Once Xander begins his job at Wolfram & Hart, the rhythm of their days changes.

He misses the intensity of before, when his whole world consisted only of himself, Wesley and Wesley's apartment. A different intensity has arisen to take its place, but it's still new and chafes him a little.

Wesley has discovered a new field of scholarship: He's become a historian whose field of specialization is Xander Harris. He's like an archaeologist who digs with a spoon -- his explorations are slow and painstaking but unceasing. It's surprising how much ground he can sift.

Two or three nights a week, Xander comes home with a throbbing headache, a side effect from the restoration of his eye. He sits on the floor, leaning back against the couch. Wesley sits behind him, massaging his shoulders, rubbing his temples, letting his fingers trail through Xander's hair. It's here that he draws out Xander's history.

"Tell me about Sunnydale," Wesley says. "Do you miss it?"

In truth, Xander doesn't know how he feels. Sunnydale's collapse tore a gaping hole in him. But Wesley has poured so much into that crater -- he fills Xander, surrounds him, contains the entire world. Xander tips his head back against Wesley's knees. "I wish it was still there," he says. "But I wouldn't care if I never saw it again." He can't imagine missing anything ever again, except the hypnotic sound of Wesley's voice, the soothing touch of his hands.

Over these headache nights he offers up his past: school, his string of crap jobs, fumbling his way at last into work that held meaning for him. At Wesley's prompting, he talks about the people who were important to him: Willow, Jesse, Buffy, Giles. It's hard to breathe when he talks about Giles. He speaks of the library, but feels the sudden shock of his body flying back against his own, both of them falling in a graceless heap in the front of that convenience store. Xander's in the middle of a sentence about Giles and Jenny Calendar when the words get stuck sideways, won't come out. He pulls his knees up and presses the heels of his hands against his forehead. Something has gone haywire since the operation: He can't cry anymore, his eyes just burn.

Wesley slips down off the sofa then, enfolding him in strong arms. "He died in the arms of a friend," he murmurs. "That counts for something."

"He didn't know I was there."

"Perhaps he couldn't react, but on some level he must have been aware."

Xander wants to believe that, but wanting is as close as he can manage.

As the sifting goes on, it reaches deeper layers. His parents. "Tell me about your father," Wesley says on another headache night.

"No." It's not really his father he doesn't want to give up, but himself. The humiliations, large and small, his weakness. Wesley has seen quite enough evidence of that as it is. "No," he repeats, but the word sounds powerless even to him, more like an early gambit in a sex game than a refusal. There is no safe word out here in the living room the way there is in the bedroom (not that he's ever used it there).

Wesley treats it as he does all resistance. He persists, his voice calm and measured. "What was he like?"

The words come in a torrent, though Xander doesn't mean to let go of this information. It's slippery, hard to control. A few descriptive sentences about the old man lead to a litany of everything ever suffered at his hands. He expects to feel shame as it all tumbles out, but he cares about nothing but those long fingers massaging his scalp.

There's one piece of his history they never discuss, however: Cordelia. She's somehow sacred between them.

Nothing else is. His sexual books are open for inspection, too, but there's a different venue for that. This subject is brought up in the bedroom, a soft-spoken inquisition threaded through the things they do with each other. He doesn't intend to, but he tells Wesley everything there is to know about Anya. Wesley's hands and mouth relentlessly tease, drawing out information, pushing him to the brink of release but pulling him back. Wesley's voice becomes a running soundtrack through his memories of Anya, the patterns of his speech the rhythm they fucked to.

Wesley teases out his fantasies, the feelings he never acted on. (Once you've exhausted the topics of Faith and Anya, what else is left?) The excruciating urgency of the attraction between him and Willow. The thoughts he had about Larry when he was trying to wrap his mind around what exactly guys do with one another (something he's more than expert about now). His hopeless longing for Buffy those first years he knew her. And even though Xander has already given up every single detail surrounding his encounters with Faith, Wesley keeps circling around the subject, asking him to relive those nights in her grubby motel room.

When he resists, he's never sure if it's because he really doesn't want to, or because of the erotic charge when he finally gives in.

While words flow both ways through this conduit, memory flows in one direction only. After all this time there's so little he knows about Wesley. He tries to recall anything he'd learned when they met before. Watcher, of course. Fell in line with Council policy a lot more closely than Giles, though his career turned out to be a damn sight shorter. That's all he can dredge up. He'd had no interest in Wesley then, who was just an impediment to work around, an insufferable twit whom even Giles treated with contempt. They'd all consistently walk out of the library while he was speaking, ignore him if they bothered to stay. The only reason he'd noticed him at all was the jealousy Cordelia provoked when she threw herself at Wesley. It's hard for him to believe now that this is the same man.

Despite how little heed they'd given Wesley back then, Xander still sifts through his memories the way Wesley does, trying at quiet moments in the work day to come up with something more. It's easier to do this outside his presence -- though he's never far from Xander's thoughts. Even more acutely some times than others: Wesley has given him a cellphone set always to vibrate instead of ring. Xander never answers when it goes off, just follows the instructions he's been given. Think of this, Wesley will have whispered into his ear the night before, causing him to preserve it all in memory: friction and breath, hands and tongue, the heavy scent of oriental perfume that triggers thoughts of their first time together. Or Imagine me taking you in this very room. Imagine my hands locked around your wrists. Sometimes the call comes during a meeting. Xander has become adept at covering his distraction by rubbing a hand on his brow above the new eye. His colleagues all know about the eye, are solicitous regarding his headaches.

The things he learns, he discovers inadvertently. One night in the grip of a headache, as Wesley massages his neck and shoulders, he talks about that day at the zoo. How the hyena possessed him in kind of a rising fever, stripping away what was human about him. He stammers as he describes what he became, how he'd savaged Willow, terrorized that family. How he'd shoved Buffy to the ground, ready to force himself on her. "That's what this thing inside me wanted to do," he whispers.

Wesley's hands stop moving, resting on his shoulders. Suddenly they seem to be a great weight. Abruptly he rises and moves to the Scotch decanter. This is what Xander's been afraid of: revealing the one weakness that Wesley can't overlook. He falls silent as Wesley pours himself a glassful of Scotch. He downs a third of it before pouring Xander a glass, topping off his own. There's something haunted about his face as he hands Xander the glass.

"Wesley? What is it?"

"It's nothing." His voice is implacable, his expression shuttered. He seats himself on the corner of the couch, out of arm's reach, lost in his own thoughts.

Xander knows enough not to try to pursue him. Wesley's secrets are his own, his past an occult history. It's not Xander's place to explore them. Instead he lets the Scotch burn through him, lets himself fall back into the grip of the headache.

Another thing Xander discovers: He can abort the torrent of questions, the relentless probing, with one simple suggestion. All he needs to do is mention the idea of cleaning out that storage closet, and suddenly Wesley's all hands and tongue and a burning desire to give Xander anything he wants.

What he wants, more and more, has to do with the cage in the closet? what closet? closet. It drifts into his consciousness with greater frequency and a lot less driftiness. Not that he's had specific fantasies about it -- the vagueness of memory it seems to inspire in Wesley translates for Xander as a fascination that's shrouded in mist. The cage itself takes up too much space in his imagination for him to create a fantasy around it, and he has no pre-formed cage-kink to fold it into. Its existence alone is arousing enough. Xander never speaks of it, even when Wesley urges him to name whatever he'd like.

One Monday morning while Wesley's in the shower, he finds his thoughts -- and his prick -- stirring in that direction. Some irresistible impulse moves him from the bed to the closet, where he stands staring inside, breathing the stale, cedar-scented air. He thinks of the time he was locked in the book cage, staring at Willow's back. The hunger that had coursed through him was so primal, so overwhelming, that it buzzed through his synapses just like sexual heat. He'd been a simpler creature then, all physicality, and the sensations that flooded his body awoke all his hungers.

He feels that rising in him now, feels buffeted by want.

"What are you doing?" Wesley's quiet voice startles him, and he whirls, heart thudding.

He stammers, barely coherent. "I thought I'd get a look. Think about built-in storage. Carpenter, you know."

Wesley flicks his gaze down the length of Xander's naked body. "I see you have your tape measure out. Come here." He waits until Xander is halfway to him, then says, "Close that first."

Xander walks back to the closet, shuts the door. When he turns around he gets the idea this isn't going to be the all-request hour on station KWES. Xander's crossed a line, and he knows he requires correction.

Wesley's nothing if not subtle, and his form of correction doesn't involve anything as prosaic as riding crops. He's registered the hunger that consumes Xander, and turns it on him. "Tell me what you want," he murmurs, and Xander in no way mistakes this for an offer.

"You," he says. "Inside me."

This is the ending place -- if he's good enough -- not the starting point. This is the thing he'll have to earn. The ache in his groin and the hunger in his skin fuel his attentions to Wesley. If he's good enough -- if he's enough -- Wesley might allow him the same abandon that Xander gives to him. At the same time, the things he does with his mouth and his hands only feed the urgency of his own desire. Please, he thinks. Please, Wesley. But he does not say it -- Wesley has set out the rules, and this word is forbidden to him today.

