(no subject)
New All Over, Part Two
It was lunchtime when Willow came into the library, Willow saying: “Giles, have you seen...?” And then she saw Wesley and her eyes got that soft look and her face that ‘aww’ look that Buffy’s had been wearing all day. “An adorable little boy...”
“Actually, yes, we have one right here.” Buffy smirked at her.
Wesley rose to his feet, looking up at Willow with something like wonder on his face.
“What is it...?” Buffy asked him.
He leant in to whisper in her ear: “She’s so pretty.”
Having overheard, Giles couldn’t stop a smile crossing his face and Willow just gasped in helpless adoration. “You are so cute….” she breathed.
He held out a hand. “I’m Wesley.”
“‘Wesley’…?” Willow shook his hand in surprise. “That’s such a coincidence, because we have…” Seeing Buffy and Giles shaking their heads and pointing at the little boy, her eyes widened and she gaped at the child in disbelief. “Wesley?”
He looked up at her nervously, as if somehow being identified as who he was would be enough to get him punished. “Yes.”
She turned to Giles. “But how...? I mean and...when...?”
“A present from Ethan,” Giles said succinctly. “Wesley opened the package meant for me by mistake.”
Buffy said: “Wesley doesn’t remember anything except being a child.”
He looked between them all in confusion and Willow hastily gave him a smile. “I’m Willow.”
“Pleased to meet you, Willow,” he said politely, shaking her hand.
“Cute munchkin, Buff,” Xander observed casually, eating an apple. “But where were you all morning? You know Snyder is always on the prowl for any wrongdoing.”
“Wesley meet Xander.” Buffy indicated the young man.
Wesley took a step back, clearly intimidated, and then cautiously proffered a hand, murmuring shyly: “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Xander blinked in confusion and hastily wiped the apple juice from his hand before taking hold of Wesley’s. “And you.” He slowly turned to Buffy. “Wait - did you say ‘Wesley’?” His eyes widened. “Wesley as in Wesley...?”
Buffy nodded. “Yes.”
Xander crouched down in front of the little boy who was regarding him nervously. “What the Dickens, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain happened to you?”
Wesley swallowed. “I think I was sent away. I was clumsy and Daddy was very angry with me. And then I woke up here. So I think I’m being punished, but I don’t mind...” He gazed up at Buffy. “I like it here.”
“You’re not being punished, Wesley.” She picked him up and sat him on her lap. He immediately gave a little sigh of contentment and curled against her, his head against her neck. “There was a spell and it turned you from the person you were here when you were here to the person you used to be when you...weren’t here.”
“Why was I here before...?” He frowned in confusion.
“You were helping Giles be my Watcher,” she said.
His already oversized eyes got even bigger as he lit up with excitement. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“They let me be a Watcher? Really?”
“Yes.” Giles winced inside as he saw how much it meant to this little boy. He had never wanted it like Wesley had obviously done. It had been something inflicted on him, a duty and responsibility he really had not wanted. But to Wesley it really had been everything, a true raison d'être.
“But Daddy said...” He broke off, looking deflated.
“What did he say...?” Buffy enquired.
He squirmed against her, ducking his head and then whispered: “He said I wouldn’t be any good and I’d never get picked because I’m too stupid and clumsy and I don’t work hard enough.”
Over his head Buffy mouthed savagely at Giles: ‘There are no words for how much I hate his father.’
Giles sighed. “Well, you obviously did work hard enough, Wesley, because the Council sent you here to be Buffy’s Watcher.” There didn’t seem to be any point in confusing him by mentioning Faith right now.
Wesley looked up at her wide-eyed. “But I’m too little.”
“That’s the spell,” Buffy assured him. “The spell made you small again. Before that you were all…grown up.”
“Like Mr Giles.” Wesley darted a nervous glance at the older man.
“Not quite that grown up,” Buffy conceded. “But twenty-something.”
His eyes looked huge as he looked at Xander. “Like Mr Xander?”
Xander glanced across at Giles. “I really like this kid.”
“Xander’s only eighteen,” Buffy explained. “Like Willow and I.”
Wesley looked across at Willow and then blushed, snuggling in against Buffy more comfortably as he gazed at her; his thumb strayed towards his mouth and then he realized in horror what he was doing and quickly shoved his hand behind his back, looking around quickly to see if any of them had noticed. Buffy felt him tremble and quickly dropped a kiss into his hair, but his thin body was still quivering with the anxiety of almost having done something that was clearly very wrong. She turned to Giles: “So, the whole not killing humans thing, is that a rule or just a guideline?”
“Definitely a rule,” he said warningly.
As Willow pulled up a chair next to Buffy and began to gently ask Wesley questions, Xander drew Giles to one side and looked at him pointedly. “So - in the place of incredibly pompous Watcher guy we now have an incredibly thin kid. What gives...?”
Wearily, Giles explained about Ethan and his spell, while Xander kept darting glances across at the little boy curled up in Buffy’s protective grip.
“None of which explains why he’s so thin,” Xander pointed out.
“Well, English food will do that for a growing boy,” Giles sighed. “I’m sure we can reverse the spell. We really need to find Ethan. I imagine he’s still in town. He won’t be able to rest until he knows what went wrong with his plan.”
“What was his plan?”
Giles mentally worked out the date and the age he would have been if he had also lost eighteen years as Wesley had done. Grimacing, he realized that it would make him exactly the age he had been when he and Ethan had been at their most reckless and…companionable. Perhaps the only person on the planet who would have been impressed by the forty-something Ethan and his life as a shit-stirring chaos mage was the twenty-something idiot Giles had once been.
Giles loosened his tie. “Just - making mischief for the fun of it.”
When Oz walked in and the whole introducing of Wesley had to be gone through all over again, Giles decided it was going to be a very long day. Luckily Oz had never been big on asking for long complicated explanations and just said ‘cool’ then shook Wesley gravely by the hand.
The hubbub of so many of them all talking at once did not help his still-throbbing head. Nor did the sight of Wesley curled up on Buffy’s lap while she stroked his hair and looked as if only brute force was going to wrench him out of her grip. Clearly, Wesley’s father had been someone who tended to the strict discipline and long hours of study mode of parenthood as opposed to the cuddles and puppies school of parenting that Willow and Buffy evidently considered more appropriate. But in some ways he supposed the man had been justified by the results. Wesley had become Head Boy. He had been put on the Active Watcher list. He had been given two Slayers to Watch for. Perhaps that had happened only because of his upbringing.
Giles tried to tell himself that there was nothing wrong with strictness but it was hard to keep believing that when Wesley was so pathetically grateful for those cuddles from Buffy. It looked as if no one had ever hugged him before in his life. He had none of a little boy’s usual disdain of being fussed over, it was clear that this was a new and wonderful experience for him, and he was confused by it but absolutely basking in the attention. He was practically purring like a stray kitten that unexpectedly finds itself in a warm lap. Oz seemed to know that he needed to keep a distance from the boy, letting Wesley get used to him, and Xander, after the boy had flinched a couple of times when Xander spoke to him or got close to him, was being tactful about not looming as well.
In theory, they were all researching the amulet, but in practice Xander was feeding Wesley junk food in bite-sized amounts, holding out pieces of Snickers and inviting the boy to take it as if Wesley was some shy little creature he was hoping to tame; Oz was quietly intriguing the boy with laconic remarks, and Willow and Buffy were cooing over him while he gave his contented kitten impression and snuggled into Buffy as if she were the safest place in the world.
Giles suspected that quite apart from the novelty of having a remarkably well behaved, quiet and obedient little boy to play with, they were slacking off from the research in part because they had no interest in restoring Wesley to his adult form. They hadn’t liked the adult Wesley. They did like the child Wesley. He could see that Buffy felt the real mission here was to prevent the one from turning into the other; the exact opposite of what Giles knew he had to do, which was ensure that the adult version was restored.
