Paradise Rejected
Decius
Wesley was tired, so tired that he thought that his fatigue had leeched its way into his bones, leaving them hollow shells that barely supported his aching body. He smiled grimly as he picked his way through the grey bones that littered the flour of the dingy warehouse off Hollywood boulevard as he thought of the state in which he now was, a state of which his father would never, could never, approve. Raised to be the perfect English gentleman from a bygone era, when even then such men had been thin on the ground, he had changed beyond all recognition. He remembered his prefect from the Oratory, the exclusive private school which he had attended, long ago and far away. The boy had been big, bigger than he should have been at that age, and had given the younger Wesley all forms of hell that he had wished at the time he could have revisited on the boy a thousand fold. He knew from his infrequent talks with his mother that the prefect was now a junior investment banker at Scottish Widows, and the former Watcher wondered what he would think of his victim now. Unshaven, hard, his eyes having the look of a man who had seen much, and endured more. The arrogance he had possessed, gained from his intellect, had been bled from him by the knives of betrayal and cruelty at the hands of enemies and, worse, from friends. The arrogance he now possessed would be recognised by any veteran of any of the wars that had plagued his homeland, from the time of Phillip Augustus to the days of Bonaparte all the way to Hitler and beyond. He had seen the elephant, and he had stared it down.
The warehouse was dark, a single lightbulb flickering on and off as it swung on its tattered wire in the light breeze that came in through doors shattered into splinters from the force of the grenade which he had thrown to blast the denizens into whatever hell was their own, different from the one which was his destiny, he was sure. Notions of heaven and hell were still very real to the young Englishman, through tempered as they were by the experiences through which had gone recently, which had been to thwart the advent of the latter onto Earth itself, to remould a world of equal parts light and dark into a twisted parody that would have excelled the ambitions of Lucifer himself. His mind was wandering, he knew. He always thought of Milton when that happened.
'Is this the region, the
soil, the clime,'
Said then the lost Archangel,
'this the seat
That we must change for
Heaven? This mournful gloom
For that celestial light?
Be it so, since he who is now Sovereign,
Can dispose and bid what
shall be right.
He who is now sovereign already had. And Wesley had fallen far from such definition.
The demons within had been, a bastardised hybrid form of Roach'im, would threaten no one any more, Wesley knew, these had been the last of their kind in a world that was increasingly hostile to any who were not human. In another time, he thought grimly, the Nazis would have appreciated such an attitude, but he thought that Willow would not appreciate any comparison to Himmler or Heydrich. The Slayers that had been summoned were too many to train, though many of them had by unforeseen circumstance had their destiny written into their very souls, and needed little instruction or direction. This was not something which was an unqualified blessing, and he cursed the red headed witch, hoping that he would see her again to tell her of, and show her, the magnitude of the short sighted error which she had made. To create an army was one thing, and something which he would have applauded. To leave it loose to pursue its ends without direction or command was worse than criminal, it was genocide. The week before he had killed two of the girls who had been summoned by Willow's spell, preventing them from destroying a colony of Gituhi Crawlers, benevolent demons who wanted nothing of the hostility of others. There had been too many of those incidents recently, and he thought that he should have felt something for the human lives which he had taken, but the stains on his soul pre-existing could become no darker, and there was only room for so many.
He barely noticed anymore.
'Heavy ordnance rocks,' Gunn said from behind him, his voice ironic as he held tight to his sword. Wesley knew that the younger man liked the feel of it, an ancient samurai katana, than he appreciated the utility, for it was for all its grace an unwieldy weapon against the enemies which they had chosen, or been chosen, to fight. Wesley preferred something more definitive than steel. 'Maybe you should see it you can rustle up a daisy cutter for next time, man.'
'Maybe you can do more than simply follow and narrate,' Wesely replied his voice, as ever, soft, barely audible. There was something of a truce between the men, now, but it was a delicate thing, easily broken, and inflexible.
