a.connor  a.doyle  a.lindsey  a.oz  a.spike  a.wesley  a.xander  a.other  three.somes  het.fic  character.study           
Title: Amid the Weeping, Porn
Author: Wiseacress
Pairing: Angel/Wes
Rating: Hard R
Setting: Early seasons AtS

 

Midday, no sleep in sight, the whole place empty and silent except for the occasional flutter-and-fall of a page behind the office door pulled almost to. Occasional mutterings: God, no, that's the subjunctive... and But...what's the root, then? Frustrated and unconscious and almost inaudible, and it itches to hear it.

They keep the curtains pulled all the time, so he can walk around without catching on fire. Still, there's a bar of light on the floor outside the office door and he has to lean around it to stand close enough to hear the heartbeat. Which speeds up when he puts the tips of his fingers on the wood and pushes.

Wes is sitting at his desk, looking up, his mouth slightly open as if he'd been in the middle of one of those Oh Gods when the door creaked. He looks startled and tired and messy. The books are piled up around him like sandbags. Everyone else has gone home, but he's still here, wrestling Varnish to the mat. Cordelia thought it was funny, a language named after paint. She's not the one who has to learn it by dusk.

"Angel." Wes shifts a little, glances at the sunlight on the floor at Angel's feet, and then back up. "Am I--do you need something?" Just a touch of pissiness to his tone, probably thanks to the eyestrain and the fatigue and the fact that if Angel were an actually useful employer or vampire, Varnish would be one of the languages he knows. Apart from the words to order beer and human sweetmeats, that is.

Wes is still looking at him, so he blinks and shakes himself mentally and says, "No." And then just stands there. They look at each other. The silence draws out. Wesley raises an eyebrow.

"Then--?"

"Right." Angel starts to pull the door closed, then pauses. "I couldn't sleep. Is there anything I can do?"

"Do?" Wesley's looking at him oddly now, as if he'd offered a foot rub and a shared Heineken. It occurs to him that maybe they don't have the kind of relationship where he can come into Wes's office and offer to help out. But Wes works for him. He's Wes's boss. He can do that if he wants to. Can't he?

"Thank you," Wesley says, the piss a little stronger still because now it's apparent that he's been interrupted for no good reason. "No. I just need to understand the structures, and then we'll have something to work with."

"Right." He taps the doorknob, staring at nothing. "Right. Okay. Well, keep me posted."

Wesley nods, and Angel pulls the door almost but not quite closed, and steps back carefully around the bar of sunshine. He takes a few steps back toward the kitchen, thinking vaguely that he should drink something, maybe that will take the edge off wakefulness, then stops. Listens.

After a minute, he hears the flutter-and-fall of another page, and it almost pushes him into the kitchen. But not quite. Instead, he turns carefully on his heel and goes back to the office door.

He's annoying Wes; he can hear that. He can hear the page held in midair, the rapid ticking of a pencil on calfskin, before Wes catches himself. He can hear Wes clear his throat carefully and say, through the almost-closed door, "Yes?" His tone is polite and pointed; it adds silently, ...you great cumbersome git?

He rubs a finger over his lips and reminds himself that it's his door, his doorframe, his desk that Wesley's sitting at. With the same finger, he pushes the door open halfway. Wesley's got his head lowered but his eyes raised, staring at him while the Yes? hangs like a dust mote in midair. He's wearing a blue button-down, not buttoned down because last night's encounter group session with the Varnishes rendered it unbuttonable. The collar's hanging by a prayer over his left shoulder. Angel finds himself staring at it; there's something strange and...strange about seeing Wesley wearing something so hacked up.

"Angel," Wesley says, raising his head and regarding him through the little white squares of light on his glasses. "Are you all right?"

"Fine." He taps the doorjamb, glances around the room, then says, "You sure there's nothing I can do?"

