elgrey

All previous parts linked to from Story Notes


Temps Perdu, Part Seventeen

Wesley felt hands on his shoulders tentatively rubbing his back and turned to find a blurry Gunn with tears in his brown eyes. The man said hoarsely: “Better though, right? To have known her?”

Wesley managed a smile although he realized now that he had evidently been crying as well. “Much better.” Seeing the look in Gunn’s eyes, he gripped his arm. “It wasn’t your fault. I blamed you because I had to have someone to blame, but I was wrong. You signed a piece of paper.”

“That’s what I told him,” Angel put in.

“I knew there would be consequences. I knew someone would pay.”

Wesley sighed. “What was it Faith said to Connor? That just makes you one of us? We’re here because we’re not perfect, because we make mistakes, because we’ve done things we can never take back.”

Gunn nodded, looking across at Angel. “Must be contagious. Hang around with Angel for any length of time and you become as big a screw up as he is.”

Wesley managed a faint smile. “Isn’t that actually in the job description? I thought it was in our terms of employment?”

“Like that cheap bastard would ever give us a proper contract.” Gunn rubbed Wesley’s shoulders again gently. It was always gentle when Gunn touched him. He could never decide which he preferred, that solid pressure from Angel that told him everything was okay, or that tender contact from Gunn that told him he was fragile and cherished.

“Hey…” Angel looked hurt. “I’m not cheap. I’m just…old. They didn’t have terms of employment in my day.”

“This is your day, Angel,” Wesley reminded him.

Gunn was still gently touching him and he knew that as an Englishman and his father’s son he should quietly withdraw from that contact but it was comforting and he didn’t want to and his father wasn’t here anyway to see and disapprove of someone touching him with kindness.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that alone,” Gunn added. “Losing Fred.”

“I wasn’t alone.” Wesley looked around the room again, remembering everything, leaving tacos outside and watching her collect them and Fred wearing those glasses that didn’t suit her at all and yet which somehow looked so wonderful on her, telling them she was fine, really. “Fred was with me.”

Gunn grimaced. “I mean…after… I thought afterwards that we knew what was happening, we knew it was something old and evil hollowing Fred out and we just left you alone with her – with it. I was just thinking you should have all the time you could with Fred but then later… I should have been there after.”

“Illyria was.” Wesley took a last look around the room. He knew there were still some of her clothes in here; more probably in the room she’d shared with Gunn. And Gunn had his own guilt at having let her down, his own grief, his own painful memories of their time in this hotel, and he’d come back here and faced it. “That was one thing, at least. I was never alone with Fred’s…corpse. She passed out of this life and Illyria stepped into it. At the time that seemed uniquely terrible but now I find it strangely comforting.”

Gunn nodded. “I never expected her to stick around after you and Angel disappeared into that other world, but she stayed with us, with me and Spike, came back here and never talked about leaving, just about ways to get you back, how it couldn’t be permitted for you to stay in another dimension. She got very frustrated by not being able to just step into that world and grab you back. A lot of stamping her dainty blue feet about no longer having the power of a god. But she worked with us. She never even talked about going somewhere else. I think in her own way she’s scared of this world.”

“Yes, I think it terrifies her.” Wesley reached out and touched the wall in temporary farewell. “And I think Fred’s humanity is in there somewhere. A spark of it. Perhaps her soul as well. Illyria lost her army of doom and her worlds of wonder and now we’re all she has left, and she’s all we have left of Fred.”

Angel sighed. “Still don’t like her.”

“She’s an asset, Angel. A warrior on the side of good.”

“But she isn’t good.”

“She doesn’t understand our world or our morality yet, but she’s still doing good by being with us.”

Angel rolled his eyes, and there was something definitely sulky about the set of his shoulders. “I think I liked you better when you were crazy.”

“We’re the only family she has, Angel.” Wesley looked at the place where that drawing of Fred and Angel on the horse had been. “And in her way I think she’s as lost and in need of a family as Fred was on Pylea.”

Angel shook his head. “Great rescue that turned out to be. Save her from the monsters only to deliver her into hell.”

