Disclaimer: See Chapter 1...
SHADOWED SOULS
Chapter 4
After five minutes of careful cogitation, Wesley decided to open one eye a bit and see if his head didn't fall off. He had no real sense of how long he'd been lying here, but then his usually reliable inner clock was always scrambled by the agony. And of course he did have only himself to blame, he acknowledged ruefully while being careful not to move a muscle…in a second he'd do it, build up to it first…
The blood test results from the handkerchief he'd been given by his weasely associate at Ye Olde Britannia had been stunning yet, in a peculiar way, something that Wesley found wasn't really a surprise to him. What it had done was underscore his need for a complete, undamaged Scroll of Niamh, but since there was more likelihood of Jack the Ripper being elected Man Of The Year by the Women's Institute than Wesley being able to locate one, he'd had to do his best with what he had, which led directly to his current agony.
Ignoring the warning tingle in his temple, he'd pushed himself to track down every scrap and resource he could. Eschewing food and sleep he'd been putting in a good six hours again after a full day in the office trying to get a handle on a nasty intimately connected to the Senior Partners, some sort of cabal named The Circle of the Black Thorn, which Angel was convinced was an integral part of Lindsey MacDonald's "we're in the middle of The Apocalypse" riff. Hours spent in the middle of the night, hunched over books and parchment bearing horrific pictures and written in a hand that always seemed to head straight for "tiny and crabbed" had taken their toll. Finally going to bed for a change, he had been awoken in the middle of last night by the searing agony in his skull as his body rebelled and decided to give him an object lesson in why he should not ignore what it told him.
Such ruminations, however, were only delaying the inevitable moment when he had to risk moving again, so... Raising one lid a crack and encouraged by the lack of searing agony, he opened one eye all the way, then the other. His face ached from the stress of him clenching muscles against the pain for so long, but he actually felt…okay. Weak as a newborn kitten, but pain free. He had a vague memory of Team Angel being there en masse at some point, their every twitch drowning him in fresh waves of excruciating pain, then just Angel and Spike's voices…something about lowering his blood pressure, Angel sounding angry…then two warm spots of suction either side his neck and suddenly – blessed relief as the endless pain had eased, like someone snipping a taut elastic band with scissors…hands lifting his head and helping him take painkillers with tepid water…He'd drifted a while after that, the pain still acute but not crippling, until he'd gone into a natural sleep. Ah yes, he was still in bed with a now cold hot water bottle on either side -
Spike cuddling him on the left, Angel on the right.
Whoa.
Blinking rapidly to clear his gummed eyes, Wesley regarded the two vampires, each of whom was pressed up against him each side, half-propped up on pillows, their expressions calm as they regarded him, their eyelids half-closed sensuously over eyes that glittered with the pleasure of recent feeding. Moving one arm upright, Wesley billowed the covers and looked down, relief swamping him when he saw the sweats, only to dissolve like hoarfrost under sun when he recalled that he hadn't been wearing them last night.
Frantically he searched for a memory of Fred and/or Illyria donning them on him, but all he got was vague flashes of Angel holding him as he vomited into the toilet bowl, and Spike turning on the shower before beginning a striptease. "Am I going to need to start hyperventilating shortly?"
"I wouldn't recommend it," Spike answered as he slid off the bed, standing up and putting his boots and coat back on, "but yeah; the potential for excruciating embarrassment is trying to sneak past the bouncers on the door. Just be English and pretend none of it ever happened."
"None of what?" Retorted Wesley sarcastically, sitting upright, then hastily added, "Forget I asked that question, please."
"We fed…" Angel confessed hesitantly as he copied Spike and then hovered as Wesley carefully shuffled to the edge of the bed, "…lowering your blood pressure helped ease the migraine."
Automatically looking at the clock, Wesley saw with surprise that his migraine had lasted a good two hours less than normal, as Spike walked past the bottom of the bed and started down the staircase to the ground floor while Angel hovered as Wesley, gritting his teeth, stood upright, fresh relief surging as his head only throbbed slightly and his stomach merely gave a half-hearted churn.