The brink is a place Wesley has introduced him to -- like an intimate cafe, it's become their special place, and he takes Xander there often, invites him to linger. He takes him there today with hands and tongue and teeth, showing him previously hidden corners, to the point where Xander would beg if he were allowed, would weep if his new eye permitted. All he can make are inarticulate sounds, groans and cries as Wesley stokes the fever in him beyond endurance.

Finally Wesley reaches for the lube on the bedside table, and Xander starts to turn onto his belly. "No," Wesley says. "On your back." He pushes Xander's legs up, entering him so they can fuck face to face. Wesley's never taken him this way before. Xander's mesmerized by the intensity of those blue eyes, the scar on his throat that turns deeper red as his face flushes with exertion. He groans in relief as Wesley finally allows him to fall past the brink, and the building orgasm begins to roll through his body.

Wesley pulls back and gives a soft pinch to the delicate skin behind Xander's balls, sending the orgasm jolting to a sloppy halt. "I'm afraid we'll have to finish this later," he says, as if they're having a conversation in the hallway. He withdraws. "I have an early meeting this morning and I have just enough time for a quick shower. I'll need the car, so you'll have to call for a cab." He disappears into the bathroom, leaving Xander sprawled across the bed, an arm crooked over his face. When he comes out, fastening his shirt cuffs, he tells Xander, "When I call you today, I want you to come to my office."

Waiting for Wesley's call seems to take up the whole of his being. Somehow work gets done, conversations are had, and no one seems to note anything unusual about him. Of all days, it's today that Dawn makes a surprise appearance at Wolfram & Hart to ask if he'll have lunch with her. "I miss you so much," she says.

"I'm kind of on call today. Is the company cafeteria okay? It's pretty nice. I'll put it on my account."

"Sure, anywhere. As long as -- hey, there's something diff-- oh my god. You did it, you got the glass eye." He's been careful to keep mostly his right side toward her. "It looks so real I just didn't even think -- can I take a good look?"

"I'd rather you didn't."

"Xander, there's nothing to be sensitive about. It looks great. What little you let me see, anyway. No one would ever know."

"Here we are." He steers her into the cafeteria. "There's the list of today's specials, but you can pretty much get whatever you want."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong."

"Why are you so tense?"

"I'm not tense," he snaps. He softens his voice. "I'm sorry. I'm likely to get called into a meeting any second. It's a big account. There's a lot at stake."

"Oh. Do you like what you're doing?"

Xander nods. "It's pretty interesting." He gives her the brief, carefully-edited-for-transmission-back-to-Buffy version. "How about you? How's life at the Hyperion?"

Dawn considers the three entrees on offer, asking the server about the veal piccata, but settling on the meatloaf and macaroni and cheese. "It's good. New trainees coming in all the time, but we all get a bathroom to ourselves. Sweet, huh?"

"Deluxe accommodations, sounds like." So why isn't Wesley calling? He'd thought surely at lunch hour --

They carry their trays to a table, where he seats himself at her left.

"So why is everyone so worried about you?"

"How should I know? Ask them." He slips his phone out of his pocket, flips it open to check that it's on.

"I have. They get really weird and won't say. Sort of like you, right now."

Xander shuts the phone, replaces it in his pocket. "I'm not acting weird." Fuck. Where is Wesley?

"Please. On the scale of weird, you're hovering right at eleven. This is fantastic, by the way. It tastes just like Mom's."

"I know. Can I sneak a bite?"

"Sure. But why didn't you just get some yourself?"

Because when he does, it tastes just like his mom's, that's why.

"Should I be worried?"

"No. I'm good." Except for the slight fact of his skin being on fire and his insides feeling completely hollowed out. Except for wanting to smash his phone into tiny pieces because it hasn't rung. Except for wishing he could break Wesley's office door down and plead to be fucked. Other than that, he's terrific.

"Why is everyone so freaked?"

"I said I don't know, Dawn. Jesus."

He spends the rest of lunch apologizing and cajoling her out of being all hurt. She accepts a hug as she's leaving, though, and kisses his cheek, turning his face toward her as she steps back. "Wow. That really is good."

"Hey, there's my call. Gotta go." He retrieves his phone and peels off down the hallway, but it's just a ruse to get rid of her before she figures out exactly how damn good the eye is.

It's 5:05 when Wesley finally calls. Xander heads for his office, forcing himself to walk with measured steps. He taps lightly on the door.

"Come."

Xander sure as hell hopes to. He steps inside, closes the door behind him. Wesley's at his desk, taking notes from a pair of opened books. "Just a moment," he says, distracted.

Xander remains standing, looking around. It's not what he expected at all in here. No bookshelves, just a table with a row of identical books, like an abbreviated set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He waits, watching Wesley's pen fly across his yellow pad. His whole body hums with need, but he stays silent.

Finally Wesley looks up, pushing his glasses up to rub at his eyes. "Ah, Xander," he says, as if it's news to Wesley that he's there. "How has your day been?"

Xander holds his gaze. "Harder than usual."

"Ah." He sets the pen down. "That's to be expected. Have you taken any action on your own?"

Can't say he hadn't thought of it. But the idea had formed as some distant, impossible prospect, like wouldn't it be cool to be an astronaut. "No, I -- I thought it better to wait for your guidance. You always know what's best."

"I'm pleased to hear it. You've done well."

Xander releases a shaky breath.

Wesley rises. "Have I shown you my library?"

"Um, no." He hopes it's small and unpopulated and very close by.

Wesley approaches the table with the encyclopedia. "Wolfram & Hart has at its disposal thousands of rare texts from this and other dimensions." He pulls one of the books. "These are the templates for those ancient texts." He holds the book out, says a name in a language Xander doesn't recognize, and when he opens the book, the pages flow with text in some spiky black lettering.

"Wow," Xander says, because he thinks he's supposed to. After a moment, he asks, "Do you ever miss the smell?"

"What?"

"The smell. Old books. Leather, old paper. Faintest whiff of mildew sometimes. I've always kind of liked that."

Wesley smiles. "Occasionally, yes." He touches the side of Xander's face. "You've been very good these last hours. Is there anything you've been wanting to say?"

Xander freezes, unsure whether this is permission, or a test. "I'm sorry about this morning. I -- I forgot my place."

"Anything else?" He lowers his voice. "Anything at all."

Xander closes his eyes. "I want you," he says, so low he can barely hear himself. "Please. Finish it."

Wesley clears his books and papers off the top of the desk. Xander isn't quite sure what he'd hoped for, but there's no more of the face-to-face. Wesley orders him to take off his pants entirely, but leave on his shirt. He bends Xander over the desk, hands pinning his wrists against the glass covering the desktop. Freed now to beg, Xander does, even past the point where he shudders in long-delayed release. He quivers beneath Wesley's weight, panting, and he can't stop. Please, please. Wesley, please.

He'd have thought that all-day fire would have burned out any lingering fascination with the cage, but it doesn't. Makes sense, he guesses. Tempered steel doesn't burn, just flesh. His thoughts return to it more than ever, and there are times it's an almost unbearable temptation to have it right there, especially when Wesley's occupied elsewhere.

He wishes Wesley would just dismantle the fucking thing, like he said.

Xander resists the temptation, at least for a while. The thing he's learned about resistance, though, the lesson Wesley has taught him so well, is that it's made to crumble. There's resistance, then there's capitulation, and the two in combination are incredibly sweet.

He waits until Wesley leaves for an entire morning, attending to some business with Angel. He waits until he's been gone long enough that he won't return for something he's forgotten, but it's too soon yet for an early return. Xander doesn't even know what he's planning, really, when he walks to the closet wearing nothing but his jeans. He sits on his heels, regarding it, almost managing to convince himself he's just admiring the craftsmanship of a well-made thing. A car passes by on the street that sounds like Wesley's SUV, and Xander freezes until it continues on out of earshot.

He closes his hand around one of the bars, testing the door. Locked. Disappointment and relief flood him all at once, and he --

Fucking vampire-lover.

The weight of a knife in his hand, street light glinting along its blade.

The cries of a baby.

He deserves it, they all do.

Xander falls back on the bedroom floor, gasping. His hand tingles and hurts, as if he'd run afoul of a live wire on a job site, which happened a couple of times. Jesus. He scrabbles back, kicking the door closed. What was that?

The dreams start that night.

He'd managed to put in a day's work, came home with a killer headache, took up his usual place on the floor at Wesley's feet. Wesley rubbed his temples and began with the questioning, and Xander found himself talking about that summer when Buffy was gone. That summer, when she was really gone. How hard it was to hold his own grief at bay as he tried to keep everyone else going. What it was like to patrol with that thing that looked like Buffy. How he'd tried to make Dawn laugh, allowed his sorrow to make him short-tempered with Anya, grown increasingly uneasy with Willow's plan to bring Buffy back.

Just as he was about to launch into their discovery that they'd actually yanked her out of heaven, he stopped himself, reaching up to take one of Wesley's hands, stilling it. "I think I'd like to just go to bed now. This -- for some reason it's not helping tonight."

