[Gunnwesley] Fic: Kungai Part Six 3/12 (Wesley/Gunn, NC17)

[helenraven]

Title: Kungai Part Six 3/12

Author: Helen Raven

Email: helenraven at talk21.com

Pairing: Wesley/Gunn

Summary: The full history of the relationship between
Gunn and Wesley in the Birthdayverse. A novel in six
parts.

Rating: NC-17

Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit, not even a blip
on the litigation radar.

The Story's Home Page: http://www.kelper.co.uk/kungai

-----------------------

When they checked on Angel before going to bed, they
found that his eyes were closed, and in the morning
his hand was turned so his palm was facing upwards. By
the time they came back from training he was awake:
lying just the same, but making small groaning sounds.

Angel's face was tense, held in a frown, eyes pushed
half-closed. Wesley knelt down while Gunn covered him.
"Angel? Do you know me?" Probably did. Not afraid, not
puzzled, not angry. Just tense.

"Head." Tight, complaining.

A pause, then: "Your head hurts?"

Angel closed his eyes and gave the smallest possible
nod. So the tension was pain.

Wesley put his hand on Angel's shoulder. "I'll get you
something for that." Gunn heard Wesley in the
bathroom, searching through the bottles in the
cabinet, then in the kitchen, running water. As he was
kneeling beside Angel again he put the glass down on
the carpet, and then he pulled the blanket down to
Angel's waist, placed the pills on the palm of Angel's
left hand and folded Angel's fingers over them.

"I know it hurts you to move, but you'll feel better
if you take these. Sit up slowly, and I'll hand you
the water when you're ready."

Angel looked at Wesley, then at the glass. He looked
for a few seconds like he was bracing himself to push
himself up, but then he gave another of those groans,
raised his hand quickly to his mouth, and swallowed
the pills with a jerk.

The pills would take minutes to work, wouldn't they?
(if they even would work on a vampire). But Angel
seemed to show the effect after just a few breaths: he
closed his eyes, lost about half the tension, and then
slowly rolled onto his back. A few more breaths and he
gave a long sigh and pushed his right hand across the
carpet to find Wesley, and settle around the curve of
Wesley's thigh. "Thank you"? "Stay"? Or just needing
to touch him? Wesley laid his hand across Angel's. "Of
course I'll stay"?

Gunn looked down at Angel, remembering the screams,
the staggering steps, the fall. What would Angel think
had happened to put him in this state? Quietly: "I'll
leave you alone."

Without looking up, Wesley said, "Are you hungry,
Angel? Would you like Charles to bring you some
blood?"

No. Really no. Angel looked nauseous. Gunn was walking
towards the door when Angel said, "Ice?" He was
looking up at Wesley. "A cloth? Cold?" He lifted
Wesley's hand and drew it across to hold it against
his own forehead. "Please?"

"Your head feels too hot? You want me to cool it
down?"

"Please." And Angel shut his eyes again.

He did seem to know what he needed, because he managed
to fall asleep after about half an hour, and he looked
so much better that Gunn took away the blanket. Angel
hadn't spoken to Wesley, except to ask for more of
what Wesley was doing, or to ask for less.

"Anything in the books about visions that just... get
lost?"

Wesley shook his head and shrugged. "Maybe they can't
exist together if there's more than one. They cancel
each other out. With a violent implosion. It must be
very rare. If -" A pause. "Do you think it's sick to
want to write an article about it? But then... I can
hardly draw attention to the fact that I'm in close
contact with a seer. A vampire seer."

"Don't hafta use y'r own name."

Wesley laughed. "Then I'd feel as if I was writing for
the National Enquirer."

* * * * *

On Saturday afternoon Wesley drove up to the nest
looking for Piriti. It was a miserable day, grey and
damp, but the brothers had still come up to work.
Piriti hid at first, same as he had from Grouw, but
then Solito shouted that it was Wesley and Piriti
showed himself almost immediately. He came forward
slowly, asking what had happened.

They talked in the car, while Solito made himself busy
in the tunnels. Wesley told Piriti something of what
he'd put himself through in the past months, how far
the guilt and shame had taken him - including the
collapse in the library - and he told him the reasons
he'd recently found to try to put himself through
something different. He wasn't there to tell Piriti
what he should do, more to remind him that there was
more than one possible approach; and to listen,
however Piriti needed him to listen.