"I see. Hence the…" Nothing would have induced Wesley to say 'cuddling' even if his migraine came back that instant.
"…unfortunate necessity of close body contact." Spike's voice drifted back up the stairs as Wesley cautiously made his way after the blond, aware of Angel practically on his heels, the dark vampire ready to grab if Wesley should falter.
Instead of feeling embarrassed, Wesley flushed as he found his main emotion was one of relief, followed by gratitude. "I've heard of kissing cousins, but this is ridiculous," he murmured under his breath as he reached the bottom of the steps without incident and began to head for the kitchen, forgetting completely the super-hearing of vampires.
Angel and Spike exchanged startled, what-did-he-just-say? looks, but before either of them could form the question, Wesley spoke again, "Spike, would you make me a cup of tea, please?"
"I'll make it," offered Angel anxiously, watching as Wesley swayed a moment.
Wesley and Spike exchanged looks of perfect understanding. "Not on your unlife." Wesley said flatly. "Spike, if you would?"
"Wha-at?!" Angel demanded looking back and forth – it was obvious he'd just been silently insulted by the two Englishmen, but what about?
Sitting down slowly – he still felt about 85 right now - in the chair Spike pulled out for him as the blond vampire went past into the kitchen, Wesley bluntly told Angel: "There are three things Americans can't do – tea, cheese and irony. The last decent cuppa the Yanks mashed was at the Boston Tea Party."
"Pretty baffling really." Spike commented over his shoulder as he flicked on the kettle and got a couple of mugs of the stand – a spot of tea was sometimes what a vampire needed too. "I mean, we are talking about a nation of people with the creative vision and scientific genius to put a man on the moon, yet the simple premise of adding boiling water to plant leaves and it all goes horribly wrong."
"I'm Irish!" Angel declared in mortal offence.
"How long have you lived in this country?" Wesley demanded.
Angel glared, "One hundred and two years, why?"
"Long enough for the rot to set in." Wesley judged immovably. "Spike, you make the tea. Angel, there should be some more of those lovely extra-strong opiate-based painkillers in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Be a cinnamon bun and fetch me the bottle."
Stomping into the bathroom, Angel firmly removed just two of the pills and went back into the kitchen, placing them on the table in front of Wesley before folding his arms and watching his fellow vampire with what could only be described as a Full-On Little Boy Pout attitude. Any idiot could make tea!
Wesley's lips twitched minutely and though Spike's face remained bland his eyes danced. Sometimes it was sooo easy to get a rise out of the big guy.
Opening the cupboard, Spike pursed his lips approvingly at the wide selection of teas – some of which were extremely expensive and usually impossible to buy outside their native land – that separated the average consumer from the connoisseur. He dismissed the Chinese teas – too delicate to give Wes' that bit of pep, and too good to be wasted when he was in no fit state to appreciate them. Ditto the Japanese green teas. He needed a black tea, to take away the aftertaste of stomach bile. Spike shoved the Lapsang Souchang out of the way – too strong and smoky; the Earl Grey's strong perfume scent could set Wesley's stomach off…here…Assam, perfect.
"What did you mean by that kissing cousins crack?" Angel asked, more to divert attention from him dropping his okay-maybe-a-bit-ridiculous huffy stance than any burning desire to know the answer.
Wesley looked startled before belated recollection crossed his face. "Oh, that…well it's a matter of public record in the Watcher Diaries on the web, so I suppose somebody will come across it sooner or later. Technically, Spike is my very distant cousin."
To his credit, Spike never faltered as he reached out, picked up the boiling kettle and added the water to the Assam-leaf containing teapot. "Technically?"
"Come again?" Angel was blunter.
"Spike's maternal great-grandfather and my paternal great-great-great-grandfather was the same man, Laurens Wyndham-Pryce, the 5th Baron of Wyndham, who had four sons: Pelham, Arthur, Theodore and Wrythosley. Spike's maternal grandfather – his mother's father - was my great-great-great-uncle, Theodore Wyndham-Pryce, Laurens' third son, and his second son, Arthur, was my great-great-grandfather. Of course it was recorded in the Watcher Diaries as the Wyndham-Pryces are an ancient Watcher family, but…you never knew your father, did you, Spike?"