“Fred was glad to come back – even if only for a few years. I think if you’d asked her she would have told you she’d still want the rescue. She didn’t wish she’d never come back to this world when she was…dying, she just wondered why she couldn’t stay.” He turned to Gunn. “Who’s Feigenbaum?”

“That tatty old rabbit of hers. Why?”

Wesley gazed at him for a moment. “I just… Why didn’t we talk to each other more when we were in that place?”

“Wolfram & Hart?” Angel grimaced. “I keep wondering that myself – how much did they manipulate us and how much did we do it to ourselves. Every time I tried to talk to you I came up against that damned mindwipe, what I’d done to you, the things you didn’t remember. I hated putting that look on your face. Like your head hurt and you didn’t know why you didn’t understand what I was talking about.”

“I was so lonely all the time I was there. I hated it so much.” Wesley turned to Gunn: “You seemed happy. I couldn’t talk to you about it.”

Gunn shrugged. “I was happy. I felt as if I was really doing some good. Like I knew who I was and where I was meant to be for the first time in my life. I remember wishing you’d lighten up and enjoy all the books. At least Fred and Lorne seemed to be having fun…”

“I think that place nearly got all our souls.” Angel also touched the wall in farewell. “I could feel it sucking all the hope right out of me. Like what was the point of anything when it was all going to be there the next day and the next day, the Senior Partners and their slow burning apocalypse, and the elevators rising and falling, and the damned paperclips. It should have told us right then that place was Hell Incorporated, when they could take every employee being slaughtered by a fiery lava beast and just…shrug it off and remake themselves as good as new a few weeks later. I was supposed to be a champion of humanity, but they put me in charge of people I despised, who I didn’t even see as human half the time.”

Wesley grimaced. “I shot someone in the kneecap. I still can’t believe I did that. Does anyone know if he was given any kind of medical care?”

Gunn nodded. “Wolfram & Hart employees have excellent medical benefits. There would have been an automatic repair job done.”

“I tried to treat them as if they were decent ordinary people but I couldn’t get past the fact they worked for Wolfram & Hart. The fact they were alive when Lilah wasn’t…” Wesley winced. “I didn’t even know I felt like that until this minute.”

“I sent that guy to see Magnus Bryce and I didn’t really care that he came back in a bucket. I was annoyed about the affront to my corporate dignity but it didn’t…bother me. I didn’t lie awake thinking that a human being was dead because of something I’d done. I don’t even remember his name.”

“Neither do I.” Wesley tried to recall it and then winced. “I’m just hearing Harmony talking about ‘bucket o’ lawyer’.”

“As a corporate sell-out, I was way too good.” Angel backed out of the room.

Gunn said, “I remember a guy telling me that the thing about atonement is, you never run out of chances.”

“It’s starting to feel like every time I crawl a few inches up the greasy pole towards redemption, I fall another foot further down straight afterwards.”

Wesley patted him gently on the shoulder. “Just try not to eat anyone, shut anyone in a room with murderous vampires, or wipe anyone’s memories for a few years, Angel. You’ll climb back up again.”

Angel narrowed his eyes. “I definitely preferred you when you were crazy.”

Gunn shrugged. “He’s baiting the cranky bloodsucker, Angel, do you really think that’s sane?”

Wesley grimaced apologetically. “I did thank you for saving me in that hell dimension, didn’t I? And the hand-holding and not leaving me when I had an unexploded bomb inside me, and the…comforting me when I was having nightmares? The comforting of which I’m trusting that no one has any Polaroids…?”

“So, you don’t want me sending out the picture of you naked in bed with a vampire on all my Christmas cards this year then? Because I was thinking that brotherhood of man would be a good theme…”

“Angel…” Wesley gave him a reproachful look.

Gunn winced and made the sign of the cross. “Sheesh, Wes, you ought to register those eyes as an offensive weapon. Just don’t tell me I have to burn my naked-Watcher-in-bed-with-naked-Vampire photos because they’re really the heart of my blackmail collection.”