"I have the tea," Wesley offered.

"Thanks, but the last time I drank that shit, I woke up with a new eye. I think I'll stop at two, before I ruin my chances of ever dating again."

Wesley regarded him for a moment. "Perhaps you're right. You go on, and I'll join you later. I have some reading to do."

He swapped his pillow for Wesley's, wanting his scent close by, if not his body. Xander snugged his arms around it as he drifted into sleep, falling into a dream.

Fire in his throat.

Pain that's all-consuming, yet somehow dulled. He struggles to follow what Angel is saying.

"... understand ... what you did."

No. I don't deserve that. Not after --

Suddenly Angel's face is blotted out, and with it all light. Something covers his face, soft yet unyielding, He can't breathe. He flails, but he's too weak to fight. His blood roars in his ears, but above it Angel's voice rages.

You took my son! You sonofabitch, you bastard! I'll kill you!

When he wakes, Wesley's hands are on him, trying to transmit calm. "Xander, you're safe. It's over, you're safe. Caleb's dead."

Xander's hands shake. "It wasn't Caleb. I was lying ... helpless ... I couldn't breathe."

"You dreamed about Faith?"

"No. It was nothing like that. Nothing that made sense. Forget about it. Just a garden-variety bad dream. Angel was in it, but he was saying things that didn't make any sense."

"Are you sure it wasn't Angelus?"

Now he remembers -- he'd actually said he wasn't Angelus. Xander shakes his head. "It was Angel. It's nothing. Just crazy shit. I'm sorry I startled you."

Wesley strokes his hair. "No need to apologize." He settles onto the bed with Xander, spooning him from behind, and soon Xander falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The next night it's the girl and the knife.

A figure staggering toward him. He draws a gun from beneath his jacket. In his other arm, he clasps a moving bundle.

A baby.

The girl is someone he knows. Someone has beaten the shit out of her.

She cries about betrayal, then in a flash she's on him, her blade biting deep into his throat.

Xander wakes, all hunched in on himself, his back pressed to the headboard, his hand clutched to his throat.

Wesley fumbles the bedside light on. "It's a dream, that's all it is," he murmurs. He touches a hand to Xander's face. "Can you remember any of it?" The scar across his throat gleams pale in the dim light.

"Not -- not really. There was a baby."

"A baby?" Wesley laughs. "I suppose that would terrify any--" He sees Xander's distress, drops the joke. "What about the baby?"

"I tried. I couldn't keep it." He realizes his hand is still pressed to his neck. "Do you have any of that tea?"

"Of course."

Xander follows him out to the kitchen, watches him make tea, as he's done any number of times before. This time watching not Wesley's graceful hands, but the slash across his throat.

The tea actually makes things worse. It sucks him into a deep sleep he can't shake off, and the dreams are that much more vivid. Blood on his hands, welling up from an ancient book on his desk. Angel burying his fangs in the tiny body of a baby.

He scrambles awake, finding himself at his desk, head resting on his arms. Quickly he looks around, but no one is there to have seen him. Exhaustion crashes over him like storm waves, but he can't give in to it.

There must be a way to stop this.

Papers litter the desk, covered in scrawls of many different languages, along with attempts at translations, from early fumbling to what seems fairly close. They make his head swim. All these prophecies seem to point him in one direction only. No matter how many times he tears the puzzle apart, shakes the pieces and starts over again, they add up to the same picture.

The father will kill the son.

Xander claws his way toward wakefulness, shaking off the dream, but the tide surges up around him again, pulling him back down.

The room blossoms with fire, hurling him out into the hallway, against the wall. Angel is on the other side, cradling the boy. The ground shifts beneath their feet, and debris rains down on Angel. He hunches protectively over the baby and runs through the flames.

Surely Angel would give his life for this child.

But the final puzzle piece shows him blood raining down on a receiving blanket that looks like sky.

The father --

Xander thrashes, fighting off the dreams, but they engulf him, threaten to drown him.

He lies in a darkened room, a dim light casting a feeble glow above the headboard of his bed. The brown-haired girl from the Hyperion -- Fred -- shifts her feet, clutching a cardboard box. He wants to speak to her, but he can't.

She babbles when she's nervous. She sets down the box nearby. Not a gift, but his things from the office.

She hovers near the door.

He'd never noticed how like a hummingbird she is. So small and fine boned, her movements quick and darting.

"Don't come back to the hotel," she tells him.

This girl has a blade, too, and she uses it. The prophecy was false.

Xander nearly fights his way to the surface, but again he's dragged under.

It doesn't even hurt at first.

That's what amazes him.

The blade is so sharp that he barely feels a thing until she's wrenched the child from his arms. Then there's blood and air frothing at his throat. So much blood. It's the sight of red dripping from his fingers that awakens the pain and the shock that she's done this thing.

He presses his hand against the wound, but it's as much use as bailing floodwaters with a teacup. He slips to his knees, unable to call out, and watches the taillights of his own car round the corner and vanish.

When he finally breaks the tenacious hold of the dreams, Xander finds himself on his knees by the side of the bed, clutching his throat. Wesley is right there with him, holding him by the shoulders, calling his name over and over.

Xander drops his hand from his neck and stares at it. He can scarcely believe there's no blood. Suddenly he's seized with self-consciousness, realizing he's acted out Wesley's maiming right in front of him. But when Xander looks into his face, there's no recognition there, no reaction to this unconscious parody, only concern.

"Okay," Xander says, "I think the tea was maybe a bad idea." He's almost surprised that he's able to speak.

"You had another dream."

"I had a string of them. The tea wouldn't let me wake up."

Wesley rises and helps him to his feet. "Was there something they had in common?"

Sure. Angel. Baby. Girl with knife. "I -- no. Not that I can recall."

"Do you remember anything at all?"

"There was a fire in one of them. I think an earthquake and explosion." Desperation makes him bolder than he normally is with Wesley. "Look, is there someplace we can go? I need to walk this off, get some air -- I feel drugged."

"We can drive to the ocean."

"As long as you promise to keep me awake during the drive." He's not in the habit of extracting promises from Wesley, who's not in the habit of granting them in this way, but they both know the circumstances are extreme. He stands pinned in Wesley's acute gaze for a moment.

Finally Wesley nods. "Yes, of course. Get dressed."

Puzzle pieces. Angel keeps reappearing, and a baby. The girl with the knife, the hospital room. Something about prophecies. Did he dream that once, or several times?

He tries to sift through these pieces, but Wesley keeps him talking as they drive the dark highway. He's trying to piece together the puzzle too, attempting to work with the few details Xander's given him. "You saw a fire, maybe an earthquake," Wesley prompts. "Are there any other details you can remember? A sense of place?"

"It wasn't anywhere I knew," he lies -- in truth, he's sure it was a room in the Hyperion. Xander can't even say yet why he's keeping this back from Wesley. They could be solving this puzzle together, using the considerable resources Wesley has -- not just in that creepy-ass Wolfram & Hart library, but in his head. But something makes him want to move with caution until he knows exactly what he's seeing, and why Wesley can't remember it.

"Indoors or out?"

"Outside. All I could really see were buildings." Wesley looks poised to ask the next question, and Xander heads it off. "Everything was dark, shadowy."

"Were there other people?"

Xander shrugs. "Dream extras. No one I recognized. What do you think it means?" he asks, because it doesn't seem natural not to.

"Hard to say. Perhaps nothing. There's a chance they could be prophetic."

That brings a laugh. "What do you mean?"

"According to the release you signed before your eye was restored, that's a potential side-effect of the procedure. The Sight, as it's sometimes called."

"According to --" all those pages he hadn't read, because his head was aching when the time came to sign them.

"The odds are very small. Don't let me distress you. I'm just speculating -- it's my nature to explore all the possibilities, no matter how obscure."

He pushes back a surge of panic. Of course they're not prophetic -- they're about the attack that caused that scar on Wesley's throat. That's long past. And it's likely they're not even related to what really happened, just story fragments that his mind creates for him out of his fascination with the scar and the absence of any actual facts.

"Is there anything that seems to have triggered them? Apart from, or in addition to, your new eye?"

The cage.

"Nothing that I can think of."

Wesley casts a sidelong glance at him, and Xander wonders if he can sense the lie. He wonders what the consequences would be for being caught out.

"Can I ask you something?" Xander asks.

With anyone else, it would be a knee-jerk Sure. But Wesley makes him wait for the answer, with no certainty what it will be when it comes.

"What is it?"

The words have to be pushed past the tightness in his chest. "That scar of yours."

He touches his shirt over the puckered mark Xander's seen on his belly. "This?"

"Yes," he stammers. So it's true. The scar across his throat seems to live in his memory only when someone else calls it to his attention. "What happened?"

After a pause, Wesley says, "I was shot. Someone had the bright idea of reanimating LAPD officers who were killed in the line of duty. It was one of them." Not surprisingly, the answer's deflected from Wesley himself to the case. Yet there's not the same eerie sense of vagueness he got when the throat injury or the cage came up.

"Looks like it must have been serious."