The breeze blew warmly behind him from the night beyond that seemed brighter for all the flickering of the bulb above that was casting dancing shadows on the filthy walls. The bloodstains were old ones, from people long dead whose bones were gathered in a grim testimony to the feeding habits of the Roach'im, but they were people for whom Wesley felt no empathy. It was enough that he would ensure that nothing of the same thing would happen again; there was no requirement for him to mourn those long dead.
He shivered slightly, though, as he thought of their fates, the screaming, the awful knowledge that they were next. He had not left his humanity behind over the last year, he knew, it had merely changed, and there was still enough of the idealistic youth that he had been left to wonder what it was like for them.
'We're done here,' Gunn told him, coming alongside, looking at the blown apart remains of the last of the Roachim. Their blood was black. Appropriately so. 'The job's done.'
'The job will never be done,' Wesley told him, though he did not look in his direction, seeing as he did only a boy who thwarted his own desperate desire for the one source of light which he could see in a world increasingly black for him. He knew that he did not love Fred, not in the way that she and her former lover thought. Rather, he ached for the feeling that would come with the effort of doing so. It was enough that he wanted to feel something like that again, though it had been so long since Lilah's death that he thought that he would not recognise it again when it came, the rush to his stomach and the clenching of his heart. He idly wondered why he desired that again so badly, given what had happened the last time that he had allowed his defences to slip, albeit for a short while.
A drowning man will always cling to the only rope available, he thought to himself, even though he knew that it would not be strong enough to save him. That he could pull and pull and still never escape the waters that denied him breath.
It was all the worse that he had cast himself in of his own will, and stayed because it was easier.
Gunn turned beside him, and was about to walk back out to the fresh air beyond when his phone beeped. The two men jumped as the electric tone burst through the echoing silence like a violation. The incongruity was somehow frightening, though that Gunn had Carmina Burana as his ringtone made it somehow less so. Wesley knew that Orff had written his masterpiece as a homage to God and the Church, but the sound was chilling enough to serve as a war song for the legions of Hell.
'Fallen cherub, to be
weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering; but
of this be sure,
To do aught good will
never be our task,
But ever to do ill our
sole delight,
As being contrary to
his high will,
Whom we resist.'
Gunn listened for a moment, brushing his hand over his shaved head as he often did when he, too, was tired. It was more than they had to keep going out, night after night, to take the battle to those demons who fled in increasing numbers to the City of Angels, being the refuge that it was from the legions of young girls who had been set loose. Angel could handle it, but Angel was not human and had not been for so long that he could not remember simple fatigue. With Connor gone and Fred too weak for this sort of continuous combat, it fell to Angel, Wesley and Gunn to fight, to fight without end, without hope of victory as the legions of their enemies were continuously augmented. They needed more help, but there was none to be had.
'You' re finished?' Gunn demanded through the phone. 'Right. We'll see you back at the office.' He pushed the antenna of the phone back into place and pocketed it, turning to the man who had once been his friend, who had taken a bullet for him.
'Back to the office.'
'Right,' Wesley said, looking forward at least to some sleep, for which his body cried out more than it ever had during Faith's cruel ministrations.
They walked out of the warehouse, into Hollywood, without looking back.
Had they done so, they would have stared. A bright started from a pinprick of radiance in the centre of the large room, expanding rapidly to fill the area with impossible illumination that would have struck any human blind, reflecting from the bones that were the last testament of a demon race now lost. The light reflected from a human skull that lay haphazardly on its side, bathing it, seeming to bring it to life once again for a brief second, before it was charred to little more but ashes. The light, as bright as anything unleashed in Nevada by Oppenheimer sixty years before, carried with it the same burning wave that nothing within creation could withstand. It stopped before the walls, though the dried blood that stood as a memorial to those who had died nameless smoked from the cement, leaving nothing but grey stone.
The light flickered black for a moment, and flashed once more. The glass from the exploded bulb above fell, and vanished into motes of steam that dropped like rain. The noise should have been loud enough to herald the Four Horsemen themselves, but the silence was deafening as the light receded as quickly as it had come.