Wesley wouldn't tell Gunn the details of what they'd
talked about. He wouldn't have said anything about
what he'd done with Angel, obviously, but he'd
probably said something about how difficult he'd been
to live with, some of the ways he'd turned away from
pleasure. But wasn't that one of the first things Gunn
had noticed about Piriti - that he never gossiped
about sex? Whatever Wesley had said, it would be safe
with Piriti.

Piriti called Wesley on Sunday evening, and after a
couple of sentences and a few seconds of listening and
nodding, Wesley told Gunn that he was going to go down
to the car. Gunn looked out of the window every ten
minutes or so. One of those times Wesley was looking
up at the window, maybe talking about him, and Wesley
saw him and smiled slightly and nodded, but not trying
to give any hint or promise about how long he would
be. He was nearly forty minutes.

"How's he doin'?"

Wesley shrugged and sighed. "He's been having long
imaginary conversations with almost everyone he knows.
I think he just wanted to see what it would be like to
call me. He didn't have anything specific. I'm going
to keep him informed about what happens with me and
the Kekulei.

* * * * *

Wesley and Lilah mostly talked about money: Wesley
wanted to know why Lilah's company was prepared to
spend money on Angel, and Lilah wanted to know how
long Wesley and Gunn could keep paying their bills if
Wesley wasn't doing any translation work.

Lilah could make a case for Angel as a research
project in the mechanics of prediction, as an
investment in goodwill with the Powers, as a curio
with value for its potential to attract the attention
of new clients, or as a tax-efficient charitable cause
- but in fact it was many months since she'd had to
make any case at all. Her boss, Holland Manners, had
always taken an interest in Angel and had been happy
for her to organise the interns. After the evening
when he'd relieved young Newton and seen Angel for
himself, he'd taken a much more active interest and
had soon found Angel a champion in the form of a
Senior Partner. So there was certainly sufficient
budget to hire the squad for a long weekend every few
months.

Wesley's answer to Lilah's question: they could pay
their bills for about two months, assuming they were
cheap months. He was going to ask around the
bookstores, see if he could get a lead on some
cataloguing work, or shelving, or anything. Lilah said
she was going to start paying him a monthly retainer:
she didn't want him taking on too much cataloguing,
she needed him to keep himself available for her
translations. The sum she suggested would be enough to
cover their rent. Obviously it was charity - they both
knew that he'd be lucky to get ten hours a week
through the bookstores - and Wesley was just plain
glad to have it.

Wesley put himself in charge of managing the damage to
their bank balance. He made a spreadsheet to break
down their expenses and decided that food was the only
area where they could really cut costs, and then he
spent hours checking out grocery stores, produce
markets and butchers' shops to find out what items
where cheapest and what were the best days and times
to get clearance bargains, and spent many more hours
building up a stock of recipes to give Gunn some
chance of welcoming, say, liver and surplus cabbage,
even for three dinners in a row. Wesley genuinely
liked liver (and kidneys, and all the stuff you'd
rather throw away) - which was an English thing, he
said. Gunn gradually got so he didn't have to pretend;
after a few weeks he didn't need Wesley to give it a
French name, or hide it in a lot of sauce.

In the end, they weren't able to make use of the best
of Gunn's experience in living cheap. The crew was
already working the best angles for free food, and
Wesley wasn't going to poach on their ground. Wesley
wouldn't consider stealing food or power or anything
else. The moral side didn't bother him, but he just
couldn't afford any problems with the law; it might
not be certain that they'd deport him for shoplifting,
but he wasn't ever going to run that risk.

Wesley sold most of Angel's books and pawned Angel's
jackets and coats. He raised nearly $400 and he put it
aside and called it their "beer money". It was for
renting videos, too, for any luxury that they used for
winding down; when Gunn went over to the beach house
for the evening, he took $20 from the beer money to
pay for his share of the whatever the boys decided to
order in. Sometimes Gunn felt like he was in some
traditional white-folks marriage, back in the '50s, or
maybe in the '30s, deep in the depression: him
bringing in the money, and Wesley using every
house-keeping trick he could find to make that money
stretch far enough that Gunn could go out drinking
with his buddies. But Wesley was so fierce about the
savings, so focused.  This was his way of keeping
control and it wouldn't be forever, soon he would
start earning again, and they'd be able to ease off.