"It was. It was the closest I've ever come to dying." His voice grows distant, softer. "We were under siege. In this shelter for street kids. I'd never felt so cold in my life." And yet his memories are as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. Abruptly his tone changes again. "We're almost there."

As Xander half suspected, there's a price for presuming to dig into Wesley's history. He pulls into the deserted parking lot at the beach, leaving the engine running. Xander reaches for the seatbelt release, but Wesley closes his hand around his wrist. "Wait."

Xander turns to him, expecting there to be a further message, but apparently that's the extent of it. "Wesley," he dares to say, "I need some air." Even with their conversation occupying his attention, the ride has lulled him and the aftereffects of the tea pull him down toward sleep. "Please."

"I asked you to wait," Wesley says simply. He cranks the heater, even though it's unnecessary.

"Can I roll my window--"

"Be still," he orders. "Do you trust me?"

The stuffy air of the overheated car is like a drug all on its own. "You promised."

"Do you trust me?"

He closes his eyes. "Yes." Because he doesn't want to imagine what he would be if he stopped.

"Perhaps I can walk with you through one of the dreams. Help you retain it, understand it."

"Please don't make me."

"Shhh." He caresses Xander's face. "I'm asking you to do this for me. I know you're strong enough."

He fights the weariness sweeping through his body. "Please. I can't do this again."

"Don't fight it," Wesley whispers.

He doesn't stop fighting, but he slips under anyway. The girl pulls him around, reaching around him with the knife. Just as it first bites into flesh, Wesley gives him a hard shake. "Go. Get some air."

Half-falling out of the car, he gulps in the cool ocean air, but it's not enough. He staggers down the beach to where the surf batters the shore, falling onto the wet sand, letting the waves wash over him. He shivers in the night breeze in his wet clothes, coughing and gasping with each frigid wave.

Wesley makes his way to him, wrapping him in a blanket and drawing him up the beach, where Xander sits on a wooden plank by an unused fire ring, shivering but awake. "You promised," Xander accuses.

"What is it you're keeping from me?"

"Nothing."

"You're certain of that."

"I swear, Wesley." How easily these lies come to him now.

They walk to get Xander warmed up, but a stiff wind sweeps the beach, ultimately driving them back to Wesley's SUV. Wesley puts a hand to Xander's cheek. "You're freezing. I'll turn the heat on. Not warm enough to --"

"Don't." He turns his face, pressing his lips against Wesley's palm. "Please." Moving toward Wesley, he offers and demands at the same time, without words.

Wesley allows him this, smoothly assuming the lead from Xander. Deftly, as always, he takes him to the brink, shows him around the already-familiar territory, invites him to stay awhile. In this way he exacts the cost for Xander's forwardness, restores the delicate balance of who they are together. As Xander tips his head back against the seat, breath ragged, building toward release, Wesley disengages.

"It's time we started getting back."

Xander groans.

Wesley invokes the no pleading rule, adding a major sub-clause: no groans, moans or other inarticulate sounds until the ban is lifted. "They're all really another form of begging, aren't they?"

He takes the long route back, but there's no danger of Xander falling asleep on the drive. As he's done before, Wesley keeps him at a fevered pitch just by talking, teasing him with questions. For each major piece of new information his inquisition turns up, Wesley allows him to name something he'd like done to him.

"The first time you ever touched yourself," begins one line of questioning. "Do you remember the person you thought about?"

To his vast surprise, he does. Not her name, but he remembers she was the centerfold in his father's Playboy the first time he ever ran across a copy. He was transfixed as much by her copious blonde hair as her impressive breasts. Her turn-off was guys who were arrogant and rude to waiters. The whole of his adolescence and even into his adulthood, he has been impeccably polite to waiters and waitresses. He wishes now that he'd been as kind to Anya.

Xander tells Wesley all of this, including the part about Anya. He's overcompensating, he knows, for the secrets he does keep.

"Have you ever been caught?"

"Twice. My old man, when I was fourteen. He found me with one of his magazines." A Hustler, but he doesn't say.

"And what did your father do?"

"He gave me my first beer, to celebrate the fact that I was beating off over girls."

"And the other time? Who was it who interrupted you then?"

"Anya. When I was still living in my parents' basement. I'd forgotten she was planning to come over."

"And what did Anya say?"

His face flames as he laughs. "'Oh, thanks for waiting!'"

"How did it feel to be caught wanking by your lover?"

Oh, fairly mortifying, yet somehow hot. He says this to Wesley.

"And how does it feel now, to be describing this to your lover?"

Not a whole lot different, he thinks. Only more so.

He still has consequences to suffer from trying to wrest control from Wesley. The release he'd hoped for on their return home is denied him, as well as the voice to plead for it. Xander has time to warm himself with a shower and a coffee before they leave for Wolfram & Hart, nothing more. As he pulls the car into his designated space in the parking garage, Wesley informs him he has a late meeting tonight, and Xander should pick up dinner on his own.

He draws Xander toward him for a kiss, brushes his thumb across the shirt over his nipple ring. "Think of me today."

"I never think of anything else."

Once they enter the building and go their separate ways, he doesn't see Wesley for the rest of the day. He runs into Fred in the cafeteria, however.

Well, not precisely runs into. When he hits the cafeteria for his morning danish, he asks the server about her. "She the sweetest little gal, int she?" says Antoine. "Hardly ever see her, though. That fella Knox takes her up a sandwich most days. She does come down for the home cooking special on Thursdays." That's cafeteria code for the enchanted "just like Mom's" meal. "Thursday is barbecued ribs and cornbread. She puts away a lot for such a bitty thing."

"So that's today."

"Yeah. Be down about one, if she's on her usual schedule."

So Xander happens to be in the cafeteria at one, where he happens to run into her on the lunch line, happening to order the same meal. "I just love the Texas barbecue," she gushes, "and it's so hard to get in L.A. There's such a cult of the North Carolina barbecue."

He listens to her hold forth about the merits of various barbecue sauces as they push their trays along the cafeteria line, and invites her to sit with him. She asks how he's adjusting to L.A. and the new job and if all his people got out of Sunnydale okay. When he tells her he lost his parents and girlfriend-well-ex-really-but-it's-complicated, her pretty face twists with sadness and he sees why Wesley was so gone on her.

This realization comes to him suddenly, based only on a flash of his dream, but he knows it's true. Her clutching the cardboard box with his things from the Hyperion office (the big purge couldn't wait till the guy got home from the fucking hospital?), the lurch of Wesley's heart as she told him to stay away from the hotel. Xander's not sure Wesley had had time to love her, but as Antoine might say, he was sweet on her.

Another realization follows on its heels: that somehow he's come to accept the dreams as true. "How long have you known Wesley?"

"Oh, about two years now. They rescued me from another dimension. Angel and the others. Wes. He's such a brilliant man."

There's a descriptive word he knows would never be applied to him in his wildest dreams, yet Xander sees how inadequate it would be coming from a woman you'd hoped would love you.

"Y'all knew him from before, right? In Sunnydale?"

He nods. "You know about the Slayer? Watchers?"

"Angel filled me in a little. Wesley doesn't really talk about it."

No. He doubts Wesley would.

Fred adds another rib bone to the growing pile. Antoine was not kidding about her ability to put it away. She smiles at him shyly. "I'm glad you ... well, that you're here. He seems more settled in himself somehow."

Funny -- that seems an apt description of how he's felt since he went home with Wesley. "Did you know him when this happened?" Xander slowly draws his finger across his throat.

"Oh, gosh. That was a terrible time. You think a neighborhood is safe, and then something like that happens --" The weird thing is, a kind of vagueness settles over her, the same as it had over Wesley the first time Xander had asked about the scar. Or whenever he mentions the cage.

"Something like what, exactly? Did it have to do with a case?"

"There was no case we had going. It was just a random mugging, as far as anyone knows. His wallet was taken, and there was a huge withdrawal from his ATM."

Maybe he lived too long in Sunnydale, but Xander no longer believes in random. "'As far as anyone knows' -- so nobody saw what happened?"

"No. And Wesley doesn't remember." Weird how definite her words are, while her manner seems so vague. Like she's listening for a transmission from some distance away.

"What about the baby?"

There's apparently a hiccup in the transmission, but then she smiles a Moonie smile. "There wasn't any baby. Where'd you get that?"

He shakes his head. "I thought there was a case."

Fred laughs. "No case. No baby." She glances at her watch. "Gosh, look at the time. I've got to get back. I'm working on something to make Spike corporeal again."

Right. Spike. The whole office has been buzzing these last few days about his reappearance. Xander's not interested. He can't fill in Wesley's missing pieces, has nothing to do with Xander's life now. Spike had accosted him in the hallway once, taunting, but Xander walked right through him. It unsettled Spike more than it did Xander; he'd kept his ghostly self out of Xander's path since then.

Fred rises, gathers up her purse. "I'd love to do this again next Thursday, though. Why don't you bring Wesley next time."

Xander trails behind her and scrapes his uneaten meal into the trash, convinced now that his dreams are true and it's somehow the world that is false.