Where there had been nothing but bones and blood, now there was a flour bleached hotter than the fires of hell itself into impossible cleanliness, marred only by a figure in pure black that lay dazed on the concrete.
He spake; and, to confirm
his words, out flew
Millions of flaming swords,
drawn from the thighs,
Of might Cherubim; the
sudden blaze
Far round illumined Hell.
The figure groaned in the darkness, the only speck of anything other than black being a shock of hair bleached white in defiance of the tradition of his kind; he had never conformed to any stereotype.
'Bollocks,' was the only word to break the silence.
'So something is coming,' Wesley summarised what Angel had told them from behind his desk, a slight ache behind his eyes telling him how desperately he needed sleep. Beside him, Gunn stifled a yawn which proclaimed loudly the same need in him. 'Any idea what it is?' And, Dear God, don't let it come for next eight hours at least.
'Not much,' Angel told him, leaning back in the chair, his leather coat draped nonchalantly on the back of it. 'Just something that could help us, though that could mean anything.'
'Could be a Slayer,' Fred piped up from the other side of the office, her glasses making her look younger than she was which, Wesley though, may have been part of her appeal, the desire on his part to recapture the easy illusions of his youth, when everything had been black and white instead of the endless grey which was the only thing that he could see now, stretching as it did to the end of his horizon and beyond.
'I thought the Slayers were staying away from LA,' Gunn said, his voice hoarse. 'Something to do with what happened last year.'
'That was the assumption,' Wesley informed him, though he knew too well that it was only speculation on his part that informed such an assumption. Certainly, there was no other reason of which he could think that the city had been more or less spared the plague of Willow's misjudgement. 'But it was only an assumption.'
'Angel's informant didn't say anything about a Slayer,' Fred told him, her voice clear. 'He probably would have known about a Slayer. Besides,' she smiled, 'they aren't exactly rare any more.'
'More's the pity,' Wesley replied, thinking darkly of Willow and what it was that he would say to her when next he saw her, if he ever did. Only Angel truly appreciated the magnitude of the error which she had made in pursuit of short term gain which, if he had heard correctly about what had happened in Sunnydale, was largely superfluous in any case.
Gunn grunted, placing his crossbow on the table with a grimace of pain as he felt his bruised left arm, hit hard by a staff before the detonation. 'After what happened last year, I don't think that we should be taking anything for granted.'
Angel crossed his hands in front of his face and stared intently at the shining surface of the desk which he had appropriated, though it still irked Wesley that the vampire had slipped so easily back into the role of leadership at which he had proved himself time and again intellectually and emotionally ill-equipped. The continual misjudgements over Connor alone .
Since Cordelia's absence, Angel had often been distracted to the point of pre-occupation, though Wesley never could understand why. Though he had never been properly in love himself, he at least understood that it had to be accompanied by some hope of reciprocation and consummation, neither of which Angel could ever have expected from the flighty girl from Sunnydale, even before the horrendous shocks of the previous few months. Still, he empathised to an extent with what the vampire was feeling, if only to a small degree. The former Watcher's capacity for resentment, bitterness and rage were nearly limitless, he was learning to what a year before would have been horror, but was now perversely a source of satisfaction to him.
His phone, which was on silent, vibrated lightly in his pocket, and he activated it. It was one of the smaller Nokia models, a 6530, and he disliked it intensely. 'Yes?' he asked, without bothering to read the ID signal on the blue face as it had lit up.
'Coming to bed, lover?' a deceptively seductive voice asked huskily on the other end of the line.
His heart increased its beat for a few moments, but he quashed any excitement that he felt with a ruthlessness that had only been perfected after tortuous months of long practice. He might be drawn to Lilah's exquisite body like a moth to a flame, and with the same effect, but he never allowed himself room to believe that it would ever be anything but that base, carnal attraction. Anything else that he could have felt for the woman would have vanished, to be sucked into the endless blackness within her that made his twistings of morality seem pale by comparison with her malevolence.