“You didn’t really take photographs, did you?” Wesley’s confidence faded a little at the look of ‘why wouldn’t we?’ surprise on Angel and Gunn’s faces. “I mean, why would anyone do something like that? Unless they were fiends from the innermost pit of hell.”

“Well, I was kind of a fiend,” Angel said thoughtfully as he led the way downstairs. “And I’ve visited a hell. So, there may have been a time delayed photo or two, not to mention some sketching. Just as a keepsake.”

“Me too. Two weeks in a hell dimension getting my heart cut out.” Gunn shrugged. “That does stuff to a guy. Makes him harder. But not in an in-bed-with-a-Watcher way.”

“I’m an ex Watcher,” Wesley retorted. “And just because in some strange alternate dimension used as a demon conjuring trick on poor Cordelia I may have been unwise enough to decide that any port in a storm…” As Angel and Gunn both gawped at him Wesley had a sudden mental image of himself as someone in a muddy hole who could not seem to stop shovelling. “You know, I never actually said that. It’s the echo in here.”

Angel waved a hand between him and Gunn. “So, which port are we talking about here. Oh right, I was insane, wasn’t I? So, presumably it had to be…Gunn.”

Gunn annoyed Wesley by failing to shy like a nervous horse before quickly changing the subject, as he had always been taught was the proper masculine response to such a situation, but instead looked smug. “So, I was doing the one-armed version of you, eh? Damn, I bet I was good. You know that could be the real reason you looked so wrecked. Nothing to do with the strain of looking after Angel at all – just trying to keep up with me in bed.”

“You have no shame,” Wesley observed. “What happened to men stuttering inanely before talking about sporting events or the weather in loud carrying voices whenever something like this is suggested?”

“Cordy should have shared.”

“Yes, because it’s not as if you would have been insufferable about it or anything.”

“Hey, we both know I would have been the best sex you’ve ever had, English.”

“You are so unbelievably full of yourself!”

Angel shook his head. “I can’t believe you two were having sex while I was insane. That’s just…tacky.”

“We weren’t…” Wesley broke off. “Why am I having anything to do with this conversation? That world never even existed. It was a lie told by Skip to manipulate Cordelia.”

“Gotta wonder why Skip saw you as the gets-laid-by-Gunn type though.”

Gunn shrugged. “He probably read that from Cordy and she would have known that I was irresistible in any world, and Wes is just really…easy.”

“Perhaps I seduced Gunn with my suave wit and sophistication?” Wesley countered.

Gunn snorted and patted him – still gently – on the shoulder. “Yeah, Wes, you keep telling yourself that. There could even be one dimension out there out of all those infinite possibilities where that might even have happened. I so seduced you. I probably saved your skinny one-armed ass from some skanky demon and then taught you everything you ever knew.”

“From the sound of things, I was actually the one in charge.”

“Outside the bedroom maybe, inside – never.”

Wesley looked around the lobby and realized that everyone was staring at them in rather wide-eyed confusion.

Angel grimaced. “Oh, Gunn and Wes didn’t actually turn gay upstairs or anything…”

Gunn looked a little discomfited. “We were just talking about other dimensions…”

“Positing possibilities,” Wesley added hastily.

“In this other dimension Cordelia visited where I was crazy with the visions, Gunn and Wes were…an item,” Angel explained to Buffy.

Willow raised an eyebrow. “Oh, in another dimension Cordelia visited Xander and I were skanky evil vampires and did skanky evil vampire things. I never think those other dimensions have much bearing on ours except that it turned out I was kind of gay after all and actually Xander and I did have that brief thing with the touching and the formal wear and the…”

“You could stop talking any time now, Willow,” said Wesley with a fixed smile on his face. “Really.”

She looked hurt. “When you were crazy you really liked my hair and you thought I was pretty.”

“I still like your hair and I think you’re extremely pretty, it’s just been a long day, I’m hungry, and I don’t want to have to get drunk and have sex with Gunn. I’d really much rather eat that delicious food that Buffy has been cooking all day.”

