::.. Witlingville ..::

Notes: I still owe Spander to [info]aimeelicious. Actually, she asked for either Mal/Jayne or Spander, but I'm like a coin drop that way--you put the penny in and there's only one way to the bottom. Spander it is!

I'm taking this opportunity to do a follow-up to a previous story, The Assistant. Because you can never have too much Vamp!Xander, and because I'm kind of curious to know exactly how those two crazy kids worked things out. The answer, you won't be surprised to learn, is: angstily, with bad puns, and at great length..

The Middleman part 1-7; complete

The most disturbing thing about the situation was how quickly it began to feel normal. Wesley would have been willing to bet any odds that he'd never again feel comfortable sitting down to breakfast across from Xander Harris, and Wesley was not a betting man. Yet here he was, drinking a cup of tea and sharing sections of the paper with Xander, who was drinking from his own cup. Which happened to be filled with blood.

"Will you look at that," Xander said, propping his cheek against his fist and reaching for a pen. "Whites sale at Macy's. And somebody doesn't know an nine-letter word for 'horny coney.'"

"It makes no sense," Wesley murmured, most of his attention on the riots in Dakar. "A coney is a rabbit."

"And a horny coney is a...?" Xander paused, pen hovering, eyebrows raised. When Wesley said nothing, he shook his head and started writing. "Clearly you've never been to Wall Drug."

"There's no such thing as a horned rabbit," Wesley said, with some irritation. "It's a hopeless puzzle."

"Says the guy who recently ran off in pursuit of a giant, sentient sponge."

"I hardly think the local paper is going to ask its readers to know 'spiny soft death star' in order to complete its crossword."

"No," said Xander, dropping the puzzle in the middle of the table and shoving his chair back, "but apparently 'jackelope' is fair game."

Wesley leaned forward and peered at the puzzle.

"I'm going to bed," said Xander, tossing the pen down next to the puzzle. "If you see Captain Dickhead, tell him I'm low on blood."

"Of course," Wesley murmured, drawing the paper over with one finger, already filling in blanks in his mind.

Captain Dickhead appeared some time later, smelling of sewers and ichor. Wesley tried not to wrinkle his nose too obviously.

"Where's Harris?" Spike asked immediately, the way he always did--getting the lay of the land. Over the course of the last few months, Spike had become a finely attuned instrument, calibrated to the extreme weather of Xander's moods. As far as Wesley could tell, Xander spent ninety percent of his time abusing Spike mercilessly, and the rest cajoling for blood and sex. It didn't seem very fair, but it wasn't Wesley's place to pass judgment. It was no doubt difficult to sustain an equal, mutually respectful partnership when you lacked a soul.

"He's gone to bed," he replied. "And he said to tell you he's low on blood."

"He's always low on blood," Spike groused, but he sank into the other chair and leaned over the table, glancing without interest into Xander's abandoned blood cup. "Drinks like a bloody fish."

"Your hunt was successful, I take it?" Wesley nodded at Spike's boots, which had left ichor tracks across the kitchen floor. "The Fleuvag demons have been ousted?"

Spike nodded, dug out a cigarette, and lit it behind a cupped palm. "Thanks," he said, waving vaguely at the table, the papers and cups and the crossbow sitting on the counter behind Wesley's head. "For, you know. The usual."

"My pleasure." Wesley stood, stretched, and rolled his head on his neck, wincing at the crunch. "No troubles, obviously. And you'll be pleased to hear I got a letter from Noel Winterbottom, promising some action within the month."

"The month," Spike repeated, staring at Xander's cup. "Wonderful."

"Considering the Council's usual rate of speed, that's quite dramatic. Noel must be working very hard on our behalf."

"Remind me to send him a gift basket," Spike said, sounding tired. Wesley paused, gathering up his own cup and plate.

"He's going to be all right," he said. Spike glanced up at him, his eyes weary and bloodshot. "He is, Spike."

"Good," Spike said, touching his finger to a drop of blood spilled on the table, then putting it to his mouth.

They'd closed down all the offices on the floors directly above and below what had been Spike's room. It was now Spike and Xander's room, and though there were no security cameras in there and Wesley had never visited, he understood that it had undergone some radical redecoration. He'd seen lengths of chain going in, and heard some of the hammering and drilling that it apparently took to outfit a suite for a soulless, helpless, furious new vampire. He'd also heard some of the screaming, and the sounds of breakage, that had caused them to close down all those offices. Too many employees coming quaking to his office, eyes downcast, asking for reassignments.

"Try to keep it down to a dull roar," Angel said to Spike. Spike curled his lip and walked away.

Wesley's own room was on a different floor entirely, but he still heard Xander screaming, later that afternoon. He called Spike terrible things, things that might have made sense for Angelus, but that made no sense at all for the man who'd taken him in, who cared for him. The pure shrill hateful fury of it raised the hairs on the back of Wesley's neck, made his hands clench over his keyboard. More than once he'd had to stop himself from taking the elevator down to give Xander a piece of his mind. Laughable, really. He could just see himself down there in that ruin of a suite, shaking his finger in Xander's ridged, fanged face while Spike glowered in the background. More likely Spike wouldn't even let him through the door.

Anyway, it always ended abruptly, spiraling up to a fever pitch that finally made Spike decide enough was enough. Some small mean part of Wesley loved that moment, when the horrible screaming cut suddenly to silence, because he could imagine Spike's forearm around Xander's throat, choking him into submission. It was terrible, he knew, to feel the slightest bit of satisfaction at that image. None of this was Xander's fault. The tantrums were to be expected. They were all doing the best they could under the circumstances.

Still, when the hail of abuse finally reached that precise level of intensity that made Spike react, and was unceremoniously silenced, Wesley heaved a sigh of relief and pressed his fingertips to his eyelids. The whole building seemed to be standing still, listening. There might have been one muffled thump, no more.

Wesley opened his eyes and went back to reading his email.

Earlier on, they'd made the mistake of introducing Xander to some of the others. Specifically, to Cordelia and Fred.

"Hi Xander," Fred said uncertainly.

"Hi," he said, with a friendly smile. They all thought it was going well, so they didn't keep close watch and nobody heard exactly what he murmured to her in the corner of the room. All Wesley knew was that Spike's head whipped around as if he'd smelled blood, and that Fred's face was a white blur, her eyes big and horrified.

"Oh, I don't think so," Cordelia said, standing up with her chin outthrust. "I don't care if you're vamped, you're one letch away from getting the tip of my Fendi up your ass."

"Sounds awesome," he said, grinning. "Then we can trade, and I'll plow that sweet peach of yours so hard you'll taste cream for--" That was all he had time for, before Spike punched him in the chin and his head snapped back with a crack, spilling him over a chair. He landed on the other side with a thump, already laughing. "I can see up your skirt, Texas! My, ain't that a pretty little puss!" Spike was around the chair by that time, hitting him again, and Fred was fleeing in the direction of the labs, where she remained for almost three days, refusing to admit she was upset.

They debated making him apologize, but decided it wasn't worth it. After that, the only people he saw were Spike and Wesley.

If one of them mentioned Angel's name in conversation--they never mentioned Angelus--he fell silent, and sometimes refused to respond to anything else they said.

It was really an untenable situation, or a situation made tenable only by the fact that they knew it wouldn't last, that the Council was going to deliver a solution--that they were, by hook or by crook, going to get Xander Harris's soul back. In his lowest moments--when he was fatigued beyond reason, when Xander was being more than usually irritating even with Wesley, whom he usually treated with more civility and respect than anyone else, when the halls had been filled with screams and curses and sounds of expensive breakage and violence--Wesley tried to remember that Xander Harris was a hero, many times over. Sometimes it helped. A little.

"It's a takeover bid," Angel said, in an enough-already-we're-cutting-this-short tone of voice. "They're trying to take over Wolfram & Hart."

"Not quite," Wesley corrected him, trying not to sound impatient. "They're proposing a merger, with joint ownership."

"Come on, Wesley. These guys aren't interested in being one big committee. They want to take us over, but they want to do it without a fight."

"Which makes sense," Cordelia put in, "since, as far as we can tell, they're the good guys."

"It's so weird," Fred said. "I mean, angels. Cherubim, whatever. With MBAs." She looked around. "Am I the only one who thinks that's weird?"

Wordlessly, Cordelia and Spike held up their hands. Wesley acknowledged them with a nod.

"Granted, we find ourselves in an unusual situation--as proprietors of Wolfram & Hart, we appear to be on the side of darkness." Tactfully, he left out the fact that they currently counted three vampires among their inner circle.

"I don't care what the situation appears to be," Angel said, pushing his chair back and standing up. "This is my company, and they're trying to take it over. In my books, that's a hostile activity. So if these cherubim people want to do this thing, they're going to have to bring it."

"Did you just quote that cheerlead movie?" Cordelia asked. Angel frowned.

"I'll tell them you're not interested in the offer," Wesley said quickly.

"Meeting adjourned," said Angel.

The angels took the news rather well, he thought--they seemed to be decent types, if a bit leaden in the prose department. Their emailed response was heavy on the 'heretofore's and 'thereunto's, and frankly when it got into the begats he skipped to the end, but overall they seemed civil. If only all their business dealings went so smoothly, he reflected, filing it all away and moving on to the outstanding lamia issue.

Later that afternoon, he looked up from his laptop to see Cordelia standing in the doorway, wearing her coat. "Apparently you don't read your APBs," she said. "Incoming cyclone? Battening the hatches? Hello?"

"What--" Confused, he switched over to his email, and saw at once the message she was talking about. There was an extreme weather alert--whatever that was--for the entire downtown area. A massive storm front coming in off the water, carrying gale-force winds, rain, and hail. The local news station seemed as baffled as anyone, but businesses all over the downtown core were expediently shutting down, hammering plywood over the windows and chaining the doors closed.

"We're sending everybody home," Cordelia said. "I'm leaving five minutes ago. You want a ride?"

His flat, still nominally his because he paid rent although he hadn't visited in months, was on the east side, out of the worst predicted path of destruction. He gazed in fascination at the red line the weather map traced through the heart of the city. If it was accurate, the storm was headed straight for Wolfram & Hart's offices.

"No thanks," he said absently. "I'll be all right."

"You boys are all the same," she said. "You love playing White Squall. Keep away from the windows, okay?"

"Yes, thanks," he said, his eyes still on the screen. There was something strange about the storm--something almost familiar--but he couldn't pin it down.

Ten minutes later the sky outside his window was greenish grey, and the wind was hitting the glass so hard he could hear it inside the office, irregular petulant wallops like an invisible body hurling itself against the surface. He reached for his phone without looking.

"I'm not liking this," Angel said. "Are you liking this?"

"No. It's highly unusual weather for Los Angeles. Particularly at this time of year. Particularly in this pattern--" He studied the television screen, showed the great blue sweep moving in across the water. As he watched it, the screen flickered.

"Call me arrogant, but it feels personal."

"It's possible," Wesley allowed. "The storm is headed directly for us."

"Like I said. Do we have any outstanding prophecies I should be thinking about?"

"Prophecies, no. I'll start researching other possibilities."

"Get Spike working on it too--he's the only one still here. Let me know when you've got something. And keep away from the windows."

"The glass is reinforced," Wesley said. "I hardly think we're in any danger of--" He was cut off by a blast of wind hitting the glass with a bang.

"Keep me posted," said Angel.

Wesley hung up and dialed Spike's mobile. Unlike the rest of them, Spike didn't deign to occupy an office. He picked up on the third ring, sounding harassed.

"What?"

"Where are you? I need your help researching this storm." The television flickered again, and Spike's first few words were cut off.

"--love to lend a hand, but I'm kind of busy keeping Harris from tearing the place apart--" He broke off again, but this time Wesley clearly heard him, yelling away from the receiver. "Fucking put that down. Put that--Harris, I swear to Christ I'm going to kick your head right down your fucking throat if you don't--" There was a crash, a quick fumbling sound, and Spike was back. "Yeah, got my hands full here, sorry." The connection broke, and Wesley stared at the phone in his hand, then set it carefully back in the cradle.

He was halfway to the library when the lights went out. For a moment he was plunged into blackness, then the emergency floods kicked on with a snap and a buzz, and everything was bathed in a dim orange glow. He fumbled in his pocket for his mobile: no bars. He tucked it back into his pocket and started for the library again, walking instinctively close to the wall. The skin of his palms was damp, and the back of his neck felt tight and vulnerable. He could hear the wind howling outside the building, scaling up to what must be a ferocious pitch. Cordelia had called it a cyclone--perhaps she'd been right. For the first time, he began to worry about the windows.

He had to haul the library door open by force; it had swung shut automatically when the power had cut out. Inside, he took the big torch from the bottom desk drawer and carried it through the stacks, skimming the spines. The wind hammered at the outer walls, and some part of his mind called up the old Biblical references: cymbals and gongs. Over the sound of the wind he heard a distant crash, then another. He paused, his hand poised over the third volume of the Eternal Diamond Fortune. Then the door to the library banged open, and he jumped and almost dropped the book.

