[Gunnwesley] Fic: Kungai Part Three 1/18 (Wesley/Gunn, NC17)

[helenraven]

Title: Kungai Part Three 1/18

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

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Gunn had decided they'd be better keeping the human
and the demon markets separate. They'd keep the name
Angel Investigations for the human market so someone
who'd heard of them from the early days could still
find them, and for the demon market they'd have a new
name: Wyndham Gunn. Separate 'phone-lines, too. The
'phone in the apartment would still be for Angel
Investigations, and they'd use Gunn's cellphone for
Wyndham Gunn.

Gunn set up two email addresses and made two websites:
both very plain, but looking much more like the work
of sane people than anything from their competitors;
and hopefully looking different enough from each other
that someone who found both sites wouldn't get them
confused. He got new cards made for himself and Wesley
for both businesses, and he decided to leave the
street address off all of the cards and say instead
just "Inglewood".

Really, they could do with an office, especially for
meetings with demons - an office covered by the same
type of spell as Caritas. But they just couldn't
afford it. Wesley said that even when he and Angel had
the office, a lot of clients preferred to meet
somewhere else - a bar, usually, or a coffee shop -
somewhere that they'd chosen for themselves. Gunn came
up with a list of four central locations for meeting
humans, so he and Wesley would be ready with
suggestions if someone asked for a location. The list
of locations for meeting demons started out with just
Caritas, but Gunn gave himself two weeks to find them
other places that were also safe, but had less noise
and longer opening hours.

He'd taken a stack of his Wyndham Gunn cards along to
Caritas on the Thursday before the tour, and he'd
given a set each to Matt, Grouw and Piriti. Grouw told
him during the tour that they'd given cards to five or
six people in Caritas, and that he'd given some to
people at work and to his roommates; the roommate with
the largest and most complicated family had gone home
for the weekend, and Grouw thought he'd probably
mention the tour to his family, at the very least.

Gunn had thought they'd have weeks to wait, with him
spending most days of those weeks looking for demon
hangouts where he could meet clients, listen out for
gossip, or at least leave a few cards. No way L.A.'s
demons were gonna be lined up around the block, like
they'd been lying awake nights over shaky translations
and complicated research. The first call came on the
Monday after the tour, and Gunn told himself it was
just some kids playing a joke, seeing if the card was
for real; there wasn't really a shelter for homeless
demons, not even in L.A., not anywhere, and there
certainly wasn't some poor, lost demon, that no one
knew where he was from. Gunn called Matt as the first
stage in trying to check with Grouw, and Matt told him
straight-off that, yeah, there was a shelter, Grouw
had spent some time there a few years back, when he'd
hit a bad patch after his family had skipped town. So
Gunn was wrong several ways, and they had their first
case, really that soon.

The shelter was run by a religious order, tiny little
demons with way too many arms, who thought the meaning
of life was all tied up with travelling. Or maybe with
making your way in a strange place. Gunn could live
without understanding the details for now; maybe
later, if it looked like they'd be seeing much more of
the shelter. The lost demon was probably a kid, maybe
not very bright. It had been found wandering the
sewers near Universal Studios. Got separated from its
tour party? Or brought to L.A. by accident, stowed
away or something? First priority was finding out what
it would eat, then they'd work on getting it home. The
kid ate most kinds of snails, and the monks (or nuns)
had found its family by Thursday - as Grouw told Gunn
at Caritas on Thursday night.

They got paid fifty bucks, which the monks had said
upfront was all they could afford. Not a great rate
for ten hours or more of intensive research and
snail-collecting, but better than nothing. Wesley
hadn't wanted to take the money, thought they should
treat the shelter the way they treated Anne's, and of
course he was right, but Gunn really needed to hold
that money: the very first earnings for Wyndham Gunn.

By the next Monday they'd had four more calls and two
emails, had earned a hundred bucks more, and had
meetings set up with a school and an employment agency
that might just possibly lead to a very useful amount
of regular work. Gunn started putting more and more of
his time to learning his way around Wesley's books,
building up his working knowledge of demons so he
could take some of the load off Wesley. The time might
come when they would have to turn away work. The time
might even come when he could run an entire case on
his own.

Angel was confused sometimes about their new work,
especially at first. He'd see Wesley surrounded by
books and he'd think it was a case like their old
ones, like the visions. He'd ask how dangerous this
demon was, what sort of weapons he should get ready.
Wesley and Gunn explained, and the first three or four
times he reacted with the same harsh disbelief each
time, but then he remembered better and better. By the
beginning of December, when they got their first check
by mail ($320), Angel no longer needed an explanation,
but asked instead about progress on their current
cases, whether there'd been any more calls. Sometimes
he could help: he checked email, did research online,
improved their website, and sometimes he'd surprise
them with how much he knew about demons. But then he'd
been around for ten times longer than Gunn.

Angel envied them the work, Gunn was sure. Being busy
and useful, coming back every day with five, ten
stories about the amazing L.A. that they were just
starting to discover. Of course Angel would never
admit to anything like envy, had to say instead that
this new work was all kind of tame, compared with the
good old days of Angel Investigations. Gunn saw the
twist of pain cross Wesley's face, and wondered how
Angel could miss noticing how hard Wesley took any
reference to Doyle. Because that's what Angel meant by
"the good old days": the time before Wesley, when
Angel was working with his friend Doyle. If Doyle had
lived and had kept the visions, would the Powers have
seen any reason to save Wesley from the Kungai?

