[Gunnwesley] Fic: Kungai Part Four 3/11 (Wesley/Gunn, NC17)

[helenraven]

Title: Kungai Part Four 3/11

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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The theatre was locked up tight, but Gunn knew five
people who could deal with that, and one of them
(Scott) was there in half an hour, and then Gunn and
Wesley were creeping in with all the crossbows and
stakes they could carry. The cage that Angel had seen
was on the stage, about twenty people inside, most of
them curled on the ground asleep. There was a vampire
standing guard. Well, sitting guard, probably also
asleep. But there was a massive chain and padlock on
the door of the cage and there were probably more
vampires in the building. Was there a smart way of
doing this, that would save all of those people and
put a final stop to Sanders' career? They backed out
of the building and returned to the truck to talk.

Their lock-breaker Scott was having a coffee around
the corner, waiting to lock up the theatre again. They
could take him in, kill the guard and open the cage,
all quiet enough that the other vamps should sleep
right through. But when the vamps found the empty
cage... No chance of a surprise attack after that.

Well, they couldn't leave those people in the cage. Of
course they couldn't. They'd have them out within an
hour, no matter what.

But what if they replaced them with another group of
people, all with weapons and training? The vamps
wouldn't notice the difference, it was just a crate of
food. Scott could fix the chain and the padlock so the
cage could only be opened from the inside. Be an even
better surprise if they had other people hidden all
round the theatre. Maybe Sanders would hold a meeting
that night, reel off his slogans, dole out rewards,
get his team all motivated. Or maybe there'd just be
him and his henchmen, coming down to feed. Either way,
it'd be a good haul of vamps.

"Would your crew do it? Would any of them be willing
to go in the cage?"

"Think they'd be fighting for the chance." Gunn called
Rondell, who loved the idea and brought in all of the
crew who were at the base when Gunn called. This gave
them twenty-six people including Gunn and Wesley;
they'd put twelve in the cage and the rest around the
building.

As soon as they'd agreed on the plan and handed out
roles, the rescue party went in. Wesley and George
stayed in the theatre after everyone was out, on watch
for any other vamps appearing. Rondell talked to the
people from the cage, learned that there was a meeting
on that night, could bring in up to a hundred vamps.
And add the gang of seven or eight who ran the
meetings... A very good haul.

Gunn and his cage-crew went in first, with the idea
that they'd provide a diversion if any of the snipers
got into trouble while moving into position. The
snipers were organised in four teams, each with its
own zone of the building; they went in a team at a
time, in order of their distance from the back door.
Scott fixed the door so it would seem locked to the
vamps but would open to the crew with a simple trick,
then he went home and they were left to wait.

At around two in the afternoon a small, dark-haired
female vampire was suddenly on the stage near the
cage. She must have come from the wings, to be able to
get there so quietly. She looked around for the guard,
wasn't at all worried not to find him, just muttered
"Typical," then gave a broad, jagged smile as she
turned to the cage. Her arm thrust into the cage,
lightning-quick, and she caught Taye's wrist and
pulled so he slammed against the bars - and then she
was dust. Worth every second of the wait, and the
cage-crew couldn't help letting out some of their
feelings of triumph. They heard themselves
immediately, though, and cut it dead. Maybe it had
sounded like a cry of panic... but was that normal
from the cage in the middle of the afternoon? The
people hadn't said anything to Rondell about the days,
just about the nights.

The sound must have been fairly normal, because the
next vampire took ten minutes or more to arrive, and
she was just wondering what "Lisa" was up to. But this
one didn't think it was "typical" to have two missing
vampires. She looked properly, and she saw the
sprinkling of dust around the chair and by the cage,
and she didn't really believe it but she looked at the
humans in the cage, testing out the wild idea that
there might be something in there other than terrified
food. And maybe someone met her eyes, or maybe she saw
a stake or maybe she could just smell the difference.
She ran for the wings, shouting that something had
happened to the food. They stopped her with the
crossbows, but too late: the other vamps were on their
way.

The fight was over quickly and then they all went for
ice-cream. The ice-cream was Rondell's suggestion, and
Rondell also took charge of organising the new plan:
picking off any vampires who showed up for the night's
meeting. He chose the four best shots (including
Wesley), with eight others on reloading duty
(including Gunn). The meeting started at nine, so
they'd come back at eight-thirty and take up their
positions.

The crew was going to Venice Beach for the rest of the
afternoon. All agreed they needed a game of pickup to
let off steam after all that waiting.

