angel
He takes to watching them whenever he can get away with it, which isn't often, 'cause man, that demon had *not* been kidding when it called Wesley paranoid, and Gunn spends lots of time away from the hotel when they aren't actively fighting something, and Wesley hides in the office a lot.
And Cordy keeps making him make the coffee.
Two hundred years of unlife, and he's become a barista.
He's making the coffee when he hears some grunting and a crash, and Gunn saying, really loudly, "Uncle!"
When he goes out to the lobby, he sees Wesley and Gunn in a tangle on the floor while Cordelia sits on the counter and files her nails.
"Guys?"
"Angel!" says Wesley cheerfully and scrambles to his feet, absently holding out a hand to help Gunn up. "We were just--"
"Acting like a pair of five year olds," Cordy interrupts.
Gunn rolls his eyes. "We was sparring."
"Tch-yeah." Cordy waves her nail-file. "Like five year olds."
Gunn flips her off and she clutches her hands to her chest, waving Angel off when he starts toward her. "I'm so hurt," she says happily.
"Bite me, princess."
She smiles sweetly at him. "Kiss my ass, rebel scum."
"Children, behave," Wesley says, and ducks when Cordelia throws the nailfile at his head.
And it's not like they *mean* to cut Angel out of it, but he can't think of any way to get *in*. He's always just a second too late, a step behind, out of the loop, and he knows that he can't catch up. There's no way, and looking at Cordy, he knows that what he bought back wasn't what they had before. Not even close, and where it used to be him and Gunn and him and Wesley, now it was Gunn and Wesley, back to back.
He asks Cordy, and she says it's 'cause Angel didn't buy Wesley a cool new sword or take Gunn out for Mexican, he didn't make the *effort*, see, and it was like forgetting an anniversary only worse, 'cause Wesley had almost died (Angel flinched when she said that, and she put a hand on his knee and said he did, but it was only for a minute, and the doctors got him back) and Gunn had spent so much time at the hospital that the nurses gave Wesley extra food so Gunn could eat with.
She points an elegantly manicured finger at him and tells him not to ever let on that he knows that, because Wesley doesn't know that Angel was there.
"You didn't tell him?"
"No," she says and he blinks at her. Cordy sighs and pats his knee again. "I love you, Angel, but you've got the people skills of a dead skunk. Especially when you're insane."
"I do not. I'm...good with people."
She doesn't say anything, but she looks at him really loudly.
"Okay, I'm not." Angel fidgets, picks up the mug of blood she brought him earlier and puts it down again. "They're just good friends, right?"
"Of course," Cordy says soothingly. "They're really good friends."
Angel nods. "Really good friends." Then: "Is that code?"
"Code?" she asks. Angel is suddenly reminded of why Cordy rarely gets acting jobs playing the innocent waif.
"Yeah, for like...you know. *Code*."
"Morse code?"
"No. For--" he waves his hands.
She stares at him. "For being dancers in Vegas?"
"For sleeping together, Cordy!"
"*Code*?" Cordelia glares at him. "What, is it such a problem if they are? Willow's gay, you know."
"It's not a--Willow's gay?"
"Yup. And no, when I say they're really good friends, I mean they're really good friends. Do you really think I'd be afraid of saying they like to get it on in the storage room sometimes when you're out fighting demons in the sewers? 'Cause I'm not."
"They have sex in the storage room?" asks Angel faintly.
"Only the once," says Cordy. "And they promised never to do it again where I could see, because I told them I'd go blind. Then I told them they'd go blind."
"They had sex in the storage room?"
"Oh, like it's such a shock?"
"It is!" Angel protests. "They--why are they having sex? None of us had sex before."
Cordy rolls her eyes. "Because Wesley's a big giant slut, and Gunn's not any better, and 'cause they really like orgasms. You know. Orgasms yay." She does something cheerleady with her arm.
"It's unprofessional," says Angel, and the thing is, he *knows* that's lame.
"Yeah, 'cause you and Buffy never had sex."
"Just once!"
Cordelia looks at him.
"Twice."
Cordelia keeps looking at him.
"Okay, three times, but that was *it*, just that one night and then I didn't, you know, have sex for a really long time after. With my soul."
"A really long time? Then who'd you have sex with?" she demands. "It was Darla, wasn't it? You had sex with Darla!"
Angel winces. "Uh...no?"
"You big *liar*! Oh my *God* and you have the nerve to be all 'Wesley and Gunn are having sex! oh no! sex is bad!'"
"Cordy--"
"No! No Cordy-ing me! Now you have Darla-germs and I have a mental image that's gonna haunt me forever." Cordy looks up at nothing. "No offense, Dennis. And, can I add, *ew*."
Angel buries his face in his hands.