“You prefer food to me?”

“Gunn, can you get off the insanely alpha male ego-trip for just a few minutes and acknowledge that if it were a choice between having sex with me or eating a burrito of even moderate quality the burrito would win by a landslide.”

Gunn thought about it for a moment and then inclined his head in reluctant acknowledgment. “Okay. But… Hey, next time Buffy goes into Martha Stewart mode can we get her to make burritos…?” And then everyone started to realize how hungry they were and the moment had – thankfully – passed.

Wesley shook his head. “I think I must have gone insane in self-defence.”

“Do you hate me now?”

He turned in surprise to find Illyria gazing at him with her head on one side and something that definitely looked like fear of rejection in her pale blue eyes.

“No. Why would you think…?”

“The Burkle creature. You blame me for her death and now you are visiting places where you knew her.”

“That’s what we do, with people that we love, Illyria, we like to remember them.”

“Why do something that brings you grief?”

“Because it’s part of being alive and the people that one loves are part of us, alive or dead, they helped make us what we are.” He looked around the room, seeing them all: Giles, Buffy, Willow, Xander, Angel, Gunn, Lorne, Connor, Spike, Illyria. “Just as everyone here has helped make me what I am today.”

Illyria walked around him with a frown, head tilting to the other side as she contemplated him thoughtfully. “Are you not generally considered undernourished and mentally unstable?”

“Hey…” Gunn put an arm around Wesley’s shoulders. “We put him together from a ‘Make your own skinny crazy English guy’ kit. They’re meant to look like this.”

Wesley looked down at himself. “Are you completely sure you read the instructions correctly, Charles?”

Gunn removed the arm from his shoulders but gave him a last pat and Wesley wondered if Gunn had ever touched him so much or so often; then remembered he had been like this after the gunshot wound. “Well, they were in Korean, so we had to wing it, but, I think we got it more or less right.”

Seeing Angel peering at his shoulder, Wesley sighed. “You want to see it again, don’t you?”

“No.” Angel waved a dismissive hand then got that hopeful look on his face that made him look about fourteen and a complete dork. “Can I?”

Sighing again, Wesley unbuttoned his shirt and flipped it off his right shoulder so Angel could peer at the brand. Gunn and Illyria also looked at it with interest as Xander put a hand written menu in Wesley’s hands.

“Time to take your seat in the dining room, Wesley, and oh yes, you people are sick.”

Angel pulled Wesley’s shirt back up to cover the brand. “Just checking he’s still…legally…”

“Yours?” Xander patted him on the shoulder. “Make sure you drink a lot of that wine, Wesley. He so owes you.”

The scent of food was delicious and Wesley thought of how excited Fred and Cordelia would have been at the thought of a proper meal in the dining room. “The dead are always with us, Illyria.” He looked between her and Angel. “Some of them in a more literal way than others.”

Angel plucked the menu from him. “Fine, pick on the dead guy. I tried to get Buffy to just make steak and kidney pie. Sometimes I feel like something from back in the day.”

“A virgin gypsy to go?” Xander suggested. “Can you get those as takeout?”

Angel looked at Xander levelly. “I also killed men. Tortured them too. Especially the really annoying ones…”

Wesley and Gunn exchanged a glance and then both edged back a pace. Gunn coughed. “Greasy pole, remember…?”

Angel looked sulky. “That’s the real reason people don’t stick with their atonement, you know, they’re never allowed to have any fun.”

“Willow and I made place settings.” Buffy held up napkins folded into intricate shapes which almost resembled birds and animals, although not very much. As they all looked at her blankly, she pointed to the office. “There was a book on it.”

There was a moment of confusion before everyone turned to Wesley. “I don’t have a book on napkin folding,” he insisted. “It must have been Cordelia’s.”

“It’s on home entertaining.” Buffy gazed at her folded napkins proudly. “Isn’t this swan cool?”

“We could decorate the candle holders too, if we had more time.” Willow held up the book to show them an illustration.

They all peered at it and Xander wrinkled his nose. “Is it me or is that completely…?”

