Print page
Notes: Dark AU, Spander with Wesley.
The Assistant part 15 - the end
It takes three days for Wesley to recover full feeling in his hands and feet, and another week to lose the deep ache in his bones. Still, he recovers faster than Angel. The offensive gouged matching black circles into Angel's chest and back, so that at first glance he looked as though he'd been impaled on a red-hot spike. Effectively, it cooked him from the inside out. No one but a vampire could have survived it, and there were a few bad moments, in the first couple of days, when it seemed as though not even a vampire could.
Angel survives, but he spends almost two weeks in limbo, drifting in and out of consciousness on an infirmary bed with dampened sheets. The door to the room is kept double-locked, and Wesley and Spike are the only ones with keys.
Wesley visits when he can. He sits on a metal folding chair and studies the man lying in front of him, trying to decide how to feel. The first couple of visits are simple; he feels mostly numbness and panic, alternating as Angel's condition swings up and down. Then Angel begins to heal, slowly but steadily, and to sleep instead of simply fainting. Wesley begins to feel more complicated emotions. Anger is chief among them.
He's angry without focus until the Council finally sends a cautious, oblique email inquiring about possible difficulties on or around the eighteenth of May. Wesley spends two days on the phone with a series of increasingly highly-ranked Council bureaucrats, forcing himself to speak calmly. Yes, there were difficulties. Yes, the difficulties concerned Angel's soul. Yes, the difficulties were serious. Very serious. Extremely goddamned serious.
No one has clearance to tell him what's happened; instead, he's transferred steadily, relentlessly up the line until he's speaking to people who rank higher than his own father. His fury builds to the point where he keeps a box of pencils by the telephone, and snaps them methodically in two while he talks. Spike comes in a few times, sits on the corner of the desk, shakes his head, and leaves. He has Xander to worry about.
Finally, on a conference call with six of the highest-ranking Council administrators in the western hemisphere, Wesley gets the full story. Tunbridge Wells, de-souling research, stroke, momentary mayhem. By this time he's worked some of it out for himself. He sits stroking an index finger down one of the last pencils left in his box, feeling a momentary vacuum of emotion. On the other side of the Atlantic, he can hear six uneasy silences.
"What about Xander Harris?" he asks at last. They know about Xander's turning. Wesley supposes that it's one of the reasons he's got such relatively prompt answers.
"The situation is under review," Taszio says. And that's it, for a good long time.
Sitting by Angel's bedside, watching him moan and mutter in his nightmares, Wesley feels highly focused anger. Downstairs, in the basement cells, Xander waits to hear what they're going to do with him. Wesley's already decided that he won't obey an order to stake. Re-souling isn't out of the question. And there are other options too, ones he's devising in his off hours in the library, between visiting Angel and conferring with Spike and running Wolfram & Hart. There are spells that could be altered for the situation.
"You all right?" Spike asks, on a rare occasion when he drops by Angel's room and finds Wesley there. Spike doesn't visit often, Wesley knows. He appears to have come to terms with whatever pain Angel is suffering, and to have ranked it lower on his list of priorities than Wesley can do. It's hard to blame him, really.
"I'm fine," Wesley says, his eyes on Angel's sleeping profile. He isn't, really--he's barely holding himself together and he knows he doesn't hide it well. But he doesn't want to have a conversation about it.
"You look like shit." Spike pulls his own chair up, sits down, and produces a flask. He drinks and holds it out. Wesley takes it with a nod.
"How's Xander?"
"Getting very good at Scrabble." Spike pulls out his cigarettes, and props his feet carelessly on the edge of Angel's bed. "Is 'qat' really a word?"
"Yes."
"Bugger." For a couple of minutes they sit in silence, Spike smoking his cigarette moodily. Angel jerks and frowns. In all his nightmares, he's never gone to game face. Wesley wonders if that's usual, or if even in his delirium, Angel is too afraid to let the demon show.
"Poor twit." Spike rubs his temple thoughtfully and blows out a stream of smoke.
"I find," Wesley says, still staring at Angel, "that I hate the Council of Watchers more than I ever hated any of the demons they fight against."
Spike lets that sit. Wesley remembers he's still holding the flask, and passes it back. He hasn't drunk from it.
"If it's any consolation," Spike says, "I ate half a dozen of the bastards in my time."
"Good," Wesley says, without remorse.
Wesley visits Xander, too. Not as much as Spike, who spends the better part of every day in the basement now, but as often as he can. He takes the elevator down with an eerie sense of déjà vu, carrying small token gifts with him each time. Blood bags, cigarettes, comic books. It's like visiting someone in prison, he thinks. In fact, it is visiting someone in prison.
