"I'm worried. I mean, seriously worried, Wes. He's not getting any better."
Wesley stood in his office, staring out the window. On the street below him, traffic
passed in sporadic bursts, moderated by the changing of lights further up the
road. He heard Cordelia with only a portion of his awareness. The other noted
the position of the sun, calculating the hour, the distance to go until its burning
rays would sink low enough to make it safe to open the shades elsewhere in their
building again.
Not that it would matter. The man whom such precautions centered around had not
left his bedroom in two days. Two nights.
"I tried feeding him again," Cordelia continued. "Wes, he wouldn't even take it.
He didn't even have the strength to grr at me."
Two days ago, when his normal ration of blood had made him dry-heave. When the
fever had first set in. When the injury he had been nursing for a month, from
the lizard-thing, finally cracked its half-healed scab and began to fester. Wesley's
first move had been to call Farsheed Noor. Dr. Noor was human, but he had over
the years built up a sizable demon clientele. But he had taken one look at Angel,
and simply shaken his head. Whatever ailed the vampire was nothing human science
could cure.
Their next call had been to Ba'hu. No-one knew what species Ba'hu belonged to,
or if Ba'hu was a name, a title, or a description. But he - it - knew everything
about every other species around, what they were prey to - and what healed. The
creature had studied the wound, then washed it with a dilute acid and sprinkled
powders into it that made the skin glow and froth. Angel had cried out, then gone
still, his eyes locked on something none of the others could see.
"It will heal," Ba'hu told them. "But it merely opened the way for that which
ails him. For that, there is no cure. He must ride it through."
But what 'it' was, or how Angel was supposed to ride it, Ba'hu could not - would
not - tell them. Damn shamans. And Angel's fever continued to rise.
"Wes, he called me Katie." Cordelia said quietly. "He thought I was his sister.
And then he saw something behind me -- which, believe me, there wasn't. The hallucinations
are getting worse."
"We should call Giles," Wesley said, finally.
"What, you think he's got a cure? Why didn't we call him bef-"
"So he can bring Buffy. And the others, if they wish it."
Cordelia caught up with what he was saying, and fell silent. She swallowed hard,
trying to drag a deep breath through lungs that felt flattened as though by some
iron weight.
"Right. Just...let me do it, okay?"
#
"Hello, Giles residence - oh, hi Cordelia." Without waiting, Riley handed the
phone over to Giles, who took it with a distracted nod of thanks. Riley went back
to his work of the afternoon, which was trying to distract Buffy while she maintained
an active trance state.
"Cordelia." His voice resonated with real pleasure, and he settled back into the
sofa as though preparing for a long chat. But the words which came through the
receiver made him sit upright immediately. Riley, in the act of tickling the soles
of Buffy's feet with a feather, stopped and looked at him. Alerted by the change
in the atmosphere, Buffy opened her eyes, grabbed the feather from Riley, and
turned to look at her Watcher as well.
He was listening intently, the furrow between his eyes matching his frown of concentration.
"Dear God. Yes. No, I understand...yes, of course. Yes, we'll be on our way immediately."
He paused, then asked, in a softer voice, "Are you all right?"
The answer clearly didn't satisfy him, but he merely sighed. "Hold on. Cordelia.
We'll be there as soon as we can."
Buffy was already standing, her shoes on, ready to do battle. "What and where's
the bad?" she asked, then took another look at Giles' expression. His eyes were
on her, the look in them darker, sadder than she could remember them being...
in a long time. But not so long that she didn't remember what it meant. Her stomach
fell out like a zero-gee ride, and she got sweaty, the way she used to when she
got sick as a kid.
"Angel?"
"Call the others," Giles directed Riley. "If they're not here in half an hour,
we're leaving without them." He reached out to touch Buffy's arm, gently. Too
gently. "He's ill," he told her. "Very ill. Cordelia... they've done all they
can, but he keeps getting weaker..."
For a moment, Buffy thought that she was going to pass out. Or throw up. Or both.