Wesley stares at him, and he adds, "Because I'm going crazy, here. You know. It's just--" He rolls his head, thumbs his neck inside his collar where he's already healing over a little parting gift from Varnish number three. Even a minor nick is itchy in hot weather like this. "I'm just too keyed up to sleep, and I figured, you know, I might remember a few words if I looked at the books--"

Wesley raises his eyebrows. "I can't imagine--"

"Well, I can give it a shot at least." Without thinking any more about it, he pushes the door open the rest of the way and hops the sunbeam. The office smells like paper and dust, sweat and skin, frustrated breath and a body beating frail and durable as parchment. Wes smells like salt and soap. His heart sounds like rain on a window: fast, fascinating. He's frowning.

"You really ought to sleep," he's saying, as Angel shifts a pile of papers off the other chair and drags it over. "Don't put those--look, you'll have to fight more of them tonight, you should get some rest."

"Varnish," Angel says, settling in the chair and craning his neck to get a look at one of Wes's books. "They're pikers. So what do I do?"

Wesley takes a second to answer, and when Angel looks up from the weird spidery writing he catches a strange look on Wes's face. Something like pleasure, or hope, or just dumbfoundment. Then it's gone, and he frowns. Put-upon. But his heart's taking leaps down a big grassy slope, and that's more than strange. It's mesmerizing, amazing. Angel rubs his neck again while he listens.

"Well--" Wes looks away, gives the mess on his desk a where to start? survey, then reaches out and picks up the thickest volume. "You can look in this for any mention of Varnish etymology." He tips it over the end of the desk onto Angel's knees, and Angel almost drops it. Wesley gives him a hard look. "It's a sole copy."

"Right. No highlighting." He starts paging through, diligent, and after watching him for a moment, Wesley goes back to his own book. A page flutters and falls. It's hard to hear under the galloping of Wes's heart, the sweet muscular pulse and the sound of all his little movements, the riverbed smell of his sweat, that torn and hanging collar. His fingers are long and brown, fingernails clean and short except for the fourth right, which is broken black and smells of blood. He keeps it off the books consistently, unconsciously.

There's a warmth growing in Angel's spine, his belly, and now his thighs feel warm, his hands won't stay still. He stares at the book on his lap and tries to make some sense of what he's seeing. More weird spidery writing. Great. Wesley smells of white soap and weariness. His heart is slower now. Angel's neck itches. He flips a page, stares blindly, flips, stares, flips, until finally he realizes Wesley's stopped reading and is sitting staring at him again.

"Angel," he says, and this time he puts down his pencil and takes his glasses off. That makes it serious. "Perhaps you'd like to tell me what you really want?"

He sits there with his mouth open, not saying anything, like the great cumbersome git he is. He wants to help out. He couldn't sleep. He's antsy. But...when's the last time he volunteered for book duty? He's still trying to remember when Wesley says, "Is there something bothering you?"

"Yes." There is. His neck itches and he can't sleep and the sound of a human heart isn't usually like liquor. The smell of warm skin, a mouth, a tired body under an onionskin of cotton; it usually passes him by. So yes, there's something wrong. But--

"No." He can't say what it is. And there's nothing wrong, really. He's just antsy. Hungry. Or something.

Wes is looking at him strangely, and he has a microsecond's vivid glimpse of what comes next: his own body landing on Wesley's like a lion, like fate, heavy and implacable. No time for argument. Just his hands popping Wes's shirt apart, his legs splaying Wes's knees, and the line of Wes's throat as he fights will be hard, like carpentry. His mouth will taste like fear and exhaustion. Kissing them then, as they're learning there's no chance, you can hear the ocean. Salt and chaos. And the taste is like wine.

"Angel--"

He blinks and turns his head away, back to the sunbeam on the threshold. His hands are shaking as he closes the book. "I have to go."

He gets halfway across the room before Wesley catches his arm. "Angel, what are you--"

"Let go." He hammers the last word hard, and Wes's hand flinches, then tightens again. He could still pull free. Skip the sunbeam, savage a bag from the fridge, then go downstairs to the cellar where he belongs and beat the shit out of a nylon bag. He could do that, he should do that. But he doesn't.