Leaning his back against the worktop as he waited for the tea to mash, Spike folded his arms and gazed contemplatively at the artificial floral arrangement that Fred had brought from her apartment to grace the kitchen table. "No…I was posthumous. My father, Horatio de Vere, was killed in an accident in London when mum was eight months pregnant with me. It made the papers - him, two other men and the driver of the Hansom cab they were in – one of those sudden summer thunderstorms blew in up the Thames from the Channel and spooked the horse. It freaked and took off, crashed into a bridge over the Thames and they all ended up in the water. Ironic, really – and hilarious, in a disturbed kind of way."
Seeing Angel's incipient disgusted expression, Spike rolled his eyes at his grandsire and explained, "That branch of the de Veres had always been into the 'seafaring' in a big way, s'why they named my Dad, Horatio, after the country's greatest Naval war hero. That was the irony, y'see: My father suffered so much seasickness he even struggled with a deep bathtub, and then the poor bugger drowns in a freak million-to-one-odds-against accident. Even evil and soulless you have to feel for the suckage rating in getting brick-batted off the mortal coil like that."
"You never had much to do with your dad's family?" Angel asked the question with genuine curiosity. Again with the irony, Angelus had always synched more completely with Spike, even from their first aggressive meeting, despite knowing virtually nothing about his mad daughter Drusilla's 'my Sweet William', than with his own sirelings, despite stalking them and forensically studying their lives for weeks before he had attacked – James and Elizabeth, Penn, Dru herself – even Lawson, on that damned submarine, had revealed more both consciously and unconsciously about himself than Spike ever had.
Spike's standard response on those few fleeting instances that Angelus had been momentarily interested in his grandson's history had been a shrug and either a cryptic quip or classical quote followed by an immediate deflection: 'you need some fun, Angelus, your face is longer than my old bloodhound's. Come on; let's go pillage and massacre a brothel – my treat.' Always cheered up by the prospect of combining his two favourite pastimes – sex and slaughter – Angelus had never been really interested enough to ignore the deflections and force his grandson to provide an autobiography.
Back in those days, there had been none of that 'nothing tastes as good as thin feels' crap, and a guy lusted after real, Rubenesque women with wide plump hips and big juicy tits; as they were going to one notorious brothel (the male owner of which had thrown Angelus out on hearing his Irish accent, unaware of what he was dealing with), they had sneaked in through the stables and witnessed the owner – handy with a whip – berating and lashing one of the prettiest whores for becoming a 'skinny bag of bones' – their vampiric senses enabled them to determine the girl had terminal and rapidly progressing Tuberculosis.
The madam, whose opinion of her boss was succinct, accurate and obscene, had sneaked them inside and told Angelus she wouldn't charge him a penny, nor Spike – nor Darla and Dru (who liked to watch their boys in action) if they wanted to 'take tea' with a couple of ladies-for-ladies. That offer and her contempt for the owner, had saved her life – she and the 'bag of bones' whore were the only two to live out that night they spent clinging together in mute terror in the custody of Darla and Dru as Angelus let his hair down and partied; they had, finally, tortured the owner to death minutes before sunrise. Later on that day in their hideaway, Drusilla had let slip to Angelus that Spike had Sired his mother, terminally ill with tuberculosis, only to stake her within a couple of hours after her First Rising when the vampiress tried initiate an incestuous relationship with him; Angelus's mad daughter had never mentioned Spike's father, obviously since the man had been dead for decades.
Angel had to stop himself physically moving as he tried to shake off the memories – Angelus was always trying to insert Technicolor images of his monstrous past before his mind's eye; even now the demon was whispering that such close proximity as a 'night-long cuddle' meant that the madam had contracted TB from the other prostitute and Angelus whispered that both had died a slow, lingering death as a result of his 'mercy' when they could have died quickly that night instead – resolutely Angel squashed his inner tormentor's voice down and tuned back into to the conversation.