"Yeah, sure it's tame. You wanna opt out, not take
your share of what it's bringin' in, you tell us. We
c'n find our own plans for the money. Y'know, maybe
get somethin' tame like a pool table."

Yes, Angel envied them. He had to, stuck in here
without even a TV, no connection to the living,
working world except what the visions forced on him.
Gunn couldn't imagine how he'd deal with that himself;
except that he'd do it in a way that didn't hurt
Wesley.

* * * * *

Four weeks to the day since Gunn had passed the first
batch of business cards out to the boys, and he and
the boys were in Caritas as usual for a Thursday
night. Well, would have been as usual except Wesley
called after half an hour to say that Angel had had a
vision about a nest of vampires, Gunn shouldn't come
back to the apartment but should go directly to Vernon
and La Salle. Wesley was at the trunk of the car when
Gunn arrived, sorting out crossbows, axes, stakes and
holy water.

"The house is around the block. There are between six
and eight vampires. There are people in the house,
being held in separate rooms. They've been chained up,
may have been there for several days. I don't know the
layout of the house. We'll have to rely on surprise.
Can you carry two crossbows in this time?"

"What about Angel?" Angel was still sitting in the
car. Gunn bent down to look in at him, and saw him
flinching away from something, acting kind of panicked
- like there was a wasp shut in the car with him.

"We can't use him. He hasn't really come out of the
vision, he's not seeing what's in front of him. It's
as if he's trapped in a nightmare. I brought him with
me in case he could identify the house from the
outside. And I think he did, I think he reacted to one
of the houses. But it felt as if..." Wesley was
shaking his head. "Almost as if he was seeing the
house as a dream that he was having inside the
nightmare. As if the image only got through to him
because it belonged inside the nightmare. We can't
trust him to fit into any plan. Not like this."

There were three people in the house, all kids off the
street, all terrified, all suffering the effects of
confinement and loss of blood. They knew each other,
had all been taken together two days ago, and the
vampires had been playing with them; the lead vampires
got even more pleasure from head-games than they did
from blood. And, OK, that meant the kids were still
alive, but who the hell would wait two whole days
before sending a vision for them? What had Wesley said
about the Powers? "Benign incompetence" versus
"callous efficiency" - great choice.

Afterwards, Gunn took the kids to hospital in the
truck while Wesley took Angel home in the car; best to
keep the kids away from Angel, no guessing how his
nightmare would react to the sight of them. Wesley was
only at home for long enough to lock Angel in his
room, and he joined Gunn in the waiting room at the
hospital after half an hour.

"Was he difficult?"

"No. He did let me guide him. Well, push him, mostly -
it was safest to stay out of range of his arms. He was
fending things off. Shouting. I thought about the gag
but... The noise didn't seem any worse than the TV
upstairs."

"He been like this before?"

Wesley shook his head. "You've seen him the way he
usually is after a vision. Where it's obviously still
vivid to him, the most important thing in the world.
But he knows it's about someone else. And it leaves
enough of his head clear that he can take action. Ask
the right questions. Work with us. When it's
Angelus... He thinks each vision is a personal
invitation. That the cruelty is calling out to him.
But he does come out of the visions, he does know
where he is, he sees exactly how we're stopping him
from answering the call. This time... No, I've never
seen anything like this. A vision that doesn't let go,
not after he's finished drawing, not even after the
people are safe."

"Could be he's like this 'cos it was vampires?"

A shrug. "Maybe. But they've never had this effect
before. He might be able to tell us later. Though he's
never been able to explain any patterns in the type of
vision that brings out Angelus."

Gunn had called Anne to check that she had room in the
shelter for the kids. They had several hours to wait
in the hospital, but then the kids were all released
in the space of twenty minutes, so Wesley took two to
the shelter in the car while Gunn took the third in
the truck. Anne didn't need any help, and they got
home around midnight.

They didn't try to look in on Angel before they went
to bed, but Gunn understood just from the sounds
exactly what Wesley had been saying about Angel being
trapped in a nightmare. A nightmare happening to him,
not to some poor kid, not to someone else. He was
crying out and begging and flailing, like he was one
of those kids, seeing the vampires coming back for
him, over and over again, hearing the same terrible
things happening to his friends. Crying out about so
many things, in so many ways: you'd think the vision
had made Angel live every second of those two days
before the kids had been saved.

Once they were in the bedroom Gunn couldn't hear
Angel, not even when the light was out and he seemed
to be able to hear every other sound in the apartment
block. "God. Think if I listened much longer, I'd
start to think I could tell which vamp was with him.
How many there were. All the... All the differences."
No response from Wesley, not even a grunt; though
Wesley's body got even more tense. "Wes?" Almost a
whisper. "He'll sleep it off. He'll be OK tomorrow."

Angel had gone quiet by morning, but you couldn't say
he was OK. When he came out to get blood, he moved
like he was half asleep, and when he looked at things,
at either of them, it was like he was seeing them from
the middle of a slow, calm dream, the type of dream
where you accept anything that's happening. He didn't
heat the blood, drank it straight from the flask, and
then stayed kneeling in front of the open fridge until
Wesley took the flask from him, wiped the blood from
his mouth, and then coaxed him to his feet and back to
his room. He stayed the same all day, and Wesley
locked him in his room when they went out to train.

* * * * *

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