frimfram: Fathoms: m/m kiss/PG13: Wes/Angel

Title: Fathoms
Author: frimfram
Pairing: Wesley/Angel
Rating: Teen
Summary: Set in the Birthdayverse, as seen in the AtS S3 episode Birthday where Cordelia never came to work for Angel. This story takes place a week or so after Wes's arrival in L.A.; in the canon 'verse it would happen sometime between Parting Gifts and Somunambulist.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon, ME, and all that jazz.

NB: Nobody seemed to be assigned to graphics today, so I made myself a banner! Hope that's ok :)

Thanks to bogwitch, jans_intentions and Phin for the beta-reads.



Fathoms

Since he came to L.A. Wes has woken to phantom scents: rain on hot skin, mint and sugar, engine oil.

He counts the cracks in the ceiling and waits for the smells to go away. The fragrant ghosts take longer and longer to dispel, and he finishes counting now before they leave. Wes heaves himself upright on the squeaking mattress and breathes hard. He’s still learning to move without setting off the injury, hemming and hedging round the agonising heat that lurks in wait, ready to snare his nerves. A few weeks ago he used to sit on the bed and change the dressings, and the effort and pain would wear him out enough to lie back down and fall asleep. Now, he has nothing. The scar tissue’s open to the air. It itches like buggery.

Wes swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands, rolling the knuckles of his feet down carefully onto floorboards that would squeak and betray him in a heartbeat. He listens. Fabric softener, sweet and drying, flavours the air and makes his nose itch. That’s all it is, fabric softener; not English summer air. And there’s nothing to hear: no percussion of rain, no crunch of breaking glass. Wes breathes evenly and holds the memory firmly under the surface, willing it to give up the struggle.

He stands. He decides to lie down again. He sets out for the door. Five creeping steps across the room he catches sight of his reflection, grey and stupid in the wall mirror, all bug eyes and curved spine. He makes himself stand straight. Opens the door with his surviving hand and gains the corridor, pushing the door shut behind him and leaning against it with eyes closed and chin raised. He breathes.

It’s never quiet outside. Passing cars rattle the windows and a far-off siren laments. Wes film-noirs his way along the hall, back glued to the wall, head turned hard to the left so his cheek touches the plaster. He stoops to pass under the coat pegs, breathes in the savoury bitter smell of bike leathers that have hung untouched since that first day here. There’s a burnt spot where the Kungai’s yellow viscera seared through the hide. Wes wonders if the trail it was leaving is still hot, if anyone else will pick it up. He’s all done with that now.

The oily smell’s back, but Wes knows this time it’s coming from his abandoned biker clothes. He doesn’t want to remember. As a matter of fact he goes to great lengths not to dwell. This place is haunted, but only since he moved in.

He bites the tip of his tongue when he pushes open the door at the end of the corridor, distracting the niggling inner voice that wonders whether this is a good idea. It is, of course. A good idea. He knows what he has to do. Any responsible person in Wesley’s position would be obliged to proceed just as he is. He is acting out of concern for the welfare of an incapable –

Angel’s sitting upright, straight and serene. His arms stretch up above his head, hands relaxed over one another between the manacles holding them there. The smooth, taut muscles in his arms scarcely bulge, as though Angel is doing this for himself, some kind of strange meditation. Blue light, pooling from the opposite building where a neon sign advertises a strip club, drowns the room. Angel’s eyes are unfathomable in the blue and his lips look swollen.

“It’s me,” Wes says. The pacific light leaches the heat from his blush.

Angel parts his lips and stares.

Wes swallows. “I, um, I wanted to check on you. I thought I heard…” He tails off, embarrassed by the dry sound of his voice in the submerged dark. Angel is still. Wes can’t tell if he’s staring up at him from the depths, or drowned.

Outside the rattle and smash of breaking glass bounces off the tall buildings, echoing up. It makes Wes flinch, jangling the sense-memory that refuses to let him go, and making his fingers tremble. He pads away from the sound, breath held. He measures five paces across the bare boards til he pulls up toe-to-toe with Angel’s bare white feet. “You… are you… how are you feeling?” Wes asks, gritting his teeth against the hope in his voice.

Angel says nothing.

“It’s been an entire week since the vision,” says Wesley.

Angel does not blink. He unfurls the fingers of his left hand, stretching them out as though they’ve gone numb, though Wesley can’t imagine there’s a circulation problem.

Wes’s skin burns. Awkwardly, knee joints cracking, he lowers himself to the floor and relaxes his spasming muscles, inch by inch, onto the wood. Angel’s head rests against the wall. He’s bigger than Wesley, squarer, and Wesley has to look up to search his eyes. The world’s shuttered down now, under a fringe of his own eyelashes. It’s easier down here. “Perhaps it was a one-off,” says Wes, curling his fingers into his clammy palm to stop them trembling. “It was obviously a mistake for the visions to pass to you at all; surely the Powers will see that. They’ll take them back.”