"Oi, Watcher," yelled Spike. Wesley put his head out the end of the aisle and was afforded the bizarre sight of Spike attempting to haul Xander into the library at the end of a length of chain. Xander, in jeans and a T-shirt with the collar ripped halfway to his shoulder, was trying with all his considerable strength to resist being pulled in. His feet were planted on the threshold and his arms, yanked straight out in front of him by the force of the chain, were corded with muscle. In full game face, he reminded Wesley of nothing so much as a brutally strong, recalcitrant dog.

"Harris," said Spike, wrestling with his end of the chain, "I'll break every limb you have, I swear to Christ."

"What's going on?" Wesley asked, stepping out of the aisle. Neither of them looked at him. Harris had managed to hook his leg to the outside of the door, and was using the leverage to brace himself. The wood creaked. Spike, Wesley noticed, wasn't gaining any ground. "What are you doing here? I thought you were staying--"

"So did I," Spike gritted. "Till the lights went off and Harris tried to make a run for it."

"Make a--" Wesley stared at Xander, who'd at some point bitten his own lip, causing it to bleed down his chin. His expression, in the orange emergency lights, was distorted and wild, almost bestial. "What's wrong with him?"

"Don't ask me," Spike snapped, looping his end of the chain around the leg of the big table. "He's got a wild hair about the storm. He's not making any sense, and he won't--" He cut off with a grunt as Xander jerked suddenly at the chain, then jerked it savagely back, slamming Xander into the door but not dislodging him. "Won't fucking listen to reason."

"Xander," Wesley tried, resting the torch on the table. "It's all right, you're safe here--"

Unfortunately, Angel chose that moment to appear in the hallway behind Xander. Xander registered it at the same moment Wesley did--he reacted by whipping around and striking with snakelike speed at Angel's throat. The spell dropped him to his knees, and Spike took advantage of the situation to drag him into the library by his still-chained wrists. All in all it hardly seemed fair, Wesley reflected. But now was not the time to contemplate just outcomes.

Angel hesitated at the threshold, watching with a troubled expression as Spike wrapped Xander's chains around the leg of the table.

"Is he okay?" he asked, over the still-rising howl of the wind. Spike didn't reply. He finished securing the chain, then pried up one of Xander's fluttering eyelids. After a moment or two he let it go again, his mouth tight.

"Right," he said, climbing to his feet and clapping his hands against his jeans. "What're we dealing with, exactly?"

Wesley pulled his gaze away from Xander, who was rolling clumsily from his back to his side, his hands pawing for purchase. "So far," he said, laying the Eternal Diamond Fortune on the table, "just a storm. As far as we know."

"It's hailing baseballs," Angel said flatly. "It's more than just a storm, Wes." He stayed close to the wall, giving Xander a wide berth on his way to the head of the table. "Somebody's trying to tell us something."

"Quite possibly," Wesley said. He had to raise his voice to hear it above the storm, he noticed, with a frisson of alarm. "The question is, who? And what?"

Xander said something, too low to make out over the storm. Spike toed him in the ribs. "What's that?"

They all looked at Xander, who ground his forehead against the floor in silence. Wesley gave it a minute, then flipped to the index in the Fortune and started looking for references to storms. There were dozens. He frowned and tried the first.

"Wes, I need to know what's going on." Angel was at his elbow, peering at the page. "There's got to be some way to short-cut the book stuff."

"There is," Wesley said, without looking up. "It's called the database. However, since the network's down, we can't use it."

"Some other way," Angel said. "What about the White Room?"

"No power," Wesley reminded him. "The elevators won't take us there."

"Whatever this is," Angel said, "it's ripping my building to pieces." As if to underline his urgency, the building gave a long, low creak. They all fell silent. Wesley wasn't certain, but he thought he felt a faint, deeply unpleasant sense of movement beneath his feet.

"Who the hell is doing this?" Angel barked. There was a startled clank from beneath the table, and he mastered himself with visible effort. "Wes, I need answers."

Very clearly, Xander said: "You're so fucking stupid."

Even the wind fell silent for a moment. They all stood looking at each other. Then, as one, they all crouched down and looked at Xander, who was curled around the table leg, trembling visibly, every muscle taut. The manacles were digging cruelly into his wrists, but he hardly seemed to notice them. He stared back at them, one eye golden and the other dull brown, sweat running down his throat.

"Xander," Angel said quietly, and even that was enough to make Xander flinch, before he caught himself and shook it off. He met Angel's gaze with a combination of terror and disdain. "Do you know what's going on here?"

"You're all so fucking stupid," Xander repeated, and let out a short, involuntary laugh that showed his fangs and the red lines of his gums. "I'm the only one who gets it, right? Because I'm the only one who's really bad, now."

Wesley looked at Spike, asking with his eyes: What's he talking about? Spike shook his head, made a vague gesture with his hand: More of the same, it's all bollocks.

"It's the good guys," Xander said, panting through half-open lips. He was so pale now he looked waxen. "Act of God, right? Put that on your insurance claim, you dick."

"Xander," Angel said, just as they all felt an awful, seismic shift in the building around them. There was an explosion, a sound of hundreds of industrially reinforced windows exploding all at once, and then a snapping sound, a quick, rank, electrical whiff, and all the lights went out. Even the torch died in Wesley's hand.

They stayed where they were, crouched in the darkness. The wind was gone, Wesley realized dimly. He could hear Xander breathing in quick, gasping pants. He could hear the clink of the chain.

"Aw, fuck," Xander said softly, and in the darkness he sounded so much like the old Xander Harris, the good man forever backed into a terrible corner, that Wesley wanted to reach out and touch him. "Here they come."

"What the--" Spike started to say, and then the door to the library bloomed with a blue-white light. Wesley's eyes immediately began to water. He heard himself make a choking sound, and realized Angel's hand was on his shoulder.

"Are you all right?" Angel asked, his mouth close to Wesley's ear, as if there weren't a host of angels standing in the door to the library. Wesley, afraid he'd vomit if he opened his mouth, nodded.

"Lie down," Angel said, pressing him gently to the floor. "It's easier if you don't look at them."

But Wesley couldn't look away. He lay on his back and stared through weeping eyes at the giant figures. They each had multiple faces, and they gazed around the library with expressions of kindly interest that were at the same time furious and supremely, transcendently uninterested. When one of them turned its eyes directly on Wesley, he felt that he was simultaneously burning alive and resting more deeply than he'd ever done. It was more pleasurable and painful than anything he'd ever felt, and it only stopped when Angel stood up between them, cutting off the thing's line of vision.

"You're in my house," he said flatly, and Wesley spent a flickering instant amazed that he could stand up, let alone speak. "I didn't invite you in."

"This place is unclean," said the angel, searing the room with its gaze. "It has been an unholy house for many years. We offered peace."

"You offered a buyout," Angel said. "We said no."

"And so," said the thing. "We are here."

Remotely, Wesley became aware of Xander lying on the floor to his right, underneath the table. He was shaking uncontrollably, clattering his chains against the floor and the table. He'd sweated through his shirt, and there was a bloody froth on his lips. Spike crouched beside him, one hand on his shoulder, but Xander didn't seem to notice. His head lolled, and his eyes met Wesley's blankly. His face was more elongated, his fangs longer, the ridges of his head and neck more ferociously pronounced than Wesley had ever seen them. Here was a demon, Wesley thought dimly, trapped in the presence of avenging angels.

"This house isn't as unclean as you think it is," Angel was saying. "You know who I am. What I am."

"A demon," said one of the angel's faces. "A man," said another. "With a soul," said a third. They turned to Spike, who ground his jaw but gave them a steady glare in return. "And this one, too."

"This one is a man," said another, and Wesley realized faintly that it was talking about him. "A good man. Our soldier."

"Yeah," Spike said, getting to his feet with some effort. "Be nice if you could tone things down a bit, for his sake."

There was a pause, and then Wesley realized he could breathe without pulling at the air, that he could stop making the whooping-cough sound he hadn't even realized he'd been making. His muscles released their death-grip on each other. He was cold. He could see his breath in the air.

"That one," the angels said, "is a child of Morning Star."

Wesley turned his head and found himself looking into Xander's eyes again. Silently, they gazed at each other. Xander's wrists worked incessantly, bloodily, in the manacles.

"Not really," Spike said. "More of a red-headed stepson, I'd say."

"Unclean," said the angel, and the word was so singular, so pure and irretrievable, that Wesley's heart sank. He felt tears fill his eyes again, and spill down his face to the floor. "This one, and the others who are not here. The low and unclean ones. We shall smite them."

"No," said Angel. "You shall not."

There was a pause. Wesley had the distinct impression that the angels were conferring, although none of them moved or spoke.

"Here's how this is going to go," Angel said, turning his back on the angels and walking to the weapons case against the wall. He opened the door, spent a moment perusing the contents, and chose a longsword. "You're going to leave now." He weighed the sword in his hand, glanced at Spike, then reached back into the case and withdrew a battleaxe. With his foot, he eased the case door closed. "You're going to go tell your boss this isn't the den of sin he seems to think it is. And if I hear of a single one of my people begin smitten?" He walked back over to the table and held the axe out to Spike, who took it and swung it experimentally. "I'm going to come over to your place and start breaking furniture."

The silence drew out. Wesley tried to raise his head, and couldn't.

"I don't know," Spike said. "They're busy people. Maybe we shouldn't wait for the Christmas rush."

"Fine with me," Angel said. "These assholes broke my building."

Things happened very suddenly after that. All Wesley was sure of was that Angel raised the sword, and that Spike turned and swung the axe in an impossibly fast arc, that the blade passed through the air with a zipping sound and through the leg of the table with a single decisive whack. The table itself jumped, then stood still, then started to slide woozily to the floor, spilling the Eternal Diamond Fortune to the ground beside Wesley's head. He blinked. Spike had attacked the table. Why had--?

Then he heard the clatter of chains and a hurried thundering of feet, and realized that Xander was escaping out from under the far end of the collapsing table, heading for the back of the library and the door to the tunnels.

In the front of the library, Angel seemed to be doing battle with three columns of light. Something struck him in the head, he staggered, and Spike stepped in behind him, swinging the axe in a silver circle. They fought well together, Wesley reflected, as he slid down the warm slope toward the waiting darkness. It was a shame there was no possible way for them to win.

He woke up to the embarrassing, ammoniac sting of smelling salts. He was under a blanket, lying on the floor of the library. The ruined table knelt beside him, the Eternal Diamond Fortune was still splayed open next to his head. Spike was sitting back on his heels, the open salt vial in his fingers, looking around the room with an expression of weary bemusement.

"What--" Wesley's voice came out creaking, and he had to clear his throat. "What happened?"

"Draw," Spike said, without looking at him.

"They kicked our asses," Angel said. Wesley raised his head with an effort, and saw Angel standing behind the desk, his mobile phone pressed to his ear. The lights were on again, Wesley noticed. There was a twist of blackened metal on the floor by the doorway; after a moment, he recognized the cruciform handle of the longsword. Beside it was a cold puddle of solid steel--Spike's axe.

Slowly, Wesley sat up. Spike offered him the salts, and he shook his head.

"Where are they?"

"They left," Angel said shortly, hitting the cutoff and punching in another number. "But they'll be back. We need to get hold of someone who can deal with these people. A mediator."

"A...priest?" Wesley asked. Spike gave a rude cough. "Then who?"

"A mediator," Angel said again, and turned to face the wall, one hand rising to rub the back of his head.

"You all right?" Spike asked. Wesley blinked at him.

"Xander--where did he go?"

"Fucked if I know," Spike said, with a bitter laugh. "I checked the route down to the tunnels, and he's not there."

"But it's not safe for him to leave." Wesley had the vague sense that he still wasn't thinking very quickly. "He can't--he can't fight. He's helpless. He knows that."

"Sure," Spike said. "He also knew he was going to be a tiki torch if he stayed here." He smiled grimly. "Ladies and gentlemen, Xander Harris has left the building."

Had Wesley been in any state of mind to make predictions, he would have assumed that finding a mediator would take more time and effort than finding Xander. He would have been wrong.

The mediator was a small, red-faced man with a bulbous nose and prodigious tufts of hair growing from both ears. "Marcel Pagnol," he said, presenting a business card with a weary flourish. "No, not that Marcel Pagnol. Although I knew him, would you believe it? I could never stand those movies. Everything so slow, everyone so troubled, where's the action? Where's the--" He clapped Angel's lapel. "You have a problem with divinity, yes? Tell me more."

"We've got activist cherubim," Angel confirmed. "Watch your step."

Pagnol touched a checkered handkerchief to his lips, stepping lightly over an overturned chair. "I can see," he said, nodding at the blown-out windows. "So, where do we talk?"