They agreed early on that they wouldn't buy each other
anything for Christmas. Gunn would roast a chicken and
Wesley would make mince-pies, they'd have a full game
of that role-playing card game that Gunn had bought
for San Diego, and they'd each promise to try a new
experience, whenever the other had decided what to ask
for. On Christmas Eve, though, Wesley got a call that
the Kekulei wanted to see him at a meeting to decide
if he was worth the effort that they'd have to put
into testing him. "The hearing", Wesley called it,
about his "eligibility for rehabilitation", and they'd
arranged it for two o'clock on the afternoon of
Christmas Day. They wouldn't say exactly how long it
would take: maybe two hours, maybe three. Wesley
wouldn't be in a state to appreciate food beforehand,
so they'd have their meal in the evening instead and
then see what type of game Wesley was in the mood for.

Gunn wanted to drive Wesley to the meeting and wait
for him but Wesley said no, though he did agree to
call to ask Gunn to collect him if he felt even
slightly shaky afterwards. While Wesley was gone, Gunn
cleaned the kitchen and bathroom from top to bottom:
scrubbed every surface, rearranged every cupboard; and
then played Duke Nukem on the computer while he waited
for the call. Wesley wasn't in danger. Swift would
have called him if she'd heard any hint that Wesley
might be in danger.

Wesley drove himself back, and he said he was fine but
he wouldn't really answer any of Gunn's questions
about what had happened. Gunn made tea, and Wesley lay
on the couch and read while Gunn started dinner.
Later, over the card game, Gunn asked if they couldn't
think of any way of doing what Swift had suggested:
get out of town for six months if the Kekulei still
wanted Wesley out of sight.

Wesley shook his head. "I'm fairly sure we won't need
to do that. I think they are going to give me a
chance, though it sounded as if they'd need several
more meetings amongst themselves to decide what they
want me to do."

"It went OK, then?"

A shrug, and Wesley suddenly seemed to lose about four
inches in height. Looking down at the coffee table:
"Much as I expected, I suppose. The prosecution had
done their research."

"Prosecution?" Gunn could feel his outrage building by
the second. "They made it an actual trial? With you
there on your own?"

"No. No." Wesley sighed, sounding exhausted. "They
just wanted to look at me. The hostile elements were
in the minority. But they were noticeably organised."

Sharply: "Who were they?" To be prepared.

Another sigh. "It doesn't matter. I think they'll...
accept whatever the others decide."

Going to bed, Wesley was very subdued, obviously not
in the mood for sex. They lay and talked about the
game: about fairy-tales and fantasy stories, about
magic. Wesley's mind was on the conversation, but it
was also on something else: he acted like he was
thinking at half his normal speed. Gunn was right
almost to the minute about when the other thing would
break the surface. With a sudden change of tone to
quietly defeated: "I've never understood what women
see when they look at me. Apart from the 99% who
immediately assume I'm gay."

God, where d'you start with that one? "So who's been
lookin' at you? We're talkin' human women, right?"

A shrug. "I doubt if it makes any difference. I can
see them deciding something about me. No matter what I
do."

" 'Do', like what? What I seen, 's you always bein'
super-polite. 'n' Anne - or Yan or whoever - decidin'
that y're very serious 'n' very English. Y'know, cool
in a weird sort of way. What you want them to decide?
Gotta be a cover  'bout you and me? You're the
straightest skinny white guy that ever lived?"

Wesley shook his head. "Not now. I don't care now. I
meant..." A deep sigh. "... the way I used to be."

When he had two arms? "Y'mean, how y'used to be when
Cordy had the hots for you?"

A brief snort, not really a laugh, then, flatly: "Yes.
Exactly."

"So she didn't say what she saw? Wasn't that kind of
crush? Or you thinkin' what you'd've 'done'
differently?"

"I think she liked the accent. And the tailoring.
While I liked the breasts and the confidence. She was
good company but I have to wonder who we were. Who we
thought we were. And the same for anyone who - With
men, they just want to know how you fuck, what you'll
do. Women... you do have to wonder what they expect,
why they've fixed on you."

Eventually Gunn said, "You care if women like you. You
don't with men."

A pause, then Wesley nodded. "I did the way I used to
be. Now it's the other way around. Or - Not with
'men'. With you."

And with Angel. Wesley did care what Angel thought of
him. Not about being liked, though. All about being
trusted. Being trusted to be useful, back in the
beginning. Now... Gunn thought Wesley needed Angel to
trust that he would always be there, that he would
always put Angel first.

* * * * *


-----------------------

Rather read Kungai in HTML or PDF? See http://www.kelper.co.uk/kungai