A/N: Written for Escape from LA Ficathon, hosted by Versaphile. I wrote for Gilesbabe, who I don't think ever read it, so enjoy! My requirements were:
pairing: No one from Angel - either someone from Buffy or original character
one or more restrictions: no deaths - no non-consenual sex
four or more requirements:
1)Set after Angel season 3 story Double or Nothing.
2) motorcycle
3) use of magic (Wes or someone else)
4)at some point in the story either Cordy or Fred calls him to say that they're willing to overlook what he did because they need his help and he tells them where to go.

Surreal, walking back into the place he once called home, the heavy box in his hands falling from nerveless fingers as he slumped tiredly against the doorjamb. The room was dark, the lights off just as when he walked out the door that fateful day, never intending to return. His notes were still scattered across his desk, maybe as a silent plea, an unspoken explanation and apology meant for his friends to find upon the discovery of his and Connor's absence. Everything in the small flat was more or less untouched, though a few things looked out of place.

His chair was moved, not quite pushed under the desk like before, and maybe his notes and papers were a little more scattered than he remembered leaving them. Fred and Gunn probably came here, looking through his things in an attempt to understand his motives. Fred did say she found his notes on the prophecy. He wondered idly if Angel came into this place while he lay in the hospital, but part of him doubted it. The room wouldn't be nearly as neat, the entire place torn apart, if that were the case.

Reaching out his hand, Wesley flipped the switch to turn on the hallway light, looking at it in numbed confusion when nothing happened. He stared up at the dark light fixture, eyebrows coming together. Could it have possibly burned out? Frowning, Wesley crossed the room, only stumbling once over the box of his things, and tried to turn on the lamp. Again, nothing happened.

His eyes drifted across the dim room over to his messy desk. Right there on top of the pile sat his electric bill, unopened, forgotten, along with his bills for water, cable, telephone, and gas. Right. He never bothered to pay them, seeing as how he didn't plan on remaining in the area. Come to think of it, he didn't pay his rent, either.

Turning around, he saw a white envelope on the floor in front of the door and he walked over and picked it up. Unadorned, save for his apartment number scrawled sloppily across the front, Wesley ripped it open, taking out the single piece of paper and reading it in the light from the hallway. A notice to vacate, a simple form letter with his name and other appropriate information written in the blanks. According to the document, he had to be out of the apartment by the day after tomorrow, letters had been sent to various collection agencies, and he owed them a substantial sum of money for breaking his lease.

Calmly, Wesley ripped the letter in half once, then again, and again, until all that remained of it were little squares of paper. He dropped it, watching the pieces flutter to the floor around his feet. Closing the door, not bothering to lock it, he walked across the apartment once more, detecting the faint scent of rotting things coming from the refrigerator.

It added an appropriate amount of ambience to the place, so dark, dreary, dismal, and all matter of other depressing 'd' words. The apartment suited Wesley's mood remarkably well. After all, everything else was going wrong.

On a whim, he opened up the drawer of his desk, taking out his cell phone. He'd turned it off before he left it behind and, sure enough, when he pressed the power button, it chirped to life. At least that was on automatic bill pay. A friendly message popped up on the screen informing him he had twenty-seven new voice messages. He dismissed the alert, having no desire to listen to them. Perhaps on a day when he was feeling even worse, he'd subject himself to that abuse.

He started to set the phone down when it rang, jarring the silence in the room, an odd rap ringtone singing out and breaking the quiet. Wesley gave a pained smile at that, remembering the previous year when Gunn had sneaked that onto his phone when he wasn't paying attention. He'd never gotten around to changing the ring, as it was usually on vibrate mode anyway.

The pained smile turned into a grimace when he recognized the number. He didn't have to answer it. He could just turn the phone off, drop it on the floor, and stomp on it a few times for good measure. Halfway to doing just that, his body reacted in the completely opposite direction, his thumb jamming on the answer button, raising the tiny thing to his ear.