"My office is still standing," Angel said, ushering him that way. Over his shoulder, he said, "Spike, you want me to call someone to find Xander?"

Spike was sorting through a handful of pages that had blown off someone's desk; he didn't bother to respond. Angel glanced at Wesley, a request in his eyes. Wesley nodded, and Angel closed the door on his conversation with Marcel Pagnol.

"Where do we start?" Wesley asked, dry-swallowing the aspirin he'd found in Fred's desk drawer. Spike gave him a narrow look.

"You've got a building to put back together."

"The building can wait." Xander, he omitted to say, probably could not. "I want to help, Spike."

"I can handle it."

"I'm sure you can, but it'll go faster with two of us." Spike's gaze was flat. "He's my friend. Or, he was before all this happened. It's partly my fault he's in this situation."

"Well," said Spike, turning away, "we all get a share in that one, don't we?"

They compromised; Spike did a first sweep in the tunnels while Wesley got the network up and running again. They kept in touch over their mobiles while Wesley printed out maps of all the tunnels connected to the one Xander had fled to.

"What about the angels?" he asked, collecting the sheaf from the plotter and glancing out the window at the darkening sky. "Will they be looking for him too?"

"Dunno," Spike said. "Dunno what put this bug up their ass in the first place. If Angel's mediator is any good, he should be working on backing them off a bit."

Privately, Wesley hoped that Marcel Pagnol was a very good mediator. Out loud, he said, "Tell me where to meet you."

Spike paused. "It's dark out, yeah? I'll come up at Figueroa and First."

"I'll be there in ten minutes."

The streets outside the building were empty, the traffic lights burnt out or blinking red. All the smaller businesses were shuttered with metal gates. In the lobbies of the big ones, the office buildings and banks, he glimpsed security guards standing around in the gloom, studying the broken windows. Occasionally he heard sirens. The streets were slick and shining, the gutters full of slush. Los Angeles, in the wake of a hurricane, was an even more unnerving city than usual.

Spike was a thin dark figure on the windswept street corner, his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his collar turned up, looking like the ghost of James Dean. He got in, bringing a waft of cold, smoky, slightly sewerish air. Wesley cracked his window.

"Sorry."

"Not at all." Conscious of the absurdity, Wesley drew the folder of maps from the back seat, and passed it to Spike, who was swigging from a flask. "Where should we start?"

"You sure you're up for this?" Spike gave him a close look. "You look knackered."

"I'm fine." In addition to the aspirin, he'd taken four of Fred's caffeinated Midol. He'd have to remember them as an antidote to angelic visitations and other depleting encounters. "Where would he go, once he was able to travel aboveground?"

Spike spent another few seconds scrutinizing him, then pursed his lips and started shuffling through the maps. "Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether it's Harris or the demon running the show."

Wesley considered that, while the engine purred. Spike took another swig from the flask, and held it out. Wesley shook his head.

"Right," Spike said, settling into his seat with an air of resignation. "Let's start with the brothels."

Harris, thank God, wasn't in any of the half-dozen vampire brothels they visited. Wesley wasn't sure, but he thought that was a positive sign.

"All right," he said, settling back behind the steering wheel and trying to forget the last two hours of his life. "What's next?"

Spike thought, unscrewing the cap of his flask. "Bars, I guess."

"Demon bars?"

"Maybe." Spike swigged, and this time Wesley took the flask when it was offered. It was rough, unwatered bourbon, and it was excellent. "He might try human ones, though. Might think his chances were better."

"His chances of what?"

"Of not getting dusted."

Wesley turned the key in the ignition, then paused. "Perhaps we're going about this the wrong way. In his condition, mightn't he look for the safest possible place to hide? Somewhere isolated?"

"The Virgin Islands, yeah." Spike repossessed the flask. "He's got no money, doesn't know anyone. And he's panicked." He slouched deeper against the passenger side door. "Harris is a drinker, and so's the demon. Bars next."

Wesley tried to think of something to say to that, but quickly realized that there really weren't any good options. He put the car in gear and pulled out.

They gave up a couple of hours before dawn, and Spike insisted on driving them back.

"You look like shit," he said, lifting the keys from Wesley's fingers. "Last thing we need is for you to plow through a bus full of nuns. Bloody angels'd skin us all alive."

"Indeed," Wesley said, too exhausted to put up much of a fight. The angels seemed like a lifetime ago; the last few hours had turned to an indistinguishable slurry of smoky back rooms, grim stares, and John Cougar Mellencamp classics. He'd smelled too many rancid bar floors, and brushed up against too many sticky, unseen substances to really believe that God existed anymore. He slid into the passenger seat and massaged his temples, trying to think. "It'll be daylight soon--he'll need somewhere to go to earth. We should try some of the warehouses on the other side of the river."

"You need sleep," Spike said, staring straight ahead, his legs sprawled loosely in the footwell, but his fingers tight around the wheel. "We're going back to the office, maybe he's turned up there."

If he had, someone would have called. But Wesley didn't argue; he allowed himself to slide down the walls of his own consciousness, and was asleep before they hit the freeway.

Marcel Pagnol had left, taking with him a sizeable check and a detailed description of the angels in question. They found Angel alone in the lobby, considering the Pagnol business card amid the splintered remains of most of the office furniture.

"He said there's been a lot of this lately--random crackdowns." Angel paused, giving Wesley a second look. "You okay?"

"Fine." In fact the muscles on either side of his spine had begun to stiffen and fuse, and he was having trouble keeping his eyes focused. "Did he say what...why they're doing this?"

Angel continued to stare at him, until Spike walked past and said casually, "He's a mess. Better get one of the womenfolk to fix him up."

"They're not here," Angel said absently, reaching for Wesley's arm. Irritated, Wesley drew it away.

"I'm fine," he said again. "What kind of crackdowns?"

"You should sit," Angel said. He took Wesley's arm in a firm grip and led him to the battle-scarred leather club chair in the corner of the lobby. At the same time, he turned his head to follow Spike, who was heading for the elevators. "Any sign of Xander?"

"Not a one," Spike said, slapping the buttons and frowning at the floor lights. "Bugger's gone to ground somewhere. Or he's dusted."

There was a brief silence, while Wesley sank into the chair and Angel looked at Spike. Spike slapped the buttons again, then muttered, "Fuck it," and started for the stairs.

"Spike," Angel said. "I want to talk to you."

"That's nice. I want a shower and a pint."

"Come see me in my rooms."

Spike gave no indication that he'd heard; he just straight-armed the emergency door and disappeared into the stairwell. Angel added, "Or I'll come find you."

The door closed with a crash. Wesley winced; his head was pounding. Angel turned back to look at him. "Do you want help getting to bed?"

"No, thank you." He planned to sleep in the chair. "Why crackdowns? And why us? Surely this firm is on the side of right for the first time in hundreds of years. Why attack us now?"

Angel looked thoughtful. "I don't think it's anything personal. The way he explained it to me, it's like...well, kind of like the Council, only bigger. With more bureaucracy."

Wesley squinted.

"Yeah," said Angel. "That's what I said, too. I'm going to go get you a cup of tea."

Wesley laughed. "All right," he said. He could still feel the pressure of Angel's hand on his arm. He let his head fall back against the chair and watched Angel walk away through the wrecked lobby. Behind him, the eastern sky was just beginning to turn pink.

He woke up under a blanket, with a cup of cold tea at his feet. The sun was bright outside the shattered windows. A faint breeze stirred the papers scattered across the floor. His neck was kinked and his temples felt tight, but he wasn't teetering on the edge of complete exhaustion anymore. He stood beside a shattered window and drank the tea with the bag still in it, the little paper tag fluttering in the wind.

In the security room, he took a quick look around the building. All of the windows on floors eight through fourteen appeared to be blown out, but the others seemed intact. Angel's suite, on the top floor, was still glassed in. From what he could tell, the White Room was still there, although the elevators didn't seem to be working yet. He'd brought the office network up on the backup generators, but everything else was still down. A quick look out the window confirmed it--the power was out for blocks.

His mobile had service again but the battery was low, so he took the stairs up to Angel's suite. By the time he got there he was breathing hard and he could feel the prickle of perspiration at his hairline. He needed a shower, he realized. He could smell the lingering traces of his own rank sweat in his clothes. Unfortunately, his room was on one of the floors that had been hardest hit by the storm: so far as he knew, he had no windows, no electricity, and probably no plumbing. Glumly, he considered the prospect of driving back to his flat for clean clothes and a shower. It seemed impossible, given all that he had to do here.

Angel opened the door in pajama bottoms, nothing else. It was and would forever be a point of painful embarrassment for Wesley that he couldn't look directly at Angel unclothed. He felt his eyes slide immediately to the side, and tried not to acknowledge his own blush.

"I'm sorry," he said, automatically. "You were sleeping, I'll come back--"

"No," said Angel. "I'm up. Are you okay?"

"Fine." Wesley tried to remember what he'd come for. "I was wondering--well, most of the windows have been broken, it's not safe for you on those floors until the sun goes down. And I was wondering about the staff, whether we should contact the department heads, start bringing people back in--"

"I don't want anyone coming back until we're sure it's safe." Angel hesitated, then stepped to the side. "You should come in so we can talk this through."

Wesley nodded automatically. "The mobiles are working again. We should call Spike, he could take the service corridors to get here."

Again, Angel paused. "I'll fill him in," he said, closing the door quietly. "Hang on, I'm going to put some clothes on." He started across the room toward the bedroom door. "There's water in the fridge."

Wesley took out a warm bottle and drank it staring out the treated glass of Angel's window, trying to collect his thoughts. He was just beginning to formulate a list of priorities, neatly ordered in descending order of importance, when he realized he could hear voices in Angel's bedroom. A moment later, he realized whose they were: Angel himself, and Spike.

For a moment he stood staring blankly out at the silent city, at the broken windows of the high-rise opposite, at the single plume of dark smoke rising from somewhere across the river. He turned and looked at the room. The couch, the deep leather chairs--it was all familiar. Across one of the chairs lay Spike's duster. On the low table were two glasses of whiskey dregs, like a pair of puzzle pieces. Wesley gazed at them, while the low, almost inaudible murmur of discussion went on behind the closed bedroom door. After a minute or two, it stopped.

Wesley turned back to the window, and drank his water.

After another couple of minutes, Angel came out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him. He was dressed in a dark shirt and trousers, and his hair was worked into a semblance of its usual shape. He went to the fridge and took out his own bottle of water.

"Our first priority," said Wesley, "is to determine how negotiations are proceeding with the...cherubim."

"Agreed," said Angel.

"Once we understand the situation better, we can hope to prevent another attack, or answer it better, should it occur. In the meantime, we need to find Xander. It's still light out, but I can start searching if Spike provides me with a list of locations."

"Okay."

"Full power will have to wait until the city grid comes back up, but in the meantime we have the generator to run the basics. We should put Fred to work on getting the network back up to strength."

Angel said nothing. Wesley turned to face him with a small smile.

"I'll need to take a side trip," he said. "To my flat. For a change of clothes, a few other things."

"Sure," Angel said. "Of course. Whatever you need." His eyes were intent on Wesley's face. "Listen, Wes, I think I should say--"

"Tell Spike to send the list to my mobile," Wesley said. "I'll charge it in the car along the way."

He took the Land Rover, gunning it out of the basement garage too fast and driving it hard, with grim satisfaction, through the rubbish-strewn streets. He knew he was being ridiculous, and some part of his mind watched his own behavior with chagrin. That didn't stop the burn of anger in his stomach, or the sick feeling he got when he thought back to the sound of their voices. They were vampires, he reminded himself. These things didn't have the same meaning for them. And besides, it was none of his business.

His phone buzzed and he checked it, saw it was a text from Spike, and tossed it back onto the seat without looking at it. He wanted to get as far as possible from that bloody building, from the whole maddening, awkward, painful situation. Perhaps after this was all over, the current crisis averted, he'd move back into his own flat. It was his own fault, he'd let himself fall into the same old traps all over again, living at the company, spending all his time there. Playing the role of faithful manservant, slavishly grateful for the slightest show of affection. It was his own fault for expecting things to be other than they were.

It was past two o'clock by the time he got to his flat, and he had three more messages on his phone. The first was from Fred, saying she was on her way to Wolfram & Hart. The second was also from Fred, saying that she was there, and that because there was no air conditioning in the server room she was going to have to take most of the network down again. The last was from Cordelia, something about a check written on an overdrawn account. He was listening to it as he walked up the stairs to his floor of the building. He turned the corner in the stairwell, and stopped.

"Hi," said Xander.

Wesley stared at him, slowly lowering the phone from his ear. Xander was still wearing the ripped T-shirt and jeans he'd had on in the library, but somewhere along the way he'd picked up a zippered, hooded sweatshirt. It was too big for him; the cuffs covered his hands, and he'd pulled the hood over his head so his face was half-concealed. From what Wesley could see, he didn't seem to be injured.