When he walks into the office the next morning, he gets a multitude of glares and a lecture from Wesley *and* an employee handbook which says that "fraternizing with the enemy will result in prompt termination and a possible staking". Angel tries to laugh it off, but no one else even cracks a smile.
Gunn pulls him aside later, when Wesley's on the phone with a client and Cordy is making a sandwich and blood run, and says, "You hurt either of them, and you're dead."
He walks away then, and leaves Angel looking after him, alone in the middle of the lobby.
And Angel can't *not* watch them, not since Cordy's pronouncement, and what he sees isn't anything obvious. Or not obvious. They don't spend so much time together, exchanging deep meaningful glances or doing anything but fighting and sometimes fighting really loudly and other times fighting loudly with weapons.
Once, after everything goes back to normal, Angel walks in on them, sitting quietly together.
He stays by the stairs, just looking at Wesley reading one of the Pylean books, and Gunn next to him, sharpening some stakes. There's a chair pulled up next to them, piled high with weapons, and the table in front of Gunn has all the care things spread out and waiting for him to use.
It's absurdly domestic, in that strange way that is their lives.
Wesley leans over, puts a hand on Gunn's forearm and points out a passage in the book, and Gunn scoots his chair closer to Wesley's. Pushes his way into Wesley's personal space bubble like it's his own.
And Wesley *lets* him. Wesley. Who always stood around like he was waiting for an inspection and looked at Angel reproachfully whenever there was casual touching. Wesley smiles at Gunn now, and points out another passage, then gestures at his notes and the whole time, Gunn's nodding like it makes sense which Angel knows it doesn't 'cause Wesley's mind in full research mode makes leaps that almost no one could follow.
"Hey, guys," he says and they look up at him but don't move apart.
Wesley is still smiling when he motions Angel over. "I believe there's a passage in here that relates to the Scroll of Aberjian."
"About me?" asks Angel, and walks over to stand behind Wesley's shoulder, looking down at...gibberish.
"Mmm. About Cordelia, I think." Wesley taps one of the paragraphs. "It mentions the Cursed One, which could be either of you, really, and I believe this word," he grabs one of the bright pink note flags that Cordelia bought him and sticks it on the page, "is a different form of something that appears several times in the Scroll."
"That's...good."
Wesley blinks up at him. "I haven't finished translating the Scroll, of course, or the holy books, but I dare say I'm making quite a bit of progress."
"He thinks that we're all in there, somewhere." Gunn makes a face at Wesley. "I'm not so sure I believe in all this stuff."
Wesley glances at him. "What, the prophecies?"
Angel frowns at Gunn. "I do."
"I don't think anyone can know the future," says Gunn stubbornly.
"Now, really, there have been documented cases of visionaries and seers throughout history." Wesley pokes Gunn in the arm. "What about Cordelia?"
"She sees now someplace else."
And it's *weird* for Angel to hear that, to have it all dismissed so casually. "Why don't you believe in prophecies?"
"Free will," says Gunn promptly and Angel thinks that maybe this is something that's bothered him for a while. "The future can't be real until it happens."
"There was actually a bit of a row in the Council over that."
"Yeah?" Angel snorts. "What did they come up with?"
"Prophecies one, naysayers zero, kicked out of the Council and shot."
"You worked for some mightily fucked up people, Wes," says Gunn. "They *shot* them?"
Wesley waves a hand vaguely. "It was quite some time ago. The Council has advanced considerably since."
"Now they just fire people," says Angel, and shuts his mouth way, *way* too late.
Wesley ducks his head over the book and shrugs. "As you say."
*
generation x
Angelo had already gone to several classes at the Academy before he realized just how much had changed.
Not just the surroundings, the people, the complete lack of decent food, but...
Or maybe it was all of those things, but *mierda*, it was him, too. In the bathroom, stretching and pulling skin out of the way to shave. In the mirror, this *monstruo* that was supposed to be himself, in a house full of the same.
Suddenly, it seemed as though he'd made his choices too quickly. Suddenly, it was too late to do anything about it.
He was dead and buried--to his madre and to his colors and, he thought when his head hurt and his skin ached, to God--but still kicking, like he was too stupid to know when to quit.
And what was it that he thought he was going to do when it was all over and he graduated? Not for him were spandex and The Cause, capital letters because everyone else thought it was muy importante. Not to him and not for him because his power was, he had to be honest, pretty crap. Skin and more skin which wasn't armored or ability-sucking or anything but acres of gray and a huge pain in his ass.
*
the mummy returns
It would be terrible to stop, simply because he was tired.
The creature was not dead, not for the first time and not for the third, as it had yet to die at all. Gone, perhaps. Asleep. Buried somewhere under what used to be a green and growing place full of the dead.
Imhotep had been keeper of the dead, bringer of the dead, vital and not and caught between worlds. Sometimes, Ardeth laughed to himself at the the irony of it all. Death in a garden, life on the sand, and the only thing binding them together was love.
