Wesley lies still
in the darkness, in the soft smell and the warmth of Virginia, who is sleeping
next to him. He can barely make out the curves of her face, but his body
holds the memory of the textures of her skin. He is still warm and satiated
from making love to her.
He thinks he might love
her, but he isn't certain. He loves the idea of her--bright and beautiful,
escorting him to places where people fawn over him and feed him marvelous
food. He loves the sound of her voice and the rich redness of her hair, the
way her breasts fit into his hands, the way she closes her eyes and smiles
a little and makes a soft, throaty hum just before she comes.
He might love her. He
wonders if it matters. Everything about her feels like something he'll be
forced to let go.
He watches her in the
dark, because he can't sleep. And finally he gets up, and goes to the kitchen
to make tea.
He knows what's really
bothering him, but he's fought it back so hard over the past several days
that he can barely give it conscious consideration anymore. But as he pours
his tea, he lets it surface quietly.
He's heard nothing from
Angel. He'd thought Angel's self-enforced isolation would last no more than
a few days, but it has stretched into weeks. Angel hasn't called, hasn't
dropped by. Wes has a hard time accepting this, so he just pushes it back.
But every once in a while,
the bite mark on his shoulder aches, and he's forced to remember.
He tried, one last time,
to connect. Went to the hotel and spoke to him, and he said nothing. Didn't
even turn to acknowledge him. It was like a knife to the heart. Whatever
has happened between them, he thought at least--at the very least--that Angel
was his friend.
He's beginning to wonder
if he was wrong.
As he pours milk into
his tea, he sees Virginia out of the corner of his eye, as she comes into
the kitchen. She's put on his robe, and she comes to lean against the cabinet,
her hands in its deep pockets.
"Wes?" she says. "Are
you okay?"
"Just having trouble
sleeping. Would you like some tea?"
"No, thank you." She
comes to stand behind him, slides a hand across his bare shoulders. "What's
wrong?"
He draws a deep breath.
It doesn't help, doesn't cleanse anything. "Nothing that hasn't been wrong."
Virginia kisses the top
of his head. Her scent falls softly over his face and he breathes it. It's
sweet, lovely, female.
"He was more than just
your boss, wasn't he?"
His fingers tense a little
on the teacup. She can't know. It doesn't matter, anyway.
"He was a friend."
"You looked up to him."
Wes nods. "I did." This,
perhaps, is the crux of it. He has made of Angel something he is not. Built
him up as the grand hero, when in fact he is only a man, with faults and
flaws, and a demon inside him.
"Maybe he's just working
through some things. Going through a bad time."
"Yes."
This is what he thought
at first, too. That Angel needed time alone to sort through his feelings
about the loss of Darla. But since then, he's come to a different conclusion.
Angel has pushed them all away because he is afraid for their safety.
He remembers that day
last summer, lying in Angel's arms in Cordelia's bed. Remembers his words--"I
would never do anything to hurt any of you. If I thought I was that close
to the line--I'd get you out of danger. Somehow." This is what Angel has
done, but Wes is certain it's the wrong way. Angel, left in isolation, can
only implode. He's afraid of what that might mean. He fears the possibility
of having to put a stake through Angel's heart.
Virginia straightens
behind him. "I think I'll go ahead and go home."
He turns to look at her;
she smiles gently at him. "You certainly don't have to," he says.
"No, if you're having
trouble sleeping, maybe it'll be better if I'm not here." There is no trace
of bitterness or rejection in her voice; she's only being logical, sensible.
He doesn't protest any
further as she gets dressed, prepares to leave, though he's suddenly almost
afraid of going back to his bed alone. But he kisses her goodbye and watches
out the window as she drives away.
He finishes his tea,
goes back to bed. The sheets are still warm from her, still smell of her.
It seems so tenuous.
She will leave him. He's
not sure how he knows this, but he is certain of it. She is too fine, too
glorious for him. And, although they've moved past it, the fact remains that
she fell for him when she thought he was Angel. The irony of this is not
lost on him.
Sleep remains elusive,
but finally he drifts into it. It draws him in, cradles him.
Angel is there in the
darkness. But somehow not Angel. The darkness not only surrounds him, but
seems to ooze from him. It is dangerous, arousing. He is, perhaps, Angelus.
He walks toward Wes with
a smile that is half pure menace, half pure sex. Wes melts with arousal but
he can't speak. His tongue seems glued to the roof of his mouth. It's going
to be one of those dreams, then, the ones where he's helpless
to scream, rooted to the ground--
No, he can move. He takes
a step toward Angel. It doesn't really matter, either way. He knows
he can end the dream whenever he wants. They taught him lucid dreaming at
the Watchers' Academy.
He looks down at his
hands, and he can consciously will them to turn, to clench into fists. He's
safe, then. He has control.
Looking back up, he finds
Angel right in front of him, looking down into his face. Angel is too tall
by a good three inches.
Wesley's subconscious,
he decides, isn't very subtle.
This Angel, this too-tall
dream-Angel with the wicked smirk slashing across his face, grabs him and
kisses him. Hard and deep, taking what he wants. Then he leans back, sprouts
fangs, and bites Wesley's throat.
This might be a good
time to change the dream, Wes thinks, but he doesn't. He doesn't want to.
This isn't the same as a real-life bite--it doesn't hurt as much, and it
arouses more quickly, more thoroughly. But it steadily becomes more real,
more tactile, more intense, until Wes can hear his heartbeat drumming in
his head, and he suddenly remembers an old wives' tale--that if you die in
your dreams you'll never wake up.
Still, it's glory, having
Angel's teeth buried in his throat, and he hangs there in the moment, until
his heartbeat begins to slow...