He lets Wes pull him back around, and finds that they're standing too close, so close that he can see every white thread in the torn shirt collar. Every hair on Wes's arm, every freckle. He can hear Wesley's breath, fast as a bird's. His eyes are hard and wary.

"Angel," he says. "It is Angel, isn't it?"

Angel blinks. He knows exactly how it will feel to lunge, his body tipped just so, so that his shoulder strikes Wes in the middle of his sternum and jars his heart, snaps the fragile bone above the diaphragm. He knows how a man of Wesley's height and build feels. Warm and solid and sometimes hard when the teeth go in. He's drunk Wesley's type before.

But he doesn't want that. That isn't it, not really.

"It's me, Wesley," he says, and wants that to be it, end of story. Everything's fine. But it's not. He wants--

"Are you--" Wesley starts to say, and that's as far as he gets before Angel leans forward and tastes him. Gently, his tongue just brushing Wesley's lips, because he needs the salt and the warmth but not the chaos. Not now. Just the taste. Because he knows how it will be.

And that's exactly how it is.

It's warm and soft and wet for just a second, the second of surprise, and then Wesley realizes what's going on and tries to pull away, but Angel's fist is in his shirt, and he's not going anywhere unless he's going without it. He tries anyway, and there's a sharp ripping sound, and Angel gathers a second handful of cotton and starts backing him up to the bookshelves.

Then something cracks him hard on the side of the head and he slews sideways, staggering, still clinging to Wes's shirt with one hand. Tiny planetoids whistle through his eyes. He sees acres of blood. When he looks up, Wes is holding a hardbound volume in one hand, looking somehow both determined and unsure.

"Angel," he says. There's a pause, while Angel straightens up and rubs his temple. "I'm-- Are you all right?"

He nods, realizes his free hand is still cinched in Wes's shirt, and drops it. He could feel the heat of Wes's skin through it, feel the tiny tremor of his heart. Such a tiny movement it makes, for so much deafening noise.

"I'm sorry," he says, because although his head is circling and he can't think straight, it seems to be what Wes is waiting for. "I just--"

Wes doesn't finish the sentence for him, but after a moment he puts the book back down on the edge of the desk. There's silence.

"I just want to kiss you," Angel says, and Wes's heart does just what he knew it would. Because he knows what hope smells like, too.

"You can't--" Wesley starts, and Angel leans into him. Close enough that their cheeks almost brush, and he can feel the heat from Wes's face. Close enough that his hip touches Wesley's, and then closer still, hard with the proof that he really, really does. Wesley jerks back. Swallows. Then takes a quivering breath and pushes his own hips very slightly forward.

Sometimes that's all the invitation you get. Or need.

Angel brings both hands up and catches Wesley's head, his jaw and his neck, holds him still and kisses him like drowning. Like breathing. He tastes of human warmth, human spit, tender harmless mouth and eager tongue and abandon. He's rough with stubble but he makes a soft wanting sound in his throat and Angel can't help it, he has to duck his head under the shelf of Wes's chin, chuck it up, and inhale him. His nose against the hard box of Wes's larynx, clicking in sudden fear. The smell of his skin, the trace of sweat and soap and the blood coursing beneath it.

Wes's hand touches his shoulder hesitantly. "Angel--?"

Angel lifts his head. He has one hand under Wes's jaw, the other cupping the back of his head. Wes's eyes are wide and frightened and black with lust. His heart is running sweet and fast, like a double-stroke motor.

"Wesley," Angel says firmly. It's a sentence in itself, and Wesley's face breaks in a way he's never seen before, like a whole new man emerging. A younger, happier man. A slightly stunned man. It feels good to see.