"Poison again?"
"I don't think so. Cordelia said that they didn't know the source, only that it
was clearly draining strength from him, and nothing they've done has slowed it,
much less reversed... " He stopped. Took a breath. Tried to find some better way
to say what he had to say. "They suggested that we come up as quickly as possible."
The pain in his eyes was real, she noted. And it wasn't just for her. So much
time gone...
Buffy turned to Riley, who already was on the phone. "Tell them we'll meet them
up there," she said. By the time he nodded in understanding, Watcher and Slayer
had left.
#
The ride to Los Angels was silent. Not for the first time, Buffy blessed the mid-life
crisis whatever that had led Giles to buy the sporty little coupe - it skimmed
along at 70 miles an hour where his old clunker could barely reach 35 without
wheezing.
"I thought he was going to outlive us all. When I thought about it, I mean. I'd
pretty much gotten past the whole 'I'm going to die young' thing, but when I thought
about the rest of you, I figured Angel would be there, even when Xander and Willow
were old, there'd still be Angel looking out for them..." Once she opened her
mouth, Buffy heard the babble, but couldn't stop herself. "And y'know, if Will
or Anya had kids, they'd have Angel lurking in the shadows, and their kids...
and he's not supposed to go before the rest of us. That's just not fair."
His right hand reached over to cover her own, his clasp reassuringly warm and
strong. In the normal course of events, he would have been gone long before anyone
else, being so much older. If not for Cordelia's vision.... She concentrated on
that hand in her own, letting the solidity of it push the panic down from where
it had swarmed up into her throat. Giles had lived. Angel would live. She wouldn't
be left to carry on.
Everything was going to be okay. They just had to get there.
#
It took them longer than they expected to find the new office building and park.
Buffy knew she should have been racing down the street, dragging Giles if needed,
but instead the closer they got, the slower her steps. Something was wrong.
She stopped, her hands clenching into fists as though waiting for an enemy to
attack.
"Buffy?"
"He's dying."
"Yes, I believe that was -"
"He's really dying."
Giles understood, then. And while the walls of denial faded into too-familiar
dust at her feet, he did the only thing he could do. He took her hand, and led
her up the front steps of Angel Investigations.
They were met at the door by a blond-haired woman Buffy vaguely remembered from
her last trip as some kind of cop. She didn't say a word, just took Giles' coat
and directed them down the stairs.
The door swung open to a surprisingly airy space, with high ceilings and whitewashed
walls. The floor underneath was carpeted, muffling their footsteps, but something
alerted Wesley to their arrival. He looked up, and Buffy managed to pull herself
out of her own pain long enough to acknowledge his own.
"You look like hell."
"I rather feel that way," he admitted. His hand lifted, as though to smooth back
his hair, then dropped back down to his sides. "The past few days have been...well,
hellish. We thought, at first, it was something, a remnant of that slash he took
in Sunnydale, as it wasn't healing properly, but... we had a - a specialist in,
and the wound was merely an entrance of sorts for whatever it is which has afflicted
him. And as Cordelia told you, no-one has been able to determine what that is,
much less what might cure it."
"Can I see him?"
Wesley nodded, but his expression kept her from rushing past him to where she
supposed Angel's bedroom was. "Be warned. He is not always...coherent." He held
first her gaze, then Giles', until they both nodded their understanding, then
turned and led them into the back of the apartment.
Angel's bedroom was austere, but not bare. Instead of a window, there was a large
photograph of a garden walkway, light dappling through a lattice overhead. The
floor was covered with a thick, dark blue and red-patterned rug that looked both
old and expensive. And the dresser boasted a scattering of framed photographs,
some casual snapshots, some posed studio portraits. A quick glance identified
several of them as being of Cordelia, Wesley and a young black man, clearly laughing
at the photographer. And one, Giles noted with interest, was of Angel seated in
a chair, Cordelia leaning against one shoulder, Wesley standing just behind them
on the other side. It took Giles a moment to realize why the placements seemed
so familiar; he recalled seeing a similarly posed photo in his own house. It was
a standard family portrait: patriarch and children.