'I'll be there in a little while,' he said shortly, severing the connection with a snap, reversing the phone and placing it in the back pocket of his faded and dusty Levi's. In another time, he would have probably affected a theatrical yawn to explain his departure, but he owed these people nothing but the loyalty of a shared purpose; of explanations or justifications, nothing.
Reaching into his light jacket, he removed his sword and placed it in the weapon's cabinet, a shining silver example of wealth spent extravagantly on that which could be purchased equally well at a tenth the price. Within it were all the tools of a trade kept barely hidden from the consciousness of the public. A lochabar hung beside a vicious hooked and barbed dagger, a shining silver Glock beside a petite, double-bladed crossbow.
'I'll be back tomorrow,' he told them without explanation, turned, and left the building.
He emerged into the cold night air, which he inhaled deeply with his eyes closed, enjoying the feel of the cold penetrate his lungs, the small shivers on his arms. He loved night, knowing too well that he was no longer suited well to the sunlight.
He was walking the short distance to Lilah's plush apartment, replete with a simple and tasteful luxury which was the antithesis of its complex owner, when an instinct that had kept him alive already more times than he could count warned him that he was being watched, though he would never possess a Slayer's sense which would tell him what it was which was watching him.
He reached into his jacket casually, within which was kept the pistol that he always carried now. His father, a Watcher who had survived the destruction of the offices in London, would have been horrified that he had so departed from the traditional tools of the trade, but he concerned himself only with effectiveness, and a gun would slow down anything that it would not kill, though the majority of what had hunted him fell into the latter category.
The buildings above and behind seemed taller somehow, their shadows in the moonlight seeming more ominous, and the silence beyond the distant thunder of car engines more close, more oppressive as he walked as casually as he could, his hand still inside his jacket, though he did not turn. He could still feel the attention on him, though strangely it did not feel hostile. He could think of none who would follow him so stealthily that he could not tell from where their eyes watched him and would not intend malice, but he still remembered how to keep an open mind.
For a little while, until he felt a breath of wind on his exposed neck, and a near silent fall to the ground behind him whose stealth a cat would have been hard pressed to match.
He pulled his matte black beretta and spun in one smooth motion, keeping the sights trained in front of his eyes as he relied on his instincts to protect him for the second that he was vulnerable while he was in motion.
He stopped for a split second to assess what it was that he saw, though what he saw did not alleviate his tension any.
The man who had dropped from three flights above was about as tall as he, though leaner, slender as a rake, though powerful for all of it - that much was evident in the smooth confident of his movements, the palpable aura of danger and near-invincibility that emanated from him. He stood nonchalantly, his hands in the pockets of his black jeans, beneath a black shirt, under a long black leather coat, worn from years of use. The light was faint, though not prohibitively, and Wesley could see that the man's eyes were a clear and mocking blue, set in a pale face of angular precision that would have impressed Roman sculptors. The only incongruous thing about the picture of menace was the bleached hair, smoothed back. Something tickled at the edges of Wesley's memory, as though he had seen this man before, though he was sure that he had not. There was, nevertheless, something familiar about him.
'Stop there,' Wesley ordered him, keeping the gun straight in front of him, pointed unerringly at the man's head. 'Keep well away.'
The man simply looked at him, shrugged, and reached into the right side pocket of his long coat, pulling from within a battered flip top box of Marlboros. Removing one, he lit it with an equally battered silver zippo lighter, though his eyes never left those of Wesley's. The former Watcher was not afraid - he had faced the forces of hell itself without being overly afraid - though he was unsettled. Even vampires were given pause by guns, if for no other reason than that they made them vulnerable for an experienced hunter, which he was obviously was. He exhaled the smoke with a breath of enjoyment, the acrid particles creating a cloud of fog in front of his face in the night air that dissipated rapidly, though some still trickled upwards from the burning red tip, held low.