Ah. Damn all poets.
*
angel 2
It feels silly, but Wesley has always been afraid of the dark.
He sleeps with a light on, always has, and it wasn't until very recently that he realized how having a little light just made the shadows darker and deeper, made them cling to the corners and linger. But he's learned that now and he turns the lights off before he goes to bed. He lies awake, stares at the ceiling, at the shadows that crawl along it, thrown into his room by the cars passing outside and the streetlamp just outside his window.
It's just a little twinge in his gut when the sun goes down, and the hairs on the back of his neck rising when it's dark inside.
As a child, he'd dreamed that the dark under the stairs was eating him up.
*
angel 3
Sex and death, love and the end of the world. When Wesley looked back, poised on the edge of one and wishing he were at the other, he realized how absurdly close the two were.
Which is to say that the world was indeed a cruel, cold place, but Wesley liked it anyway, and refused to sit idly by while it was sucked into a hell dimension or left to the mercies of a sorcerous plague.
They'd, they, the side of light, *he'd* lost a few people when the plague came, though not so many as the group from Sunnydale and selfishly, Wesley is glad that he had no real talent for magic in any of its forms. He'd gotten sick though, enough that he'd woken in the hospital more than a few times with Gunn sitting watch in the chair beside his bed.
Gunn's tired eyes had made Wesley want to promise never to get hurt again, but all he could manage was ("Lame," says the Cordelia in his head, "incredibly lame.") a weak, "We've got to stop meeting like this."
And Gunn just nodded, making that face that said Wesley was weirder than anything that lived in a sewer. "This makes what? The sixth time you near-deathed?"
"Only the fourth," answered Wesley seriously. "I've been told that I get a gold watch when I hit five."
"I'm crossing my fingers."
Quiet then, quiet, because they both knew she'd've been the one to say that, and they missed Cordelia. Lost not to Wolfram and Hart, but to the Powers, and it hadn't been long after that Wesley found a way to talk to them directly.
Their resignation had consisted of the words "Fuck off" and a candy-filled black mug with "I feel much better now that I've lost all hope" written across it in gold lettering.
But they hadn't, really.
Even when the rumors started, spurred on by Wolfram and Hart who pointed out that the plague was affecting a certain group of people.
Wesley watched the news conference on the television in his hospital room. Lilah Morgan, looking as composed and lovely as a doll, stood in front of a bank of microphones. Uncharitably, Wesley thought that the flash of the cameras made her look sallow, but he had to admit that she gave good interview.
Ah. Cordelia.
Lilah (familiarity bred contempt, and Wesley had enough of both to feel perfectly justified) stood in front of the reporters and the cameras, her face a perfect mask of troubled sincerity as she laid out the source and the astonishing coincidences that tied the victims together.
It felt more than odd to be outed after so many years; not just the existence of magic, but of demons and vampires and monsters. Los Angeles was ready to believe -- it took the knowledge into its heart and into its hands, until there were only a few remnants of magic within the city limits.
When the smoke cleared, there was a lull while the city congratulated itself on its tough love and the protection of its innocent citizens.
And the plague spread through the city like wildfire.
--
"Men and women may merely be players, but improvisation is a time-honored tradition."
(And after all, hadn't Angel proved that time and again? Lost the once to Buffy and sex, lost the second to Darla and sex, and lost the third to the promise of humanity. He'd left them *again*, returned to Sunnydale because that's "where they need me. You understand. Someone's got to fight the war."
Perhaps those weren't his exact words, but they were close enough to the meaning.
Chin up, Wes, he'd told himself after Angel left. It's not like you've been fired again. No, no, you're just not enough for Angel.
Gunn helped him pack up the office. They stole Cordelia's computer back and several of the rarer tomes in Angel's collection. They'd also taken three of Angel's black leather coats and several weapons.
Wesley raised an eyebrow when Gunn emptied the storage locker of everything large and wickedly sharp.
Gunn just shrugged. "It's an L.A. thing."
"Stealing office supplies?"
"Looting.")
Which is how they ended up on the road out of Los Angeles, catching the 10 off the 405 and heading east into Arizona. Gunn had never been anywhere landlocked, and Wesley hadn't spent a good deal of time in the southwest after he'd been fired by the Council.
"Nothing really bad ever comes out of Arizona," said Gunn. "It's all on the coasts and big cities."
"Ah, so this is a vacation."
"Yeah. You're convalescing."
Wesley grinned and pulled off his glasses, searching in his pack for the clip-on sunglass lenses. "Taking the waters."
"Building your strength."
Wesley leered at Gunn, who hit him soundly on the thigh. He waited a moment before saying, slowly and clearly, "Ow."
"Ass pansy."
"Well," said Wesley in his primmest voice, "you'd know."
And Gunn, to Wesley's enduring and happy surprise, let him have the last word.
*
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