Wesley Wyndam-Pryce

Weeks had passed for Wesley since Gunn's visit, and in the meantime he found himself on the receiving end of peace and quiet.

Well. 'Peace' probably wasn't the word -- he certainly didn't feel peaceful; on the contrary, he was and continued to be angrier than he'd ever been, albeit a cold kind of anger. But it certainly was quiet.

Then came a day when there was another knock on his door, and he was quicker to answer it than he'd been the last time. Call it loneliness, call it desperation for someone to talk to. Wesley honestly didn't care.

( In which a book changes hands and lying abounds. )

[[from angel 3x20 "a new world." this is one of my favorite scenes in the whole show, omg. possibly number one. nfb, but open for phone calls, sure.]]

Now, a week might have gone by in Fandom time since Angel's son's birth, but for Wesley and the rest of the Angel Investigations team, it had only been two days.

Over the course of those two days, Lorne had moved in (something about his club being firebombed as a result of the eighteenth-century vampire hunter who wanted to kill them all), quite a few groups had continued to seek after the baby in order to kill him or eat him or whatever it was that such groups did, and Angel had proved persistently unwilling to let anyone else so much as hold him.

( Lorne called it a Mama Bear vibe. The rest of them called it irritating. )

That night, Angel was still anxious and refusing to let anyone else watch or touch the baby. Fred pulled an all-nighter in the office with Gunn for company as he came in with batches of weapons every few hours before leaving again, while Wesley and Cordelia did their work upstairs, each of them uncomfortable with the noise of the baby crying but aware that Angel didn't want any help.

Then in the morning, Lorne slipped Angel a piece of paper offhandedly, and their whole approach changed.

( Oooh, a private strategy session. )

[[nfb/nfi. top bit is from angel 3x10 "dad," second part by me. idek.]]

There were times -- like, for example, watching a pregnant vampire go into labor -- when Wesley had no choice but to look back upon what his life was like five, six years ago and wonder how in the world he'd gotten to this point.

( He could probably rattle off the list of events if someone was really curious, but at this point he found it best to just sigh and go with it. )

( Wesley was ridiculously out of his league when Gunn and Fred wheeled an ultrasound machine into the room and Angel barked at him to make it work, but no one seemed terribly bothered by that, so he was doing his best. )

[[taken and adapted for length from angel 3x08, "quickening." nfb/nfi.]]

After implicating Billy Blim as responsible for that woman's murder, the next logical step was for Angel to trek out to the Blim estate and stop him from doing it again. Or, well, actually Wesley and Gunn went along as well, but only Angel had been able to hop the fence.

What he ended up stumbling upon was Billy getting arrested -- by two police officers, a man and a woman -- for supposedly phoning in an unexplained tip for another crime, this one a woman's drowning.

Back at the hotel, the team was piecing that together.

"My contact at the city morgue confirms it," Wesley said, hanging up the phone. "Her body was discovered earlier tonight. A young woman was reported missing three days ago. Someone phoned in a tip."

( What's that saying about three times making a pattern? Yeah... )

[[nfi/nfb, 3x06 "billy" again, and another mild mention of violence under the cut.]]

Technically speaking, Wesley had left Fandom as soon as he could on Saturday afternoon. Practically, however, it wasn't until Tuesday morning that, exhausted, he stepped back into the hotel with exactly half of his original luggage in hand.

And he was promptly nearly tackled by a wall of energy in the form of Fred. Despite everything, he had to smile -- it was endearing, even as tired as he was.

"Wesley!" Fred squealed, hugging him with surprising force before bouncing backward to look up at him. "You'll never guess what happened this weekend. Go on, guess, I'll wait."

She actually did seem to be waiting. Wesley paused. "Er," he said. "Killer... lobster demons?"

He wasn't really sure why that of all things had popped into his head.

"No, silly!" Of course. How could he have been so foolish. "My mom and dad showed up!"

Well. That was certainly significant. "Really?"

"Yuh-huh!" Fred agreed. "And at first I was scared 'cause I didn't want 'em to see me an' know all about what happened to me, so I tried to run away and there was this icky bug demon tryin' to attack everyone so we got sidetracked, and my mom killed it, or at least we thought she killed it. And then we went back home, I mean here to the hotel, and everythin' was good for a while until I kept thinkin' about how it didn't make sense for me to be here, not when there's already you and Gunn and Cordy, so I started to leave with my parents until I realized there had to be more of the bug things, and that goes all the way back to when Angel took me for ice cream the other night, but anyway I came back and I catapulted it with a thing I made and I decided to stay after that and here I am."

Wesley blinked. "Here you are," he echoed, fixing her with a sincere smile. "I'm glad you decided to stay."

"I'm glad too," Fred said, looking up at him with that oddly intense gaze of hers.

There was a moment's pause. Wesley wondered -- would now perhaps be a good time to--

"Well," he said. "Since I seem to have missed all the action, how would you like to go out for some pizza, Fred?"

Her eyes lit up. "Sure!"

"Excellent," Wesley said, and it actually really was.

"Let me just go get Cordy and Gunn," Fred said, before sticking two fingers in her mouth and whistling sharply. Then she set off toward the stairs to the basement, where they were probably fighting over setting the rat traps again. "Cordy! Gunn! There's gonna be pizza!"

Wesley exhaled slowly, suddenly re-feeling that exhaustion that had gone away once Fred had started talking. Then he set down his bags and started rummaging for his wallet.

[[NFB/NFI/OOC-okay! i totally made this up because i didn't want to do a catchup for this episode and brat_inslayage agreed it was unnecessary, but holy crap fred is hard to write from scratch. events taken from angel 3x05 "fredless," la la la.]]