As far as approachability goes, Fred was his best bet among Wesley's comrades. Gunn has a fierceness that he'd rather not test. Lorne's a fricken demon who reads people's minds, and if that's not torture enough, he makes them sing first. He'd been through that already, on his round of interviews at Wolfram & Hart. Xander had gone blank and dredged up the first song he could think of, a floor wax jingle. The demon had kept his face carefully blank, if green, saying only "Poor kid." Xander wasn't sure if that referred to Sunnydale, his current situation or his singing. If life is good, that's the last close contact he'll ever have with Lorne. That leaves Angel, who's out because -- well, Angel.

There's no one else he can ask but Wesley, and there's no asking him. Even if Wesley could remember what happened to him, Xander has racked up a high enough cost for his boldness in the past 24 hours.

His cellphone goes off four times during the afternoon, once during a meeting. He has his instructions: Think of tonight. The things I've promised to do to you. The afternoon passes in an agony of arousal, and he curses the late meeting that will delay his release. He takes the car service back to Wesley's neighborhood, stopping for Thai takeout and walking the rest of the way. The evening air doesn't cool him as much as he'd hoped.

The phone vibrates again as he's unlocking the apartment door. He nearly drops the takeout bag, does lose several pieces of mail tucked under his arm. A magazine spills onto the hardwood floor, face down. Its brown mailing wrapper is unfamiliar to him. Xander bends to retrieve it and it slides out of the wrapper. He's greeted by a pair of tits with an almost architectural quality. The food forgotten on the entryway table, he flips through its pages, where nothing is left to the imagination.

He spreads open the centerfold, sucking in his breath. The old man would be proud to know that glistening pussy shots can still command his attention. There's nothing artful about the shot or the pose, but if he wanted art, he'd go to a fucking museum.

He kicks off his shoes, strolls to the couch and stretches out on it, studying the centerfold. When was the last time he even looked at one of these things? He sure as hell hadn't been wearing an Italian wool suit and Egyptian cotton shirt. Unfastening his fly, he slips his hand below the waistband of his briefs. He lets the magazine fall onto the floor, thinking instead about Wesley, about the things he's promised.

Wesley's voice has threaded through Xander's every erotic moment for the past weeks, so ever-present that Xander can summon it now as he gives in to the temptation to stroke himself. He replays Wesley's running commentaries on the things they do together, a soft, insinuating play-by-play that makes every act of release -- and denial of release -- that much more exquisite.

Xander's been in a fever all day, every inch of his skin buzzing with need. So much of his energy has been taken with tamping down his desire that it actually takes him longer to bring himself to the brink now. His body has spent so much time on the edge of orgasm that he has to work now to let himself fall. There's no such thing as a quickie anymore, it's all about the slow build, the agonies of arousal and long-delayed completion.

Finally he reaches the tipping point, his body at last allowing him what Wesley has denied. Xander's breath grows ragged and he permits himself a moan.

When the lock clicks, it barely registers. By the time the door swings open and Wesley appears, Xander is past the point of stopping it. There's no question of him even pausing in his furious stroking. The silky voice of the Wesley in his head twines with the cold, commanding voice of the Wesley at the door, and Xander's own inarticulate cries of release join in.

He sits up and moves to cover himself, but Wesley stops him with a command. "This is how you comply with the things I've asked of you?"

"Wesley, I --" He halts. There's no justification he can give for this betrayal. "I'm sorry."

"I believed I could trust you." His voice is calm, dispassionate.

"I know."

"I believed you trusted me to take care of you."

"I do, Wesley."

"You do," he repeats. "Then it's just that you couldn't be bothered to wait."

There is nothing Xander can say to refute this.

Wesley sits next to him, threading his fingers through Xander's hair, stroking his thumb over his temple. "Tell me everything," he orders. "What were you thinking of?"

"You." Xander closes his eyes. "I thought of you all day long."

"About this morning? Fumbling like teenagers in the car at the beach?"

The memory goes straight to his cock. "I was thinking about tonight."

"What about tonight?"

"What you said you would do."

He brushes his fingers over the nipple ring, pulling a gasp from Xander. "Do you still believe you've earned those things? That you deserve this?" He leans in toward Xander, favoring him with a rare kiss so deep and prolonged that he feels he could lose himself in it. "Or this?" Another tweak of the nipple ring, half pain, half pleasure. "Do you still have the right to ask for these things?"

"No," he whispers.

"But you still want them."

"Yes."

"Tell me how you felt all day, thinking about tonight."

"I was on fire."

"Thinking I might touch you here." Fleeting brush of fingertips inside Xander's thigh.

He gasps again. "Yes."

"Wanting me to fuck you."

Xander looks away. "I always want that."

"Yet it was worth throwing away for a quick wank."

"Not worth it, no."

"Tell me how it felt." His breath is hot in Xander's ear. "To be discovered, exposed just as you were reaching the point of no return."

This is when he grasps it, sees how dense he can be. Wesley choreographed the entire thing, set it all in motion. His state of unfulfilled excitement, stoked throughout the day. The time alone to succumb to weakness, and the temptation to lead him to use it.

Discovered. This is how Wesley has always related to him: viewed him as unexplored territory that he's determined to map, to the smallest detail.

"Tell me."

Exposed.

"I wanted to stop. And I didn't want to."

"Did you want me to see you?"

"I didn't. And I did."

"Would you like me to watch you now?"

This, he thinks, is as much as he's going to be allowed. It's more than he thought he'd get. "Yes." He waits for Wesley's directive, then reaches for his prick, riding the current of Wesley's voice as much as the sensations of his body.

How beautiful you are in the throes of abandon.

Suddenly this is enough. Not a punishment of some kind, a reminder of what he could have had if he'd been stronger. He cries out, experiencing his orgasm not for himself but surrendering it to Wesley, offering his abandon as a gift.

This, he needs to remember, is what his body is for.

It belongs to Wesley.

His surrender is Xander's gift to himself. Letting himself be cared for, giving up the burdens of always choosing his own course. He had taken care of himself pretty much from the time he was eleven, doing his own laundry, getting his own meals, except for those rare periods when his mother roused herself from her depression to notice he was alive. It's a relief to hand everything over to someone else, someone who wants only what's best for him.

But the more he relaxes into the structure and security Wesley offers him, the more the dreams shatter his nights. Seizing a stone statue and clubbing Lorne over the head. Angel's hand, bone-chilling cold and whiter than usual, flashing up to take his scarred neck in an iron grip. Always the knife slicing across his throat, the baby being wrenched from his weakening grasp. He wakes gasping for air, sitting upright in bed. Wesley soothes him, inquires gently, but Xander claims the details slip away on waking.

Wesley's not fooled. He comes back to the dreams at other times, asking when Xander least expects it. He's a master at sensing resistance, and has the infinite patience to chip away at it.

Xander makes his own sneak attacks in hopes of finding the truth. He catches Gunn in the hallway once, casually asks him, "Do you know where I can find Justine?" He doesn't know who she is, it's just a name that has surfaced in the dreams.

Gunn is impatient. "Justine who?"

"I don't know, man. Someone just said to give her this document."

"Sorry. Ask Harmony."

Another time he tries Lorne, who's sailing down the big staircase dialing his cellphone. Xander touches his arm. "Excuse me a second. Do you know where Wesley took the baby?"

Vagueness looks pretty much the same in deep green. "No, but if you hum a few bars, I can fake it."

"Nah, forget it. Thanks."

Both attempts are forgotten within seconds, unlikely ever to get back to Wesley. The latest dream, however, drives him to a more direct attempt. His heart thuds as he hands the baby over to Angel, who murmurs and coos, his hands so huge cradling such a tiny child. Not perfect happiness, because we all know where that leads, but perfect love. This is what he's about to destroy. May God forgive him, because he'll never forgive himself. The next day Xander presents himself as a supplicant before Harmony (Harmony! Proof that the world has gone topsy-turvy) to request a meeting with Angel.

Just as he remembers, it's no huge chore to get gossip out of her -- especially now that he's wearing custom-made suits. She lays Angel's whole deal on him: the handover of Wolfram & Hart to him to run, the decision of his people at Angel Investigations to follow him here. There's a story underlying this all, he's sure, but what he cares about is Wesley.

His appointment time comes around, and he knocks softly on the corner office door, enters when bidden. Angel's standing at the window, gazing down on Los Angeles. Something feels off about the room, and in a moment it hits him. Angel's office is flooded with sunlight.

"Vampire with a corner office," he says. "That didn't even register on me last time I was in here."

Angel turns to face him. "It's specially treated glass. My cars have it too."

"Does it make it easier or harder that you can never go out in daylight?"

Fixing a sharp gaze on him, Angel leaves the window and goes behind his desk, pouring from a silver pitcher into a glass. "Is that what you came to see me about?"

"No. Just curious."

"Can I have Harmony bring you something?" He turns, his crystal glass of blood in his hand. "Coffee? Soda?" He downs about half the glass, his eyes locked on Xander's.

He smiles. Next to Wesley's subtlety, this kind of one-upmanship is almost laughable. "No thanks."

"I'm sorry -- where are my manners? Have a seat." He seats himself behind the desk as Xander complies. "So what's this about?"