Unaware of his grandsire's brief flashback, Spike's grin was feral and strongly reminiscent of pre-soul Spike. "Didn't have much to do with either side, truth be told. Apparently Dad was pretty savvy when it came to the purse-strings – he wasn't quite what manure is to roses when it came to cash but he wasn't daft either. When he was killed he left a watertight will making mum his sole heir, and both her Wyndham-Pryce lot and dad's de Vere clan pretty much gave up on her when she proved not to be the gullible, easily fleeced widow." Spike's voice dropped an octave and the light in his eyes became uglier, "…and o'course, once word got round that she'd got the consumption…"
"Actually, I'm astounded at the idiocy of the Watchers Council." Wesley put as Spike's voice trailed off; standing helplessly by while someone you loved died slowly of a painful illness ranked as one of the worst things in the world, and prodded a far too-raw wound of his own. "Considering how far back our lineage in the Watchers goes, you'd have thought at least my great-great-grandparents Honoria and Arthur would have put two and two together in 1880."
Accepting a cup of tea from Spike, Wesley took a cautious sip and found his stomach accepted it readily, so he rose from the table and went to get dressed, aware of the two vampires tracking his every move, though they tactfully remained in the kitchen; Wesley called back, "I mean, Arthur's widowed niece and great-nephew suddenly disappear from the London social scene never to resurface, and a new vampire called William turns up at the same time; it's not rocket science."
"Never thought about 'em," Spike confessed. "Hadn't seen anyone much from either side of the family for years, could've passed 'em in the street and not known it."
"Wait a minute…" Angel frowned, having replayed the last few minutes of conversation and been trying to follow Wesley's explained genealogy. "I think you lost a 'great' somewhere in there."
"It sounds like it but no." Wesley returned dressed in jeans, dark blue T-shirt and a deep indigo coloured shirt that he didn't bother to button up.
Reseating himself at the table, he took another appreciative swallow of the Assam before explaining to Angel, "At one time genealogists – family historians - used to refer to the siblings of your grandparents as your grand-aunt or uncle, and the siblings of your great-grandparents as your great-uncle, etc. It was a sterling system of efficiency and clarity, but, for some reason, it fell into disuse and it became common instead to refer to the brothers and sisters of your grandparents as your great-aunt or great-uncle, thus the brother or sister of your great-grandparent had therefore to become your great-great-uncle, and so forth."
Angel scowled. "So... all the other children of your great-great-great-grandfather – for example Laurens Wyndham-Pryce - who are not your direct ancestor are your great-great-great-uncles or aunts - Pelham, Theodore and Wrythosley - bar your direct ancestor, Arthur, who is only your great-great-grandparent, but the brothers and sisters of your great-great-great-grandfather – for example Laurens again…are your great-great-great-great-aunts and uncles?"
"Exactly."
"My head hurts now." The dark vampire complained plaintively.
Wesley smiled then sobered. "I do appreciate the pair of you taking time out to help me. These migraines are…"
"Giant red flags to the fact that you're suffering from profound levels of stress?" Spike suggested challengingly.
"Who isn't stressed…or does the unresolved nature of the Shanshu no longer keep you awake?" Wesley retorted.
"Wes', we all seek ways to reduce stress a little…that's what hobbies are for." Angel cut in, pointedly looking around Wesley's apartment, "This place doesn't take stress down a notch; it kicks it into high gear."
"It's my job." Wesley was unable to keep a hint of snappishness from his tone.
"Not twenty-four-seven." Angel tried again, "You don't always have to be working, Wes."
"Yes, Angel, I do," Wesley thumped the mug back on the table, "we already forgot once what we were dealing with in Wolfram & Hart, and Fred died."
Angel couldn't pale any more but he flinched back from Wesley's harsh tone. "Wesley, no…What happened to Fred wasn't your fault…"
"It was all our faults," Wesley visibly reigned in his temper. "Because Andrew Wells was right - When he and those Slayers took Dana off us on Buffy Summer's orders because she didn't trust that we were still on the right side."