Cordelia herself was seated by the bed, her dark head bowed as though listening
to something being whispered by the figure in the bed. Giles slowly let himself
look at the tableaux, filtering the realization that that was Angel looking so
frail, so ill, as though that slowness would dull the pain.
"Angel?"
Buffy's soft whisper was enough to get Cordelia's attention. Smoothing the dark
red coverlet over Angel's bare torso, her hand touched lightly on his hair, matted
with sweat, then she stood to greet the newcomers.
"He's sleeping now," she told them. Her face was drawn with exhaustion and sadness,
but her eyes were dry, her voice steady. "That's good. When he wakes up, he should
be pretty clear. For a while, anyway. Don't freak on him, 'cause then he tries
to do the big strong hero thing, and he doesn't have the energy for it now. He's
going to want to talk - just listen. There's blood on the night table, but he
hasn't been able to keep anything down for a couple of days, so don't try to force
it. Stress just makes things worse."
Buffy barely heard, moving to the seat Cordelia had vacated and pulling it closer
to the bed, her hand stroking the dry, flushed skin of his face with a tenderness
that was touched with more than a little fear.
"Where are you going?" Giles asked as Cordelia picked up a leather bag from the
floor and slung it over her shoulder.
She shot a look back at her boss, then turned back to Giles. "There's someone
I need to see," she said simply. "When he asks, tell him I'll be back soon." 'When,"
not if. She was that confident Angel would look for her, even with Buffy at his
bedside. She touched his hand in passing, and he could feel the tremors that were
running through her, as though she too were running a fever. But then she was
gone, and his attention returned to the figure on the bed.
"Angel?" Buffy's voice broke on his name. The vampire turned his head, as though
even in his sleep he heard her, but he didn't wake. A line of sweat formed across
his forehead, rolling back into his hair and down his neck. Giles spotted a washcloth
on the table beside the bed, and picked it up, handing it to his Slayer. Perhaps
the act of doing something, however useless, would ease her pain.
For himself, there was no such hope. He knew vampire physiology well enough to
recognize the signs. Angel's undead metabolism was skyrocketing, burning himself
up from within. And without a steady intake of moisture in the form of blood,
the undead tissue wouldn't be able to rehydrate and recover from the damage done...
Helpless and suddenly violently angry, Giles left his Slayer to her ministrations,
and went to do the only kind of fighting left - research. Up the flight of stairs,
he followed the sound of voices down a hallway, into the main offices of Angel
Investigations. The blonde woman was gone, and a young black man - the one in
the photographs - was shuffling through a sheaf of papers while he talked on the
phone. "Yeah, we got it. No worries. Yeah, we'll send you a bill. Look, gotta
go." He hung up the phone and stood to great Giles.
"You must be Rupert. I'm Gunn. Shit reason to meet, but otherwise it'd probably
be a pleasure. Cor speaks highly of you, which for her is a rare trip."
"Yes, I - I was hoping I might be of some use..."
Gun laughed without much humor. "Take your pick. We've got a ghoul-thing down
in the warren to take down, insurance forms to fill out, and half a dozen backlogged
phone calls to deal with, plus the ongoing research frenzy which has just out
frenzied itself out, if you know what I mean."
He was rather afraid he knew exactly what the young man meant. But perhaps a fresh
brain might be able to help. He said as much to Gunn, and was directed up another
flight of stairs, to where Wesley had taken over a conference room as his base
of operations. Books, scrolls, chalkboards and countless mugs of tea and coffee
were scattered about the room, and Wesley was back at work trying to decipher
a rather arcane-looking parchment. He looked up when his fellow former Watcher
entered, and merely pointed him towards a pile of writings. Scanning the room
to get an idea of what had already been tried and discarded, he only wondered
where Cordelia had run off too. Knowing how deeply she cared for her affectionately
nicknamed "boss," he hoped she wouldn't do anything foolish...