If they left it too long it was going to feel as if they were somehow destroying the little boy who at the moment was a living breathing person that Buffy could hold in her arms. The truth was, of course, that that little boy had grown up many years ago; this was not the right timeline for him. Ethan had forced this regression on Wesley and in doing so undone all those years of…
All those years of what…? All those years of conditioning that had turned this nervous, scholarly, and perhaps over-serious, but undeniably sweet child into the pompous annoying little twerp who regularly drove them all up the wall? It was, on reflection, very difficult to see that as any kind of achievement. It was certainly not something of which either the Council or Wesley’s father had any reason to be proud.
He looked up in surprise as Wesley giggled and saw that Xander had won his trust enough to be able to tickle him with one forefinger. The boy clasped a hand over his mouth, evidently not thinking himself permitted to be noisy, but then giggled again as Xander said, “I knew you were ticklish. I can always tell…” and wiggled his finger between Wesley’s oversized shirt buttons to tickle his tummy. Wesley laughed out loud and then clamped his hands across his mouth again, but his eyes were shining and he looked more like a normal little boy than he had done all day. He began to giggle helplessly, squirming on Buffy’s lap as Xander tickled him, and then gave a peal of laughter and flung out his arm, knocking over Xander’s can of Coke.
Everyone snatched up the books while Willow shouted: “I’ve got it!” dabbing at the sticky liquid with a hankie. Everyone except Wesley who had gone white as death, shot one panic-stricken look at Giles, and then dived under the table.
Having seen the abject terror in his eyes, Giles felt abruptly sick. He saw Oz catch Willow by the arm as she made to get down to Wesley’s level and reassure him, giving an almost imperceptible nod of his head in Giles’s direction, while Xander caught Buffy’s arm and did the same. Buffy gave Xander a reproachful look, clearly wanting to dive straight after Wesley, but Xander also nodded at Giles.
Giles could almost taste the little boy’s fear in the air. Not knowing what to do or say, he walked over to where the Coke was still dripping onto the floor and said as gently as he could: “Wesley…?”
“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry…” The boy was murmuring it in a breathless whisper.
Giles crouched down to his level and saw that Wesley had jammed himself under the table, hunched up, lips working as he kept repeating his apology, but as Giles appeared on his level, he flinched, tears sprang into his eyes, and he gave the man a look of panic-stricken fear.
Giles snatched a breath of his own. “Wesley, it’s all right. It was an accident. Accidents happen.”
“I spilled… on the books… I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to…”
“I know you didn’t.” Giles held out a hand to him. “Wesley, please come out.”
The look the boy gave him was still one of the terror, but he obeyed, of course; that was what he did. Giles realized with another sick lurch of comprehension that even if the boy believed he was going to be beaten he would still come out when he was told to because disobedience was not even to be thought of.
Wesley crawled out from under the table and stood up, shoulders hunched, and shaking violently. “I’m very s-sorry,” he whispered, the shaking making him stutter. “I d-didn’t mean to...” He was breathing much too fast, snatching the air into lungs working like a bellows as the panic attack took hold.
“I know…” Giles tried to keep his voice as gentle as he could when what he really wanted to do right now was get on a plane for England and go and punch Roger Wyndam-Pryce very hard. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Things get spilled sometimes. It happens.”
Wesley darted a terrified look at him, still shaking so hard Giles could hear his teeth chattering. The boy looked over at the staircase that lead up to the stacks, his fingers clutching at his overlong sleeves as he clearly tried without success to stop himself from trembling. The door to the understairs cupboard seemed to be hypnotising him like some hideous monster under the bed.
“Please don’t…” Wesley gasped. “I promise I won’t… I’ll never do it again…”
Giles risked a look at the others and saw that Willow had tears in her eyes, Buffy looked torn between sobbing and punching someone, Oz was very still and Xander very shocked. The sound of Wesley’s teeth chattering was now even more audible, and Giles abruptly reached out, picked the boy up and held him. Wesley started to cry, silently, in fear of the punishment he thought was coming. Giles could hear his heart hammering against him, his thin warm little body reverberating with terror.
Rubbing his back very gently as he carried him to his office, Giles said again: “I’m not angry, Wesley. You didn’t do anything wrong. No one is angry with you.”
The boy gave a little whimper of fear as they passed the staircase and Giles wondered if he even wanted to know what the boy thought he was going to do to him. He carried him into the office and then set him down very carefully so he was sitting on his desk. Then he reached into his drawer - a stupid move, he realized, as soon as he’d made it as, of course, the boy thought he was reaching for a cane or ruler and more of those strangled sobs of fear spilled from his throat - and produced a packet of chocolate digestives. As the boy gazed at him in confused terror, Giles took a biscuit out of the packet, broke it in half and put one half between Wesley’s fingers, saying again, very gently: “No one is angry with you, Wesley. Now, be a good boy and eat your biscuit and I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea.”
Wesley gulped in confusion a few times, swallowing sobs, while Giles filled the kettle and put it onto boil, very aware of those huge blue eyes watching every move he made. Inside he was thinking: ‘Wyndam-Pryce, you son of a bitch, what did you do to this poor child?’ Out loud he said: “Do you want sugar in your tea, Wesley?”
He turned to find the boy still gazing at him, the half a biscuit still clutched in his fingers. Wesley gulped a few more times and then whispered: “Yes, please.”
Giles exhaled in relief. At least the boy had stopped hyperventilating before he went into shock; that was something.
“Milk…?”
Wesley snatched another almost normal breath and managed another whispered: “Yes, please.”
Giles poured out the tea, making sure the boy’s had two heaped spoonfuls of sugar to help with the shock, and lots of milk so he could drink it down quickly. “Here you are.”
It clattered in the saucer as Wesley took it, and Giles gently took the saucer from him and, as the tea began to slosh like a millpond in his shaky little fingers, held the cup to his lips so he could sip. Wesley gulped down the tea gratefully, his long thick lashes wet with tears, still shuddering with the aftershocks of his fear. Giles helped him to drink his tea, eat his now half-melted half a biscuit, then took him to the bathroom, waited outside as he relieved himself and washed his hands, then suggested that perhaps he should settle down in the sickbed in the corner and have a nap.
Wesley gazed up at him fearfully. “What if I wake up somewhere else?”
“You won’t,” Giles promised him. “You’ll wake up here, and I’ll be here, I promise.” He unlaced the boy’s shoes for him and then posted him into the bed, covered him with a tartan blanket and then walked out to where the others were still sitting in horrified silence.
Buffy said quietly: “Now do I get to kill his father?”
Giles sighed. “I’m afraid not, Buffy.”
Xander breathed: “Did you see how scared he was?”
Willow had evidently been crying in silent sympathy with Wesley’s fear and Oz had his arm around her. “Not the best advert for the English way of child-rearing,” Oz said quietly.
Giles pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need to find a way to restore Wesley to his proper form and…”
“No, we need to make sure it stops!” Buffy said furiously. “We need to make sure that Wesley never has to go back to the people who did this to him! We need to make sure he grows up with normal people and normal human kindness and…”
“And it’s too late for that,” Giles told her sharply. “Face it, Buffy. Wesley is twenty-six years old. Whatever happened to him has already happened. It’s in his past now and we can’t do anything about it. That little boy in there isn’t the child it was done to. He’s an adult who has been regressed to that age and has the memories of being that age, but he isn’t the little boy who…”
“Say it, Giles,” Buffy demanded as Giles stuttered over finishing that sentence. “Say he isn’t the little boy who, because he spilled some soft drink on the table, is so terrified that he can’t even speak.”
Giles snatched another steadying breath. “We need to undo what Ethan did. We need to give Wesley his real life back.”
“He doesn’t have to be the way he is! He could be…!”
“He is the way he is and it’s his right to be who he is. Wesley is a grown man.”
Buffy gazed at him in disbelief. “Don’t you even care?”