Then they're kissing again, Wes's hands on Angel's shoulders and over his chest, touching at first as if he can't quite believe he's doing it. Then firmer, harder, more insistent. Heeling down his sides, over his ribs, back up and along his arms as if memorizing the shape. Greedy, hoarding touch. He kisses hard, bites Angel's tongue, then opens his own mouth and lets himself be licked. His palate is ticklish. Angel almost loses his tongue finding that out.

Wesley laughs and wipes his mouth, glances at Angel over the back of his hand, and gently rubs his thumb over Angel's lower lip as well. His fingers smell like blood: the broken nail. Angel closes his eyes and breathes it in. Blood and a hurrying heart, and again he sees his own body heavy overtop of Wes's. Pinning him down, parting him. Sinews like ropes, and a sweet frantic agony, and begging. He always loved the begging.

He shakes his head and opens his eyes, and finds Wes smiling a happy, disbelieving, wet-lipped smile. Smiling like a man who's just won the lottery, without even having bought a ticket. Wes, good true stalwart friend. He's never seen him look like that.

He smiles back, and for a moment there's bliss and gentle kissing, and then they start to stumble back toward the desk.

Wes hits it first, and grunts as it gets him in the back of the thighs. He's still smiling, though. His hands are still pulling at Angel's shirt, shaking a little, not quite daring to unbutton or untuck. Just pulling. He smells like-- Angel closes his eyes and touches his nose to the notch of Wes's jaw, just below his ear. He smells like the moment of grappling-down, like blood and sex and willingness. Like another man once, smaller and more annoying and gone. That's a dark lane, one he doesn't want to go down.

He kisses the round bone below Wes's ear and opens his eyes to find Wes staring at him with a look of complete startlement. Startlement and delight, and the delight touches off another candle in his chest, another little point of warmth. Because Wes is good, and it's good to see him happy. Good to see the blue circles wiped from under his eyes, good to see him shocked and flushed and trembling slightly because he's trying not to push his hips against Angel's leg.

Angel moves his leg, and Wesley's eyelids sink. His lips part and he's so warm, so easy to break into. Smell of punctured fruit, smell of sweetwater. His cock is curved and rigid, licking a dark spot just left of his fly. Angel drops one hand and pushes it between them, between Wes's legs, to cup him. That makes Wes gasp as if he's been punched, and grab the edge of the desk with one hand. The other hand bites into Angel's shoulder.

"Don't--" He's imploring the floor, ragged and throaty, breath like pages tearing. Angel moves his fingers gently, and Wes makes a thin high sound and grinds his fingers into Angel's shoulder. When he looks up his eyes are desperate and bright, dispossessed. "Don't, I don't want to--"

Angel moves his hand away. The feel of Wesley stays in his fingers, hot and tight and aching. His whole right side aches, from his fingers to his ear. His neck feels scalded. He rubs it briefly on his own shoulder, shakes his head, and leans forward to inhale Wesley again.

They're standing hip to hip, cock to cock, Wesley gasping into Angel's mouth and leaning back now as Angel presses into him. The desk keeps him upright. His fingers find the back of Angel's neck, and there's a dim bloom, like an absinthe aftertaste, and for a moment he's lost in gaslight and wet red linens. He jerks his cock against Wes's thigh, scrabbles roughly at his fly and suddenly Wes is slick and hot in his palm. Hard and jerking. Not what he expected--he was lost, for a moment. But good enough. Narcotic perfume from between Wes's legs. He wants to drop to his knees and inhale, taste, swallow. His neck is on fire.

He realizes that Wes is pushing at him, pushing his hands away, or trying to, and saying something ridiculous that sounds like Don't--. It's far away and hard to fathom. But then it sinks in, and he looks up, blinking. Wes's shirt is pushed up over his belly--did he do that?--and he's leaning back across the desk, braced on his palms. His cock bobs swollen and wet between them, a peony. He's staring at Angel, wide-eyed, not smiling anymore, teetering. On the edge of something Angel might someday have the time to understand, when he isn't hard as iron and furnace-hot. When he has time to think about something that isn't the only thing he can think about right now.