Angel knew the hurt was showing on his face. "Buffy's seen what we're doing now; the Scooby Gang understand the deal here, Buffy… "
"Then Buffy misunderstands the deal here." Wesley chopped off Angel's justification. "Angel, Wolfram & Hart is EVIL. Capitals all the way through. When me, Fred, Gunn and Lorne accepted their offer, nobody batted an eyelid because we were just ordinary, easily corruptible Joes. But when Angel said yeah, that was Shock Horror; it was as if in the space of thirty minutes you'd gone from Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace to Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. You have no idea just how scary that is. When I do something dangerously amoral, people see just another human irritant corrupted by power. When you do something even slightly morally ambiguous, people whisper, "Angelus!" and start backing away towards the nearest exit…Spike's never made any secret of how he feels about Wolfram & Hart – I believe your phraseology was, "'I've got no desire to join the evil Empire.'""
"Sorry, Angel," Spike spoke without any hint of his customary attempts to bait his grandsire. "But I won't go corporate. I wouldn't have accepted the offer, I'm sorry. Leopards don't change their spots, and you don't change the world, it changes you."
"You're locked into being the ultimate mystical workaholic because you think I'm turning evil?" Angel tried not to let his upset show, but knew he was failing badly.
"No, of course not! But when enough people start saying the same thing, I start to take them seriously. When Spike first re-materialised one of the first things he said was that you had walked into the belly of the beast and were so busy fighting your enemies you didn't even realise you were being digested…"
"How'd you hear that?" Spike asked, since Wesley hadn't been present at the time of that argument between himself and Angel.
The ex-Watcher ignored him. "Buffy Summers and Andrew Wells too, a lot of people on the side of the Light were and are deeply disturbed that the Vampire With A Soul is now CEO of the most evil law firm in a hundred dimensions. We've all been affected by our decision, and some of us have paid terribly for forgetting what we were getting into." Wesley's voice took on a savage note, "Knox…he was planning to murder Fred from Day One. I wish I could have kept him alive so I could practise being Angelus with him…"
"I wouldn't have let you." Angel said with absolute authority; once you crossed that line and committed an act of pre-meditated murder, you lost something you could never get back, as both Andrew Wells and Faith could testify; he would never allow Wesley to do that.
"I would have given you a couple of minutes," Spike told the other Englishman, "but I wouldn't have let you either…goes straight to hell, that road, pet – and we should now."
"Maybe five or ten minutes…" Amended Angel as he considered suitable punishments for what Knox had done to kill Fred and allow Illyria to take over.
Wesley managed a wry smile. "The point is we were complacent. Knox, I hate forever. Gunn…hell, if you would have asked me to pick the most gullible amongst us I would have pointed straight at myself the geek." Wesley admitted, unaware of the look that passed between Spike and Angel at this Freudian slip of how he still saw himself, "But not Gunn – he fought vampires most of his life, he's smart and so street-wise he's light years ahead of me, possibly even you, Angel. But he still got gulled. When Rondell and that psycho Tito attacked Caritas and tried to make Gunn kill you and Lorne because you weren't human, Gunn backed you because you had the mission, and Rondell had lost it, killing anything not homo sapiens for kicks. But now…Fred died, at least in part, because Gunn lost the mission. He was so desperate not to lose what he'd gained that he made the raw amateur's mistake of forgetting that this is Wolfram & Hart and while everything has a heavy price, that price isn't always money."
Angel remained helplessly silent; desperate to retain the vast amounts of legal knowledge downloaded into his brain permanently, Charles Gunn had inadvertently signed Illyria's sarcophagus through Customs to Wolfram & Hart, and curious Fred, opening it, had been infected with the ancient demon's life force; their brilliant, quirky friend was now a lodger in her own physical body, existing only as a pattern of neurons in the cerebellum of a ten million-year-old demon.