Giles felt something inside himself perilously close to snapping. He lowered his voice still further to say shortly: “Of course I care. If Roger sodding Wyndam-Pryce were here right now I would punch his bloody head in. But he isn’t here and everything that was done to Wesley was done eighteen years ago.” As she continued to look at him as if he were a were-demon of callousness, he rolled his eyes. “Don’t you understand, even now? Wesley wanted to be a Watcher. That’s what he studied for. That’s what he went through all that misery and cramming and not spilling orange juice on the furniture for. All that little boy wants to be when he grows up is what he is already is - active Watcher to an active Slayer.”
Buffy ran a hand through her hair. “You mean the active Slayer who nearly crushed his ribcage because she was feeling tetchy during training?”
Giles sighed. “I can’t excuse what you did but I will say that you’ve been given a chance to make amends and I suggest you take it.” He pushed a book towards her. “And that means finding a way to reverse this spell.”
For a moment they all looked mutinous and then Willow sighed and sat down, followed by Oz and then Xander and lastly Buffy. Reluctantly, the books were opened again, the amulet examined, pencils began to scratch on paper.
Giles went back into the office to take a look at the boy; not at all surprised to find that he was already fast asleep, long black lashes still wet with tears, thumb slipped into his mouth for comfort. He tried not to think about making this child cease to exist. That wasn’t what they were doing. This child had existed eighteen years ago and was now a grown man with a right to have his life back; that was what he needed to hang onto. He looked down at the boy and tried to see the adult Wesley in him, and it was a shock abruptly to realize that the mouth was the same, and the line of the jaw. This must be what his hair was really like when not tamed with brylcreem; unruly clipped dark locks that wanted to spring out from his head into a soft short shock of bed-hair.
With a sinking feeling as he looked down at the small boy and for the first time saw all the ways in which he really was Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, he wondered if, to the adult Wesley, they had seemed like only the latest in a long line of bullies; and if Giles, as the one who most closely resembled Wesley’s father, had seemed like the biggest bully of them all.
***
Wesley was tentatively drinking chocolate milk and working on some Latin translation when Snyder walked in. Wesley had slept for a few hours in which time Giles had persuaded Buffy and the others to go back to their classes, promising that he would take care of the boy and they could come and see him again after school. He really wanted to avoid Buffy taking Wesley home with her if possible. He thought Joyce would take his side when he explained that the adult Wesley had been the victim of a spell and would undoubtedly want to be returned to his normal age, but he couldn’t be sure. Willow had certainly sided with Buffy in the time it took for the child Wesley to give her a look of shy adoration from those ridiculously big blue eyes. Both Oz and Xander had looked down their nose at Giles for not wanting to effectively kidnap the child and bring him up secretly far away from the Watcher’s Council and his father. If Joyce sided with Buffy and Willow, he was not going to be able to overwhelm her with his authority as an adult in a way he might - possibly - be able to do with Buffy and the others. He wasn’t sure that even Joyce was going to be proof against the underfed affection-starved cry to mothering instincts that Wesley represented in his current form.
When Giles mentioned the rights of the adult Wesley, their argument was that they were looking out for those rights when planning to bring him up to be a sensible well-adjusted and happy member of society instead of a screwed up, uptight, socially-retarded Watcherlite. Thinking about how sweet the child Wesley was and how annoying the adult Wesley was Giles had so far found it a little difficult to counter that argument.
Giles had found that the boy was so unused to having time off that he started to fret if not given some kind of lessons. Wesley was programmed to be working and trying to not be any trouble and possibly earn a few crumbs of longed-for praise. He knew Buffy and Xander would probably have insisted on taking the boy off to a playground but he felt that might be too much of a culture shock for someone used to ten hours of lessons a day so had found the easiest text he had in Latin and given him that to translate to occupy him.
Snyder now took one look at the child, curled his lip in disgust, and said to Giles: “We have a policy of no pets in the school grounds.”
Giles gave Snyder a Look that would have made even Buffy back down and said crisply: “This is my nephew. He’s staying with me for a few days. I thought it would be instructive for him to see the American educational system.”
Snyder sniffed and looked around the library. “Where’s your new ‘assistant’?”
Giles thought the man could hardly have made the inverted commas clearer but refused to rise to the bait. “He’s attending a rare book fair.”
“I don’t see why we need an assistant librarian for a library where the only children who ever come in are the troublemakers like Summers and the halfwits like Harris.”
“Willow has also been known to use the library from time to time,” Giles pointed out, keeping an eye on Snyder in case he went near Wesley. The little boy was still working on his translation in between very quietly drinking his chocolate milk, savouring each sip the way he savoured every cuddle from Buffy and Willow. Giles knew very well that Nesquik was available in England, as was Ribena, but apparently they had not found their way to Wesley’s schoolroom.
“Now Rosenberg at least shows some sparks of normality. You should be encouraging her to dump her loser deadbeat friends.”
Giles mentally counted to ten as Snyder moved behind Wesley to look at what he was doing.
“Is there something I can help you with, Principal Snyder?” he enquired.
Snyder peered at what Wesley was doing and then frowned. “Are you a practising Satanist?” he demanded.
Wesley gazed up at him fearfully. “No, sir.”
“What are you writing?”
Wesley swallowed. “I’m translating some Suetonius, sir.”
“What language is that?”
“Latin, sir.”
“Satanists use Latin.” Snyder glowered at the child. “I know you’re never too young to be playing your records backwards and pledging yourselves to Lucifer. What does that say?”
Haltingly, Wesley began to read out each word: "Suscepto... igitur... civili... bello... ac... ducibus...”
Snyder looked around suspiciously, as if expecting the Goat of Mendes to appear. “All right, that’s enough of that.”
Giles loomed over him in what he hoped could in no way be mistaken for anything other than a threat. “If you’ve quite finished quizzing my nephew, Principal Snyder, I do have rather a lot of work to be getting on with.”
Snyder gave Wesley’s translation a last suspicious look and then walked out, muttering that he knew ‘Summers’ was around here somewhere.
Given the trouble Wesley had been given by reading the words aloud, Giles wondered if he had set him much too difficult a task but when he looked over his shoulder he saw that he had written a translation in his childish but confident hand that was remarkably accurate.
"Having begun the civil war, and having sent officers and troops into Italy before him, in the meanwhile he went across to Alexandria, to accept the keys of Egypt."
Giles couldn’t help wondering exactly how much the child knew. “Can you translate that into Greek? Don’t worry, if you can’t. I’m just curious as to how far you’ve got with your studies.”
“Yes, Mr. Giles. Do you have a Greek dictionary I could use?”
“Yes.” Giles picked the book off the shelf and then hesitated. “Wesley, what dictionaries do you usually use in your lessons?”
“Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and German.”
Giles picked up the Greek and Hebrew dictionaries and carried them back to the table. He wondered why he had never asked the adult Wesley what exactly he knew. So irritated by what he conspicuously didn’t know and wouldn’t admit he didn’t have - experience in the field - that it hadn’t occurred to him to find out just how useful Wesley was capable of being. He could in no way approve of the punishing schedule of lessons to which this child had been subjected by his clearly stern - and quite possibly even cruel - father, but it had certainly been more intensive than even Giles’ own system of learning.
On a whim he carried through a tower of books and put them on the table. “Wesley, leave that translation for a moment. Can you tell me which of these books you have at home?”
Wesley looked at the books carefully and pointed them out. “That one. And that one. And this one. I don’t know that one. I’m not allowed to touch that one.” He put his hands behind his back as he said it and Giles looked at the volume to check. It was a guide to demons with some particularly grisly woodcuts. It was also extremely rare and valuable. He wished he could believe it was off Wesley’s reading list because of the first attribute rather than the second, but somehow thought Wyndam-Pryce senior more the type to think that it would just be molly-coddling a boy to protect him from pictures of hideous demons eating the entrails of screaming victims.