The word that slipped from his lips might have been hello, but it didn't come out quite right. His voice, scratchy and rough, didn't sound remotely human, hardly demon for that matter. As though a cheese grater had been shoved down his throat then pulled back up again several times, the words wouldn't form and he remembered belatedly that his doctor instructed him not to attempt to speak for quite sometime.

"What was that?" demanded the prim, short, slightly irritated voice on the other line. "Wesley, did you just wake up? Good lord, it's mid-afternoon. When did you grow so lazy?"

His father. Wesley opened his mouth and closed it again several times, at a loss. The doctor mentioned no talking, but he didn't say exactly what to do in the interim. E-mail, perhaps? But his father despised e-mail.

"Fine, don't speak then," his father carried on, sounding more aggrieved by the minute. "You do know your mother's birthday was last week? I suppose you were too busy running that little company of yours with that vampire to bother yourself with the people who raised and cared for you all through childhood. It's disgraceful. She cried. I hope you're pleased with yourself."

Well, no, he hadn't forgotten his mother's birthday, but he'd been so hopped up on painkillers and out of his mind in agony following his surgery, he didn't quite have the time to nip out and buy a card. Add in his desperation to save Angel's child in the weeks before, his growing terror at the prophecy that kept translating the same way no matter how many times he tried to look at it in a different angle, and his mind had been far from birthdays and distant family that didn't care for him much. He did intend to send a card, though, at the very least, not that he could tell his father as much at the moment.

"What the silent treatment?" His father made a noise of disgust. "Very well. Act like a spoiled child. I should have known better than to expect something mature from you. You never did seem to want to grow up. Sorry we bothered you."

The phone call ended with an exaggerated slam on the other end and Wesley pulled the phone away, looking down at it with a blank expression on his face. Shrugging, he turned it off and put it back inside the drawer. Stomping on it might be relaxing, but he'd probably annoy the neighbors, who would alert the management office, who would send somebody down to demand money he didn't possess.

Letting out a sigh he wished was a scream, Wesley picked his way through the darkened room toward his bedroom. Sudden exhaustion claimed him and he reached out his hands, feeling his way around furniture until he found his bed and collapsed upon it, kicking off his shoes almost as an afterthought. He could have opened a shade, he knew, used the sunlight from outside to guide his steps, but he preferred the dark.

# # # # # #

A loud pounding noise forced him awake and Wesley sat up with a start, blinking in blurred confusion. His hand automatically reached out to the nightstand, fingers wrapping around a spare set of glasses, which he slid up his nose. The pounding increased in both volume and intensity and Wesley dragged himself out of bed, trying to figure out where it was coming from.

A quick glance at the window told him it was mid-morning. He'd slept all afternoon, through the evening, and well into the next day, apparently. Strange, that, as it only felt like he'd closed his eyes seconds before, no dreams haunting his rest, such as it was. He didn't feel rested at all, actually.

Rubbing at his aching head, Wesley staggered out of the bedroom. The pain medication the doctor gave him had clearly worn off, a sort of agony radiating from his throat unlike anything he'd ever suffered. Even being shot in the gut was less painful than this particular injury. It hurt to swallow, hurt to even blink, and the bile rising up the back of his throat in response to that terrible pain did nothing to alleviate it. On top of everything else, he was hungry, but there was nothing still good in the warm refrigerator and nothing in the cupboards he could force past the angry scar tissue. Not his best morning, by far.

On his way to answer the door, he paused at the box still on the floor, reaching down and digging through it. At last, his hand wrapped around a tiny bottle of pills and he swallowed two of them dry, not an easy task by any means. Then, he kicked the box out of the way and grabbed the doorknob.

When he opened the door to his apartment and saw the person reasonable for the pounding, he knew it wasn't going to get much better. Mrs. Peddelem, the woman who ran the apartment complex, struck him as kind and cheerful the many times he'd interacted with her. She'd seemed delighted the day he walked into her office to inquire about available apartments, shaking her hand and on his best behavior. She once told him he was quite the relief given the sort of wild kids that tended to rent and wreck the place. Ever since the incident with his shot up apartment last year, however, some of that friendliness had been replaced by wariness, even though Gunn had managed all the repairs and made the place better than it looked when he moved in.