"Hello," Wesley said. The hairs on the back of his neck had prickled up. He was startled, that was all. It was the first time he'd seen Xander outside Wolfram & Hart since Xander had been turned. Even knowing he was harmless, it was strange to see him here, at Wesley's own flat, without Spike standing guard in the background. "Are you--how long have you been here?"

Xander shrugged. "A while." His expression turned momentarily shamefaced. "I kind of forgot I couldn't get in on my own."

"Oh." Wesley remembered the phone in his hand. "I should call Spike and Angel, they're looking for you."

"Um." Xander took another step back, into the shadow by the wall. "If you could hold off on that just a little. That would be awesome."

Wesley lowered the phone. "Is everything all right?"

"Fine." Xander flashed a self-conscious smile. "I was just hoping I could crash here for a while."

Wesley said nothing. For a few seconds, Xander met his gaze. Then he ducked his head and said, with a tight grin, "Or not."

"Xander, I'm sorry. It isn't safe for you here."

"Right, right." Xander nodded amiably. "Unlike the impenetrable offices of Wolfram & Hart. Where I could never be chained to a table and fried alive."

"We're working on discovering the motivation for the attack. Angel has engaged a...mediator." Wesley raised the phone again. "At the very least, I should let him know you're alive."

"Wes," Xander said. "Please. Come on."

Wesley hesitated.

"I'm kind of not in the mood for Angel right now," Xander said. "Or Spike. Or...anyone. I was thinking of just holing up and feeling like shit for a while." There was a catch in his voice, Wesley realized. Beneath the hood, he looked pale and fatigued. Perhaps there was an aftereffect to being in the presence of the angels--certainly Wesley himself had felt one. He thought of the headache pounding behind his temples in the hours before he'd slept, and felt a new wave of sympathy.

"Or," Xander went on, "how about if you just lend me a hundred bucks, and forget you saw me?"

"What? No--of course not." Wesley put the phone back in his pocket, and took out his keys. "Look, it's not safe for you to be out in the open right now. My flat isn't optimal, but under the circumstances, it may be our best option."

Xander said nothing, watching him sort through the keys. Wesley felt a faint prickle at the base of his neck, and glanced up. There was nothing unusual about Xander's expression--he looked hopeful, a little fearful, and very tired.

"You can stay here," Wesley said, passing him and continuing up the stairs. "For a short time. Until we work out something better."

"Great, thanks." Xander sounded sincerely grateful. "And...you won't tell Angel yet?"

Wesley thought of the voices murmuring behind Angel's bedroom door. It was none of his business, he reminded himself. Still, he felt the sting of it as if it were very much his business, as if he were the one betrayed. "No," he said, opening the door to his hallway. "Not yet. You can stay here tonight, and I'll call Angel in the morning."

"Wesley," said Xander, following him through the door and waiting while he found the long-disused key to his flat on the ring, "if you repeat this I'll deny I said it. But you are a mensch among men."

Wesley paused, letting a smile touch the corners of his lips. He could always cast an uninvite spell, he reminded himself. "Come in," he said, and swung the door open.

Xander was a quiet, extremely appreciative houseguest. He ghosted along behind Wesley for the short tour ("Towels are in here, I think. Tea in the cupboard, that clock used to work, I don't know what's gone wrong with it, this folds out, I need to throw that ficus away,") and said little, gazing around mutely at the few sparse furnishings under their layer of dust.

"Are you tired?" Wesley asked, remembering that for Xander it was effectively the middle of the night. "You can sleep if you'd like."

"Sure," said Xander, but there was something about the way he said it that made
Wesley pause.

"I think there's still some blood in the freezer," he said with a frown. "Would you like something to--"

"Yes," Xander said immediately. Then he laughed, his expression self-mocking. "Jesus, sorry, manners much? My mother would kill me."

Wesley raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment. "You must be hungry. I'll see what there is."

Xander hovered near the microwave while the bag defrosted, and burnt his lip biting into it when it came out. He drank fast, wincing, from the mug that Wesley gave him. Wesley occupied himself with finding a backpack, and tried not to pay too much attention. Of course Xander hadn't fed since the day before, he realized--he'd had no opportunity. The ordeal with the angels must have exhausted him. And unlike Wesley, he'd had no one to put him in a chair to sleep off the effects, or make him a (not very good) cup of tea. It was ridiculous, but Wesley found himself angry all over again with Angel.

"If you'd like to shower," he called, discovering a pair of corduroy trousers he'd forgotten entirely, "feel free. There should be...soap, the basics." He couldn't remember what there was, in fact, but at the very least there was hot water.

"Thanks." Wesley jumped; Xander was standing in the door to the bedroom, watching him work. "Whoah--sorry." He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and glanced ruefully down. "Little cat feet, here."

"Indeed." Wesley smiled, but again he felt the faint prickling at the back of his neck. Xander was completely harmless--in fact, he was completely vulnerable. It was Xander who should feel threatened in the current situation, wandering the city without protection. It occurred to Wesley that he shouldn't leave Xander here alone. If the angels found him here, no amount of explaining could justify the results.

"I'll go take that shower," Xander said, easing out of the doorframe. "I smell like five mile of rough road."

"Where did you spend the night?" Wesley asked, pausing with an old shirt in hand. "Spike and I searched the sewers and the bars." He forbore to mention the brothels.

Xander shrugged. "Mostly I spent it trying not to get noticed. Which is another way of saying, you don't want to know."

Wesley gazed at him, fingering the shirt. Xander rubbed the back of his neck briskly with his palm, and exhaled loudly. "Okay," he said, stepping out of the doorway with a self-effacing grin. "I'm gonna go test-drive that soap."

Wesley made himself a salty, execrable cup of soup, and ate it sitting at his own kitchen table, feeling like a guest. Xander stayed in the shower for a long time. He'd rinsed out his blood mug, and put the empty bag, neatly folded, into the trash. Twice during the time he sat there, Wesley almost picked up his mobile to call Angel with the news. Both times he let it go. Nothing could happen until nightfall anyway--Spike and Angel couldn't reasonably get there, and Wesley couldn't take Xander back to the firm. And Xander's desire for some time and privacy was entirely understandable, under the circumstances.

Xander finally emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed but with his hair dripping water onto the shoulders of his shirt. He hovered briefly in the kitchen doorway. "Okay if I grab a nap?" He looked half-asleep already.

"Of course." Wesley had moved on to a few of the tomes he kept at the flat--minor works, most of them duplicates of copies in the firm's library, but still better than sitting on his hands. "Do you need anything?"

Xander shook his head, his gaze dropping to the books. "Boning up on angels," he observed.

"Trying to. We've focused our collection efforts on demonologies, I'm afraid--I don't have much about the...other side, as it were."

Xander's eyes were dark and meditative. He pursed his lips, pressing a palm to the door frame beside him. "What about the spell?" His eyes flicked momentarily to Wesley's face, then down again. "Did Nigel ever get back to you on that?"

Wesley released a careful breath. "I'm sorry, Xander."

"Nah, it's okay." He shrugged, already turning away. "Just thought I'd check in, that's all. Night."

"Good night," Wesley said automatically, to the empty door frame. In the tiny front room, the springs of the pull-out bed squeaked and were still.

Wesley made a cup of tea, read half a chapter of theoretical extrapolations from Milton, and realized he was exhausted. He took the book to his bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and lay down on top of the blankets, his mobile on the night table. Through the half-closed slats of the venetian blinds, the sun cast a long, late-afternoon light. Half an hour, he told himself. He was used to grabbing sleep where he could get it, and waking on a schedule.

His first conscious thought was: Something's wrong. The room was dark and foreign--for a moment he couldn't remember where he was. Then he recalled his own flat, his own bed, his own stolen half hour of privacy and rest. But it was dark now, and there was a strange smell in the air, and when he tried to move his hands, he found them bound together at the wrists, fastened to his waist.

"Unh--" He was gagged, he realized. Something soft had been tied across his mouth. His heart kicked over and he sat up abruptly, tried to get off the bed, and found his feet tied at the ankles. His head swam, and he had a bad moment of nausea, the gag going damp between his teeth.

For a moment he just sat there, trying to figure out what was happening. He'd been in his flat, he'd let Xander in, they'd both fallen sleep-- A stone dropped into his gut. Xander.

As if on cue, the door to the bedroom opened, letting in light from the hallway. Xander was wearing an old jacket of Wesley's now, overtop of the hooded sweatshirt. He was just closing a mobile phone, slipping it into his pocket. His expression was somber.

"Hi," he said. "And just for the record, I'm sorry."

Wesley stared at him, breathing heavily through the gag.

"I like you, Wes," Xander went on, walking to the bed and leaning over, getting a hand under Wesley's arm. "You're a decent guy, and under normal circumstances I'm pretty sure I would totally spare your life. At least, I wouldn't go gunning for you or anything. But right now?" He pulled Wesley to the edge of the bed, and gave him a rueful smile. "Things aren't exactly normal."

Wesley jerked his arm free, and tried to lean out of reach. Xander caught hold of him again without any apparent irritation. One hand curled around the back of Wesley's neck and held his head straight, firmly but not painfully. The other fished in his pocket, and produced a small bottle.

"I can't hurt you," he said conversationally, holding up the bottle. There was a label, but Wesley's vision was swimming too much to read it. "But I can chloroform you again if you get on my jock." He looked momentarily apologetic. "Not that I blame you, obviously, but come on--we both know who's going to win here, right?"

Wesley worked the gag between his teeth, trying to get enough freedom for speech. Xander gave him a long, steady look, then tucked the bottle away again and hauled him forward to the edge of the bed. Their faces were inches apart.

"You're a good guy," he said, "and you're also kind of hot, in a fucked-up, obedience-school kind of way. I'd be pretty okay with turning you and scampering off into the night together to drink Chianti and hump co-eds. Or vice versa." His gaze was momentarily contemplative. One finger stroked the bone behind Wesley's ear. "But." His expression firmed; he gave Wesley a quick, tight smile. "That's not going to happen. So."

He leaned forward the last few inches and pressed his mouth to Wesley's through the gag. He smelled of Wesley's toothpaste, his old forgotten aftershave. His lips were cool. Then he stood up, and in the process pulled Wesley with him, up and easily over one shoulder, like a bag of laundry. Wesley's glasses fell off. He couldn't breathe.

"What is going to happen," Xander said, carting him unceremoniously out of the bedroom, and sweeping the Land Rover's keys off the mail table, "is that I'm going to follow up on a good idea about this fucking spell, before my ass gets flame-broiled by the Jeebus Squad." He opened the door to Wesley's apartment, paused to glance out, then stepped out into the empty hallway and started for the stairs. "And you're going to...well, actually, I didn't ask too many questions about what you were going to do. But don't worry, I'll send Nigel a thank-you card. For all his hard work on our behalf."

After that, things got confusing for a while. Wesley remembered being dumped across the back seat of the Land Rover, then rolled gently into the footwell. He'd been bound with his own neckties, he'd discovered by then--the knots were cinched tight. The gag was torn from one of his shirts.

"Whoopsa-daisy," Xander said, tucking his feet in with a careful hand. "Hang tight down there, okay? Take a nap." He shut the door and got into the driver's seat. The engine started.

Wesley tried to remember the sequence of turns they took, but his brain was shrouded in fog and his head was splitting. He lost track almost immediately. He'd started to sweat. He couldn't reach the door handles, couldn't do much more than squirm out of the awkward position he'd fallen into and try gradually to work his way back up onto the seat.

"How you doing back there?" Xander asked at one point, sounding genuinely concerned. "You want music or anything?"

Wesley paused, gasping for breath, and allowed himself to heartily wish that the angels had smitten Xander when they'd had the chance.

They got onto a freeway and drove for twenty minutes or perhaps an eternity. Wesley had made it back up onto the seat and was sawing his wrists against the ties to free his hands when they swerved down an off ramp. He glimpsed warehouses, possibly factories, through the tinted windows. The car slowed and he kicked at the door handle by his feet.

"Hey, now." Xander pulled into a parking lot, cut the engine, and glanced back over the seat. "You want another hit of this stuff?" He had the chloroform in his hand. "Might take the edge off."

Wesley lay still, panting, staring at Xander and thinking as clearly as he could, Stop this now. It's not too late to stop this. For the love of God--

"Hokay," Xander said, and got out.

He opened the back door, dragged Wesley casually out by the ankles, and slung him like a bag of onions over one shoulder. When Wesley fought, he got a smack on the ass.

"Wes, at times like this, you want to hang onto your dignity. Don't make me take you in there all pathetic and teary-eyed. This isn't summer camp."

Wesley hung for a moment, gathering his breath, staring at the pavement swimming darkly beneath him. He could hear traffic on the freeway and some kind of industrial machinery in the distance, which must mean they were still in the city. He'd gained enough free play in the ties to work his hands around and grab the fabric of Xander's coat. He twisted it in his fist and tugged, trying one last time to communicate.