Enough. He doesn't want
to wake up, so instead, in the dream, he lifts his hands and grasps Angel's
head, draws it away from his throat. When Angel looks at him, his face is
human, and Wes kisses him. There is no blood left behind in Angel's mouth,
because this is a dream. Wes kisses him deep and hard, tasting his tongue,
the depths of his mouth.
Angel has changed to
his normal size now. No more larger-than-life. But Wesley's control seems
tenuous. He's not sure what Angel's going to do next.
That's okay, he decides.
A dream can't speak to you if you control it. He looks at his hands again,
for reassurance.
"Did you really think
you could trust me?" Angel's voice is thready and taut. Angelus' voice. An
echo in the background: You are...simply...inferior. "I'm a fucking
vampire, for God's sake. Didn't they teach you anything at the Watchers'
Academy?"
Wes stands his ground.
He can speak now, because he's decided he can. "Yes. I learned all about
vampires. And later I learned all about you. I read a first-hand account
of the massacre at Our Lady of Sorrows. You let one of them get away. It
was all quite horrific."
"And yet you're stupid
enough not only to work for me, but to crawl into bed with me." That thin,
derisive smile slants across his mouth. This is not Angel. "Didja think you
could make me happy?" He laughs, mocking, and suddenly he's on Wes,
turning him around, slamming his face against a wall that wasn't there before.
And Wes is naked, and Angel shoves hard up against him.
"You want it, don't you?"
Wes feels Angel's fingers pushing between his buttocks, invasive, demanding
entrance. "Beg me for it, boy."
"Please," Wes breathes,
and Angel shifts, spears his cock hard into him. Wes is crushed between the
wall and Angel's wide, hard body, impaled on Angel's cock. It doesn't hurt.
It makes him hot, makes him pulse.
Shouldn't it hurt? But
no, it doesn't , because he wants it, and is ashamed he wants it. His body
pushes back into Angel's, taking him inside, and Angel burns there, a thick,
hard brand inside him.
Angel's face is next
to his, his chest hard against Wesley's back. "You know what you want,"
he hisses, thrusting hard into him in time to his words. "Beg me for
it. Beg me."
It's just a
dream, just a dream, change it, pull out of it... But instead Wes says,
"Oh, God, please. Fuck me."
And Angel does, hard,
brutal. He's never been like this with Wes in reality. Wes is frozen to the
wall as Angel slams into him, but he doesn't feel the wall; all he feels
is Angel's hard length driving deep inside, and the brilliant fire stoked
by the intense penetration and the slim knife-edge of pain...
"You want it,
you know it, and you want it because you're dirty, you're
dirty, you're filthy, boy, you're a filthy little whore..."
The voice is Angelus.
The voice is his father. The voice is every doubt he's ever had about himself,
every bit of shame he's felt in response to his desire for Angel. And he
can't stop it.
"How could you
want this? How could you need this? Little fag. Little
whore. Beg me, beg me you fucking little bitch--"
"Please--" Wes' voice
is wrenched out of him. He can't concentrate, can't pull the dream back under
his control. Where are his hands? He needs to look at his hands-- "Please,
God, Daddy, no--"
He wakes up. Abruptly,
completely, and just as his body unclenches, opens up, and he pulses and
spasms and comes all over the sheets. He's taut, sweating, and even though
he knows it was a dream he can still feel Angel burning inside him.
He looks at his hands.
They're shaking. His shoulder aches and throbs where Angel bit him, and he
thinks back to that moment. There have been occasions when Angel has laid
himself bare to Wes, and that was one of them. He doesn't understand why
Angel shut down after that, and probably never will.
But he's certain
of one thing--the dream was bullshit. Because nothing about what he's shared
with Angel has been dirty or shameful or wrong. It's taken this, the violence
and the darkness of the dream, to make him realize that. Sex with Angel hasn't
been that much different for him than sex with Virginia--a reaching out,
seeking for connection to another person, a desperate, sometimes futile quest
for healing.
Whatever drove Angel
to shut down, Wes is finally certain it was through no fault of his own.
He did everything he could to let Angel in, to be there, to be open. Angel's
choice not to accept it was his own. Wes can only be left to wonder why.
He gets up to rearrange
the sodden sheets. He remembers days in the past when this, too, has been
a cause for shame. It doesn't bother him now. Perhaps he's learned something
from Angel, about acceptance. The irony does not escape him--that he has
learned to accept himself from someone so steeped in self-hatred, self-doubt.
With the wet parts of
the sheets out of his way, he wraps himself up, closes his eyes again. This
time, sleep comes quickly, and there are no dreams.
#
A few days later, he's
lying in a hospital bed with a bullet wound in his gut, riding the wave of
a morphine-induced stupor. The others are speculating about why and how the
zombie cops had collapsed so suddenly, just when it seemed they were all
doomed to die. Wes doesn't say anything, but for some reason he's certain
Angel had something to do with it. That Angel saved them.
He drifts into blackness
for a time, and when he comes back he hears Cordelia's voice say, "Can you
imagine the nerve?"
"He better not be stepping
foot in this room, that's for damn sure." Gunn is as vehement, as bitter,
as Cordelia.
"Angel?" Wes manages,
though he seems to have little control over his voice. "Don't send him away.
I want to see him."
But apparently he hasn't
managed to make all the words, because Cordelia pats his hand and says, "It's
okay, Wes. He won't be bothering you any time soon. Asshole. Can you believe
him?" This last is apparently meant for Gunn, who grunts his agreement.
Wes closes his eyes,
losing himself to the morphine. But part of him is happy, tranquil. Because
he is certain, now, that at least some part of Angel still cares.
END.