Wesley went on picking out books which showed that he was currently studying the languages he had mentioned plus cuneiform, was apparently expected to recognize Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and to have at least a working knowledge of some of the simpler demonic alphabets. This was a level of study Giles had not reached until he was twice Wesley’s age. But then, of course, Giles’s father had been a responsible, kindly and sane man who did not resent his son having a childhood, even if it had not always felt like that at the time. Giles thought back to the resentment he had felt at having his destiny dumped into his lap at the tender age of ten. At the time he had thought his father selfish in the extreme to have robbed him of the rest of his childhood. Now he was grateful for the years he had been left in blissful ignorance. Roger Wyndam-Pryce seemed to have been standing over his child’s crib since he was born, with a stopwatch in one hand and a cane in the other, demanding that Wesley grew up at once and knew everything that an adult would know.
Wesley had also confirmed that he wasn’t prohibited from contact with the grislier books because of their contents, only their value, as he continued to point out those with which he was familiar. Some of them had some very nasty accounts in them of things vampires had done to their victims.
“Do you have ever have nightmares?” Giles asked.
Wesley’s eyes widened. “No,” he said at once. “Never. Only cry-babies have nightmares.”
Giles felt another of those hot spikes of anger and took a moment to collect himself before saying carefully: “What happens to cry-babies who have nightmares?”
“They have to f-face their fears.” The boy’s lip trembled and his eyes were full of fears that did not seem to have been banished by being faced.
“How would they do that, Wesley?”
At once the boy’s gaze darted to the stairs and the cupboard underneath them. Giles had to think about it for a moment and then thought he understood. It bothered him more than he could say that it really didn’t take him that long to put himself into the mindset of Wesley’s father. “Do they have to - become used to the dark…?”
Wesley nodded mutely.
“I see.” Just for a moment - and it really was a moment - Giles thought about paying Ethan to go and do something very chaotic to Roger Wyndam-Pryce, and then reminded himself that he was one of the good guys and Ethan was one of the bad guys and he absolutely could not descend to his level, however tempting it might be.
“How do they become used to the dark, Wesley?”
Wesley swallowed and tears sprang into his eyes again. He bowed his head and whispered: “They have to go under the stairs.”
Giles closed his eyes, understanding some of the boy’s paralysed terror of earlier. Because what was more reasonable when a little boy was afraid of the dark than to terrorize it out of him by locking him up with the shadows and the spiders, and presumably punishing him even more cruelly if he dared to have hysterics or beg to be released?
He came to a decision and rose to his feet. “Wesley, would you like to go to the park?”
Wesley looked up at him in shock and then at the clock. “Isn’t it...lesson time...?”
“I have a headache and I’d like some fresh air. Would you like some fresh air?”
Wesley looked at the doors to the library and then back at Giles. “Yes, please.”
Giles held out his hand. “Come on then.”
Shyly Wesley put his hand into Giles’ and then gazed up at him, still a little fearful but with a glimmer of hope behind it that Giles might not actually be going to tell him off or punish him if he did something wrong. In another child that would not have seemed like much of a breakthrough, but with Wesley Giles could only look on it as something of a personal triumph.
***
Giles felt they had done rather well. He and Wesley had visited the park and eaten ice creams with only moderate spillage on to their clothing and a much briefer-than-usual spasm of blank-eyed terror from the little boy at the upset before he had listened to what Giles was gently telling him and realized that he wasn’t going to be punished for the fact that ice cream melted in the sun and gravity pulled things downwards. Giles had side-stepped not being an ogre rather neatly he thought by segueing into talking to Wesley about gravity and how it worked, meaning that the poor child didn’t suffer too much of a shock to his world view while out with a tweedy male authority figure. He discovered that Wesley actually knew rather a lot about a number of things, but didn’t cope well with being put on the spot. If he was just left alone he could recount what he knew quite well but any suggestion that he was being asked to perform in front of others and he started to gibber. Giles had learned that by trial and error. The information was in Wesley’s head but direct questioning made the boy freeze up.
After a couple of false starts when he had tried to ascertain what Wesley knew about Sumerian culture and the Rosetta Stone and had reduced the poor child to blushing, fumbling incoherence, he had learned to be a little more lateral in his approach. After the gravity conversation Giles had essayed a hopefully casual: ‘Now, was it Newton or Einstein who was obsessed with alchemy, I always forget…?’ Which disclosed the fact that Wesley actually knew rather a lot about Newton and alchemy and how it related to spell-casting, and - when eating an ice cream in a sunny park - could talk about it quite coherently whereas if Giles had demanded that he explained it he had no doubt that the boy would have gone to pieces.
They had eaten in a MacDonalds where it had taken a little while for Wesley to comprehend the concept of ‘you can order anything you like’. Giles thought about what that said about Wesley’s father, who certainly wasn’t going to be needing to sell off the family silver to get his roof repaired any time soon, that the eight year old Wesley knew how to hex a demon in ancient Aramaic but didn’t understand the concept of being able to order any dessert from the menu however much it might cost.
They had visited a book shop where Wesley had been persuaded after a little bit of verbal sleight of hand from Giles that it was all right for him to go and pick out five books that were just to be read for enjoyment because this was a special treat and anyway, Wesley had completed all his studies already, years before, and become a grown up, and been made a Watcher, so was surely entitled to the reward of a few books. He had picked them with as much care as if these were the only books he was ever going to be allowed to have in his life that weren’t connected with schoolwork, and then brought his selection to Giles in some trepidation, presumably in case Giles thought they were frivolous or showed signs of being the choices of a bedwetting cry-baby who would have to go into the under the stairs cupboard to learn a little more about being a man. Giles presumed that at some point in the future he would stop being angry about the under the stairs cupboard thing, just not at any time soon. He was also upset to realize that if the adult Wesley had mentioned in passing his father’s idea of fitting discipline he would just have thought Wesley was whining again; thinking of the adult; not fully taking on board that even annoying twenty-six year olds really had once been frightened little eight year olds.
Giles had then realized that he had also qualified as a Watcher and was therefore also entitled to buy some books and did so, realizing that he also never bought books just to read for fun, or to read aloud to small children for fun, and it was perhaps high time that he did both of those things.
Once the idea had occurred to him, he realized that there were a vast number of books that he had enjoyed when he was a child and thought that he would definitely enjoy reading aloud to another child - The Narnian books, Alan Garner, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Silver Sword, E. Nesbit, The Otterbury Incident, Stig of the Dump, even - rather shamefacedly - some of the books his cousin Emily had loaned him when he was staying with her parents, such as - shame of shames - Ballet Shoes, most of which had been written by, well, girls. E. Nesbit, he remembered, had always been acceptable as no one knew what the ‘E’ stood for so one could pretend it was Eric or Ernest rather than Edith.
That settled it. Even if Buffy did call in reinforcements in the shape of Joyce, Wesley was coming home with him that night. Now decided, Giles went shopping for pyjamas and a toothbrush. He had just put their books and other purchases in the boot of his car when he noticed the toyshop. It wasn’t Hamley’s but it was big and brightly painted.
“Did you have a teddy bear, Wesley?” he asked.
Wesley nodded. “Yes. Cuthbert. I don’t suppose I still have him, do I?”
Giles thought it unlikely. “Well, just in case you don’t, shall we try to find something similar?”
Wesley looked confused. “How?”
Giles nodded at the toyshop and Wesley looked as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “But it isn’t Christmas.”
“No.”
“And it doesn’t help one to become a good Watcher to play with a lot of silly toys.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Giles was starting to enjoy himself. “But I think we should do it anyway.”
He personally thought that it would have been worth paying a great deal more than even the rather large amount he ended up expending in the toyshop just to see the look on Wesley’s face as he was led into a place piled high with pointless frivolity and told that he could choose a birthday present.
“But it’s not my birthday.”
“Well, it is your birthday one day this year and I may not be around for it, so go and choose something.”