“Hideous,” Angel confirmed.

Wesley put his head on one side to examine the picture better. “Why would anyone want to do that to an inoffensive candlestick?”

“If you two have quite finished going all…Stepford wife, kittens, some of us really want to eat that delicious-smelling food before it gets cold.” Lorne took the menu from Angel and straightened it. “And Buffy made me write this out by hand. Don’t crease it.”

It was impossible to walk towards the dining room without looking around for Fred and Cordelia, imagining Cordelia looking like a million dollars and critiquing Buffy’s choice of footwear while Fred’s beauty outshone every candle as she amazed the visitors from Sunnydale with her ability to eat more than her own weight in food.

He had to take a moment by himself while the sound of other people’s voices broke over him to breathe around the pain of her truly being gone and never coming back, then opened his eyes to find Gunn looking how he felt. It struck him again that Gunn had lost as much as he had done; he had shared more meals with Fred; had breakfast with her more times; in some ways had probably known her better. To Wesley she had always been enchanting exactly as she was; he had never felt he needed to know more about her, because it seemed to him that everything he knew was just another strand in her perfection. He had thought Gunn was guiltless of needing her to remain an ideal but ironically it was Wesley who had felt no lessening of what Lilah called his ‘schoolgirl crush’, and which he thought of as his great love, when Fred had come to ask for his help in murdering a man who had wronged her. Gunn was the one who had stepped off the pedestal on which Fred had unknowingly placed him to save the woman he loved from becoming a murderer. Or had that been to stop him from being in love with a murderer? Either way it had undermined the foundations of their relationship. And Wesley had done his part in chipping away at that crumbling edifice as well. He had been petty, perhaps, hurt and angry because Gunn’s friendship hadn’t been unconditional, after all. He looked across at the man and they exchanged a look of shared pain. It was there in Gunn’s eyes as well. They’re really not coming back, are they? Cordy and Fred. They had been here, dammit, close enough to touch. They had walked across this lobby wearing those dresses, looking like a million dollars, Connor asleep upstairs in his cot, and the world had been something that lay ahead of all of them, the demon hunters who occasionally took the night off from helping Angel with his mythic destiny to partake in a little culture and relaxation. He had liked that life. He missed that life.

“Wesley…?”

He turned his head and there was Connor. Not a baby. Full grown and sane and well and looking at him in concern. The boy touched his arm gently. “Are you okay?”

Wesley looked around the hotel, stairs they had walked down, floor they had crossed, Cordelia spinning on that chair doing her impression of Angel, Fred hiding under that table, Cordelia holding that ice bag to the back of his head, Fred rushing back in to save them from the bug demons with one deft slice of her incredibly dangerous decapitating device, Cordelia leaving plastic flowers to lighten Angel’s gloomy basement, Fred rocking Connor in her arms looking so beautiful he could hardly catch his breath; and him, another version of himself, with an axe and murder on his mind, and her words to him: “It wasn’t something in you, Wesley. It was something that was done to you… You’re a good man…”

He focused on Connor’s concerned kind face, those eyes so like Darla’s. “Yes. I’m just…”

“He is remembering Fred.” Illyria sounded so tragic.

“They’re good memories, Illyria,” Wesley told her gently. “Memories I’m grateful to have back. And I’m remembering Cordy, as well. And everyone else. That’s what we do when we have friends we love. We like to think about them, to remember them and be glad we knew them, even when they’re gone.”

Xander nodded. “I still think about Anya. Sometimes they’re happy memories and sometimes they’re not. Still wouldn’t want to be without them.”

“Memories of the people we’ve lost also help us to be grateful for the people we have left.” Wesley looked at Angel and Gunn and Lorne and Connor and Spike and then smiled gently at Illyria. “You would count as one of those.”

She gazed at him for a moment in non-comprehension and then realized and smiled in a very human way before she collected herself and turned away. “I am indifferent to such human emotions.”

“Lucky that,” Spike grinned at Wesley. “Terrible thing when demons go all humanized. Right, Peaches?”