Spike is usually there, inside the cell, reading a book or leaning over a Scrabble board propped on a folding chair, with Xander leaning in from the other side. They play with casual intensity, mocking themselves and each other but paying close attention to each new tile laid down. It would be amusing, Wesley thinks, if the circumstances were different.
"X-Men, cool." Xander takes the comics out of the bag, fans them out on the bunk, and nods. "Thanks, Wes."
"Not at all." Wesley stays outside the cell, for all of the obvious reasons. The metal folding chair is still there, and he takes it gratefully. He tires easily now, and his legs ache if he stands for too long.
"Geek." Spike's head is bent over the board, and he has a cigarette burning between his fingers. It looks as though it's been burning for a long time without movement.
"As long as there's no judgment in the relationship." Xander props his chin on his hand and yawns. He's cross-legged on his bunk, wearing an orange T-shirt and jeans. The marks on his neck are gone now; he looks like himself again. "Are you planning on playing, ever?"
Spike chews his lip, frowns, and takes several tiles carefully from his rack. He lays them down on the board and sits back to stretch. Xander peers at them.
"It took you twenty minutes to spell 'cheese'?"
"Took me twenty minutes to block out your fucking yammering and think straight."
"God, I hope the attention span doesn't run in the family."
That's a little disturbing for various reasons, and Wesley shifts and clears his throat. "I thought you'd like to know that Angel's doing much better."
The temperature drops a sharp thirty degrees. Xander sits up straight and turns to look at Wesley. His expression is flat and hostile.
"Fantastic," he says, and turns back to the board.
"He's awake," Wesley says, persevering despite the look that Spike is giving him. "He may be able to walk in a day or two."
"Good for him." Xander grabs a couple of tiles and drops them onto the board almost haphazardly.
"What's your point?" Spike asks.
"My point is," Wesley says, "that Xander and Angel will encounter each other sooner or later. I thought Xander would like to know that the time may be getting nearer."
"Right," Xander says. "Because I'm pretty much on display whenever he's ready, right? It's not like I can go anywhere."
"If you don't want to see him, I'm sure he--"
Xander reaches out suddenly and flips the Scrabble board off the chair. Tiles fly. Spike jumps back in his chair, almost dropping his cigarette.
"Game over," Xander says, leaning sullenly back against the bars.
"You're fucking picking that up," Spike snaps, brushing ash off his forearm. Xander ignores him, staring at a spot somewhere up the middle of the far wall.
Wesley leans down and retrieves a fallen S from the floor beside his feet. Standing up makes his thigh bones ache.
"I'm sorry," he says, placing the S on the crossbar of the cage. "I didn't mean to upset you."
Neither Spike nor Xander acknowledges that, which Wesley takes as his cue to leave.
"I don't get it," Angel says, staring at the sheets over his knees. "How could they do something like that?"
"Stupidity," Wesley says. "And foolhardiness. The Council has always had too high an opinion of its own abilities."
"I killed Xander," Angel says, and the statement is so bald it's almost funny, in a hysterical, desperate kind of way.
"You almost died," Wesley says, to restore perspective.
The look Angel turns on him is easy to translate: I should have died.
Wesley turns away and pours another glass of water. Simple tasks, he's found, are the polestars of overwhelming grief.
He goes down to the basement with a bag of otter blood and a double espresso, peace offerings. Some part of his brain notices the faint sounds coming from the direction of Xander's cell, but he hasn't slept in thirty hours and he pays no attention. He gets almost to the cell before he realizes what he's walked in on.
They're both in the cot, Spike on top of Xander, a pile of clothes on the floor beside them. Xander's head is tipped back, his throat on display. There are marks in it, little dark holes with petals of blood running out. His eyes are closed in ecstasy. Spike's head is bent, biting or kissing.
Wesley stops short. Spike raises his head and looks at him, heavy-lidded. There's blood on his mouth and his hips are moving slowly, rhythmically, beneath the blanket. Xander's eyelids flutter.
"Get out," Spike says, without embarrassment or anger.
Wesley sets his gifts down on the floor where he's standing, and leaves.
Angel checks himself out of the infirmary and retreats to his old apartments. He's weak, barely able to walk, and mentally he's still far from well. Wesley continues to run the company to the best of his ability, putting off whatever he can and having Harmony cancel everything possible. The ship is drifting, but it's still afloat, and that's what matters. They all have more important problems.
A packet arrives from England, addressed to Wesley, with a return address of the head Council office in London. He opens it at his desk with the door closed, the security camera turned off. Inside there's a terse, formal letter from the Director, apologizing for the recent difficulties without actually accepting any blame. There's also a packet of official instructions for dealing with "the current conditions of Alexander Lavelle Harris."