'You do understand that that gun is just a toy, right?' the man asked, and Wesley was for the first time surprised. The man's accent was clearly British, though it was nothing of which his father would have approved. 'Even against a human with any level of skill, a gun isn't much more than an annoyance.'
'It's worked for me so far,' Wesley said cautiously as his interlocutor took another deep drag, this time not even bothering to keep a close watch on the man with the gun. 'Are you saying that you are not human?' It was perhaps a stupid question, Wesley knew, but he had met those who thought that they were more, while in fact barely meriting the term.
All he got for the question was a snorted laugh of pure derision. 'You've worked for that asshole for how long,' he was asked, 'and you can't even tell an Aurelian vampire from a human?' Another laugh. 'The standards for Watchers must be damned sight lower than they were in my day. Giles would be ashamed of you.'
'You know Rupert Giles?' Wesley asked, even before he had time to consider what else it was the man had said. When he did, he removed his finger from the trigger guard.
He placed in on the trigger, for he knew at last who this man, this vampire, was. One of the most dangerous vampires to ever live, and one of the most unpredictable. Slayer of Slayers, the lover of Drusilla from the time when Britain still ruled the waves and dispensed colonial justice to one fifth of humanity to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
William the Bloody. Spike.
Wesley knew what he had heard from Willow and others, though he had been so angered by what else he had heard that he had paid little attention, and had in any case disbelieved it. That Angel had a soul was a miracle before God. That this creature had sought one out was a bedtime story.
'I'll shoot,' Wesley told him, and meant it not as a threat but a promise. He had fought worse than this and come out alive, though never alone on a dark night in a street deserted except for the warm desert breeze.
Spike grunted, and extinguished the cigarette, grinding it into the tarmac with a twist of his steel toed boot. 'To repeat my good self in another time and from another life,' he declaimed, as though reciting, 'you'll be dead before the bullet leaves the gun.'
'You think so?' Wesley asked, before the world turned upside down in a shadow ghost of quick moving black leather.
Spike moved faster than anything Wesley had ever seen, faster than anything for which he could ever have been prepared, and appeared behind the former Watcher before the latter could even depress the trigger. Wesley was picked up almost before he could shout, the gun wrenched from his hand with a sharp and painful twist and, in the same movement, he was thrown ten feet through the air to crash against the wall.
Dazed for a moment, he took a while to focus his blurred vision as he felt something land in his lap. He had brief visions of it being a human heart before his hand closed around it. It was mercifully cold, and it was metal.
He opened his eyes to see Spike crouched in front of him with an amused look in his blue eyes. Wesley at that moment would have been afraid, was he not uncomfortably aware that the vampire had returned his gun to him as quickly as he had divested him of it. That spoke volumes for its uselessness but, more, of Spike's apparent lack of hostile intent for if there was ever anything of which Wesley was more certain, it was that Spike could have killed him more easily than he disarmed him. The vampire extended his hand as he rose and Wesley, his heart in his mouth despite his certainty, took it, noting the strength in the vampire's grip. The same grip, he reminded himself, that had ended the life of two Slayers. He had always been a more proficient student of vampire history than Giles, and he had no trouble remembering the records with which he had been raised. In truth, he knew, he had always been a more proficient student than Giles at everything, for all the respect in which he held the older man.
'Is is true that you managed to . acquire . a soul?' Wesley asked, feeling the pain his back where he had struck the wall. What struck him more was that a vampire had just helped him to rise form his feet, and he had before only met one vampire who was worthy of that level of trust. He had been taught to believe that trust in such creatures was dangerous folly.
Spike smiled, though it was without humour. For a moment, Wesley thought that he could see a tremendous pain in the eyes of the vampire, a pain that transcended anything that he himself could imagine, something whose depths would take a century or more of life to understand. As quickly as he thought that he saw it, it was gone, leaving little but amusement.
'As far is it goes, its true, yeah,' Spike told him, his voice subdued. 'Lost it fairly damn quickly, too.'