But it's Wesley he's looking at, good true stalwart Wesley, and he doesn't live by gaslight anymore, or even want to. Much. He wants to drop on Wesley like a lion. Knock the crap off the desk and haul him up onto it by his neck, kick his legs apart and god, that moment of searching, pinning him with one hand and testing with the other. That's almost the best. Except then there's fucking him, holding him down and knowing it's good, good for both of them, face to face and snarling, struggling, seeing that fury and delight in his eyes.

He has to get hold of himself. He doesn't live that way anymore.

Except he sort of does, because the next thing he knows, his hands are on Wesley's hips, gentle but firm, coaxing him up onto the desk. It's Wes, and he won't hurt Wes. Won't do anything Wes doesn't want him to. He wants to kiss Wes gently and see him smile again, because Wes is good and never happy and et cetera. He wants to pin his neck against the desk and fuck him, use him, feel him cord with necessary fear and pain, and come inside him.

"Angel," Wesley says softly, resisting his hands. "It isn't that I don't want--"

"Shut up," Angel says, but he says it just as softly, and with a smile. "Get up there. I want to be inside you."

Wes's eyes widen and his heart skitters, slides, and runs into a wall. Lust and fear are thickening the air around him, haloing him. Angel runs his thumbs up inside Wes's thighs, along the hard inside tendon, quivering like a charged cable.

"Get up," he murmurs, and Wes jerks once, all over, tension lapping over.

"We can't--"

"We can."

"Angel, I don't think--"

"That's fine."

"Not on the books." That's in a different tone, a definitive tone, and now he's resisting Angel's hands with more certainty. Good true stalwart Wesley. Angel sighs.

"The floor, then." He shifts his grip and pulls, and Wesley staggers, collar flapping. They cling to each other for a second, and Angel finds himself looking into bright blue eyes. Time slows. He smells blood and pepper and bootblack.

Then Wesley kisses him, and the taste is sweet and human. There's the thunder of a human heart, a human head, a thousand moist frailties all pressing themselves to him, begging for rupture. He groans.

"You taste--" Wesley whispers, then stops and lays their foreheads together. They stand like that for a minute. "You taste just as I thought you would."

There's gratitude in his tone, and for a moment it lessens the burn in Angel's neck, the burn in his cheek and hand, the painful hardness of his cock. This is Wesley. Wesley, who takes out teabags with a spoon, who keeps a nailbrush in his top desk drawer and a box of demon teeth in the bottom. Who sits up alone all day learning Varnish. Who hates television. Who loves him, at least a little.

It's Wesley, and his T-shirt is still rucked up under the Oxford, and his belly is warm and flat and shuddering, and his cock is warmer still. Angel lifts his head and kisses Wesley's cheek, his jaw, his chin. He still wants to fuck him. More than wants to--needs to. They can talk about taste later. Right now his head is pounding and his neck is ablaze, and he needs to be in, inside.

He hooks his ankle around Wes's heel, plants the heel of his hand on Wes's shoulder, and starts to drop him slowly, so he knows what's happening. Wes reaches for the desk to keep his balance, and Angel catches his hand.

"Just let me," he says, and Wesley does, and they drop together, ungainly and painless with Wes on the bottom. They're body to body on the wood, and finally Angel feels his own weight press Wesley down, silent assertion of rights. It feels absolutely correct. Wes's cock jumps and his hands come up and fix on Angel's shoulders, and for a moment it's all so familiar, it's dizzying, and he has to close his eyes again. It's Wes. A pelvis grinds into his own, hipbones sparking, and he thinks, Wes. Catches a glimpse of a body so pale it might be translucent, blue veins, an eyebrow broken like a bone-- Wes.

He opens his eyes, plants his hands on either side of Wes's shoulders, and rears back to push his cock harder into Wes's groin. Wes winces.