"Just a question. Who's Connor?"

There's vague, and then there's blank. But Angel can't wipe the shock off his face quickly enough. "I don't know who you're talking about."

Xander smoothes a wrinkle on his pant leg. "I think you do. Funny, though, nobody else knows. They all get this strange, vague look when I ask about the baby. You don't have that."

Angel carefully sets the glass down in the middle of the desk, as if he's afraid of it falling off the edge. "I fail to see how that's any of your business."

"I think maybe it's Wesley's business. I think this has something to do with that scar on his throat. And I wonder why he doesn't remember what happened, or even remember the scar is there, unless someone makes a pointed reference."

Angel takes a pen from the fancy penholder on the desk, rolls it between his fingers. "Again, I don't see how this concerns you."

"No, it wouldn't be evident to you. I'm having dreams. Dreams about a baby. About a girl who takes the baby and cuts my throat. Dreams about my friend putting a pillow over my face." Xander keeps his voice light, conversational. "We both know they're not about me -- you're not my friend. Who do we know with a big-ass scar across his neck? Oh, wait. That would be Wesley."

"It's in the past, Xander. Leave it there."

"It's not in the past, to anyone but you. It's nowhere. There's this big chunk of Wesley's history gone, and he doesn't even know it."

"And why do you care?"

"I think it's hurting him. There's this ... vacuum in him, and it'll never go away until he has that back."

"How would you know that?"

He flickers a smile. "Let's just say I do." Xander realizes Angel has no reason to tell him something so personal, so he puts something of his own on the table. The only thing he has of any value. "I care about him, Angel. There's a word we never use between us, so I'm sure as hell not laying it out in front of you. But I care what happens to him."

Angel regards him for a long moment. Xander sits, unflinching, under his scrutiny. "Connor was my son," Angel finally says. "Mine and Darla's."

"But -- he'd be at least seven, eight years old."

"No. A little over a year ago, he was a baby."

"That's impossible. I saw Darla die."

Angel looks down at the big hands that had cradled the baby in Xander's dream. "So did I," he whispers. He looks up. "It's impossible, but it happened. Wolfram & Hart had Darla brought back to life. Actual life. But Dru found her and turned her again, and she and I -- All the texts and sources say it's impossible for two vampires to have a child, but we did. Darla died giving him birth."

"What happened to him? I know this girl took him, but what then? Did she kill him?"

"She took him to Holtz. He was a man whose family I killed, back when I was Angelus. He chased me across two centuries to have his revenge, and instead of killing me, he took my son to a hell dimension."

"You never saw him again?"

"I saw him a couple of weeks later." Angel chucks the pen back on the desk. "Time passes differently on Quor'toth. He was somewhere in his teens when he came back. Holtz had turned him against me, made him half crazy with the same need for revenge."

"Why is he missing from everyone's memory but yours? Why does Wesley have this big fucking hole in his past?"

Angel swivels his chair toward the wall of tempered glass, stares out the window. "I had a chance to change it all. To give him a normal life with a regular family. Had a chance to have a kid who was happy, though he'd never know me. Connor had just strapped himself with explosives, taken a bunch of hostages in a store, because he saw nothing worth caring about. Tell me what you'd do, Xander. I made a bargain, the same one that installed us here at Wolfram & Hart. I erased him from everyone's memory, so he could have a happy life. Tell me you'd do it differently."

"Dawn in reverse," Xander whispers. "Jesus. Is he --"

"He's happy. He's doing well, a fine kid."

"Jesus," he says again. "Tell me Wesley's part in this. All of it."

"Xander, you're pressing your luck."

"I'm not asking for myself. It's important."

Angel sighs, rubs his brow. "We were trying to learn as much as we could about Connor, what he might be. Wesley was researching all the texts. He found a prophecy."

"'The father will kill the son.'"

Angel directs a sharp look his way.

"I dreamed it."

"Wesley was fooled by it. It was false, planted by a time-traveling demon who'd found a prophecy of his own death by Connor's hand. He decided to make sure it would never come true by creating the fake one. Wesley made a deal with Holtz that he'd take Connor and disappear, but Holtz double-crossed him."

"The girl."

Angel nods. "Justine. She cut him and took Connor and gave him to Holtz. When this demon opened an entry into Quor'toth, Holtz took him and jumped through."

"I'm so sorry," Xander says. "All this pain -- yours, Connor's, Wesley's. All because of him."

Angel looks away. "He thought he was doing the best thing for Connor."

Xander knows what a hollow thing it can be to do what seems best. "So this is what belongs in the big hole in his memory."

Angel nods.

He thinks about the look on Wesley's face the night Xander talked about the hyena possession. Xander's sure he'll never know what memories that brought up in Wesley, but he recognizes that look. "I can't tell him. It would kill him."

Angel lets out a breath.

"I'm sorry," Xander says. "About bringing all this up again. I'll keep it all to myself." He heads back to his own office in a daze, wishing he'd never started this fucking thing.

His time with Wesley regains its previous level of intensity, his world narrowing down until it contains just the two of them during all but his working hours. His lessons resume once more, all with the unstated goal of getting Xander to talk about the dreams.

There's a new rule. Once they cross the threshold of Wesley's apartment, any speech at all is forbidden to him. He's released from this prohibition only while they fuck. At least half of those times, Xander's tied to the bedposts as Wesley does things to him, makes him wild with arousal and denial, stepping up his inquisition as Xander comes closer and closer to the brink. He hardens his defenses and Wesley renews his attacks. When Wesley finally gives up and ends their sessions, he often leaves Xander with a dull ache in his groin, always with strict orders not to speak until the workday begins.

It's the same principle as sexual denial, he knows. Wesley believes that the denial of speech will create a need in him that, when allowed release, will shatter him with its intensity. He's afraid Wesley's right. Pent-up words create a physical ache in his chest, but he holds them in.

He senses Wesley's frustration building. The ritual changes one night. The ban on speech extends even to the bedroom. Wesley fucks him half crazy, denying him nothing but his voice. When the dreams tear the fabric of his sleep, Wesley permits him not even a lie. "We'll talk in the morning," he says, stroking a hand over Xander's bare ass, then turning on his side to sleep.

The next morning Xander thinks he'll go crazy. Wesley brings him coffee in bed, settles next to him with the L.A. Times. He reads Xander items of interest, proposing various events or museum exhibits they might attend. Abruptly he folds the weekend section, lays it down. "On the other hand, a quiet weekend at home seems good to me. Look at the time," he suddenly adds. "You'd best get your morning shower, if you want to make it to the office on time."

Shortly after he steps under the hot spray, Wesley joins him in the shower. He touches Xander's throat, his signal for permission to speak. "How did you sleep last night?" he asks, just like any lover would. "Have any dreams?"

The release that rolls through him is almost orgasmic. "A few, but I hardly remember anything." He doesn't know if he can hold back or not, the pressure of words is so forceful. He makes something up, anything to be talking. "I dreamed about this house, an old abandoned place. It was so weathered the paint was all gone, and it leaned to the side. It was at the base of a mountain so steep it seemed like it just grew right up out of the house."

"What happened there?"

"Things," he said. "They were long over with. Nobody would talk about what had happened there." Careful. "Everyone knew, but nobody would say."

"What else did you dream about?"

"That's all I can remember."

"That's more than you've been able to recall."

"I know." He's been weakening.

"You did quite well, Xander." Wesley pins him against the shower wall then, and gives him a reward.

Wesley wasn't kidding about the quiet weekend. Friday night Xander's allowed half an hour of speech as they lie in bed together after sex, and Wesley pounds away at him about the dreams. Xander's spent his day trying to rebuild his defenses, panicked that he'll spill what Angel has told him. Just what I told you this morning, he keeps repeating. I can't remember any more.

When the half hour is up, Wesley goes silent too. It takes Xander a while to realize what the new deal is, then he's filled with dismay. Saturday threatens to drive him insane. Television and radio are forbidden too. When Wesley calls for delivery from the Italian place down the street, he steps into the hallway with his cordless phone, and that's where he greets the delivery boy. Xander fears his release from speechlessness tonight will send him spinning out of control, babbling every secret he holds.

This night it comes as Wesley clears the dishes from their meal. He kisses Xander, stroking his throat with his free hand. "Such a good boy," he murmurs. "So willing to bend, to become who you're asked to be. I have something special for you tonight."

Words explode from him. This makes the motormouthed teen he'd been seem like Gary Cooper by comparison. He talks about how good the dinner was, how much he likes pasta e fagioli, asks how Wesley knew to order it for him without asking. Which leads into a discourse on the Wolfram & Hart cafeteria, their fancier offerings and the home cooking special, and what a depressing prospect that is unless he manages to mooch off someone else's plate. He responds to Wesley's comments on the paper that morning, describes his work week, relates the blizzard of gossip he'd gotten from Harmony. He manages to stem the torrent somewhat when Wesley touches two fingers to his lips and draws him toward the bedroom.