They looked all through the toyshop and Giles noticed a number of things that he thought might be entertaining and many games he hadn’t played in a long time. Wesley gazed at the Playmobil castle and knights on horses for a while, looking as if he had time-slipped from the Victorian age rather than the 70s, it was clearly so remote from his experience of being a child. It obviously didn’t occur to him even for an instant that he could have something that expensive and he looked at the card games instead, although his gaze kept going back wistfully to the castle. Meanwhile, Giles had found a set of draughts in the proper wooden box, Snakes & Ladders, Ludo, Cluedo, and Monopoly, all of which he piled into his shopping trolley. He added a very grand kite in the shape of a Chinese dragon.
When he looked up he saw that Wesley was gazing at the Playmobil castle again, which had been set out on a table to entice children to play with it. Giles noticed that as well as the castle there were a number of knights on horses, various royalty, wizards, ghosts, and a cave for the wizard to mix up his potions. Wesley watched two other children playing a wonderful game of storming the castle with the attacking knights for a while, looking more and more wistful. Giles watched him examine the game carefully and then look back at Giles, and held his breath wondering if Wesley was going to take him at his word and ask for the castle. He crossed his fingers behind his back and could barely contain a smile as Wesley walked up to him, looking nervous.
“Did you find something...?” he asked in his most encouraging tone.
“Yes. Can I…?” Wesley faltered and then swallowed and then abruptly held out two small boxes, both of which contained a Playmobil jousting knight on a horse. “Could I have two knights so they can fight each other?”
Giles looked at his anxious face at what he clearly thought was a very risky request that could well lead to a scolding.
“Or I could just have one,” Wesley said hastily.
Giles took the knights from him and said, “Two is fine. In fact - more than two would also be fine. In fact, come with me - ” He took Wesley by the hand and led him over to where the bank of mediaeval Playmobil figures were stacked up ten feet high, picked up the largest castle he could find, and put it in the shopping trolley. Wesley watched him open-mouthed.
“A whole castle…?” he breathed.
“Someone’s having a special birthday.” Giles turned to see a woman regarding the heaped trolley with a smile.
“He works very hard all the year,” Giles explained. “He deserves a little fun. In fact, he deserves more fun than any child I’ve ever met.”
Giles noticed that as well as the castle he had selected, and the wizard with his potions in his cave, there were siege towers, catapults, a drawbridge, special sections of the castle wall that gave way when catapulted, a round tower, a guard tower, a battle tower, a castle gate, mediaeval houses, jousting equipment, a ghost, all kinds of knights with and without jousting equipment and various weaponry, a dragon that fitted - so the box assured him - the dungeon of the castle, and a dragon-slaying knight with a horse with extra special battle armour. They all went into the trolley. Next to that was a much twee-er fairy tale castle with various equally twee dining rooms and bedchambers, which he thought would be rather fun to overrun with marauding plastic clip-together mercenaries. He had no shame about also plundering from that section a magic tree, a crystal cage, a unicorn, an oak tree with a secret hideaway, and various small plastic royals who could be either defended or have their heads lopped off depending on whether Wesley felt like overturning hereditary tyrannies or bravely defending the monarchy in any given game. It was a matter of seconds to add a magical fairy bower.
Giles beamed across at Wesley. “Well, that’s the equipment for your Middle Ages studies sorted out. Now, I think Viking Culture would also be important. There are a lot of excellent curses and spell reversals hidden in Viking runes.”
Wesley was still gazing at the heaped trolley in disbelief. “You can’t buy all of it,” he protested.
“I can do what I like,” Giles assured him. “One of the benefits of being a grown up.”
“But it’s too much.” Wesley reached out to touch the castle and then moved his fingers back.
Now whistling nonchalantly, Giles added a Viking Longboat, Viking Longhouse, Viking Camp, a smaller boat, a superbly green sea serpent and various assorted Vikings. “There you go. All historically accurate, I have no doubt. Shall we find the checkout?”
Wesley took his outstretched hand automatically but he kept looking between Giles and the heaped trolley in disbelief. Giles felt his small fingers grip his more tightly as they got closer and closer to the checkout, looking up at Giles as if he was trying to decipher the language in which he was written.
The sales assistant’s eyes widened a little at the sight of so many toys but she began to ring them up while Wesley watched each one go through in silent amazement.
Giles refused to flinch at the eighteen hundred dollars total. It was absolutely worth it to see Wesley’s eyes go as big as saucers. The little boy still did not seem quite convinced that they really were buying all these toys. Only when Giles had solemnly wheeled them out to the car park and was lifting carrier bag after carrier bag into the boot of the car, did Wesley seem to believe it.
“You spent all that money,” he gasped.
“I missed your other birthdays,” Giles pointed out.
Wesley was doing frantic maths in his head. “But that still makes two hundred and twenty five dollars per birthday!”
“Not if you divide it by twenty-six,” Giles pointed out, closing the boot and opening the passenger door for him.
Wesley struggled in silence with the maths for that until they were pulling out the carpark before squeaking, “But that’s still about seventy dollars for each birthday!”
“Doesn’t that sound about right?” Giles enquired.
“But you spent it on toys!”
“Is there something you would rather have?” Giles remembered the teddy bear. “Damn - I mean - drat - I was going to get you a teddy bear...”
Before he could turn the car round, Wesley said, “No, please, it’s all right. I don’t mind.”
He seemed quite panicked by so much money having been spent on him; the action so very much a departure from the proper order of things that he couldn’t seem to comprehend it, darting worried looks at Giles, who he was perhaps now mentally consigning to the realm of the insane.
Giles drove them to the adult Wesley’s apartment. “Let’s see what you brought with you, shall we?”
Wesley looked nervous about entering what was to him obviously a very scary place, sticking close to Giles, who had to admit to feeling rather pleased that the boy was now using him as a buffer between scary things and himself, rather than treating Giles as if he were one of the scary things the world contained.
The room was Spartan and very neat. The adult Wesley had clearly not burdened himself with too many possessions either, but there were some books, one of them a dog-eared copy of The Once and Future King, which Wesley pounced upon eagerly. He opened it with trembling fingers and then gave a little cry of surprise as he saw his name written neatly in the flyleaf.
Feeling a little like a trespasser, Giles opened the suitcase and had a look inside. “I’d really like a photograph to show you,” he explained. “So you can see what you look like as an adult.”
That wasn’t entirely the truth. He wanted a photograph of the adult Wesley to remind himself that while this child version existed the adult one did not; he was lost in the limbo of Ethan’s spell. Giles very much feared they were all going to need reminding of their obligations to that adult version before too long.
The suitcase contained very little; reference books, notebooks, nothing else. Giles opened the wardrobe and found that Wesley had his one suit hung up in it next to three neatly pressed shirts. Rummaging in his chest of drawers produced some underwear, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that it was hard to imagine the stuffed shirt of the library ever wearing. In his shoulder bag there were a few crucifixes, two stakes, and three bottles of holy water, an address book, in which were three photographs, and a very battered-looking teddy bear.
“Cuthbert!” Wesley fell on the teddy bear joyously and hugged him.
Giles was thinking: That pompous annoying little twerp that I find so irritating was once the little boy whose father used to lock him in the dark, who never had a proper childhood, and who still loves his teddy bear. For some completely illogical reason the realization that Wesley had kept his teddy bear made him feel ten times worse about his lack of patience with the young man.
Wesley giggled and Giles sat down next to him. “What is it?”
Wesley held up Cuthbert and Giles saw that the bear had a little shoulder-bag of his own. Wesley peered into it and then pulled out a tiny crucifix and miniature perfume bottle onto which a label with a large black cross had been stuck.
“Did you make him that?” Giles enquired, smiling.
Wesley shook his head. “Not me - me. When Uncle Richard gave him to me he didn’t have a bag with him. He was much fluffier the last time I saw him too.” He examined the bear critically, small fingers stroking the bare patches. Cuthbert looked like a bear who had been very well loved.
The photographs showed one of a group of people in formal wear evidently on their way to a dance. Wesley looked very much as Giles knew him and he held it out for the little boy to see. “That’s you, Wesley. That’s what you look like - grown up.”