Angel glowered at him. “Don’t call me that.”

Giles came out of the office. “Just so you know – Buffy and Willow have made a seating plan.”

Angel, Wesley and Gunn exchanged a glance. Angel murmured, “Are you a little scared that if Illyria starts trying to act like a human woman her role models are going to be an insane astrophysicist, a Slayer with Martha Stewart tendencies, a kooky witch and…Cordelia?”

“No,” Gunn assured him. “I’m terrified.”

They all looked across at Illyria as Connor and Giles headed out of the door. Worryingly, she was examining what appeared to be a napkin folded in the shape of a swan with close attention.

“Be afraid,” Spike murmured. “Be very afraid.”

***

They ate in the dining room. Even though as Xander told them, they were just tempting fate, Buffy was adamant that this time they were going to have a nice dinner with proper napkins and no elbows on the table. They would follow her and Willow’s seating plan exactly, and yes that meant all of them. And no, she didn’t think it was unreasonable to send Spike upstairs to change his shirt or to order Wesley to comb his hair.

Angel heard Gunn murmur to Wesley: “Hands up anyone who thinks there are worse things than it just being guys and demons here?”

Wesley surreptitiously lifted his fingers – sensibly, he wasn’t going to rashly raise an entire visible hand – while Spike and Angel did the same thing. Gunn cleared his throat: “So, I guess you guys are going to have to head back to Cleveland before too long…?”

Buffy looked surprised. “Not really. That’s pretty much Faith’s particular Hellmouth headache now. Dawn’s doing the Watcher thing for her. Kennedy is helping her out with the demon slaying and Wood has the looking tall dark and handsome pretty much covered.”

Spike snorted sulkily. “I don’t think Wood is handsome. Okay, tall, yes, but I don’t see handsome.”

Buffy sucked the gravy from a piece of asparagus in a way that was downright provocative. “Trust me, he really is.”

“I dislike him already.” Angel was never going to be okay about Buffy liking other guys. He could make the self-sacrificing gesture, wish for a better life for her, but not be jealous of other men she liked…never.

“He did want to kill Spike,” Giles poured Wesley and himself another glass of wine.

Angel shrugged. “Well, maybe he’s not so bad.”

“Faith certainly thinks so,” Xander put in.

“Yes, and if you don’t actually beg her to stop she’ll tell you why, too,” Willow put in. “With details.”

Buffy looked intrigued. “Really? Anything particularly interesting or you know…sick and wrong?”

“Apparently, he’s really inventive when it comes to…” Willow seemed to become aware of the disapproving glances every man at the table was sending in her direction and grimaced at Buffy. “I’ll tell you later.”

“I would also like to hear this tale,” Illyria observed. “It intrigues me.”

Buffy frowned. “You don’t think Kennedy kisses and tells as well, do you?”

“God, I hope so,” Xander said with feeling. He became aware of Willow’s expression. “Did I just say that out loud?”

Gunn quietly removed the bottle from its place next to Xander’s elbow and handed it to Spike. “So, no urgent reason for you to be leaving any time soon then?”

“Nope.” Buffy beamed at him. “We’re fine helping you guys out.”

Angel saw Gunn and Wesley exchange less than enthused looks. One could see that it had been too long since they’d had Cordelia around to educate them out of their No Gurls Allowed mentality.

Spike seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Maybe you could fix Wes and Gunn up with some Slayers?” he suggested. “It’s time those two got back to dating.”

Connor looked up with interest. “I’d like to meet some more Slayers.”

“Oh, we should introduce Connor to Dawn,” Willow beamed. “I’m sure they’d get along.” As Angel and Buffy both glared at her, Willow blinked in confusion. “What did I say?”

“I want Dawn to date normal boys,” Buffy insisted, glancing across at Connor. “No offence.”

“You’re saying my son isn’t normal?” Angel demanded.

“Oh, dear lord,” Giles murmured.

“I’m not saying he’s abnormal I’m just saying that given Dawn’s origins maybe it would be a good idea if she went out with guys who weren’t so much…the son of two vampires with a false set of memories in his head of having a completely different background, that’s all.”