Now, however, all that cheerful, friendly, mothering was gone, her expression tight and angry. Her lips were pressed into a thin line and she swept past him into the apartment, looking over the general disrepair of the place and the fine dust covering all the furnishings, her nose turning up at the faint scent of rot coming from the kitchen. She glanced down at the torn up bits of his Notice to Vacate with a narrowing of her eyes.

"Mr. Wyndham-Pryce," she said, her voice like ice. "I've let quite a bit slide with you since you've moved in, but this is the last straw. Your rent is overdue and you've ignored every attempt I've made to contact you. I'm at my wits end, Mr. Wyndham-Pryce and I'm afraid I have to evict you for a more... reliable tenet."

Wesley opened his mouth to reply, then closed it and tilted his head up, pointing to his throat. With great exaggeration, he mouthed the word 'hospital', hoping she would understand. True, he didn't have the rent money, but maybe she would forgive him enough to let him slide until he could find away to pay her back proper?

Her expression grew, if possible, darker, and Wesley knew then the answer to his unspoken question was 'probably not'.

"I don't care anymore," she said harshly, making fierce hand motions at the same time. "I should have forced you out when you wrecked the walls with a shotgun! Add in strange people coming in and out at all hours of the night, people reporting the sounds of fighting through the walls, and that's it! I've had it! You're out of here! Be somebody else's problem!"

She stomped back to the door, her hand grabbing the knob hard. "Be out by tomorrow! The apartment better be spotless and you're not getting back your deposit!" She left the room, slamming the door hard behind her.

Wesley stared at the closed door, then took off his glasses and cleaned them, even though they didn't need cleaning. It was something to do, something to occupy his hands, a chance for the world to be blind and fuzzy, forcing him to look down, giving him time to think during which no one could look in his eyes and see what he was thinking. Granted, there was nobody in the room at the moment, except ghosts and memories, but it still felt necessary.

Putting his glasses back on, he looked around the apartment, a kind of hopelessness taking up residence in his stomach. Out by tomorrow? Spotless? Achieving both of those things was impossible and Mrs. Peddelem knew it.

Wesley crossed the room, going to sit at his desk. He pushed the papers and bills off its surface onto the floor, suddenly not minding the mess. From a drawer he drew out a clean piece of paper and a pen, then titled the paper 'Things To Do.' Underneath that, he wrote the number one.

Making lists was comforting, if a bit ridiculous. Cordelia used to mock him when he'd write up a grocery list with two items on it when it was his turn to stock the kitchen at the hotel. Yes, he knew they only needed eggs and coffee, but writing it down made him feel content, organized. In a world so chaotic, a little organization here and there never hurt anybody.

Tapping the end of the pen against his chin, Wesley thought over his options. Clearly, he could not stay in this apartment. Should he spend the day finding another one? While the chances of finding a place to live was high, finding a way to afford a new deposit and move his furniture in that short amount of time was not. No, he'd have to leave everything behind, or sell it.

Selling it would be the best option, as he needed the money, but how? Maybe if he had a week, he could take out a classified ad. Unfortunately, time was not on his side.

His eyes glanced over at his bookshelf, loaded to full capacity with texts both valuable and rare. They'd taken him awhile to collect, but they would only take a minute to get rid of. There were plenty of occult bookshops in the area that would be content to take them off his hands for a reasonable sum. Although, some of them he thought he'd rather not release into the general public, just in case they were used for dark purposes. The last thing he wanted was to be responsible for any other misfortune.

A plan was rapidly forming in his mind. He felt a strange sort of excitement building up in his chest, very similar to what he felt shortly after his release from the hospital in Sunnydale. Maybe it was a combination of hopelessness, the wearing off of his pain killers, and the utter sense of having absolutely nothing to lose no matter what he did, but for the first time in ages, he was actually looking forward to yet another radical shift in his life. At least it was never boring.

Lowering pen to paper, Wesley started to write quickly and confidently across the page.