Xander ignored him. He kicked the door closed, locked it with the remote, and started walking. Wesley twisted hard, his hip connecting with Xander's head, but it did no good. "I know what you're thinking," Xander said, shifting his grip amenably. "You're thinking, 'Aaaaaaaagh!' And you know what? You're right."

He thumped on what sounded like a heavy metal door--Wesley felt the vibrations through his body--and stepped back to wait. After a few seconds he started whistling an off-key version of The Way to San Jose. Wesley heard footsteps approaching, then the screech and clang of a heavy door opening on an unoiled hinge.

"Domino's delivers," said Xander. "I got a three-cheese pepperoni, who gets it?" He was already walking forward, stepping through a metal doorframe and into darkness. The temperature dropped a couple of degrees, and the air smelled of rust. Wesley hung in total blackness, a drip of sweat dangling from his nose.

"He's awake," someone observed, in an unpleasantly deep voice.

"Uh-huh."

"He's not blindfolded."

"And this matters why?" Xander kept walking. "It's not like you guys are operating a catch-and-release outfit here."

There was no reply except the extremely final-sounding clang of the door closing somewhere in the darkness behind Wesley's head. He flinched automatically, and Xander patted him on the back.

"Don't worry, it'll all be over...uh, soonish."

The blood in his head was forcing stars through Wesley's vision, but he still made out a faint light somewhere in front of them. He closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear it.

"Hi," Xander said. "One Watcher, as ordered." He shifted his grip on Wesley's waist and lowered him slowly, without apparent effort, to the ground. Wesley blinked and struggled to make his eyes work. He was looking at a small circle of men standing around the opened hood of an El Camino. A bare bulb hung from the hook beneath the hood. Most of the men were looking pensively into the engine. They were all Hispanic. As he stared, the one in front reached into the engine and fiddled with something.

"And so," Xander went on, as if the situation were completely normal, "one de-spelling, in return. Muchas gracias, por favor."

A couple of the men looked at him. They weren't friendly looks, Wesley realized. There was a pause.

Then the man in front pulled his hand out of the engine and wiped it on a blue bandanna dangling from his pocket. His face was round, pockmarked, and mournful. He had a thin moustache and a nearly shaved head. He studied the grease on his fingers, then unhooked the light bulb from the hood and walked over, trailing the cord, to where Wesley sat. The bulb came so close Wesley felt the heat against his cheek. He closed his eyes and turned his face away while the man studied him.

After a minute, he heard a derogatory exhalation, and the light retreated.

"Okay," the man said. Wesley opened his eyes; the bulb was going back on the hood, the man's attention was on the engine again. He licked his thumb, adjusted the light, and muttered something in Spanish. Immediately, two men stepped out of the group. One walked straight to Wesley, hooked an arm under his shoulders, and dragged him across the concrete floor toward the car. Wesley went rigid and tried to plant his feet, and the man cuffed him across the back of the head.

"Oh good," he heard Xander say. "If undoing this feels anything like doing it did--" Then he gave a sudden gasp, and Wesley twisted around to see him breathe in a faceful of dust blown from the palm of the second man, standing in front of him. Bizarrely, illogically, Wesley's first thought was, Don't be stupid, that could be anything.

But it was clear, a moment later, that it was in fact what Xander had apparently bargained for--an agent to lift the Council's no-harm spell. The symptoms were all too obvious. He stumbled back a step, smiling foolishly, his hands traveling over his chest and belly, a faint movement in his trousers that Wesley immediately tried to forget. A moment later, Xander was in game face, flexing his shoulders and popping the muscles in his neck. He made a playful grab for the man standing in front of him, who ducked back and came up in his own game face, snarling.

Xander laughed, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Hey, hey, no hard feelings. First one's free, right?"

The man with his hands in the engine looked up and fixed Xander with a steady gaze. Xander grinned at him.

"Okay," he said. "So that's that. Good luck with the car, guys." He turned and sketched Wesley a little salute. "Wesley, for what you are about to experience, I am truly sorry. But hey, if you make it out alive, look me up, okay? We can hang."

Wesley gave a throttled half-yell, and the man behind him hauled him to his feet. For the first time, Wesley saw the cage sitting in the shadows behind him. It was made of iron bars, about four feet square. A pair of manacles dangled from an iron ring in the top. Behind it sat a forklift, already in position to pick it up.

Wesley's heart kicked up. He twisted around and yelled wordlessly after Xander, who was walking away into the darkness. Xander turned back and held out his hands in a what can you do? gesture.

"Let me give you some advice about being in a cage, Wes. Keep your head down. And don't drop the soap."

Wesley yelled after him, his throat bursting behind the gag, until the man holding him upright punched him in the side of the head to shut him up. Xander disappeared into the darkness, and they all heard the clang of the door closing behind him.

Wesley went into the cage. He had no choice in the matter--his head was reeling from the chloroform and the punch, and the man holding him was brutally strong. Before Wesley even knew what was going on he was on his knees with his hands locked above his head, and the padlock was clicking into place on the cage door. The man gave him an assessing look, then went back to the little circle around the El Camino's front end. Wesley sank down as far as he could onto his knees and tried to catch his breath.

Being kidnapped and sold as fresh meat to a vampire gang was, unfortunately, a fate that he'd actually had the opportunity to contemplate before in his career. Oddly, he'd never imagined that the main components of the experience would be thirst, muscle cramp, and a strange, terrified species of boredom. The men ignored him. He stayed quiet, trying to think. Angel and Spike didn't know where he was. As the night wore on they might try his flat, but that would lead nowhere. And if the men who'd kidnapped him planned to move him, it was even less likely he'd be found. He tried very hard not to dwell on his own stupidity, which seemed more colossal with every passing moment.

Sometime later they started trying the engine, at first with a series of abortive clicks and then, endless adjustments later, with a more promising throaty cough. Wesley shifted to ease the pain in his shoulders. He was trying to come up with something to bargain with. Money seemed irrelevant. Perhaps magic--clearly they had a use for it. He was trying to approximate the street value of a Valan impotence curse when the El Camino's engine roared into life. The men unhooked the light bulb and slammed the hood. Then they started toward his cage.

He tensed, readying for some kind of assault, but they walked right past him. One got into the forklift and started the engine. He turned, blinking at the sudden noise, and heard a series of car doors open and slam. Headlights blinked to life around him--one, two, then a dozen pairs. The cage gave a little jump as the forklift kicked in. Then he was lifted off the floor, and a truck with a high cap over the bed was reversing toward him, and after a little back and forth he was in the cage, in the truck bed, and they were slamming the back gate closed.

He crouched in the darkness, sweating anew. He could hear tejano playing in the cab, and if he twisted around in the manacles he could see the dashboard lights glowing faintly through the tinted back window.

Hopelessly, he jerked at the manacles. They clanked and held. The truck started to creep forward, following a procession of tail lights toward a square of dark blue light that he realized was a door in the warehouse. They were leaving, taking him with him. Panic soured his mouth.

There was nothing he could do except save his strength and try to keep his head. He counted slowly to a thousand while the truck carried him up onto the freeway and on to parts unknown. Briefly, he wondered if Xander had felt like this in his own cage, in the basement of Wolfram & Hart, with Angelus just outside. He found he didn't really care.

The drive lulled him into a dazed, semi-torpid nightmare state, and he only fully emerged when the truck pulled off the freeway, took a few turns, and stopped. How long had it been? He had no idea. His chances of surviving the night were dwindling at an alarming rate.

He heard the driver get out of the cab, walk around to the back gate, and open it. They were behind a drab, squat building, under the ubiquitous sodium arc lights of every parking lot in Los Angeles. Music was coming from the building--it sounded like very bad rock and roll. The sky was a paler shade of blue than it had been at the warehouse; even without his glasses Wesley could see rubbish bins against a back fence, more cars parked in the lot. Something about the scene was strangely familiar.

The man--a giant really, long-haired, blade-nosed, with arms like tree trunks--reached in and snagged the front bars of Wesley's cage, dragged it easily to the back of the truck bed, and heaved it onto the pavement. Wesley was thrown against the bars, his wrists twisting, his shoulder smashing the metal. He scrambled with his feet to get his balance back, smelling cigarettes and cheap beer, and thinking with some small part of his mind, What is so familiar about this? How do I know this place?

He heard a shrill, female laugh and in a blood-freezing instant he had it. He'd visited this building two nights before, with Spike. It was a brothel. A vampire brothel.

He yanked automatically, with renewed strength, against the manacles, and got nowhere. His wrists were raw by now; there was blood on his shirt cuffs. The man slammed the truck gate, locked it, and turned to grab the front of Wesley's cage. Wesley kicked at his hand. The man swore, drew back, and kicked the cage over onto its side, spilling Wesley hard onto his back against the bars. Before he could move he felt the cage grating over the pavement, heading for the back door of the building.

His panic was in full force now, clambering over him, knocking away any thought of strategy, practically any thought at all. He yanked at the manacles, not caring that he was tearing his wrists and losing skin on his back against the pavement. He couldn't believe that it had come to this, that he was going to be sold into a brothel, molested and drained or God knew what worse fates awaited him, all because he'd been so unbelievably fucking stupid as to forget that Xander Harris no longer had a soul.

"Hi," said Xander.

The man stopped dragging Wesley's cage, straightened up, and looked back over his shoulder. Inside his cage, Wesley craned his neck. Xander was standing just behind him, his hands in his pockets, smiling amiably. He still wore Wesley's jacket, the same jeans he'd had on for the last couple of days. There might have been something slightly different about his stance, though.

"I was thinking," he said, rolling from his heels to the balls of his feet and back again. "About that deal we made."

The giant glanced down at Wesley's cage, reached out a foot, and tipped it casually over onto its top. Wesley, chained and bound, tumbled with it, landing with a crunch on his shoulder and ear.

"Wow," Xander said. "That was uncalled-for."

"He's not yours anymore," said the giant. "He belongs to us."

"Right," said Xander soberly. "We had a deal, I remember."

"Maybe you forgot." The giant cracked the knuckles of one enormous hand meditatively in the other. His eyes glimmered orange.

"Maybe I think you're wearing mom jeans." Xander shrugged. "Whatever, I want him back. We can do this the easy way, or we can do it--urk" The giant had tackled him across the top of the cage; they hit the pavement together and skidded. Wesley rolled inside the cage, twisting his shoulders painfully to try to keep his eyes on them. Xander was on the bottom, punching the giant ineffectually in the back of the head--then the giant was rearing up on his knees, punching back. Wesley heard the crack of bone hitting bone. He jerked frantically at the manacles. When he looked back they'd separated and were finding their feet. Xander looked a little shaky, with blood running down his chin. The giant looked indomitable.

"I'm thinking," Xander panted, and the giant took a stake from inside his coat and danced it over his fingers. "Okay, hey, hang on now--" He broke off, skipping backward as the giant came at him stake-first. "Fuck, what is your problem?" He kept retreating, dodging stake-blows, until he was backed up against the rubbish bins at the back of the lot. His hands searched frantically in his pockets, and Wesley thought, Oh my God, he's brought a stake and he hasn't got it out, what a complete and utter idiot-- It occurred to him that he was about to be molested and drained not because Xander Harris had no soul, but because he couldn't plan ahead.

The giant stepped in, his stake raised, and Xander's hand came up, clutching something small that was clearly not a stake. Wesley closed his eyes. He heard a yell--not Xander. The giant was staggering back, his hands clapped over his face. The stake clattered to the ground, and Xander scooped it up, stepped forward, and plunged it into the giant's chest. A puff of dust settled gently to the ground.

Xander brushed off his coat--Wesley's coat--and tucked a small canister into his pocket. Then he jogged over to Wesley's cage, leaned over, and eased it gently onto its base. Wesley scrambled to follow.

"Hey," said Xander. His face was human, battered and cut, and his real eye was flickering yellow. "I know macing a guy is kind of offside, but you have no idea, and I mean seriously no idea, how good that felt."

The sound that Wesley made in his throat was intended to convey how much he really did.

"Okay," Xander said, wiping blood off his chin and flicking it absently to the ground. "Let's see if I can get this thing open before someone comes out here and makes me an offer for you." He paused, giving Wesley a sharp smile. "I figure one rescue, I owe you. Two's pushing it."

Wesley rattled his manacles.

"Uh-huh." Xander was examining the bars closely, testing them with the tip of his tongue protruding from between his lips. "Okay, this looks pretty easy, I think I can bend this and you can just--" He stopped short, raised his head, and stared toward the front of the parking lot. "Oh, shit."

For the love of God, Wesley thought wearily. What now?

He'd barely had time to finish thinking it when a black SUV pulled in hard, tires screeching. A Wolfram & Hart car. Xander was already on his feet, in game face, backing away.