"Sorry." But he isn't really sorry, he's too hard to be sorry, and when he reaches down to readjust he brushes Wes's cock with his fingers, then takes firm hold when Wes bucks up, eyes closed, back arched. His thumb skates over the head, slick and precise. He wants Wes like this, wants him to feel good like this. His face is rapt as a saint's, his eyelids fluttering, his hands making vague grasping gestures against the floor. Angel drops his head and whispers in his ear.

"Let me in you."

It's the wrong thing to say, he realizes at once: Wes's eyes open and he tenses, starts to pull away. Angel has a moment of absolute certainty that he's going to grab Wes's shoulders, crack his head against the floor, and rip his trousers down. Give him splinters, yanking him down onto his cock. Then work and work--

His neck feels branded, glowing with heat. He takes his hands carefully away from Wesley and sits up, back on his heels. He's shaking.

Wes lies between his legs, staring up at him with embarrassment and desire.

"I'm sorry," he says faintly. "I do want you, but I'd like... I need time."

Angel nods numbly. "Right. That's--of course. That's fine."

"It just seems--" Wesley pauses, props himself on his elbows, and looks around the office. "Sudden."

"It's okay, Wes." He rubs his neck, closes his eyes, tries not to breathe in the sex and heat and blood. What the hell is he going to do? He's going to explode.

He hears Wesley sit up, and feels hands on his hips, holding him steady.

"I do want you," Wesley repeats, and kisses his belly through his shirt. He drops a hand automatically onto Wes's head, then stiffens when Wes's mouth opens and his teeth gnaw gently at the muscles of his stomach. When he looks down, Wes is looking up, smiling. The torn collar flat on his shoulder, just barely holding on. With one hand, Wes starts to inch Angel's shirt out of his trousers. The rub against his skin is maddening. He strokes his thumb over Wesley's eyebrow and thinks about cool lips, a sidelong grin, the mock threat of teeth. Once, not mock at all. There'd been hell to pay.

He knows how it will feel: hot, grasping, messy, heaven. He knows what it will make him do. His thighs are trembling, tight as boards. His belly is rigid. Wes's mouth, when he kissed it, had been soft, begging, the blood like velvet under the skin. He doesn't want to hurt Wesley.

Who has his shirt up now, and is kissing his belly, tonguing his navel, licking the hair flat and catching the skin between his teeth. It's too much. He can't do what he wants most, but there are other things that might be enough.

He puts a hand on Wes's shoulder and starts pressing him back. When Wes resists, he pushes harder.

"Lie down," he says, and when Wes starts to form the question, he frowns and pokes him in the shoulder. "Just lie down."

Wes lies down, his lips still wet, watching. Two hundred-odd years of receiving ought to lend him some finesse in the giving, but his neck is on fire and finesse can fuck itself. He drops down, wraps a hand around the base of Wes's cock, and licks a stripe across the tip. His head is clogged with salt and honey. When has he ever done this before? A hundred years ago, but he remembers the taste. Remembers the feel of thickness, wetness, the brutal sweetness of grinding into floorboards.

He doesn't remember the spasms coming so fast, or so warm, but it doesn't matter because his head is a haze, his whole body is crammed with embers, and before Wesley's even finished he's climbing up, opening his fly, fitting himself into the notch of Wesley's hip and working. Hard, fast, neutered and fruitless, one hand taking his own weight and the other on Wes's shoulder, not so much pinning as holding him. He's breathing in Wes's sweat and come and thunderous dazed pulse, he's awash in it, a hundred degrees and hard as stone but dissolving like sugar. He feels a push in the backs of his thighs and sees blue eyes. Coming is like being pulled out of himself. Abrupt and oh so welcome.

He lies for a minute propped on his straight arm, his head hanging, eyes closed. The hotel is silent. His neck aches.

Wesley shifts, and Angel opens his eyes and he's still in himself, everything is where he left it. Wes is looking up at him with weariness and amusement and desire.