Wesley gazed at the photograph a little fearfully and then in some relief. “I don’t look like Daddy,” he said after a moment. He went on gazing at it. “I look more like Uncle Richard.”
“Is Uncle Richard nice?” Giles prompted hopefully.
Wesley looked up at him out of troubled eyes. “He was very nice, but then he died.” His lip trembled for a moment and then he said quietly: “Boys don’t cry. Only girls cry.”
“Boys cry all the time,” Giles told him. “So do men. There’s nothing wrong with feeling grief at the loss of someone we love. It would be worse to not feel anything.”
“A vampire killed him. Mummy said he didn’t suffer. Daddy said he was very brave. He said that it’s important to be brave.” Wesley looked up at Giles and whispered: “I’m not very brave. I don’t like pain and I get scared.” He winced as he made the admission, steeling himself to do it. “Sometimes I get very scared.”
Giles said hoarsely: “You’re eight years old, Wesley. You live in a world where you know there are demons and vampires. Of course you get scared. Everyone gets scared. I get scared all the time, that something’s going to happy to Buffy or Willow or one of the other children, or to me.”
They looked at the other photographs together; one of a middle-aged couple; the woman pretty but thickening around the waist and with a timid expression; the man unmistakably the Roger Wyndam-Pryce Giles had met in London.
“Mummy and Daddy.” Wesley gazed at the photograph for a moment and then sighed and put it away.
The last one was one of Wesley in cricket whites in front of wicket. He looked about fifteen, gawky, narrow, with unruly dark hair, an expression of great concentration on his face. Wesley turned the photograph over and saw a press clipping sellotaped to it. It made reference to the lower sixth having won a victory over the touring team from another school. Wyndam-Pryce had apparently bowled out six men and scored a hundred and twenty runs.
Wesley smiled as he read through the clipping and beamed up at Giles. “I can play cricket!”
“You can do lots of things.” Giles looked around the Spartan room.
“What other things can I do?” Wesley asked.
Giles grimaced internally: Fold at the first sign of pressure; make an idiot of yourself over women; put people’s backs up for your country; follow orders from people across the sea who have no idea about the situation we’re dealing with...
Wesley’s face fell. “I can’t do anything, can I?”
“Of course you can.” Giles put the photographs away carefully. “You’re a Watcher, remember? Not to mention you were Head Boy of your school.”
“Head Boy?” Wesley gazed at him wide-eyed. “Really?”
“Really,” Giles assured him.
There was another pause before Wesley said very tentatively: “Do you...like me? The big me?”
Giles didn’t hesitate. “Yes.” Mentally he was adding I do now, but he had spoken with such emphasis that the boy was reassured. He gazed up at Giles for a moment, lit up with pleasure, and then had to duck his head in embarrassment to hide a pleased little smile.
Giles found he needed a moment to get his voice back under control and then he said brightly: “Shall we go and find Buffy? Introduce her to Cuthbert?”
Wesley smiled at that idea and then faltered looking at the bear. “Mr Giles...?”
“Yes, Wesley...?”
“Do you think Willow will think I’m silly for still having a teddy bear…?”
Giles wasn’t sure if Wesley meant that ‘still’ to refer to the grown up Wesley or the one who had attained the grand old age of eight. Either way he was quite certain that Willow would not think it silly at all. He was very much afraid that she would find it adorable.
“I think you’re safe,” he told him and got a smile in return that he had to admit he found absurdly sweet.
When they walked out of the apartment, Wesley slipped his hand into Giles’ without needing to be prompted, and with Wesley carrying his shoulder bag with Cuthbert safely secured inside it, they drove back to the school in companionable silence.
***
It was lunchtime when Willow came into the library, Willow saying: “Giles, have you seen...?” And then she saw Wesley and her eyes got that soft look and her face that ‘aww’ look that Buffy’s had been wearing all day. “An adorable little boy...”
“Actually, yes, we have one right here.” Buffy smirked at her.
Wesley rose to his feet, looking up at Willow with something like wonder on his face.
“What is it...?” Buffy asked him.
He leant in to whisper in her ear: “She’s so pretty.”
Having overheard, Giles couldn’t stop a smile crossing his face and Willow just gasped in helpless adoration. “You are so cute….” she breathed.
He held out a hand. “I’m Wesley.”
“‘Wesley’…?” Willow shook his hand in surprise. “That’s such a coincidence, because we have…” Seeing Buffy and Giles shaking their heads and pointing at the little boy, her eyes widened and she gaped at the child in disbelief. “Wesley?”
He looked up at her nervously, as if somehow being identified as who he was would be enough to get him punished. “Yes.”
She turned to Giles. “But how...? I mean and...when...?”
“A present from Ethan,” Giles said succinctly. “Wesley opened the package meant for me by mistake.”
Buffy said: “Wesley doesn’t remember anything except being a child.”
He looked between them all in confusion and Willow hastily gave him a smile. “I’m Willow.”
“Pleased to meet you, Willow,” he said politely, shaking her hand.
“Cute munchkin, Buff,” Xander observed casually, eating an apple. “But where were you all morning? You know Snyder is always on the prowl for any wrongdoing.”
“Wesley meet Xander.” Buffy indicated the young man.
Wesley took a step back, clearly intimidated, and then cautiously proffered a hand, murmuring shyly: “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Xander blinked in confusion and hastily wiped the apple juice from his hand before taking hold of Wesley’s. “And you.” He slowly turned to Buffy. “Wait - did you say ‘Wesley’?” His eyes widened. “Wesley as in Wesley...?”
Buffy nodded. “Yes.”
Xander crouched down in front of the little boy who was regarding him nervously. “What the Dickens, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain happened to you?”
Wesley swallowed. “I think I was sent away. I was clumsy and Daddy was very angry with me. And then I woke up here. So I think I’m being punished, but I don’t mind...” He gazed up at Buffy. “I like it here.”
“You’re not being punished, Wesley.” She picked him up and sat him on her lap. He immediately gave a little sigh of contentment and curled against her, his head against her neck. “There was a spell and it turned you from the person you were here when you were here to the person you used to be when you...weren’t here.”
“Why was I here before...?” He frowned in confusion.
“You were helping Giles be my Watcher,” she said.
His already oversized eyes got even bigger as he lit up with excitement. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“They let me be a Watcher? Really?”
“Yes.” Giles winced inside as he saw how much it meant to this little boy. He had never wanted it like Wesley had obviously done. It had been something inflicted on him, a duty and responsibility he really had not wanted. But to Wesley it really had been everything, a true raison d'être.
“But Daddy said...” He broke off, looking deflated.
“What did he say...?” Buffy enquired.
He squirmed against her, ducking his head and then whispered: “He said I wouldn’t be any good and I’d never get picked because I’m too stupid and clumsy and I don’t work hard enough.”
Over his head Buffy mouthed savagely at Giles: ‘There are no words for how much I hate his father.’
Giles sighed. “Well, you obviously did work hard enough, Wesley, because the Council sent you here to be Buffy’s Watcher.” There didn’t seem to be any point in confusing him by mentioning Faith right now.
Wesley looked up at her wide-eyed. “But I’m too little.”
“That’s the spell,” Buffy assured him. “The spell made you small again. Before that you were all…grown up.”
“Like Mr Giles.” Wesley darted a nervous glance at the older man.
“Not quite that grown up,” Buffy conceded. “But twenty-something.”
His eyes looked huge as he looked at Xander. “Like Mr Xander?”
Xander glanced across at Giles. “I really like this kid.”
“Xander’s only eighteen,” Buffy explained. “Like Willow and I.”
Wesley looked across at Willow and then blushed, snuggling in against Buffy more comfortably as he gazed at her; his thumb strayed towards his mouth and then he realized in horror what he was doing and quickly shoved his hand behind his back, looking around quickly to see if any of them had noticed. Buffy felt him tremble and quickly dropped a kiss into his hair, but his thin body was still quivering with the anxiety of almost having done something that was clearly very wrong. She turned to Giles: “So, the whole not killing humans thing, is that a rule or just a guideline?”