He tried to run, but he was cut off from the street. Behind him was nothing but rubbish bins and razor wire. The SUV drove him practically into one of the bins. The doors flipped open and Spike and Angel got out. The cavalry, Wesley realized, sinking down against his chains. Thank God.

"Oh, hey," Xander was saying, backed against the bins with the headlights in his face, trying to smile. Angel glanced over his shoulder, saw Wesley in the cage, and said something to Spike, who looked back too. They both turned on Xander, who raised his hands in surrender or self-defence. "Whoah, no, hang on, this is not what it looks like, I mean it's, okay, it's sort of what it looks like, but really it's not--"

Spike punched him in the face, and Xander reeled, then caught his balance and snapped an elbow into Spike's belly. Spike whoofed, and then there was a moment's pause while Spike and Angel watched Xander expectantly--waiting for the spell to knock him out, Wesley realized. When he didn't drop, they exchanged another look.

"Oh, um, ow!" Xander said, one hand to his forehead. "I, uh, I'm defenseless against you!" Spike punched him again, bullied him back against the bin, and he lunged fruitlessly sideways, then started fighting back in earnest. Angel stepped back and let Spike take it. As soon as it started, Wesley could see it was no contest, and he started yelling, trying to force sound through his raw throat and the wet gag, to tell them to stop. Angel came for him at a near run.

"Wes, Jesus." He was on his knees in front of the cage, fumbling frantically with the bars. "Hang on." The metal parted in his hands, the cage bent, the chains snapped. Wesley was too exhausted to feel more than the faintest embarrassment and relief. He worked the gag down to the sound of Spike kicking the guts out of Xander on the other side of the lot.

"Stop it," he rasped, as soon as he could speak. "Tell Spike to stop."

Angel was pulling him out of the cage, examining his wrists, touching his shoulders and back. "Is anything broken?"

"Tell Spike--"

"Jesus, Wes, what happened?"

"Angel." On his feet for the first time all night, he was woozy. The lot spun around him and he had to lock his knees to keep from falling. The thought of fainting into Angel's arms was beyond horrible. "Xander didn't do this. Or, he didn't--" He gestured faintly to the other side of the lot. "For God's sake, stop him doing that!"

Angel gave him a wary look and took hold of his arm. "Let's get you into the car, okay?"

"Honestly, you have to listen to me--" He didn't have it in him to fight Angel's grip. "Please. Tell him to stop hitting Xander."

"Okay, Wes. I will. But first let's get you in the car." It was so ridiculous and awful--his raw wrists, the twisted cage behind him, the terrible sounds of Spike releasing pent-up rage and frustration on Xander in the background--Wesley couldn't help it. He started to laugh.

"Really, please, listen to me--" Laughing, he was bundled into the SUV, which was warm and unbelievably roomy after a night in an iron box. Angel closed the door behind him and he sank down into the leather seat, watching through the tinted window as Angel walked none-too-quickly across the lot to say something to Spike. Who stepped back to listen, inclined his head, glanced back at the SUV, then stepped forward again and kicked Xander once more, hard, in the belly. Xander was folded on the ground by that time, clutching himself.

It wasn't funny anymore. Wesley sat in silence while Angel walked back to the SUV, got into the driver's seat, and looked at him with eyes like burnt holes.

"I'm sorry," he said, his big hands touching the steering wheel lightly, as if it were something he was afraid to damage. "Wes. I'm so sorry."

"It's all right," said Wesley, out of habit.

Wesley sat quietly in his chair, looking at the cup of tea on the table in front of him. He was very tired.

"Sorry about that," Angel said, coming into the room and closing the door, sliding his cell phone into his pocket. It was the eleventh time he'd apologized since bringing Wesley back to the office. Wesley had begun to keep count. "It was Pagnol. He thinks he's got something worked out with these people."

"With the cherubim." Wesley studied the curls of steam rising from his cup. The angels seemed a hundred years ago.

"Yeah. He wasn't clear on the specifics, but it sounds like the message got through. They're not out for Xander anymore."

"That's good." It was also ironic, he supposed, given that Xander had just managed to remove the no-harm spell, and may have done any amount of damage during the time he'd been alone.

"Yeah." Angel slid into the chair beside him, looking too big for it, the way he always did with the furniture outside of his own rooms and offices. Wesley had taken a vacant suite until his own rooms were repaired; he recognized everything he saw in it, but it was all strange and anonymous at the same time. He was very tired.

"He's okay in the basement for now," Angel went on, his fingers folding clumsily over each other on the table between them. "Spike's got him in one of the...cages." Too late, he realized the faux pas, but carried on regardless. "It's a short-term solution. We need to cast the spell on him again."

Wesley nodded. There was a pause.

"You're tired," Angel observed. "I'm gonna go." He stood up, his fingers touching the table lightly. "Is there...can I get you anything?"

Wesley looked up, studied Angel's face with the feeling of studying a well-known work of art--of Classical sculpture, perhaps--then realized he should respond. He shook his head. "No, thank you. I'll be quite all right."

Angel nodded, started to turn away, then turned back. "Listen, Wes. About before. In my...when you came up to my room."

Wesley said nothing.

"It's...complicated," Angel said. "It's...don't take this the wrong way, but it's like...the way family is complicated."

Wesley smiled and looked down at the table. "It's none of my business."

For a moment Angel said nothing. Then he put his hand on Wesley's shoulder. The pressure was gentle but firm. "You're family too, Wes."

But not like that. Wesley nodded, preserving the smile. "Thank you for saying so."

Angel lingered a moment longer, then did the only thing he could reasonably do, and left.

Wesley took more ibuprofen, adjusted his bandages, and went to bed for ten hours. When he woke up it was dark outside his windows. Los Angeles had begun to flicker back to life; he could see the lights over the main arteries again, and some of the office towers were back in business. He sat up, groaned, and almost fell right back into the sheets again. His entire body felt bludgeoned.

The water pressure in the shower hadn't come all the way back up, so he stood for a while under the hot trickle, then dragged himself out and studied the damage in the mirror. He was bruised all over--vivid, impressive smears of purple and blue that were raised and tender to the touch. He'd taken more than one knock to the head, and had the marks to show it. He still didn't have a working pair of glasses.

He dressed again in the clothes he'd been wearing, took more ibuprofen, and shuffled down the hall to the elevator. The camera room was up and running; he could see Fred in the server room, Cordelia in the front office, and Spike down in the basement, facing a cage with Xander in it. Angel was nowhere in sight, which meant he was probably in his rooms or out of the building.

For a long while he sat studying the view in the basement. Xander was slumped on the bench in his cage, his knees to his chest, his arms propped on top. Spike was seated in the folding chair outside the bars, smoking. While Wesley watched, he smoked three cigarettes, and didn't offer Xander any. They only spoke once or twice, as far as Wesley could see. A few words at a time, and Spike seemed to begrudge even that. Xander wore a strange half-smirk, which might have been the look of a man admitting fair punishment for his misdeeds. Or it might have been the effect of the bruises. He was very bruised.

There was work to be done, a building to be put back together, and Wesley was grateful for the immense distraction it represented. He went first to the front office, and found Cordelia on her knees on the floor, pawing through piles of paper. She stopped when she saw him.

"Oh my God." She'd been crouching in the wreckage of Harmony's desk, but she stood up automatically, her eyes wide. "'All right,' my ass. You look awful."

"Yes, thank you." Stiffly, he walked over and gestured at the wad of papers in her hand. "Can I help?"

"I can't believe I ever dated him." She was still staring at his face, shaking her head. "And I felt sorry for him because Spike kicked his butt! Well, I can tell you one thing--" She pointed at him with the wad of papers. "Xander Harris is off my pity list. I don't care how soulless you are, you don't put people in cages, and you don't sell them to pimps. Also, hello, you don't do any of that in a lojacked company car. I mean, how totally stupid--Oh my God, what if Spike and Angel hadn't found you guys in time?" Her horror seemed fresh, as if she hadn't contemplated that possibility before now.

"I was...the situation was under control." He smiled a little tightly, and gestured at the papers again. "May I?"

"What? Oh. Sure." She handed them over. "Angel wrote a bad check to this Maurice Pinole guy, and I can't find the right ones. Harmony had them in her desk." She surveyed the remains of the desk. "The really sad thing is, it probably looked like this before the storm even hit."

Wesley spent the next half hour helping Cordelia search the front lobby for the right checkbook, which turned out to be a more exhausting process than he'd anticipated. By the time Angel walked in with his mobile phone clamped between his ear and shoulder, sorting through a stack of disheveled file folders, Wesley was ready to give up, cancel the entire book, and start fresh.

"You'll have it by noon," Angel told someone, then hung up the phone and nodded at Wesley. "You doing okay?"

"He looks like hell," Cordelia supplied, putting her head up from behind the pile of smashed chairs in the corner. "Your definition of 'okay' is pretty broad, mister."

Angel looked cowed, and gave Wesley another once-over. "Um, maybe you should take it easy for a while, Wes."

"I'm fine," Wesley said, without looking up from the papers he was sorting. "Was that Pagnol?"

"Yeah. He wants money. We have money, right?"

"The bank has money," Wesley confirmed, "which belongs to us. However, we appear to have lost the company checkbook in the storm."

"Remind me not to give that thing to Harmony anymore." Angel looked around the room, kicked a potted plant, and sighed. "Okay, fuck this. Cordy, see if the cleaning company will send someone to take care of this. Wes, we have cash on hand, yeah?"

Wesley thought. "About ten, twenty thousand. In the vault."

"I'll take it to him. One thing about these mediators, they have powerful friends. I'd like to not piss this guy off."

"How much do you need?" With a wince, Wesley got to his feet. "I have the codes, I can get it out."

"I'll take care of it." Angel was already heading to the elevators. "Get some rest, Wes."

Wesley stood holding his handful of papers, watching Angel disappear around the corner. In her corner, Cordelia flipped open her phone.

"Is it just me?" she asked, mid-dial, "or is he getting bossier?"

Wesley gave the papers in his hand a last glance, then let them fall and walked over them without another look.

He resented being handled with kid gloves, but he had to admit he needed rest. He also needed to eat. The staff room refrigerator was warm and silent, but he rummaged in the cupboards for some biscuits and a dry soup mix. The kettle worked. He was pouring hot water into the little paper bowl when Spike walked in.

They both stopped short and stared at each other. Spike, Wesley observed, looked awful. His eyes were sunken and his face looked drawn, as if he hadn't eaten in days. He smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.

"Hello," said Wesley. Spike flinched. Then he nodded curtly, as if Wesley had told him some unwelcome but undeniable piece of news. He dropped his gaze and gave Wesley a wide berth on his way to the cutlery drawer.

"How's Xander?" Wesley kept his eyes on the soup as he set the kettle carefully down. There was a pause. Spike opened the drawer and rummaged through it.

"He'll live."

Wesley put the spoon into the soup and pressed one of the little dehydrated bits of...foam rubber, apparently, to the bottom. "I'm glad to hear it." After a moment's consideration, he added, "It was my fault as much as anyone's."

Spike said nothing. He rattled around in the drawer a bit more, then found whatever he was looking for and banged it closed. Wesley turned--he was holding a small knife and a flexible plastic straw. Off Wesley's look, he shrugged.

"For the bags. It gets messy, otherwise."

"Ah."

Spike flicked the straw with the end of his thumb, glanced at the door, then seemed to resign himself to a few more words of conversation. "Angel find the checkbook?"

"No. He's delivering the payment in cash."

"Good. Sounds like Pagnol's already pissed off enough as it is."

"Indeed." Wesley fingered one of the biscuits from its wrapper, tapped it on the counter, then just stood holding it. "Spike, I'm sorry I didn't intervene sooner at the...when you and Angel found us. I tried to make you understand--"

Spike's eyes had widened slightly. "Understand what, that Harris was a choirboy? Just happened to drive by and see you locked in a cage?"

"No. He wasn't innocent, but the situation wasn't what it seemed, either."

"Yeah, it was." Spike snorted. "He's got no soul. He's a monster. That's how it seems, and that's how it is."

"Of course."

"Don't kid yourself, Watcher." Spike was watching him closely, Wesley realized. "You think him coming back makes it all right? You think he was just going to turn himself in after that, come quietly back and sit in the basement while we fished the mugwort out to redo that spell?"

"No."

"No, he wasn't. He was going to let you go, maybe, then skip off and murder fifty people before breakfast."

Wesley said nothing. Spike raised the knife and leveled it at him with a hard look.

"I know," he said. "Believe me, I bloody well know what he was going to do."

The biscuit was hard as a rock, and the soup looked awful. Wesley pushed them away and wiped his hands on his trousers.

"Could I come down and see him?" he asked.

Spike stared at him.

"Please," Wesley added.

Spike looked down at the knife in his hand, then shook his head and slipped it into his pocket. "Yeah, all right," he said. His voice was raw. "Why not?"