Angel’s expression stays fixed, but Wes shrinks under it.

“I – sorry.” He ducks his eyes and swallows. Staccato beats pulse his skin, blood racing in his ears and burning up his cheeks. He risks a look back up at Angel, and whispers. “Angel. Are you still in there?”

A car horn shrills outside. Wes looks up at Angel, one more eyeful of open mouth and fathomless stare, and he gives up. Memory winds its tendrils round him, swallows him down and binds him. His next lungful of air is bitter with petrol smells and the heat in his cheeks stings with sunburn. The thrumming that trembles his body is the burr of an engine.

They call the car a Dolly. It’s a Citroën 2CV, grass-green and geriatric, but it ferries the Academy XI’s cricket whites and bats to their opponents’ grounds without a grumble. They’re all seventeen and Eddie Beaumont, tall and broad-shouldered and the team’s star spin-bowler, is the first of them to get his own car. The Dolly’s his pride and joy. Eddie likes to wash it in the parking spaces behind the sixth formers’ dormitories. All summer he prepares for the ritual by peeling off his shirt and slinging it over his shoulder, letting the soapy water splash on his hot skin. He sponges the Dolly’s body with supplicating gestures, rubs it down with a chamois, and at last anoints the paintwork with turtle-wax.

Wes’s dorm room overlooks the car park. He suspects he’s not the only one who watches this display with longing.

When Eddie, hair rain-slathered to his brow, offers Wesley a lift home after a rained-out match, Wes glows with pride quite as if he’s been offered a berth aboard the QE2. He sits in state at Eddie’s left hand, crunching everton mints from a tin in the glove compartment, watching the rain pound down around them. Appetising air, fabric-softener-sweet, wafts through the open windows and the rain strafes them with stray chill drops. Hedges scratch lazily at the Dolly’s flanks, back-slapping it down bramble-choked country roads. Its trundling wheels crush fallen blossom, rain-dancing pollen, and the dust of a newly-dead August.

“Excellent job at mid-off,” remarks Eddie.

“Sorry?” Wes is mid-crunch. A shard of black-and-white striped sweet sticks itself to the roof of his mouth. “Oh! I see! Well, that’s terribly kind. Thank you!” He coughs nervously. “You did, well, a sterling job in the bowling yourself… I mean, you always do, it was just that today I really, you know, saw…” His face is intolerably hot. He snatches a glance at Eddie, whose aristocratic mouth is twisted in amusement. The rain rattles, machine-gun-fire, on the Dolly’s roof. Wes draws in a shaky lungful of air. Then his nose hits the windscreen.

In the body of the slewing car everything feels completely still. No skid and spin as the car slaloms off the road and down the embankment, no sickening twist when it flips onto its roof. No scatter and sting as the windscreen shatters into grit; only the dumbfounded vastness of pain, fat and square and wide as the world.

Wes misses the pain when it begins to recede. It gives him back his sight and sense of taste, which reports the rusty trickle of blood in the back of his throat. He coughs. He realises he is upside-down, and it strikes him as rather funny. He crawls his hand to the door-handle and succeeds in opening the door, and then in hauling himself out. He slumps in the grass for a saturated minute, storm rain pounding on him and sending the blood from his nose rivering out over his face, then wavers to his feet. He gives his nose a tentative prod and takes note of the fireworks of pain that burst before his eyes. He wonders about lying back down in the grass and seeing what happens.

Then he remembers Eddie.

The petrol smell is dizzying, thick and savoury. Wes wrenches the driver’s door open and wrestles Eddie free of the tangle of seat-belt. He hauls him out and back up the embankment, and all the time all he thinks of is whether crashed cars explode in real life or just in action films. Eddie’s eyes are flat as glass. Wes can feel a weak pumping in the hollow of his throat, fast and shallow. Wes has never been so strong or calm. He’s taken countless first aid classes in the Academy, of course, and knows how to pinch Eddie’s nose and puff into his open mouth til another car arrives. He gets lost in the rhythm. It’s measured and regular, orderly under the dizziness. He hardly hears the whir of wheels and wail of sirens, is surprised by the blink of lights that throw a strange blue cast over the green ditch. When someone pries him free of Eddie, he stands, falls down, vomits, and watches the world go white.

Angel says, “Wes?”

Wes rocks forward, puts his hands on Angel’s shoulders and his mouth on Angel’s blue lips. He knows straight away that he’s lost. He can only fall apart when he lets go.