“Definitely a rule,” he said warningly.
As Willow pulled up a chair next to Buffy and began to gently ask Wesley questions, Xander drew Giles to one side and looked at him pointedly. “So - in the place of incredibly pompous Watcher guy we now have an incredibly thin kid. What gives...?”
Wearily, Giles explained about Ethan and his spell, while Xander kept darting glances across at the little boy curled up in Buffy’s protective grip.
“None of which explains why he’s so thin,” Xander pointed out.
“Well, English food will do that for a growing boy,” Giles sighed. “I’m sure we can reverse the spell. We really need to find Ethan. I imagine he’s still in town. He won’t be able to rest until he knows what went wrong with his plan.”
“What was his plan?”
Giles mentally worked out the date and the age he would have been if he had also lost eighteen years as Wesley had done. Grimacing, he realized that it would make him exactly the age he had been when he and Ethan had been at their most reckless and…companionable. Perhaps the only person on the planet who would have been impressed by the forty-something Ethan and his life as a shit-stirring chaos mage was the twenty-something idiot Giles had once been.
Giles loosened his tie. “Just - making mischief for the fun of it.”
When Oz walked in and the whole introducing of Wesley had to be gone through all over again, Giles decided it was going to be a very long day. Luckily Oz had never been big on asking for long complicated explanations and just said ‘cool’ then shook Wesley gravely by the hand.
The hubbub of so many of them all talking at once did not help his still-throbbing head. Nor did the sight of Wesley curled up on Buffy’s lap while she stroked his hair and looked as if only brute force was going to wrench him out of her grip. Clearly, Wesley’s father had been someone who tended to the strict discipline and long hours of study mode of parenthood as opposed to the cuddles and puppies school of parenting that Willow and Buffy evidently considered more appropriate. But in some ways he supposed the man had been justified by the results. Wesley had become Head Boy. He had been put on the Active Watcher list. He had been given two Slayers to Watch for. Perhaps that had happened only because of his upbringing.
Giles tried to tell himself that there was nothing wrong with strictness but it was hard to keep believing that when Wesley was so pathetically grateful for those cuddles from Buffy. It looked as if no one had ever hugged him before in his life. He had none of a little boy’s usual disdain of being fussed over, it was clear that this was a new and wonderful experience for him, and he was confused by it but absolutely basking in the attention. He was practically purring like a stray kitten that unexpectedly finds itself in a warm lap. Oz seemed to know that he needed to keep a distance from the boy, letting Wesley get used to him, and Xander, after the boy had flinched a couple of times when Xander spoke to him or got close to him, was being tactful about not looming as well.
In theory, they were all researching the amulet, but in practice Xander was feeding Wesley junk food in bite-sized amounts, holding out pieces of Snickers and inviting the boy to take it as if Wesley was some shy little creature he was hoping to tame; Oz was quietly intriguing the boy with laconic remarks, and Willow and Buffy were cooing over him while he gave his contented kitten impression and snuggled into Buffy as if she were the safest place in the world.
Giles suspected that quite apart from the novelty of having a remarkably well behaved, quiet and obedient little boy to play with, they were slacking off from the research in part because they had no interest in restoring Wesley to his adult form. They hadn’t liked the adult Wesley. They did like the child Wesley. He could see that Buffy felt the real mission here was to prevent the one from turning into the other; the exact opposite of what Giles knew he had to do, which was ensure that the adult version was restored.
If they left it too long it was going to feel as if they were somehow destroying the little boy who at the moment was a living breathing person that Buffy could hold in her arms. The truth was, of course, that that little boy had grown up many years ago; this was not the right timeline for him. Ethan had forced this regression on Wesley and in doing so undone all those years of…
All those years of what…? All those years of conditioning that had turned this nervous, scholarly, and perhaps over-serious, but undeniably sweet child into the pompous annoying little twerp who regularly drove them all up the wall? It was, on reflection, very difficult to see that as any kind of achievement. It was certainly not something of which either the Council or Wesley’s father had any reason to be proud.
He looked up in surprise as Wesley giggled and saw that Xander had won his trust enough to be able to tickle him with one forefinger. The boy clasped a hand over his mouth, evidently not thinking himself permitted to be noisy, but then giggled again as Xander said, “I knew you were ticklish. I can always tell…” and wiggled his finger between Wesley’s oversized shirt buttons to tickle his tummy. Wesley laughed out loud and then clamped his hands across his mouth again, but his eyes were shining and he looked more like a normal little boy than he had done all day. He began to giggle helplessly, squirming on Buffy’s lap as Xander tickled him, and then gave a peal of laughter and flung out his arm, knocking over Xander’s can of Coke.
Everyone snatched up the books while Willow shouted: “I’ve got it!” dabbing at the sticky liquid with a hankie. Everyone except Wesley who had gone white as death, shot one panic-stricken look at Giles, and then dived under the table.
Having seen the abject terror in his eyes, Giles felt abruptly sick. He saw Oz catch Willow by the arm as she made to get down to Wesley’s level and reassure him, giving an almost imperceptible nod of his head in Giles’s direction, while Xander caught Buffy’s arm and did the same. Buffy gave Xander a reproachful look, clearly wanting to dive straight after Wesley, but Xander also nodded at Giles.
Giles could almost taste the little boy’s fear in the air. Not knowing what to do or say, he walked over to where the Coke was still dripping onto the floor and said as gently as he could: “Wesley…?”
“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry…” The boy was murmuring it in a breathless whisper.
Giles crouched down to his level and saw that Wesley had jammed himself under the table, hunched up, lips working as he kept repeating his apology, but as Giles appeared on his level, he flinched, tears sprang into his eyes, and he gave the man a look of panic-stricken fear.
Giles snatched a breath of his own. “Wesley, it’s all right. It was an accident. Accidents happen.”
“I spilled… on the books… I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to…”
“I know you didn’t.” Giles held out a hand to him. “Wesley, please come out.”
The look the boy gave him was still one of the terror, but he obeyed, of course; that was what he did. Giles realized with another sick lurch of comprehension that even if the boy believed he was going to be beaten he would still come out when he was told to because disobedience was not even to be thought of.
Wesley crawled out from under the table and stood up, shoulders hunched, and shaking violently. “I’m very s-sorry,” he whispered, the shaking making him stutter. “I d-didn’t mean to...” He was breathing much too fast, snatching the air into lungs working like a bellows as the panic attack took hold.
“I know…” Giles tried to keep his voice as gentle as he could when what he really wanted to do right now was get on a plane for England and go and punch Roger Wyndam-Pryce very hard. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Things get spilled sometimes. It happens.”
Wesley darted a terrified look at him, still shaking so hard Giles could hear his teeth chattering. The boy looked over at the staircase that lead up to the stacks, his fingers clutching at his overlong sleeves as he clearly tried without success to stop himself from trembling. The door to the understairs cupboard seemed to be hypnotising him like some hideous monster under the bed.
“Please don’t…” Wesley gasped. “I promise I won’t… I’ll never do it again…”
Giles risked a look at the others and saw that Willow had tears in her eyes, Buffy looked torn between sobbing and punching someone, Oz was very still and Xander very shocked. The sound of Wesley’s teeth chattering was now even more audible, and Giles abruptly reached out, picked the boy up and held him. Wesley started to cry, silently, in fear of the punishment he thought was coming. Giles could hear his heart hammering against him, his thin warm little body reverberating with terror.
Rubbing his back very gently as he carried him to his office, Giles said again: “I’m not angry, Wesley. You didn’t do anything wrong. No one is angry with you.”