"It's all of us." Wesley admitted softly, "When Eve managed to get that little parasite on you to give you hallucinations, I remember how me and Gunn were arguing in your office about killing that warlock, Drake? You asked us if we were doing it because it was right, or because it was cost effective. You were so angry with me when I joked that once again we found ourselves in a grey area."
"It was so much easier when we were at the Hyperion." Angel complained. "Back then we would have just taken Drake out. Him – evil, us - good. Now we live in a permanent state of Grey."
"That's exactly where you went wrong, Angel," Spike put in with a hint of told-you-so-asperity. "You're not at the Hyperion any more. It's easy to be the Heroes, fighting back-to-back, side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder against all comers when it's just your tiny inner circle of demon-bashers who come home each night to your cosy sanctuary of the haunted hotel California. It's not easy to do that when you're part of the system, just cogs in the machine. As William Thackery said, dying for your faith isn't that hard, it's the living up to it that's really difficult."
"We're not at the Hyperion any more though," Wesley sighed, "We're not a family any more…"
Angel's drooping head jerked up and he fixed Wesley with a look that bespoke suspicion and alarm. "What do you mean?"
Wesley had no intention of confessing his knowledge of Connor, not when it would inevitably lead to the Scroll of Niamh, not six feet away, but he didn't need to. "Angel, you've met my brother, and my father…or as good as. All of you are still my family…" He cast a sly glance at the blond vampire, "…now complete with reprobate black-sheep 'kid brother'. But at the Hyperion, we were family. Of the six of us, only I and Cordelia didn't actually live there – and for her it was because she didn't want to abandon Phantom Dennis - and even then the pair of us were semi-permanent residents…"
Angel nodded; he, Lorne, Gunn and Fred had all eventually taken up residence in the hotel, and most mornings, more often than not, Wes and Cordy had been present at breakfast too… "Bickering like crazy…drove me crazy."
Wesley grinned. "Yes, I know. I have three sisters, but Cordy was the sister I always wanted…smart and sassy…but we're not family any more, we lost that when we came to Wolfram & Hart. Now we're colleagues. We don't gather around the breakfast bar moaning about the probable Big Bad of the day or spend our evenings flaked out in the lobby, reading and just enjoying the fact that we're all together. We each spend every day buried in masses of paperwork while suckling greedily at the corporate teat." He noted Spike's wince at the phrase the English vampire had tossed at him and Gunn on their "Crockett & Tubbs" trip to his basement.
"So how do we get that back?" demanded Angel, knowing that Wesley was right. He had felt the increasing sense of 'disconnection' to his mission as a Champion, as Wesley so right said, 'the work has lost meaning for you…', but also an increasing sense of distance between himself and those he thought of as family.
Before Illyria had killed Fred, Gunn had always been glued to a cell phone, making legal eagle wheeler-deals; Fred herself had been buried in her state-of-the-art science lab all the time; Lorne lived for his entertainment department, loving every minute of the A-list celebrity shoulder-rubbing and glad-handing his position entailed; Wesley was usually buried in his department in some arcane text, only coming into Angel to give him a bulky file on their latest grey area. Fighting for Fred had snapped them back into it, but now that Fred was able to emerge as herself, even if only with Illyria's consent, the team were sinking back into their old complacency again.
"We don't." Wesley said flatly, "Or rather the only way we do is if we jack in Wolfram & Hart and go back being the small, independent band of good little heroes who lived in penury and a crummy, massively haunted hotel again. As Gunn pointed out when you tried to quit after those nuns were murdered, nobody put a gun to our heads, frogmarched us into Wolfram & Hart and forced the keys to the kingdom into our clenched fists, and like he said, we all got something from the deal. We made the choice to walk into the belly of the beast, and now we have to deal with that. Look," Wesley conceded, "I'm aware that my apartment doesn't exactly proclaim good mental health, but I do my best to keep my Id's aberrations from messing up my life completely. That's the deal, live with it."
Seeing the uncompromising lines bracketing Wesley's mouth and sporting fresh psychological bruises himself from blunt home truths, Angel nodded.
Continued in Part 1 – Chapter 5…
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