It was bizarre, visiting the basement cages again. Riding the elevator down, Wesley couldn't help remembering the last time he'd done this, battered and exhausted, with Spike in a wretched fugue state beside him. The last time, Angel had been Angelus and they'd all been afraid for their lives. So why didn't it feel any better this time, when there was no clear or present danger, when Angel was himself and contractors' bills were their biggest concern?

The elevator hit the bottom floor, and the doors slid open. Spike held out one hand in a parody of a gentlemanly gesture. Wesley went first.

Xander was already standing up, leaning against the bars of his cage, as they walked down the hall toward him. His skin glowed almost white under the fluorescent lights. His teeth, when he smiled, looked unusually sharp.

"Hey Wes," he said, with a nod. "How you doing?"

"Fine, thank you. And you?" Wesley tried not to let his gaze linger too long on the bruises on Xander's face and throat, or on the blackened cut running across his forehead. One of Xander's fingers looked wrong, somehow, as if it had been bent out of shape and then halfway repaired. He didn't seem bothered by it. He nodded at Spike without malice.

"Hey. Thanks."

Spike was cutting a neat hole in a blood bag, then passing it through the bars with a straw already in place. Xander took it carefully, and started drinking. There were already two or three spent bags piled in the corner of his cage, Wesley noticed.

"So," Xander said, around his straw. "What brings you down to the Pit of Despair?"

"I--" Wesley paused. He wasn't entirely sure, himself, why he'd come down, except to show that he didn't hold Xander solely responsible for what had happened. If they didn't blame Angel for what Angelus did, surely they should have some sort of mercy for Xander too. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."

"Mm." Xander sucked on the straw, his gaze unswerving. "That's nice. You're a nice guy, Wes."

Wesley said nothing.

"It's funny," Xander went on, stepping back from the bars and easing carefully, with obvious pain, onto the bench. "I keep thinking, if I hadn't gone back to get you, I'd totally have gotten away. I'd be in Acapulco by now."

"You'd be dead by now," Spike said flatly. "I'd have staked you myself."

"No you wouldn't," Xander said, without even glancing at him. "I'd have ditched the Jeep, borrowed a few sets of credit cards, and I'd be scot free."

"You'd be a murderer," Wesley said. Xander raised the blood bag as if in a toast.

"How do you know I'm not already?" He smiled, showing blood-covered teeth. Wesley didn't smile back.

"Yeah," Spike said bitterly. "He's a real saint, isn't he?"

"Come on in here and say that," said Xander. "I'll bleed all over your party shoes."

"We'll have to recast the spell," Wesley said, with a sickening sense of deja vu. "I'll start gathering the ingredients tomorrow."

"I'll just get it taken off again." Xander chewed on the straw, studying them both with a sober expression. "I mean, you can't really think I'm going to just lie around sucking Spike's dick for the next hundred years--"

"I'll let you know when I have what we need," Wesley said, turning quickly away. Spike's face, he noticed, was taut and frozen.

"It's creepy," Xander went on, in a conversational tone. "He doesn't even want me, he wants some angst-ridden, witch-loving, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing manboy. He's all--look at him, he's practically wearing a mourning veil. Jesus Christ."

"Shut up," Spike said, in a low voice.

"For fuck's sake, Spike, get over it already. I died, okay? You guys screwed up and I got killed, and hey, I'm sorry I'm not the lovable Zeppo I used to be, but there's no going back. What you see is what you get. Asshole."

Wesley quickened his pace, feeling very strongly that it had been a mistake to come down here in the first place. He'd somehow forgotten that abusing Spike was Xander's favorite pastime. And of course Xander was right--there was no going back for any of them--but there was no pleasure in hearing him say it.

Spike said something too low to make out, and Xander barked a coarse laugh, and Wesley finally reached the elevators and hit the button to ascend. With a small part of his mind, he noticed that the button felt warm.

Then the doors split open in front of him, spilling out a silent white sun that knocked him back against the wall. He hit it with a soundless whuff and slid to the floor. There was no pain.

Vaguely, he saw the angel step over him and carry on down the hall toward the cages. Everything was silent. From the floor, he saw the raised arm, the finger pointing. At the same time, the angel turned one face back to smile at him. He felt warm and light, as if he were levitating inches above the floor on a cushion of air. The sound of Spike's voice, yelling, seemed unimportant. Xander, crying and choking, didn't bother him at all.

For the first time in a very long time, Wesley woke up feeling well-rested and happy. He was somewhere dim and warm--still fogged by sleep, he wasn't sure where. The uncertainty didn't bother him. He slipped easily back down into sleep.

Someone was shaking him. He woke up all at once, sitting up, reaching for his glasses and not finding them. He was, he realized, propped against the wall in the basement of Wolfram & Hart, in front of the elevators. Cordelia was crouched beside him, watching him anxiously.

"Wesley?" She patted his shoulder, the way she patted the computer when she was trying to coax it into doing a better search. "Are you okay?"

He remembered the angel, and scrambled to his feet. "There was--where's Xander?"

"An angel," she filled in for him, standing up and following him down the hall. "I know, I had to take the service elevator down here. Fred's freaking out--it blew half the fuses she just fixed."

"Where's Xander?" He was remembering the yelling now--Spike and Xander both, back in the cages. The angel, raising its hand and pointing. "I thought Pagnol said--"

"So did I. All I know is, it came back and did something down here, and I'm guessing it wasn't a little light cleaning. Although you actually look a lot better."

Wesley barely heard her. He was preoccupied with what he was seeing in the cage room: the door to Xander's cage standing open, Spike crouched inside over a collapsed body. Xander. Not dusted, not...smitten. But something, clearly, was wrong.

"What is it?" Wesley asked, stopping short at the open cage door, superstitiously unable to make himself step inside. Spike eased back onto his heels. Xander lay on his back with his arms outflung, his eyes closed, his face peaceful. Not breathing, but not ash. "What happened?"

Spike looked back over his shoulder, and seemed to notice them for the first time. "Bloody angel," he said. Then, more thoughtfully: "Not a fucking clue."

Xander didn't wake up, not even when Spike slapped him. He seemed to be in a deep sleep, or possibly a coma. Spike pulled up the eyelid of his good eye, and found it brown and gold at intervals, the pupil unresponsive. The skin of his face seemed strangely mobile, as if game face were trying to emerge but not quite managing to do so.

They carried him upstairs, all four of them jammed into the creaking service elevator. Spike and Xander smelled of ozone. Wesley felt strangely fearless, almost giddy. He told himself it was shock, but it felt more like happiness. There was no reason for it--under the circumstances, it was practically offensive. Helping Spike lug Xander's body through the dim hallways, he had to stop himself from whistling.

"I called Angel," Cordelia said--she was the only one with any sense, Wesley realized. He felt half-drunk, and Spike seemed dumbstruck. "He said he's tied up right now, but he'll be back as soon as he can."

"Tied up?" Wesley shifted his grip on Xander's arm with a frown. "I thought he was going to pay Pagnol."

"He was. Apparently Pagnol tied him up."

Wesley tried to make his laugh sound like a cough. Spike gave him a strange look.

"I can take him," he said, shifting more of Xander's weight into his own hands. Wesley shook his head.

"I'll help. We're taking him to your room, yes?"

"Which means I'm not coming," Cordelia said, stepping back abruptly. "I have no desire to see the West Elm dungeon, thank you."

"I've got him," Spike said again, ignoring her and trying to take Xander across his shoulder. Wesley shook his head.

"The angel could come back--you shouldn't be alone." The thought of the angel filled him with a strange mixture of fear and delight. Part of him hoped it would come back, and knock him out of himself again. "I'll come with you."

Cordelia gave them a terse, enjoy yourselves smile, then started back down the hallway to the stairs. "I'll see if I can get the power to come back on for the millionth time this week."

Wesley and Spike stumbled down the hall with Xander slung between them like a drunkard. Outside Spike's door, they paused.

"I don't mind," Wesley said, meaning that whatever he was about to see, he wouldn't be shocked. He'd understand. Xander was a vampire, he didn't have a soul. Spike was doing the best he could.

"'s not that," Spike said, rooting in his pockets with his free hand. "Can't find my keys."

Wesley ended up taking Xander's full weight while Spike fished a hundred oddities from his pockets--string, guitar picks, an eraser, a suspicious-looking ball of foil, three packets of rolling papers, an intact fortune cookie still in its plastic wrapper. Finally he produced a single key, absent a keyring.

"What did it do to him, exactly?" Wesley asked, watching Spike fit the key into the lock. He had the feeling that he wasn't firing on all cylinders yet. All his responses felt delayed and unreliable.

"Don't know." Spike kicked the door open, dropped the key back into his pocket, and turned back to help haul Xander inside. "Pointed at him. Then he went spastic, and next thing I knew he was out cold."

"But he isn't injured." Preoccupied with the problem, Wesley nonetheless noticed that he was stepping over a broken flat-screen television monitor and then a length of heavy chain, coiled on itself like a snake, the final link twisted and snapped in half. The rooms had been spared the worst of the winds--their windows were still intact--but clearly there had been some other kind of turmoil. Clothes and bed linens were strewn across the floor. There was an alcoholic stink in the air, which seemed odd until Wesley noticed the mound of glass shards on the opposite side of the room, as if the entire contents of the bar had been systematically smashed. There was blood on the carpet, a foot-long gouge torn in the wall. The door to the bathroom hung on one hinge.

"Just put him here," Spike said, and Wesley realized they were carrying Xander to the long sofa in the middle of the room. Something savage had happened to its top--it was hemorrhaging white stuffing through a series of ragged tears. Spike kicked an empty glass off the cushions and together they lowered Xander onto it. They stood back to look at him, sprawled limp and white, dead to the world. After a moment Spike pursed his lips, patted his pockets automatically for his cigarettes and, while glancing around the room, muttered, "He's bloody well cleaning all this up."

Wesley spent a moment trying to imagine the scene that had left the room in this condition, then gave up and walked away to look out the tinted window. Los Angeles was getting back on its feet, by slow degrees. He studied the few streetlights flickering off and on through the downtown core, the blinking tail lights of the cars moving carefully through the streets. It filled him with a sense of quiet euphoria, a spontaneous compassionate love for the world and all of humanity.

"Do you think they'll come back?" he asked quietly, without turning around. He could still feel the warmth of the angels' touch in his bones.

Spike said nothing. When Wesley turned around, he saw that Spike was sitting on the edge of the sofa, beside Xander's outflung arm. He had one hand on Xander's face, pulling up his eyelid to study the eye. He'd raised his head, though, to look at Wesley. His expression was thoughtful.

"You liked it," he said, not accusingly but in a tone of gradual comprehension. "Whatever they did to him--it felt good to you."

Wesley felt a strange mixture of shameful defiance, as if he were being called to account for some secret perversion. "Yes."

"Hm." Spike considered him a moment longer, then went back to Xander. "You look better. He looks worse. And what the hell does that add up to?"

"I could start researching," Wesley offered, feeling that it was a vague and empty gesture. Spike snorted. Then he put his hand experimentally over Xander's forehead, the palm down. He frowned.

"Feel this."

As if in a dream, Wesley drifted forward. Xander's forward was cool and smooth--then, without warning, it felt warm, and seemed to pulse against Wesley's hand. He drew back, sickened.

"That's disgusting."

Spike gave him an odd, sidelong look, then reached out and pulled Xander's lip up to expose his front teeth. They were normal, blunt and white--and then the canines seemed to grow and sharpen. A moment later they'd retracted.

"What are you doing?" Spike murmured, apparently to Xander himself. Xander made no reply.

"I wonder," said Wesley, backing away until his spine mmet the wall beside the window, "if they might have...if it might be a way of restoring him?"

The look Spike gave him was so immediate, so taut, that it was clear he'd already thought of this.

"It seems possible," Wesley murmured, feeling his eyelids grow heavy and his knees soften. Without meaning to, he'd begun to sink to the floor. "He was a good man for a long time, not like Angel--perhaps a reprieve--"

"What are you talking about?" Spike's voice was loud and sharp; he sounded as if he were much closer than he was. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," said Wesley. "I'm fine." He felt wonderfully calm, light, warm. There was white light behind his eyelids, a feeling of home.

"You're snoring," said Spike.

Sometime later, he woke up in the same spot he'd fallen asleep in, propped against the baseboard of Spike's room. A blanket had been laid across his legs. The room was dim now, almost dark--the only light came from the overhead spot by the front door. Most of the other lamps, Wesley realized, had been broken. The haze of alcohol hung like a bitter perfume in the air.

Wesley blinked, assessed the status of his limbs--warm and painless, not stiff at all--then looked over at the sofa. Spike had fallen asleep in the armchair, his hands laid neatly one on each arm, his chin sunk onto his chest. He looked like a man who'd just been electrocuted. Xander lay on the sofa, on his side now, his back pushed to the ripped back cushions. His eyes were open. He was looking at Wesley, both eyes brown and still. In a moment, Wesley realized the truth of it--the angels had cast the demon out.