# # # # # #

"Welcome, Blessed Be," said the young woman, bowing deeply before Wesley as he entered the shop, arms loaded down with an exceptionally heavy box.

He tried not to roll his eyes at her theatrics. Really, did anybody buy into that sort of silliness? He didn't quite grunt when he pushed the box up onto the counter, only for the sake of his throat. Walking all the way down to this shop from his apartment carrying the damn thing hadn't been an easy task in his weakened state. At times like these, he really wondered whatever became of his SUV, not that he could afford to gas it up if he wanted.

Pulling a small notepad and a pen out of his pocket, he wrote the word, 'selling' upon it, then showed it to her. She nodded sagely, far too sagely for it to be believable, then started going through the books he'd brought. She tsk'd and clucked as she reviewed each one, Wesley assuming these were sounds of approval, but he couldn't be certain.

"Quite a collection," she said, sounding impressed. "Any particular reason why you're selling such wonderful references and spell books?"

Wesley stared at her for a moment, then pointed to his throat.

"Ah, so the power of speech has left you," she said knowingly. Wesley thought that was a rather stupid observation. Obviously, if he could talk, he wouldn't be writing things down, now then would he? She continued on anyway. "Thus, without your words, many of these spells exist beyond your grasp?"

Shaking his head, Wesley scratched out a short sentence to her on his notepad.

It read, 'Bad insurance = High deductible.'

"Oh," the woman said, deflating a little. "Well, I guess that's a good reason. I'll give you three-hundred for the lot."

Nodding, Wesley watched the woman as she opened the register and counted out the money. She wrote him up a receipt, which he pocketed along with the cash. Taking the books out of the box, he took that back, knowing he'd need it again.

Reaching into his other pocket, he pulled out his list and crossed off the first item on top, then left the store.

# # # # # #

The box, filled once again with books, wasn't getting any lighter as he shifted it uncomfortably from one hip to the next, tapping his foot as he stood impatiently at the queue. While there were clearly five counters where employees could stand and serve their customers, only one person was actually working. She moved very slowly, like her legs were trapped in molasses, the angry glare on her face encompassing all of them, as if they were wasting her time and how dare they expect her to actually do her job! The nerve of it all.

A screaming child ran too close past his legs, knocking Wesley off-balance. He glanced at the child's mother, who was busy chatting on a cell phone and not paying the least bit of attention to her offspring. A teenager behind him had stuffed earphones in his ears, the music from his iPod audible from even a great distance. All around him people grumped and groused, tempers growing ever shorter, vile mutterings slipping from their lips.

Wesley figured, if he were to die tomorrow, this would be the hell designed just for him. An eternity spent suffering in this place, in a line that never moved, a horrid dimension where the worst of human society came to the fore. Yes, it was appropriate - his hell would most certainly be the post office.

"Next!" snapped the woman behind the counter, staring at the customer that came up as if it were something foul she'd stepped in on the bottom of her shoe. Wesley couldn't hear what the young woman asked for, but the postal employee sighed loudly, her lip curling in disdain.

"Stamps!" she said, shaking her head in disgust. "Do you not see the machine over there that sells them? Why are you wasting my time asking for stamps?"

He knew he should watch, get a feel for the threat he would soon face, study his enemy in the form of a postal employee so he could devise a way to best handle her when his turn finally came up, but something told Wesley that no matter what he did, the results would be disastrous. Instead, he tuned the woman and her hapless customer out, glancing up at the ceiling and letting a rousing rendition of a medley of greatest hits from "The Clash" drift through his head. He was halfway through "London Calling" when a loud "NEXT!" broke through his revelry and he realized his turn had finally arrived.

Walking up to the counter, Wesley set the taped up box of books gingerly on the counter. He'd already addressed it, so all he needed for her to do was meter the cost of shipping for him. He pointed to the box, pointed to the scale, and hoped that would get his point across.

"What do you want?" the woman asked harshly, Wesley's point clearly sailing over her head entirely.

