I used to lay – well, collapse – on those lovely cold tiles and just lie there in a little ball." Spike told his grandsire, "I used to make up poems and recite them in my head as a way to not focus on the invisible bastard who was driving white-hot needles into my left eye and pouring boiling acid into my brain. Mum just used to sit here for hours on end, just cradling me in her lap. Never moved a muscle, she didn't, was like a Buddha…gave her cramp something cruel. Even when she got the TB, she never coughed…just sat there with me like a female Michelangelo's David."

Angel looked again at the figure in the bed, helpless frustration surging through him at his total inability to ease Wesley's pain. There was mystical healing magic of various sorts but it often caused more damage than it repaired, especially when the illness or injury, like in Wesley's case, was purely physical rather than even partially mystical. "He must be in agony. Hell, I can almost see the blood pounding through his head."

"Get the painkillers, see if he can keep them down." suggested Spike, something flickering in his eyes and disappearing so fast Angel thought he'd imagined it. "It's about all you can do."

Nodding with reluctant agreement, Angel nodded towards the bed and Spike went and sat on one of the bedside chairs so Wesley wouldn't be alone. Angel headed back down the spiral staircase to get the painkillers and glass of water Harmony had prepared, which must be at room temperature by now. He had reached the penultimate step when he finally registered the barely-detectable stress that Spike had given the personal pronoun. So what could Spike do that he didn't think Angel could?

The vampire is one of the fastest unnatural predators in any dimension; forget cheetahs or striking snakes…in some cases, a vampire had even moved fast enough to dodge a lightening bolt with less than a hundredth of a second's warning. Even when attacking prey, a vampire could move in absolute silence, or at least so close an approximation thereof that a human couldn't hear the noise they did make. Less than a second after the thought impinged on Angel's brain, the dark vampire was back up the staircase, wrenching the blond brutally away from where he was lowering his head to Wesley's throat, not so much pinning as trying to shove Spike through the back bedroom wall with one forearm across the other vampire's throat, while the other twisted Spike's black T-shirt as that fist pushed into his stomach as if trying to grip his spine.

Keeping his arms down by his side, with his hands spread wide and pressed palm-side to the wall, Spike simply closed his eyes and tilted his head back as much as he was able, offering his throat to Angel, who was in full vampire-face, in a gesture of total submission. He lived or died at the other vampire's whim.

Angel's head twitched forward with the intent of ripping Spike's throat out before decapitating him, but a spark of rationality prevailed. For long seconds nothing moved as Angel brought it back from the edge. His voice a silk-soft lethal leopard's purr that was pure Angelus, he asked, "Why shouldn't I dust you right here?"

"It'll help him."

"Tell it to the Marines."

"You said you could almost see the blood pounding through his head…if I can lower his blood pressure, it'll help him."

Angel released Spike, who let the wall support him while he swallowed automatically against the pain in his throat – he was going to have a pretty necklace of violet bruises there shortly. The dark vampire looked at the bed. "No. He's helpless. He can't give us his permission."

"Let's try something else then." Spike said as calmly as if he hadn't just been micro-seconds from death at Angel's hands. "Get rid of your shoes and coat and lay down the other side of him."

Warily Angel did so; if Spike even so much as looked at Wesley's neck, he was dust…the blond vampire kicked off his boots and removed his own duster before carefully settling himself on the bed on Wesley's other side, so the Watcher lay between the two vampires. Angel raised an eyebrow…this was getting into ick territory.

"Give me your hand." Taking Angel's appendage, Spike carefully laid it on Wesley's right temple. "Nice and cool, just rest it there." With his own hand, Spike copied the move on Wesley's left temple, leaving his hand there for a moment and then, very gently, beginning to move his thumb in wide, shallow circles, almost stroking Wesley's forehead.

Angel copied the gesture, feeling rather foolish. For a couple of minutes nothing happened, then Angel saw that Wesley wasn't perspiring quite as heavily as before, though his face and body were still rigid. Not breathing, both vampires continued the gentle ministrations for twenty minutes. Gradually, Wesley's breathing became less laboured and he stopped sweating so much, but after another twenty minutes, that was all the improvement that had been made.

It wasn't enough, Angel acknowledged as his thumb moved tirelessly in rhythm with Spike's digit, the blond vampire seemingly absorbed in studying the pattern of the bed linen. "We can't without his permission." He snapped defensively. "It's almost like rape, I won't do that to him…"

Whatever rejoinder Spike might have made was forgotten as Wesley's head twitched slightly. His eyes never opened, nor his face lose the pain-lines, but under the covers, Wesley's hand slowly uncurled and slid along the sheet until it reached the spot where Angel's wrist rested on the covers; through the fabric Angel still felt the slight pressure as Wesley pressed his fingers against Angel's wrist. Moving his own hand so he could lightly squeeze the hand through the bedclothes, Angel raised a grim face to Spike, far from happy, but accepting the tacit permission.

"We need to feed simultaneously, to balance the flow of blood loss from either side of Wesley's neck. Feed very slowly, a sudden drop in his blood pressure will only cause him more pain." Spike's clinical words were at odds with the gentle look in his eyes.

Nodding his head reluctantly Angel lowered his head to Wesley's jugular, allowing his fangs to erupt. Pressing his mouth to the ex-Watcher's jugular, he could feel the blood pulsing harshly through the artery, pumping through Wesley's cranium and contributing to his terrible pain. Stretching out one hand across Wesley's chest, Angel's fingers were met by those of Spike, who had done the same. After a moment, Spike's fingers squeezed his in the signal, and both carefully bit down, letting the rich, adrenaline saturated blood trickle into their mouths…

Continued in Chapter 3…

© 2010, The Cat's Whiskers