Wesley usually tells him to undress, but tonight he does it for Xander, hands touching him everywhere, making his breath ragged even before Wesley gets his shirt off. It's a deliciously slow process, and when it's finally finished, Wesley tells him to lie face down on the bed. Wesley warms some oil in his hands, massaging him from neck down to his feet. Xander lies with his arms folded beneath his head, face turned, talking incessantly into the crook of his arm. He intentionally looses this stream of babble, fearing if he lets go of conscious effort to talk, his secrets will come tumbling from him. He yammers about his favorite films, about the new movies due to come out, about his top ten list of actresses he'd like to fuck. He's begun working on a list of actors, too, but he omits that out of deference to Wesley.

Wesley's fingers find a spot at his hips that's wired directly to his dick, bringing the monologue stuttering to a halt. He gasps and shudders, words forgotten. "Hush now," Wesley says softly, his tone making it a suggestion, not a command. Xander lets everything flow out of his mind, concentrating on the feeling of Wesley's hands moving on his skin. Wesley urges him to turn over and works on his chest and abdomen, arms and legs. Once he's finished he pulls Xander toward the edge of the bed, pushes his legs up, easing into him to fuck face-to-face. Lassitude suffuses Xander's muscles after the massage, and he lies in a daze, letting Wesley do most of the work. "It's all right," Wesley murmurs. "So lovely. Just let me take care of you. Just let go."

"Love you touching my skin," Xander says. "Please stay, please." It makes no sense, since Wesley is still fucking him as he says it, but he keeps on saying it. Once he's shuddered and cried out, Wesley slips behind him, spooning him. Xander revels in the feel of Wesley's skin against his, the fingers combing through his hair.

"Tell me about your dreams," Wesley says as he strokes his hair.

"They never stop," Xander says.

"Tell me. What do you see?"

"The girl. She has a knife."

"What does she do?"

"Takes him. Connor."

Wesley's hand stops its caressing. "Who's Connor?"

Xander rouses himself. Fuck. "I don't know. None of it makes sense. It's just random dream shit."

"What else can you tell me?"

"That's all I remember."

"You're certain."

"Absolutely."

"Quiet, then." Wesley squeezes his biceps. This is his cue that it's now forbidden to speak. Wesley rolls away from him and settles into sleep. Xander lies awake, wondering how much longer he can hold out.

The next morning Wesley steps up the pressure yet again. On top of the rule about maintaining silence, Wesley also denies him physical contact. Wesley doesn't engage him at all, taking his sweet time over the Sunday paper, leaving him to attend to his own meals. No matter what room Xander wanders into, Wesley finds reason to vacate it soon after. In late afternoon, Wesley goes out alone to run some errands.

He could turn on a ballgame. He could call Dawn. He could just chatter to himself until the tension winds down. There is nothing to stop him. Nothing but his own obedience to what Wesley demands.

He paces the apartment, ready to claw off his own skin. Fucking dreams. If they would just leave him the fuck alone, there would be none of this struggle between him and Wesley. Though in the past weeks he's thought of the cage with nothing but aversion, he's suddenly seized with the urge to take its bars in his hands, burn the dreams out of him.

It's not permitted, either. Yet not specifically forbidden.

Before he can let himself think about it too much, he strides to the closet, yanks open the door. Still there, just as malevolent-looking as before. He seizes one of the bars in his hand.

His head jerks back, his breath sawing harshly.

He's on the other side of the bars. He's crouched in the cage, chained so he can't stand. A gag is stuffed in his mouth. The closet door is closed, and he pushes back panic to be confined in such a small space. He can hear them fucking through the door, Pryce and that Wolfram & Hart bitch. The second he lets his guard down, I'll finish it. Kill that fucking vampire-lover.

Driving down a darkened street in the manufacturing district. A figure steps into the street in front of him. He stops the vamp-lover's SUV and the man gets in, looking back at the stolen baby in the car seat. The man's voice is hypnotic -- low and melodious and crazy as fuck. He knows he'd follow it anywhere.

He's chained to the deck of a boat, shivering in the cold, damp air. The metal box containing the vampire rises slowly, water cascading from it. He keeps up a steady stream of invective as the vamp-lover works to set Angel free, but Pryce is single-minded. Should've made sure I killed him when I took the vampire's kid.

Fucking vampire-lover. Stupid asshole lowers the gun. "Justine?" He steps in close enough to show the vamp-lover the beating he took. So easy to take Pryce in. Another two steps and the knife is biting into flesh and gristle. Fucking traitor. He deserves this -- they all do.

Xander wrenches himself away from the cage, falling back onto the floor, gasping for breath. His whole arm feels like it's on fire. He thinks maybe he blacked out for a little while.

Hauling himself to his feet, he kicks the door closed. He tests his arm. It moves okay, and he wonders that it's not charred black. No way to tell yet if the dreams have been burned out of him, but the desire to talk sure has. All he wants is a deep sense of quiet, a stillness that will let these visions drift to the bottom like sediment.

He rummages through the other closet, the one that's jammed to the ceiling with his things and Wesley's. Finds a spare blanket and wraps himself in it. Shivering, he settles on the couch. He should be thinking, planning, shoring up his defenses. Instead he lies staring up at the ceiling, holding his body and his mind completely still in the gathering dark.

It's well past sunset when Wesley arrives home. He switches on the light, clearly surprised to find Xander regarding him from the couch. Crossing to the kitchen, he sets down his burden, a couple of Trader Joe's bags and one from the health food store. He senses the change in the air, Xander's sure. The complete absence of resistance to the restrictions Wesley has placed on him.

Wesley comes to him, sitting on the edge of the coffee table. He pushes a lock of hair back from Xander's forehead, strokes the side of his face with the backs of his knuckles. As he begins to trail a hand down his jawline toward his throat, Xander reaches out and captures Wesley's hand, pressing a kiss into it.

He eases his hand out of Xander's. "Tell me about your day," he says, again extending his hand to stroke his neck.

Xander intercepts it again, enfolding it in his own, tugging Wesley down toward him. He threads his fingers through Wesley's hair, drawing him closer for a kiss. It's Wesley putting forth resistance this time, so subtly, as he tries to make sense of this sea change. This time it's Xander pushing past Wesley's reluctance. Wesley pulls back, seizes him by the wrist. "What is it you think you're doing?"

Again he moves to signal the end of Xander's enforced silence.

Xander bats his hand away, taking a savage pleasure in the anger that flashes across Wesley's face. He grabs Wesley's arm, pulling him off balance, tumbling him on top of Xander's own body. Hooking his legs around Wesley's, he yanks at his shirt, fumbles with his fly, pinned beneath him and yet taking the aggressor's part. He wants this Justine bitch out of his head, doesn't care what it takes to exorcise her. His hands invade Wesley's trousers, grabbing at his ass. In his head there's a harsh stream of words, a dark, roiling current, but he keeps it dammed.

Wesley overcomes his initial shock and meets aggression with aggression. "Who do you think you are?"

They pitch off the couch, crashing onto the floor, a mass of scrabbling limbs and grunts and harsh breath. "Bitch," Wesley hisses in his ear. On both sides, fingers pull hair, dig into muscle, scratch skin. "Whore." It's making him crazy that Xander makes no verbal response. "Cunt." He wrestles Xander onto his back, straddles his hips, thrusting back to grind against his groin. He circles his wrists with his hands, pinning them to the floor by his head. "This is how you want it, isn't it?" He releases one arm to bring his own hand to Xander's throat, squeezing just as he had that first time at the Hyperion. "What is it you want?"

"This," he whispers. "You."

He closes his hand tighter around Xander's neck. The rush is indescribable. Wesley thrusts back against him again, khakis rubbing against denims. The fingers loosen, just a fraction. "Whose bitch are you?"

"Wesley's bitch," he rasps.

The hand closes tighter, and Wesley thrusts again. Xander bucks up against him, wild with desire.

Again a slight lessening of pressure. "Whose whore are you?" Wesley hisses.

"Yours. Your whore."

Wesley throttles him yet again, and Xander thrashes beneath him, clutching at the fine cloth of his shirt as the orgasm shudders through him with searing intensity. Before he can even catch his breath, Wesley flips him, yanks Xander's jeans down. "How shall I fuck you?"

He closes his eyes, looking for the slightest trace of the girl who's invaded his head. The bitch is ready and waiting, just as she lay in wait for Wesley. He feels the knife in his hand, the solidness of Wesley's body pulled back against his. Feels the resistance of cartilage, then its giving way. Xander gives his head a shake. His voice is rough, damaged. "Take me hard," he says.

This is not what he expected.

His defiance this time was more than daring to ask a question or demand a promise from Wesley. Worse even than seeking his own release when he'd been instructed to wait. What he's done deserves consequences.

Yet here he lies, freshly fucked and showered, Wesley spooned behind him. He presses kisses to Xander's shoulder, skips his fingers through his hair the way he used to on the headache nights, which have vanished with the onset of the dreams. It's his voice that lashes at him, murmuring so close to his ear. Low and silky as when he catalogs the things he's planning to do with Xander, but this time it's a litany of Xander's failings.