"Are you all right?" Angel asks, thinking of Wes's leg, the bruising, what kind of memento that is. He starts to move away, and Wes puts a hand around the back of his neck to stop him. Again, he has to close his eyes. Darla used to say he was indefatigable. An excellent choice.

"Very much so," Wesley says, and he can hear the smile without seeing it. Wes's hand moves through his hair, down his neck. "I think I could--"

He pauses. Angel opens his eyes. Wes is looking at him oddly, his fingers still on Angel's neck.

"What?" It's the nick, of course, still itching and heated because Varnish aren't the cleanest of your basic nightbreed. But Wes's face is too serious for a nick.

"Let me see this." He puts a hand on Angel's chin, and Angel lets him turn his head. His neck is stiff enough to complain about it. He needs to sleep, heal properly. But he can't sleep. Even now, he couldn't sleep.

Wesley's fingers brush the cut, then fall away. "Where did you get that?" His voice is weirdly flat.

"Last night. When we were...Varnishing." The look on Wesley's face is of something falling into place. Something heavy and dark and cold. "Wes, it's minor. It'll be gone by tonight."

"Your neck is hot," Wesley says in the same flat voice, like a recording. Angel touches his neck.

"I don't get it," he says, propping himself up and noticing that he's still hard. He's made a mess of Wesley's trousers. Wesley doesn't seem to have noticed; he's slowly buttoning himself, staring at the ceiling as if reading something there. Angel's gut lurches. "Wes, what's going on?"

"Varnish," Wes says. He tucks his shirt in, then sits up and looks at the wet patch on his trousers. He touches it gently, with two fingers. The way he touches books sometimes. Then he gets to his feet, takes his glasses off the desk, and puts them on. He's Wes again. Good true stalwart Wes.

"I'll go and look up the antidote," he says, and walks out fast, before Angel can say another word.

It's a week before he can get Wesley alone. There's been no chance to say anything, no chance to do anything but keep quiet and out of his way, and chop anything that even resembles a Varnish into dogmeat. He's fine now. Room temperature, rational. He can sleep and if he doesn't want to listen to their hearts, he doesn't have to.

Demon Spanish fly, Cordy had said. Huh. A pause, while she considered the possibilities. Good thing you figured it out before you had a chance to dial any 976 numbers.

Wesley was levering a teabag out of his cup at the other end of the kitchen, and gave no sign of having heard.

A week before there's any chance to talk, which should give him plenty of time to think of something, but when he finally walks into the storage vault and finds Wesley shelving sole copies, all he can think of is, "I'm sorry."

Wesley half-turns and squints at him, as if he were a stranger. He's got a hardbound volume the size of a hubcap in his hand. After a minute he shrugs and turns back to the shelves. "Not at all. I blame myself."

That shuts him up for a second, while he tries to work it out. "Wesley, it wasn't your fault--"

"I'm a student of demonology. I ought to have known better. I did know better." He widens a gap and tips the book in. "I hope you can forgive me."

"Wesley."

He wants Wesley to turn around and face him, wants an honest exchange of something, even if it's only looks, but Wesley just takes another book from the truck and checks its spine. Angel pulls the door almost closed behind him and walks forward. Wesley seems to struggle, then turns and smiles thinly at him. The circles are back beneath his eyes. He looks weary and sad, older, the way people look after a death in the family.

"Wesley," Angel says firmly. It just hangs, a sentence unto itself, and after a second Wesley tilts his head, waiting. One hand tapping the cover of the book, the broken fingernail held away. Angel glances at it, thinks of his own head shoving Wes's head up, the intimacy of smelling him. Tasting his mouth.

"It wasn't just the venom," he says.

Wesley stares at him, his eyes distant and locked behind the white squares of light on his glasses. The corner of his mouth turns up very slightly. He nods.

"I'll be up shortly," he says. "And then we can discuss the Gribbins account."

 
-End


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