“Oh, and being a ball of green energy transformed into human form makes someone too good to go out with the son of a vampire…?”

“Dad…” Connor held his gaze. “It’s fine.”

Buffy grimaced. “Connor, I didn’t mean… I really didn’t… It’s just…”

Connor held up a hand. “Buffy, chill. I get where you’re coming from so don’t sweat it. And Dawn and I are already emailing anyway.”

“You’re what…?” Buffy demanded.

“Having super heroes for relatives means you have to vent sometimes. We’re being each other’s support group.”

She narrowed her eyes. “How supportive exactly?”

He gave her an innocent smile. “That’s for us to know and you to lose sleep over.”

Buffy turned to the vampire. “Angel!”

He shrugged. “Hey, teenagers, what can you do?” But the glance he sent in the direction of a smug-looking Connor was in no way critical.

“I was thinking like a triple blind date,” Spike continued unperturbed. “You put three Slayers into the pot and I put up Wes, Gunn and myself.”

Giles poured himself another glass of wine. “The girls aren’t gambling chips, Spike, and I think it’s highly unlikely that any Slayer in her right mind is going to date a vampire, with or without a soul.”

Buffy turned to look at him. “What was that about ‘any Slayer in her right mind?’”

Giles grimaced. “Well, clearly, what I really meant was…” He thought for a moment and then shrugged. “No, actually, I’ve got nothing.”

“What about me, Gunn and Wesley?” Xander suggested. “We could date Slayers.”

Wesley grimaced, suggesting that along with all his other memories the ones of him being tortured by Faith had also put in an appearance. “I think I’d rather not. In my experience they can be somewhat…volatile.”

“I also think this has strategy has no merit,” Illyria insisted. “It would not be fitting for Wesley to indulge in sexual intercourse so soon after losing his memories of himself.”

“Not all Slayers tie you up and smack you around, Wes,” Angel pointed out gently.

Spike looked surprised. “They don’t?”

Angel thought back to himself chained up in the mansion and he and Buffy exchanging blows in LA. “Well… not all the time.”

“Nevertheless, I think I’ll pass.” Wesley forced a smile.

Gunn shrugged. “I’m up for it.” He turned to Xander. “You?”

He nodded. “Sure. Although…”

“What?”

“Well, out of the Slayers I’ve had sex with a hundred percent of them have tried to kill me later.”

Wesley inclined his head. “I think there is something to be said for the theory that Parkinson put forward that they’re inherently unbalanced.”

Giles looked thoughtful. “Oh yes, that was a fascinating paper on the likelihood of demonic strength being linked to mental instability. I remember reading it in the old Council library. Their view seemed to be that it’s actually impossible for a Slayer to…”

“I’m sitting right here,” Buffy said indignantly.

Catching Buffy’s eye he coughed. “Of course, as I recall, that particular study was discredited by later research.”

“Absolutely,” Wesley said hastily.

Spike went to light a cigarette and at a look from Angel unwillingly put it away. “I dunno – I’ve met five fully-fledged Slayers in my time and every single one of them has tried to kill me.”

“Perhaps because you were trying to kill her?” Buffy said witheringly.

“Or it could have been that time of the month?” Spike suggested.

Angel gazed at Buffy. “Now do you see what I have to put up with?”

“And the puppy dog eyes strike again,” Lorne murmured. “Two hundred and fifty years Sir Broodsalot has been walking the earth and he still thinks that’s the best way to get around the fairer…” Seeing Buffy’s melting expression as she gazed into Angel’s brown eyes, Lorne picked up his glass. “And it turns out, he’s right.”