Wesley takes the elevator up to Angel's floor, and walks down the hall with the packet in his hand. It takes Angel a long time to answer the knock on his door.
"Wes." He looks awful, as if he hasn't slept in days, which is probably the case. Wesley is torn between pity and impatience. Life goes on, after all. Things remain to be done.
He holds up the packet, making sure Angel can see the return address. After studying it for a second, Angel holds the door open and lets Wesley in.
They sit in the deep, soft armchairs in Angel's living room, Wesley staring out the window at the tops of the buildings, Angel reading through the packet. When he's done, he slides the papers back into the envelope and rests them on his knee. The knuckles of his right hand are raw and scabbed, Wesley notices.
"Spike should be in on this," Angel says, tapping the packet.
"Yes." Wesley pauses, wondering if he needs to mention what he walked in on, and decides he doesn't. Angelus knew how things stood there, so Angel must know too. Angel remembers everything Angelus said and did, after all. It's one reason they're both sitting in a darkened apartment right now, instead of downstairs where business proceeds as usual.
"It's an interim solution," Angel says, as if he's trying to convince himself of it. "We'll get him souled."
"Of course," Wesley agrees, standing up and accepting the packet back. "It may take some time, but it will happen."
"Good." Angel doesn't make any movement to stand up, so Wesley turns to go. Halfway to the door, he turns back.
"I know you're not ready yet, but when you are, we need to discuss regular business matters."
Angel just looks at him. His eyes are dark and stony, like a reptile's.
"When you're ready," Wesley says, and leaves.
"Fucking pathetic," Spike says, dropping the papers onto the table and shoving his chair back violently. "Harris lost his fucking soul and they want to put a leash on him and call it good?"
"Nobody's calling it good," Wesley says, as gently as he can. "It's not a permanent solution, it's only to keep him in check until we can retrieve his soul. It will mean he can leave the cage, at least."
"It's the same as the bloody chip--he's going to want everything a vamp wants, but he won't be able to do it. It's like torture."
"He won't be able to hurt anyone, Spike. Surely that's what we're most worried about?"
"I'm worried about his soul, actually."
"Of course, but in the short term--"
"Fuck the short term!" Spike barks that, then gets hold of himself suddenly and sits back in his chair, his jaw jumping. "All I'm saying," he says carefully, lining his fingers up along the edge of the desk and squeezing, "is that a magic zap every time he tries to bite someone is a pretty shitty solution when you think about how he got to be this way."
"Agreed."
There's a tense pause. Spike examines the tips of his fingers. Wesley collects the papers, orders them, and slides them back into the packet.
"I want to talk to him first," Spike says grudgingly, and Wesley nods.
"So...is this going to hurt?" Xander's standing in the middle of his cell, his hands in his pockets, looking forcedly casual. "Because if it is, I'll just drop to my knees now and get it over with."
"It won't hurt," Wesley says. He holds up the packet of herbs and tries to smile. "In fact, it's designed to feel quite pleasant."
"Oh." Xander looks nonplussed. "Okay, good."
"Just do it," Spike says. He's leaning against the bars of Xander's cage, studying the floor. He's clearly not happy with the arrangement, but then again, none of them are. Wesley opens the packet and spills dried blossoms into his palm. There's a faint smell of mint and cypress, with an understory of guano that he decides not to think about too closely.
"Ready?" He holds the herbs in front of his mouth and meets Xander's eyes. Xander nods. Wesley takes a deep breath and blows the herbs through the bars. They cover Xander in a fine chaff. He stands very still, as if he's bracing for impact.
Wesley lowers his hand and brushes flower dust off his palm. Spike frowns.
"Now what?"
"Nothing," Wesley says. "That's it."
Xander blinks. The corners of his mouth have turned up in a slightly dopey smile. He takes his hands out of his pockets and rubs them over his face, then laughs. "I'm--whoah. Hey. Wow."
Spike raises an eyebrow at Wesley. Wesley folds the paper packet carefully over on itself, and slips it into his pocket.
"There may be some...side effects," he says, stepping back from the cage. "Euphoria, mainly. Also, occasionally...arousal."
"Arousal?" Spike repeats the word as if he's never heard it, then suddenly looks into the cage. Xander's dropped onto his bunk, and he's lying on his back, running his hands over his chest and belly. His smile is blissful.
"I'll be upstairs," Wesley says, starting to beat a hasty retreat.
"Don't you want to make sure it took?"
"Later," Wesley calls, heading for the elevators.
Standing in the elevator, he hears the creak of the cage door opening, and the happy, unfamiliar sound of Xander laughing.