"I'd had such hopes for you, Xander." Hearing his name this way cuts him; Wesley doesn't speak it often, usually reserving it for when he's done particularly well, as a recognition that he sees him for who he is. "I'm very rarely wrong about people, and I'd thought I could transform your weakness, temper you and make you strong. What it comes down to, always, is a failure of trust."

"I trust you, Wesley, I do."

"Don't lie to me." His hand feathers down to the nipple ring, soft and caressing, just as his voice is. "Never lie to me about that. You've deliberately denied a part of yourself to me. You've let me have the things you're willing to discard, that are worthless to you."

He means Anya. Willow and Buffy and Jesse. Giles. "No, that's not true."

"Yet the things that matter most, you hold back. You keep them to yourself. For yourself." His hand travels over Xander's hip.

"No. I've told you everything that counts." A lie, but a necessary one. "All that I can remember."

"Tell me about the dreams."

"I can't. I don't remember."

"You had another one. Today, while I was gone."

"I haven't slept today, I swear."

"I know you." His hand slips around and down, making Xander gasp. "Something happened. Something too big to hide or ignore."

As he opens his mouth to lie, Wesley slips from behind him, covering him as he rolls onto his back. Stops Xander's words with his mouth. "No more lies," he whispers between kisses.

Xander doesn't understand. Wesley strokes him, kisses him, fucks him without holding anything back, all the while recounting every way in which Xander has disappointed him. It takes a long time for his strategy to make itself clear, and when it does, Xander feels unaccountably dense. He's allowed everything -- touch, speech, as many orgasms as he can manage -- everything but sleep. Each time he starts to drift off, Wesley begins with the inquisition. "Tell me what you see." Each time Xander says he doesn't remember, Wesley teases him to an unbearable state of arousal, fucks him again. He seems to know an infinite variety of ways to make Xander come. "The dreams, Xander. Tell me just one, from start to finish."

Wesley's a man dying of starvation, who won't be satisfied until he consumes the poison that will kill him.

It may not be possible to keep him away from it, but Xander doesn't have to be the one who feeds it to him.

He shifts in bed, touches Wesley's face. "You're right," he says softly. "I can never be what you want."

This brings Wesley to a dead halt.

"I can't," Xander goes on. "There are reasons, good ones, but I can't say what they are." He brushes his fingers over Wesley's lips. "Do you trust me?"

This usurpation of the phrase he owns brings Wesley out of his frozen state. Swiftly rising up to straddle Xander, he seizes his wrists and hauls them up above his head. "You forget your place."

He shakes his head. "No. I think I lost my place." He gets it now, why in the Garden of Eden story it was knowledge that bought Adam and Eve a one-way ticket out of paradise. "Though I'm not so sure I've ever really had a place." His eyes burn. "This is as close as I've ever come."

"One of the most pathetic exit lines ever devised," Wesley says. "The old 'I'm not good enough for you.' Any other cliches you care to impart?"

Yeah, the oldest one in the book, he thinks: I'm sorry. It's too soon for that one; it will only enrage Wesley. "No. There's nothing."

Abruptly Wesley releases him, gracefully disengaging. He lies back on the bed, drawing the sheet up over his hips. "Whatever it is you were planning to do," he addresses the ceiling, "just get it done."

Xander rises, slips on his jeans. "I know that everything I have came from you," he stammers. "All I'm taking is the jeans and sweater, a pair of shoes, my shaving things."

"Oh, for god's sake. Do you honestly think I give a rat's arse? Take it all."

"The suits --" God only knows how much they cost.

Wesley rubs at his forehead as if this is an enormous pain in his ass. "Take the fucking suits. I have no use for them."

Hurriedly Xander scrapes up a pair of shopping bags and begins putting his clothes inside. He has no luggage of his own. It doesn't take long to strip the apartment of everything that belongs to him. All the while Wesley lies there, staring up at the ceiling, a muscle pulsing at his jaw.

Xander calls for a cab, is told it'll be a ten-minute wait. Time enough to wonder, in a really compressed way, if he's doing the right thing. The hole in Wesley's past is hurting him, Xander has no doubt about that. But he honestly believes finding out the truth would be so much worse. He returns to the bedroom, where Wesley hasn't so much as twitched from his place on the bed.

"Wesley --"

"Get the fuck out. Now."

Xander hesitates, wanting to say something more, not sure what that might be.

Wesley turns his head to look at him. "Are you having trouble understanding the basic concept of 'now'?"

Xander takes his bags and waits outside for the cab to come.

He finds a hotel -- not the Hyperion. There's no one he wants to talk to right now, no one he cares to see. He pours a glass from the bottle he picked up on the way.

After the better part of two glasses, he manages to sleep.

He dreams about a different girl.

Sweat glistens on her dark skin in this hot, humid air. She ducks his blow, lashes out with a kick. He evades, though it's close enough that he feels the whoosh of her foot as it flashes past. She snatches her pike off the ground where she'd dropped it and jabs it toward his chest, then sweeps the other end behind his feet, unbalancing him. She laughs as he gracelessly falls to the ground. A flurry of shrieks explodes from the treetops above. Indri, he's been told -- a kind of lemur. He'll never get used to the sound -- it's eerie and inhuman and never fails to make him think of demons.

The girl plants the butt of her pike on the ground, then bends to extend a hand and help him up.

He wakes, blinking in the neon-washed dark. Where has this come from? He's in a slightly disreputable motel where the things he's touched have been touched thousands of times before. He's going to have to be more careful where he sleeps, what he touches, now that he's gone all Dead Zone. Who the hell was he picking up?

Someone who knows about demons.

This is one of Wesley's gifts that he could stand having left behind.

Someone who feels a helluva lot like a Watcher.

In the morning he calls in sick and presents himself at the Hyperion instead, offering help in finding the Watcher and Slayer he dreamed about. His friends aren't sure how to take him -- the new clothes, the new eye, the deep sense of quiet that has settled on him since he left Wesley's. It fits him just as well as the suit, but like the suit, it's going to take other people a while to get used to it on him.

The idea that his dreams mean something takes them awhile to assimilate, too. Xander refuses to give details, just tells them the dreams are vivid and specific and he's confirmed that they're true. There's an enormous amount of talk about how to find the Slayer and her Watcher -- Willow determines from details of the dream that they're from Madagascar -- but no progress on actually finding them here in L.A.

Finally he heads up to a room that Willow's prepared for him -- including the mystical removal of any trace of its previous inhabitants. It faces the street, and for a long time Xander stands at the window watching the traffic below.

He feels like this old hotel, with its floors and floors of empty space. Wesley had occupied every room in his mind, touched every single memory, rearranged his thoughts and desires, made him see how much better everything was in its new configuration. All those changes are left just as Wesley had made them, but without his presence everything seems to echo.

It's one of the oldest cliches there is, but it's true: Xander's never in his life felt so alone.

When he finally settles in bed, a dream moves in to let him know he's not completely abandoned. Despite the cleansing spell, he finds himself back in someone else's skin, carving stakes with the Madagascar Slayer. Most of their interactions are pantomimed, but he's learned a little Malagasy, a little French, and she's picked up some English. That's the language she's singing now, a dumb little singsong tune. Joey the lemur, Joey the lemur.... She grins at him, and he laughs.

This is the detail that makes him sit up in bed, gasping. The perfect geekiness of it, the signature Xander Harrisness of this silly song he picked up from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and passed on to his Slayer.

His Slayer.

This dream has dropped him into his own skin, sometime in the future.

Epilogue: Six months later.

The blade bites deep into his flesh.

Funny how it's always a surprise. Funny how it's always someone he thinks is far too weak to do him serious damage.

The demon twists the knife. All soft tissues this time. So little resistance. A fireball forms at his fingertips and he looses it, knowing even as he does so that it's too little, too late.

She comes to him, the thing that's not-Fred. Makes him an offer, and he accepts. She becomes Fred, so deftly that he can turn a blind eye to what is alien within her.

She'd not fool him for long, but she doesn't have to.

As day is breaking, Xander sits on the rough planks of his porch, knees pulled up close to his chest. In his hand he holds a thick letter, unopened. He'd written it in the days just after his last dream about Wesley, the one that let Xander know his missing history had been restored. Since then he has carried the letter around, waiting for a supply boat headed back to the city so he could get it in the mail to Wesley. Now he's just one day away from his own departure for the city, and it no longer matters.

Too little, too late.

Fara appears without his being aware of her approach. She's getting good at that.

You had another dream, she says.

He doesn't always register anymore what language they're speaking with each other. They shift in and out of French, Malagasy and English, sometimes in the same sentence. He nods, tells her that his very good friend, who was almost like a Watcher to him, has died.

Tears shimmer in her eyes, and Xander's grateful she's doing for him something he can no longer do for himself. In the immediate aftermath of the dream, the thought came that he'd give the eye back if he could just cry again. It's never that simple, though.

It's good we're going to your country, she tells Xander. You can see to his needs there. He'll guide you. Help you.

This is what her people believe.

Maybe it's what he believes, too.

It's time we were getting to work, he tells her.

He takes up his pike, tosses Fara's to her, and they begin.