Angel picked up his glass and gazed down the table, abruptly overwhelmed by a wave of déjà vu. Buffy was the one who had set the places, not him, and yet, by chance, she had mirrored the seating arrangements of his unconscious mind. Angel was at the head of the table, with Connor on his left, but in place of Cordelia was Buffy, although with her short blonde hair, there was enough of a fleeting resemblance that he thought for an instant that perhaps none of it had happened and this was his hallucinatory fantasy once more. He was almost afraid to look, one part of him so desperate to see Cordelia again, the other terrified that this was just a dream and he was still trapped beneath the ocean, his son still full of hatred for him. Buffy smiled back at him gently and there was a mingled stab of relief and loss.

Next to Buffy was Gunn, but in Fred’s place, there was now Illyria who was trying to mimic their eating behaviour despite clearly thinking the act of cutting up food and placing it into one’s mouth was very strange. Her resemblance to Fred was strong enough to be painful but there could hardly have been more of a contrast to Fred’s healthy appetite. Yet, as he looked at her, he saw her dart a glance at Wesley to see how he was using his knife and fork, and subtly altered her own grip upon them, something in her brief insecurity that touched even him. Willow was sitting between Connor and Xander, her hair a blaze of glorious warmth, further proof that this was no hallucination. When she smiled across at Buffy, she could have been the schoolgirl he remembered, and when Buffy grinned back he saw the girl he had first met in Sunnydale. Xander leaned across to whisper something in Willow’s ear and despite the eye patch, as he moved her hair away from her ear so he could murmur into it, he looked as mischievous as when he had been a teenager. Willow laughed and then shook a finger at him in mock reproach. Lorne firmly passed on the plate of roast potatoes which Spike had been hogging, earning an eye roll in the process.

Wesley was seated next to Illyria, unobtrusively helping her with the complicated business of sipping wine and eating the dish she was sniffing so suspiciously. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and he looked older and a lot wearier than he had in Angel’s fantasy, but he was alive and well, and very much himself. At the end of the table, where Wesley had sat in his fantasy, was Giles, with more grey around the temples, but the same steady gaze, although it was now fixed on Wesley far more benevolently than it had ever been back in Sunnydale. When Giles’ gaze moved on to Buffy, he smiled with a flicker of parental pride that he would no doubt have tried to conceal if she had been looking his way. By chance Buffy looked up from her meal at that moment and smiled back at him as Giles held up his glass to her in acknowledgement of her cooking skills.

“This is incredibly good,” Wesley told the girl as he looked up from his plate. “I can’t remember the last time I had a meal like this. You are full of hidden talents, Buffy.”

Spike nodded. “Yeah, thanks a lot, love.”

Buffy beamed at them. “You’re welcome. And as a special treat I’ll even let you all do the washing-up.”

Connor checked his watch and made a very poor showing of regret. “Darn, I’d love to stay and help but I promised I’d be home by midnight.”

“Why?” Buffy demanded. “Will you turn into a pumpkin?”

“You really are a chip off the old block, aren’t you?” Spike observed.

Angel was very conscious of the faces that weren’t here, the places where Fred and Cordelia should have been. He knew Gunn and Wesley were thinking of them, too, a glance exchanged as they passed food to one another around Illyria, a moment of shared acknowledgement of shared loss. Not for the first time, Angel wondered if Cordelia was looking down on them from that higher plane of hers. Maybe the first time she’d been lured up there it had been a trick, but she’d earned the right to sit amongst the Powers and he liked to think that was where she was now; a benevolent spirit watching over them.

He looked around the table again, and thought how incredible it was that they were all here like this, like living archaeological remnants of the different strata of his life: Spike, only sane and present remnant of his vampire family; Buffy, Giles, Willow, and Xander, all miraculously alive and in more or less one piece, despite seven years on a Hellmouth, And the survivors of his third family. He had lost Doyle, Cordelia, and Fred, but had somehow managed to hang onto Wesley, Gunn, and Lorne. And even Illyria was starting to grow on him. She was certainly useful in a fight and for all her many faults she was fond of Wesley.

Angel poured himself a glass of wine and held it up. “To family,” he said.

There was a pause before everyone else followed suit, and then the wine was glowing red as life itself as the crystal shone in the candlelight and every glass was raised. And just as in his fantasy, Wesley returned his smile and said quietly: “To family.”

The End