"This may not be a good idea," Wesley says for the third time.
"Not our decision. Harris wants to do it, so we do it." Spike hangs up abruptly, and Wesley stares at the receiver for a moment, then puts it back in its cradle.
Spike's less tense and angry these days, now that Xander's out of the cage and up in the apartment with him, but he can still be a pain to deal with. He's become remarkably single-minded in his protection of Xander, for one thing. Considering Xander's condition, it's hard to blame him, but it's still irritating at times. Now, for instance. Angel's only recently emerged from his apartment, and Wesley's fairly certain he's not ready to confront Xander. But if Xander wants it, Angel will do it. If Xander wanted to set the building on fire, Angel would probably do it.
Few things are less rational than survivor guilt, Wesley has learned.
They all defer to Xander in varying degrees, so now they're all scheduled to convene in the main board room. It's been two months since Angelus walked into the library and dragged Xander out of the world. The two of them haven't seen each other since Wesley roasted Angel alive in the same room a little over a week later. Wolfram & Hart is a big place; there are plenty of ways for them to avoid each other, and that's what they've done. Until now. The board room is neutral territory, but walking down the halls toward it, Wesley feels more than a little nauseated.
Angel is already there, sitting not at the head of the table but at one of the chairs down the side, as if he's trying to fade into corporate anonymity. He looks up quickly when Wesley comes in.
"Hi, Wes." He looks better these days. He's taking care with his appearance again, and he's lost some of the haunted look in his eyes. It's not as hard to face him across the table as it was a few weeks ago. But he still looks ready to jump at sudden movements, and that fear and uncertainty have translated into a beseeching look he never used to have.
Wesley sits down and smiles as well as he can. "Hello. Do you mind if I ask you about the Li Po suit? There are a couple of points I'm not sure about--"
He came with the topic prepared, in case of exactly this scenario. Angel jumps in gratefully, and they talk about insubstantial details as if they were urgent matters of company welfare, while the clock ticks on. Xander and Spike are late.
After fifteen minutes, Wesley glances at his watch and raises his eyebrows. "Perhaps we should--"
Angel looks at the door, and it opens. Spike walks in, expressionless in dark blue jeans and a white Oxford shirt. He nods at Angel, neither friendly nor unfriendly, and sits down in a chair on Wesley's side of the table. Behind him, Xander stands unmoving in the doorway.
"Xander." Angel glances at Wesley as if for help, then half-stands up. "Hi."
Xander stays where he is. He's in khakis and a T-shirt, like a college student. His hair's getting long. Overall he looks almost exactly as he looked when he first turned up, fresh from the Sayvu, sent by the Council to help stop the end of the world.
"Hello, Xander," Wesley says, to help fill in the silence. Xander still hasn't said anything. He's studying Angel with a look of fascinated disgust, the way he might study a bug on a pin. As Wesley watches, his forehead ripples and his right eye flickers gold.
"Not unless you want a headache," Spike says casually. Unlike the chip, the spell covers not only humans, but demons as well. It was a safeguard, from the Council's point of view--they wanted to ensure that Xander couldn't attack Spike or Angel. It was hard to argue against the logic, but even now, feeling his shoulders rise around his ears, Wesley feels sympathy. Until they find another solution, Xander is literally helpless.
"I know," Xander says, still staring at Angel. Angel meets his gaze for a few seconds, then looks aside. Xander frowns. "Don't you want to say something?"
Angel's jaw clenches. "I'm...sorry."
Xander laughs and walks into the room. "Right. Okay." He pulls out a chair and sits down on the edge of it. "I'm sorry too."
"If there's anything you want," Angel says, "I'll do it. Anything, Xander."
"I want to deep-fry Angelus's balls. But he's kind of left the building, hasn't he?"
Angel stares at the conference table in silence.
"You look like him," Xander goes on, leaning forward and clasping his hands between his knees. "But you're not him. You're just a sorry excuse in a big suit. You're nobody."
Angel says nothing.
"I just had to see for myself," Xander says, and stands up. "I'm done now."
He starts for the door, and Spike gets up to follow him out. Halfway there, Xander turns around again.
"I almost forgot. I don't want to run into you, Angel. I don't want to see you. If you want to tell me something, tell somebody else or send a carrier pigeon or something. Okay?"
Angel swallows and nods. "Okay."
Xander stares at him a moment longer, then flicks a wave at Wesley and walks out. Spike follows. The door falls almost shut behind them.
Angel puts his hand over his eyes. Wesley stares past him, out the window, at the blue sky dimmed by smog. Far down the corridor, he can hear a telephone ringing and ringing, with no-one there to answer.
The End