Holding back a sigh, Wesley pulled out his notepad and wrote very plainly that he wanted to mail that box to the address it was addressed to and needed to pay for the shipping costs. He showed it to her and she sneered, then set about doing as he asked grudgingly, all the while muttering under her breath.

"Unbelievable," she hissed, shaking her head as she threw his box on the scale. "Not a single one of you can do anything for yourselves. Always demanding, always asking, always krit-sheem dira mora palis skrit MAL!"

Wesley took a step back eyes going wide. He recognized that language. The woman, hissing and sputtering in front of him, was a Kreltick demon, a kind of shape-shifter with a habit of eating garbage. Peering intently over her shoulder, he squinted at the postal employees moving around in the back room. One of them, he realized with some alarm, had three legs.

Suddenly, the world made a lot more sense.

"Eighteen-fifty," the demon woman snapped.

Still in a little shock, Wesley shoved her a twenty and didn't think it was worth arguing when she shorted him on his change. Pocketing his coins, he stepped away from the counter, the demon woman screaming 'next' loud enough to make the people around him jump. With a shake of his head, Wesley hurried out of the post office and into the LA sunshine.

Safe on the sidewalk, he crossed the next item off his list and climbed on his motorcycle, driving in the direction of the library.

# # # # # #

The library was crowded, but nobody seemed to be reading any books. Rather, everyone perched around on various couches and tables, laptops propped up on flat surfaces, typing rapidly. The public terminals were all in use and Wesley rocked back and forth on his heels for a moment, not quite sure what to do.

The emergence of Wi-Fi and free Internet connections in libraries was a blessing and a curse, Wesley figured. While not a technophobe, he didn't think libraries should have turned into Internet cafes. For him, libraries always represented a welcome respite from the real world, cool, musty places where he could slip away into the stacks and spend hours at a time, reading to his leisure about worlds near and far, real and fiction. Hearing all this clacking was distracting and highly unwelcome. But, hypocrite that he was at the moment, Wesley needed one of those bloody public terminals.

Wesley ran his fingers through his hair, grimacing at how sticky it felt. Normally, when going to a public library, he'd endeavor to make himself look his most presentable, mostly out of respect. However, since he hadn't showered in ages, the nurses usually washing him down while he slept in bed, and he hadn't bothered to change into different clothes that morning, Wesley knew he looked positively grubby, maybe even borderline homeless. It couldn't be helped, though, and he tried to ignore the wrinkling of the librarian's nose when he walked up the counter.

"Can I help you?" she said, not in a friendly way.

A clipboard sat next to her just behind the counter and Wesley pointed at it. She followed his gesture, but didn't hand it to him. Instead, she reached into her desk and pulled out a single sheet of paper.

"Please review and sign the following release and list of rules pertaining to the use of public access terminals," she said, thrusting it at him along with a pen. "Do you have a library card?"

Wesley nodded, reaching into his back pocket and taking out his wallet. He handed her the appropriate card and she looked at it carefully, before scanning it into her computer. Wesley signed the form she handed him, passing it back to her, and she passed him the clipboard. He signed that, too.

"Thank you," she said, then pointed up to the monitors hanging from the ceiling. "When a computer becomes free, you'll see the first three letters of your last name and the first three letters of your first name next to the terminal number that's available. During times of high usage, patrons are requested to limit their time on the computer to 20 minutes. Go take a seat."

Nodding his thanks, Wesley didn't go take a seat right away as she requested, instead slipping into the stacks. He didn't need the card catalogue to find what he was looking for - come to think of it, they probably didn't even use card catalogues anymore. Walking into the foreign language section, he poked around several of the texts, looking for something he hadn't read before. Most of the books were popular new releases simply printed in Spanish, but he had, on occasion, found something worthwhile. Looking at the Italian language books, he suddenly felt the eerie sensation that someone was staring at him. Glancing up, he looked left, then right, then, on a whim, down.