"You play pickup?" George to Wesley. Not a surge of
curiosity about English customs, but an invitation. To
Wesley. From a member of the crew. Gunn couldn't let
himself smile, couldn't look at either of them - too
close already to having a stupid, happy glow.

"I - Uh. No. No, I don't play." Wesley too surprised
to manage to sound pleased. Would George manage to
hear it as more than a flat no?

"Guess y'don't watch it, either?" Still friendly.
Maybe even a joke.

Wesley smiled. "I don't really watch anything except
films."

"Yeah? Hey, you seen 'Minority Report' ?" Quickly,
like he'd just been reminded of something.

Wesley hadn't, since it was Tom Cruise (and, anyway,
it wasn't out on video yet), and George hadn't seen it
either, but they traded what they'd heard; and
steadily worked out how to talk to one another about
something other than ambush tactics.

Rondell asked Gunn if he was coming to the park, but
Gunn shook his head. "Things t'do." Get back to Angel,
mostly. "Next time." When there was a 'next time' that
wasn't an emergency.

Angel was asleep. They could have gone to the beach.
They talked about heading out again, wanting some sun
after those hours shut in the theatre. But when Wesley
asked if Gunn wanted to go and find the crew, Gunn
realised that he didn't need sun nearly as much as he
needed to be alone and naked with Wesley. Not for sex
- or not immediately, anyway - but listening to Wesley
and George had made him feel so close to Wesley. So
glad to be with him. And when he felt like that the
first thing he needed was to close the gap, to be
touching Wesley.

Wesley wanted the sex, which was how Gunn put the
suggestion: that he was in the mood for slow, very
slow. Wesley was far enough behind Gunn, though, that
he was still thinking about wanting sun. Not a
difficult choice, but he couldn't hide the fact that
it was a choice.

"We'll go out tomorrow. Or... Look. Is that enough
there to give you your L.A. feeling? Enough for
today?" There was sunlight coming through the blinds
in the living room, making a grid on the carpet a few
feet from the window.

Wesley laughed, said it was perfect, drew Gunn into
the light and started to undress him. It wasn't quite
the first time they'd had sex in that room, but the
first time they'd really made the choice. The first
time they'd been naked. Angel woke up about twenty
minutes in: they heard sudden movements, low snarling.
The screen was angled away but Wesley didn't think it
was Angelus, since Angelus usually talked. Angel angry
then, for some reason, or hallucinating. They lay
quietly and listened for a while, not disturbed, just
curious; until Wesley raised himself up and they
started again with a kiss.

That night, Gunn was in a team with Jackson, the
marksman, and Jed, the other loader. Jackson had been
with the crew for two, three years, and Jed had joined
a couple of weeks after Gunn had last seen him at the
shelter, which had been the night of Angel's first
fake vision. They were busy for the first half hour,
taking their share of the twenty prompt vamps, but in
the next hour there were less than half that number in
stragglers, and they passed the time in talking and in
playing games with lists. Jed knew, now, exactly how
Gunn had come to leave his crew; not that he talked
about it directly, but Gunn could tell that he had the
full background. Or the chilled-out version of the
full background, anyway, where the shock and the anger
were fading memories, and the crew had come out fine,
and Gunn hadn't changed so very much, after all.

There couldn't be anyone left in the crew who needed
to talk of Wesley as a freak, or ask what it said
about Gunn that he'd choose a man like that over his
own kind. Maybe there were still some who thought it
but they kept it to themselves now, even when someone
like Jed appeared with his questions and new stories
about Gunn and Wesley. Just confirmation, really, of
what Gunn had seen earlier that day, but Gunn could
take any amount of that kind of confirmation.

* * * * *

Wesley was going to get to do his survey. Not really
the survey he'd hoped to do and it might not even go
halfway to answering his original questions, but it
would still be a damn good start. Their main support
was coming from the demon business-community, who had
no problem at all with Wesley doing their marketing
research for free. They gave him any introductions
that he asked for, and about half of the ideas that he
ended up using.

Wesley used the computer for a lot of his work on the
survey. Gunn offered to type in the information from
the forms, but a lot of them weren't in English, and
anyway Wesley wanted to be able to deal directly with
his own survey database. He really was quite
possessive about it; not in the way of wanting Gunn to
back off, but anything Gunn could do with the
database, Wesley wanted to be able to do just as well.