"Welcome back," he said--his mouth was dry and the words came out in a whisper. Xander started, and his eyes fixed on Wesley as if he'd just seen him sitting there. Wesley smiled, and after a moment Xander smiled cautiously back.

Then his face froze, as if he'd just seen something terrible over Wesley's shoulder. There wasn't even time to ask him what was wrong before his left eye flickered to gold, and the ridges appeared on his forehead. His hand flew up to touch them. He made a short, guttural sound in his throat, and Spike's head snapped up automatically.

"What--"

Xander's face was human again, and horrified, his eyes flicking to each of them in turn. His fingers pushed hard against the skin of his forehead, as if he were trying to push an evil thought back inside.

There was no reprieve, but neither was there total collapse. Wesley was given healing and sleep--for the next few days he fell asleep easily, gratefully, and at unpredictable intervals until he'd finally shed some bone-deep weariness he hadn't even realized he'd been carrying. By the time the episodes stopped and the memory of the warm white light behind his eyes had faded, he felt like a new man. Younger, calmer, happier. That was what the angels gave him, casually and in passing, like a coin tossed to a peasant--they gave him back some measure of himself.

To Xander, they gave exactly one half of his soul.

Not all of it, according to the psychics Angel brought in, one after another, to confirm what Marcel Pagnol had already told them. Half of it. Enough to sit like a grain of sand under the demon's tongue, chafing and burning. Enough that he'd spend the rest of his life both horrified by his evil acts and repulsed by his good intentions. But over time, Pagnol told them, with a shrug, he could earn the rest back, as certain other nightbreed had done. Look at it in the right way, and it was a gift. He told them this with the satisfaction of a professional who'd done his job well, safe in the knowledge that if Angel cut off his head there'd be a century of storms in the heart of L.A.

Looking at Xander over the weeks that followed, it was hard to see the half-soul as a gift. He spent the first days locked in the room he shared with Spike, from which Spike only rarely emerged.

"How is he?" Angel asked every time he crossed paths with Spike.

"How're your hands?" Spike shot back. Pagnol had had Angel chained to a crucifix by his wrists for seven hours--a lesson in financial management. His hands had been burnt black almost to his elbows by the time Pagnol's men had cut him down and sent him back to the office, relieved of his payment in cash.

Wesley went back to work. The building was in ruins, the business in disarray. He spent six hours recovering billing records from the crippled server, under Fred's direction, then another four listening to Cordelia detail the damage that the storm had done to the boutiques and salons of L.A., while they sorted through a mountain of half-destroyed confidential client records. He may have slept through some of that part.

Within a few days, the whole thing had begun to feel like a kind of dream. The office operated at half speed, muted and subdued. Angel was healing in his rooms, Spike and Xander were never around. In moments of abstraction, Wesley found hiself doubting his own memories--had he really been in a cage? Had there really been angels in the library? It seemed impossible--surely if it were true, there'd be some kind of follow-up, not this sense of desertion and inertia.

It was both a surprise and a relief, then to walk into his room one evening, put down the armload of folders he was carrying, and notice Xander sitting silently in the armchair beside the window. He was in a white shirt and dark jeans, his hair black and messy, his face leaner and more sober than Wesley remembered.

"Hello," said Wesley.

"Hi," said Xander.

They gave each other faint half-smiles, and then Wesley didn't know what to do or say. He'd been planning to eat something quickly, shower, and go to bed. Lately his dreams had been good.

"Spike let me in," Xander said irrelevantly, then added, with a bit more anxiety in his tone, "I hope that's okay."

"Of course."

Xander nodded, and folded his hands together on his knees, in a deliberately casual gesture. "I wanted to apologize."

Wesley felt his smile turn rueful, but he didn't reply. He'd accepted so many apologies from Angel that one more felt superfluous, even meaningless. "How do you feel?" he asked.

Xander's face tightened. "Like total shit," he said, and gave an abrupt, barking laugh. "Sorry."

Wesley pretended not to notice. "Pagnol said you can...earn back the rest of it."

Xander smiled bitterly at his hands. "Yeah. Right."

"You don't think that's possible?"

"I think every time I slip up I'm going to go deeper into the hole. And it's a pretty deep hole." Xander shrugged. "But it's not like I don't deserve it."

Wesley, as familiar with self-recrimination as he was with apology, said nothing. He went to the galley kitchen and opened the refrigerator. "Will you join me for a beer?"

Xander laughed again, more quietly, then said, "Sure."

They drank in near-silence, looking out over the city's lights.

"I really did come back to save you," Xander said at one point. "I wasn't going to leave you with those guys."

"I think," Wesley said slowly, "that we can safely consider that topic of conversation closed."

By the time Xander drained his bottle and got up to lave, the quiet in the room felt distinctly gentler, Wesley thought. He was surprised to find that he felt no ill will toward Xander--the days of sleep must have washed it out of him. He wanted to let the whole episode go and carry on. There were so many things to do.

Setting his own bottle aside half-finished, he got up to walk Xander to the door. "I appreciate your coming by," he said, and then, trying to convey some of how he felt--the importance of moving forward, not looking back--"What will you do now?"

Xander hesitated, his thumb rising up to rub his lower lip. "I'm thinking...I was hired to be an assistant. So I guess I'm going to assist."

Wesley waited.

"I think I'm going to be hired help for a while," Xander clarified. "You know. Cannon fodder." He flashed a smile. "I'm good at that."

"I'd think you might consider looking for something a bit safer."

"Wesley." Xander gave him a steady look. "I was in the library. It gets no safer."

Wesley acknowledged that in silence. He watched Xander reach for the doorknob, then asked, on impulse, "What about Spike?"

Xander's expression turned troubled. "I think that's...I think I have some damage control to do there. Or not."

Wesley considered the wisdom of holding his peace, then said, "He stood by you."

"He yanked me around on a length of chain. But again, it's not like I didn't deserve it." Xander opened the door and paused. "I think I still do, sometimes." He looked at Wesley, and his right eye flickered gold, then brown.

Wesley didn't look away. He put out his hand, and after looking at it in apparent confusion, Xander shook it. His palm was cool and dry. He left, and Wesley closed the door and went to bed.

Six months later, Wesley reflected that on the whole, the episode had probably turned out to be a strangely good thing. Angel had healed, the building had been restored, reinforced, made stronger than before. Wesley himself felt calmer, as if something in him had been smoothed over, leaving him less porous, more centered. He didn't feel a sting when Angel passed him without a look, or as much of a thrill when they walked together down a hall. He felt as loyal and fond, in some ways as passionate, as ever--but it was as if some ragged inner space in himself had been filled in, and he no longer felt the pain of its absence.

Spike and Xander, too, seemed changed. Xander was raw-edged, volatile, at times self-hating, at times furious with everyone but himself. He contacted Willow and Buffy, drove to Sunnydale to see them, came back and locked himself in his rooms for three days and never mentioned it again. He took out his anger on demons and vampires, until Angel began to rely on him as a heavy hitter, part of the front line like Spike and Angel himself. He wasn't as strong, and the false eye caused him some problems, but he had a frightening reserve of rage and an insensibility to injury that let him pummel creatures twice his size.

Spike kept an eye on him, from a greater distance than before. They didn't share rooms anymore--sometime after his visit to Wesley's apartment, Xander had quietly moved into his own suite on another floor of the building. Spike seemed unaffected. He supervised Xander with the same short-tempered, eye-rolling attention as before. The difference now was that Xander didn't shout or threaten--when Spike told him to do something, to pick up his abandoned blood bags or get out of the way of the crossbow, he did it right away, with no argument. The two of them still moved closely together, Xander taking his cues from Spike, each always aware of the other's' whereabouts, but they didn't touch. As much as it was a relief not to hear Xander hurl bitter, ugly, deeply personal insults at Spike, Wesley felt a sense of hollowness, even sadness, that he assumed would fade over time, as he got used to their new realities.

He was crouched behind the overturned bed frame, frantically reloading the crossbow, when someone yelled that the building was on fire. He cursed--fire was the last thing they needed. Angel had already been shot in the back ("I'm fine," he'd insisted, staggering to his feet. "It's just been a while.") and Fred had very nearly been brained with a pry bar by a panicking vampire punter. Clearing out the brothels had turned out to be a more laborious and time-consuming task than they'd anticipated.

But it was worth it, Wesley thought, sneaking a look over the top of the frame and pegging a fleeing vampire neatly through the open door. Every punter he ashed felt like another chip struck from an immense, vile monolith. It might be petty, to feel such personal satisfaction, but if so he'd take the remorse later. For now he was just trying to work as quickly as possible.

He smelled smoke, considered th window, remembered the sheer drop to the parking lot pavement, and made for the door. Halfway out, he ran forcibly into someone running in. The air was hazy now, and his eyes had begun to sting and water. He got a stake up, and felt his wrist seized in a hard grip.

"It's me, Wes." Xander was in game face, blood on his mouth, his eyes mismatched and glowing. He looked wild, disheveled, delighted. With a kind of rough fondness, he shook Wesley's wrist and snatched the stake from him.

"Behind you," Wesley gasped, and without a pause Xander turned and punched the stake into the throat of the approaching vamp, then slammed him into the wall and tore into the wound with his teeth. Wesley, choking and coughing, felt cold blood spatter his arm. He backe away and started down the hall, only to be grabbed again, this time by Spike.

"Where's--" Wesley pointed back with his thumb and kept moving as soon as Spike released him. In a minute he was stumbling down the stairs, through piles of ash and a wall of smoke, then veering left toward the side door as he realized the fire was in the kitchen. Someone stumbled past, on fire and screaming--no one he knew. He kept moving, through the heat and flying cinders, then out the demolished door and into the cool night air, where he took in great whooping gasps and spat out a mouthful of ash.

Angel appeared, grabbed him one more time, and walked him to the far end of the parking lot, where Cordelia and Fred were waiting with pale, dirty faces and watering eyes.

"You okay?" Angel asked, his eyes on Wesley's face. Wesley nodded, wiping his mouth. Angel looked fine, if you ignored the blood dripping from the back hem of his coat.

"That was not our finest hour," Cordelia observed, sniffing her sleeve. "And if I never smell a burning grease trap again, that'll be just fine."

"Where are Spike and Xander?" Fred asked, her eyes on the building. Wesley turned back--they all did. The brothel was fully alight now, its windows shattering, flames streaming out.

"We have to go," Angel observed, even as Wesley had the same thought. Being found at the scene of a barroom arson would be a headache, to say the least.

"They were inside," Wesley said, grimacing at the sting of smoke in his throat. "Upstairs--I saw them."

There was a moment of silence, while they all watched the brothel burn. Angel's expression changed from taut to uncertain.

"I'm sure they're all right," Fred started to say, just as Angel took a step back toward the building, his brows knitting. He stopped as the broken, smoking door opened and two figures ran out, half-crouching, stumbling, clinging to each other for support. Xander in front, Spike behind, the tails of his duster actually alight. They staggered around the lot beating at each other with the flats of their hands and convulsing with what Wesley took at first for asphyxia but then recognized as laughter.

"Those idiots," Cordelia said, in a tone of derisive relief.

Angel gave a sort of combined grunt and groan, and let his hand fall back onto Wesley's shoulder. "You okay to drive?" Wesley nodded. "You take them back in the Rover. I'll take Cordy and Fred."

"I want a shower," Cordelia said, already walking away toward the cars. "I want a shower that lasts for a week."

Fred lingered a moment, smiling apologetically, to say, "Drive safely, okay?" She'd been solicitous lately. It was her way of showing that all was not forgotten between them, he assumed--or perhaps it was an attempt to open that door one more time. Either way, he supposed he appreciated it. He gave her a weary, watery smile.

"Keep an eye on Angel," he replied. "He's been shot."

She nodded and hurried off, leaving him to stand and wait while Spike and Xander slowly stood upright and heeled their hands into their eyes and shook their heads, spitting dust and ash onto the sizzling pavement. He waited as long as he could, then, when he was afraid they weren't going to sober up before they started hearing sirens, he began walking back toward them.

At almost the same time, Xander turned and caught Spike around the neck with one hand, pulled him in, and kissed him. Spike didn't resist or hesitate. They pressed together, Xander's hand cupping the back of Spike's head, Spike's hands finding Xander's ass, kissing desperately while behind them the flames broke the building down and a fountain of sparks shot into the air.

Wesley stopped where he was, and looked politely away. He felt a small familiar ache, but it was duller than it once had been, and less important than the silly, inexplicable, angelic warmth that he felt as well. By the time Xander and Spike broke apart and came over--Xander grinning, Spike swaggering--Wesley knew he had a small, ridiculous smile on his face.

"Thanks for waiting," Xander said, as the faint sound of sirens ribboned through the night.

"Not at all," said Wesley, and led the way to the car.