Standing there, open mouthed and stock-still, was a little boy, no more than six years old, staring at the scar on his neck. Wesley raised his eyebrow at him and the boy jumped, taking a few steps back, but he didn't look away. The two of them remained locked in their staring contest for several moments, when a heavyset woman came bustling around the corner.

"Albert, what are you..." She stopped when she saw Wesley, then grabbed her son's hand. She waggled a finger at Wesley, glaring at him angrily. "What do you think you're doing, scaring my son? You keep away from him!" Leaning down to Albert, she spoke to him in a stage whisper, loud enough for Wesley to hear. "Don't you go talking to weirdoes like that. That's a bad man. We talked about this."

Tightening her grip on her son, she dragged him away, around the corner, but he kept his eyes trained on Wesley until he was gone from sight. Turning back to the books, Wesley stared at them for a moment, blinking rapidly. Sighing, he tried to reassure himself that, even if he'd been at his most healthy and his most presentable, the mother still might have said the same thing. He should be pleased to see that she was teaching her son to stay away from strangers who might kidnap him and get him lost in a unknown demon dimension.

Right.

Shuddering, Wesley reached out widely for a random book, accidentally knocking it and three others to the floor. With a mental groan, he sank down to his knees to gather them up. Reaching for the last one, he froze, his eyes fixed to its cover.

The last book lost its outer jacket when it hit the floor. The cheap paper cover said it was nothing more than an extremely dry book on the history of the Roman paints and pigments. However, underneath the paper, the book revealed something completely different. Wesley could scarcely believe it.

Tearing off the cover, Wesley confirmed his suspicions. On the top of the spine, looking like nothing more than a decorative embellishment, was complex, knotted symbol the likes of which had vanished from their reality some one hundred years ago. The Arovek Codex. He didn't know any of those still existed. To his knowledge, all were lost over the centuries under mysterious circumstances. Looking left and right to make sure no one was watching him, he slipped the cover back on and flipped open the first page. It looked like the book had only been checked out once, back in 1973, to a man named Isaac Demerov. Sure enough, as he paged through it, it was a very dry piece on Roman paints and pigments, but the words wavered slightly and the paper made his fingertips tingle.

Mesmerized, Wesley carried it to the front librarian, holding it out to her. It took her a few minutes, but she finally glanced up at him, sighing deeply and snatching the book from his hands. After scanning in his library card, she handed the book back to him, and it was his, for two weeks, at which point he would need to return it or incur steep fees and the wrath of the public library foundation. He felt a little guilty that he would never return it to this place, but the Arovek Codex! Lord.

"Your computer is ready," the librarian said with a bored tone of voice, waving lazily at the monitor above the desk.

Wesley, still lost in his thoughts about the book in his hand, didn't immediately register what she was talking about. When she gestured again, Wesley looked up. Sure enough, his turn had arrived. Nodding at her again, he hurried over to the computers, finding the one waiting for him, and moved the mouse to remove the screen saver.

It only took him a few seconds to pull up the web browser and load Craig's List. Pulling his list out of his pocket, he quickly set about putting up a quick and dirty classified advertisement, listing all of his furniture, knick-knacks, and any remaining items in his apartment for sale, all priced drastically lower than their actual worth. He hoped, doing it this way, he could get rid of everything quickly and at least recover some money for his efforts. Adding in a little thing at the end, asking people not to e-mail him, but rather simply arrive at his apartment that evening between the hours of six and nine that night, he quickly posted it. Without a second thought, he crossed that part of the list on the table.

The Arovek Codex sat on the table next to it and he rested his hand along the cover, feeling the magical energy in the book tickle the palm of his hand. Astounding, simply astounding, that he should find this now. Wesley wasn't a big fan of fate, but he couldn't deny it existed. Maybe, something somewhere was trying to tell him something. He knew his father, at least, would be jealous to know that he found it, not that the man would ever say as much.

Thinking back on his failed conversation with his father the day before, he opened up Google. How did people who couldn't speak talk on the phone? There had to be a way to do it. Not that he intended to call his father back, of course, but it might be useful to know, in case he needed to do, well, anything.

Go to the next part...

Back to the Main Page