There were more demons in L.A. than Wesley would ever
have guessed, and many more demon languages, as he
discovered when he started asking what languages were
spoken inside the household. He made a second database
for the languages, and by the beginning of May he'd
decided that there were at least eighteen main groups.
For some groups, he knew three or four languages (well
enough to issue an invoice, at any rate, or to decide
if a particular document was about jam-making or about
ritual sacrifice); but about half of the groups were a
complete mystery to him, and of course he wasn't going
to leave it like that. His next project, when he'd
finished the survey, would be to reach at least an
invoicing level for one language in each of the
missing groups.

The first week in May also saw their first practical
use of the survey database: to identify the
most-likely place to find a Haklar demon that Angel
had seen in a vision. Haklars were not the
form-completing type, but several other demons had
complained to Wesley about the Haklar that had forced
people out of the North Shore of Lake Hollywood, and
Wesley had put it in, marked as "hearsay".

That was a busy week. Not just the Haklar (and the
survey and training and work), but also Rondell
calling them in to help against some vampires who were
stalking homeless people in McKenzie Park. They were
up for most of Friday and Saturday night, doing more
of that waiting; and with the four interns on
emergency duty with Angel for the first time. The
interns were all very matter-of-fact about taking
their four or five hours of nightshift. Newton took
the first half of Friday night, including training,
Philip Moyes took the second half, and then Julia
Kepler and Thomas Li did Saturday. Maybe they were
used to doing nights, Lilah making them live on London
time one week, Tokyo time the next.

Wesley got George out of a tight spot in the park on
Saturday night. Not that either George or Wesley was
saying that Wesley had "saved George's life" against
the vampires, but George was obviously very, very glad
that Wesley had been so close. George didn't really
know how to thank Wesley, though, since he'd seen -
practically from that night at the thrift shop - that
Wesley didn't do high-fives or back-thumping, so
instead he kept doing things to include him. Wesley
said "no" or "I don't know" about half the time, but
he said it the right way.

Angel had a vision on Sunday evening, of a young woman
with long hair and glasses, standing in a library
reading from a large book, with a mist demon rising
behind her, about to attack her. Or maybe it was a
type of water demon? Something swirling and obviously
threatening. Angel talked about the "public library",
that the demon was going to "swallow her".

The central library had shut about an hour ago. Wesley
said Angel used to know an underground route into the
library; he'd gone there to do research back before
Doyle persuaded him that they needed a computer. But
he'd never taught the route to Wesley. So... they
could go down there and try to break in aboveground,
or they could wait until it opened on Monday. Why
would the girl be there on a Sunday, anyway? Unless
she'd broken in herself, and she didn't look like the
breaking-in type. They'd been given some warning for a
change, maybe to give Wesley a chance to read up on
how to kill a mist demon.

They made photocopies of Angel's drawing and cut the
demon out, then they shared out the list of
departments and went around the library asking if
anyone had seen the girl in the picture. Gunn was the
one who found someone who recognised her: the woman at
the desk in the Science Department. The girl was
Winifred Burkle (or "Fred"), and she'd disappeared
from the Foreign Language Department five years ago.
There had been flyers all over the library, but no one
had ever found even a single clue. She'd been studying
physics, working part-time in the library. She was
supposed to be shelving books on the morning she
disappeared. And why was Gunn asking? Where did he get
that picture?

"I'm a private detective. Been sent to look for her."

"Oh! Has there been... Is there any hope?"

Gunn shrugged and looked uncomfortable. "There's
always some hope, yeah? But after five years, you...
Mostly you think about knowing."

The librarian found him a copy of the flyer, and he
wrote his name and number for her on the back of
another copy and then went out into the corridor to
call Wesley.

They met at the nearest coffee stand and then took
their coffee into the gardens. "It's a fake vision.
That far in the past." But Wesley was frowning as they
spoke.

Gunn nodded, seeing the problem just as well as
Wesley. "Yeah, but how did Angel know about it? 'cos
he never saw it in a vision. Unless... he had
something to do with it?"

Definitely: "No. He was in New York five years ago. He
must have seen the flyers when he came to the library.
Maybe they're still stuck up in some of the corridors
he used. Maybe she looks like someone who Angelus...
She does look a lot like Drusilla. But why he would
imagine her being attacked by a mist demon... Maybe
it's a pun. I don't know."

Gunn shrugged. "Y'know dreams. 'And then there was
this mist demon. Only it wasn't really a mist demon,
it was that guy who used to park cars at the Italian
place.' Dream, hallucination, s'all just stirred in
together." Wesley laughed and agreed, and they
finished their coffee without hurrying and then went
home.


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