The boy gave a little whimper of fear as they passed the staircase and Giles wondered if he even wanted to know what the boy thought he was going to do to him. He carried him into the office and then set him down very carefully so he was sitting on his desk. Then he reached into his drawer - a stupid move, he realized, as soon as he’d made it as, of course, the boy thought he was reaching for a cane or ruler and more of those strangled sobs of fear spilled from his throat - and produced a packet of chocolate digestives. As the boy gazed at him in confused terror, Giles took a biscuit out of the packet, broke it in half and put one half between Wesley’s fingers, saying again, very gently: “No one is angry with you, Wesley. Now, be a good boy and eat your biscuit and I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea.”
Wesley gulped in confusion a few times, swallowing sobs, while Giles filled the kettle and put it onto boil, very aware of those huge blue eyes watching every move he made. Inside he was thinking: ‘Wyndam-Pryce, you son of a bitch, what did you do to this poor child?’ Out loud he said: “Do you want sugar in your tea, Wesley?”
He turned to find the boy still gazing at him, the half a biscuit still clutched in his fingers. Wesley gulped a few more times and then whispered: “Yes, please.”
Giles exhaled in relief. At least the boy had stopped hyperventilating before he went into shock; that was something.
“Milk…?”
Wesley snatched another almost normal breath and managed another whispered: “Yes, please.”
Giles poured out the tea, making sure the boy’s had two heaped spoonfuls of sugar to help with the shock, and lots of milk so he could drink it down quickly. “Here you are.”
It clattered in the saucer as Wesley took it, and Giles gently took the saucer from him and, as the tea began to slosh like a millpond in his shaky little fingers, held the cup to his lips so he could sip. Wesley gulped down the tea gratefully, his long thick lashes wet with tears, still shuddering with the aftershocks of his fear. Giles helped him to drink his tea, eat his now half-melted half a biscuit, then took him to the bathroom, waited outside as he relieved himself and washed his hands, then suggested that perhaps he should settle down in the sickbed in the corner and have a nap.
Wesley gazed up at him fearfully. “What if I wake up somewhere else?”
“You won’t,” Giles promised him. “You’ll wake up here, and I’ll be here, I promise.” He unlaced the boy’s shoes for him and then posted him into the bed, covered him with a tartan blanket and then walked out to where the others were still sitting in horrified silence.
Buffy said quietly: “Now do I get to kill his father?”
Giles sighed. “I’m afraid not, Buffy.”
Xander breathed: “Did you see how scared he was?”
Willow had evidently been crying in silent sympathy with Wesley’s fear and Oz had his arm around her. “Not the best advert for the English way of child-rearing,” Oz said quietly.
Giles pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need to find a way to restore Wesley to his proper form and…”
“No, we need to make sure it stops!” Buffy said furiously. “We need to make sure that Wesley never has to go back to the people who did this to him! We need to make sure he grows up with normal people and normal human kindness and…”
“And it’s too late for that,” Giles told her sharply. “Face it, Buffy. Wesley is twenty-six years old. Whatever happened to him has already happened. It’s in his past now and we can’t do anything about it. That little boy in there isn’t the child it was done to. He’s an adult who has been regressed to that age and has the memories of being that age, but he isn’t the little boy who…”
“Say it, Giles,” Buffy demanded as Giles stuttered over finishing that sentence. “Say he isn’t the little boy who, because he spilled some soft drink on the table, is so terrified that he can’t even speak.”
Giles snatched another steadying breath. “We need to undo what Ethan did. We need to give Wesley his real life back.”
“He doesn’t have to be the way he is! He could be…!”
“He is the way he is and it’s his right to be who he is. Wesley is a grown man.”
Buffy gazed at him in disbelief. “Don’t you even care?”
Giles felt something inside himself perilously close to snapping. He lowered his voice still further to say shortly: “Of course I care. If Roger sodding Wyndam-Pryce were here right now I would punch his bloody head in. But he isn’t here and everything that was done to Wesley was done eighteen years ago.” As she continued to look at him as if he were a were-demon of callousness, he rolled his eyes. “Don’t you understand, even now? Wesley wanted to be a Watcher. That’s what he studied for. That’s what he went through all that misery and cramming and not spilling orange juice on the furniture for. All that little boy wants to be when he grows up is what he is already is - active Watcher to an active Slayer.”
Buffy ran a hand through her hair. “You mean the active Slayer who nearly crushed his ribcage because she was feeling tetchy during training?”
Giles sighed. “I can’t excuse what you did but I will say that you’ve been given a chance to make amends and I suggest you take it.” He pushed a book towards her. “And that means finding a way to reverse this spell.”
For a moment they all looked mutinous and then Willow sighed and sat down, followed by Oz and then Xander and lastly Buffy. Reluctantly, the books were opened again, the amulet examined, pencils began to scratch on paper.
Giles went back into the office to take a look at the boy; not at all surprised to find that he was already fast asleep, long black lashes still wet with tears, thumb slipped into his mouth for comfort. He tried not to think about making this child cease to exist. That wasn’t what they were doing. This child had existed eighteen years ago and was now a grown man with a right to have his life back; that was what he needed to hang onto. He looked down at the boy and tried to see the adult Wesley in him, and it was a shock abruptly to realize that the mouth was the same, and the line of the jaw. This must be what his hair was really like when not tamed with brylcreem; unruly clipped dark locks that wanted to spring out from his head into a soft short shock of bed-hair.
With a sinking feeling as he looked down at the small boy and for the first time saw all the ways in which he really was Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, he wondered if, to the adult Wesley, they had seemed like only the latest in a long line of bullies; and if Giles, as the one who most closely resembled Wesley’s father, had seemed like the biggest bully of them all.
***
Wesley was tentatively drinking chocolate milk and working on some Latin translation when Snyder walked in. Wesley had slept for a few hours in which time Giles had persuaded Buffy and the others to go back to their classes, promising that he would take care of the boy and they could come and see him again after school. He really wanted to avoid Buffy taking Wesley home with her if possible. He thought Joyce would take his side when he explained that the adult Wesley had been the victim of a spell and would undoubtedly want to be returned to his normal age, but he couldn’t be sure. Willow had certainly sided with Buffy in the time it took for the child Wesley to give her a look of shy adoration from those ridiculously big blue eyes. Both Oz and Xander had looked down their nose at Giles for not wanting to effectively kidnap the child and bring him up secretly far away from the Watcher’s Council and his father. If Joyce sided with Buffy and Willow, he was not going to be able to overwhelm her with his authority as an adult in a way he might - possibly - be able to do with Buffy and the others. He wasn’t sure that even Joyce was going to be proof against the underfed affection-starved cry to mothering instincts that Wesley represented in his current form.
When Giles mentioned the rights of the adult Wesley, their argument was that they were looking out for those rights when planning to bring him up to be a sensible well-adjusted and happy member of society instead of a screwed up, uptight, socially-retarded Watcherlite. Thinking about how sweet the child Wesley was and how annoying the adult Wesley was Giles had so far found it a little difficult to counter that argument.
Giles had found that the boy was so unused to having time off that he started to fret if not given some kind of lessons. Wesley was programmed to be working and trying to not be any trouble and possibly earn a few crumbs of longed-for praise. He knew Buffy and Xander would probably have insisted on taking the boy off to a playground but he felt that might be too much of a culture shock for someone used to ten hours of lessons a day so had found the easiest text he had in Latin and given him that to translate to occupy him.
Snyder now took one look at the child, curled his lip in disgust, and said to Giles: “We have a policy of no pets in the school grounds.”
Giles gave Snyder a Look that would have made even Buffy back down and said crisply: “This is my nephew. He’s staying with me for a few days. I thought it would be instructive for him to see the American educational system.”
Snyder sniffed and looked around the library. “Where’s your new ‘assistant’?”
Giles thought the man could hardly have made the inverted commas clearer but refused to rise to the bait. “He’s attending a rare book fair.”
“I don’t see why we need an assistant librarian for a library where the only children who ever come in are the troublemakers like Summers and the halfwits like Harris.”
“Willow has also been known to use the library from time to time,” Giles pointed out, keeping an eye on Snyder in case he went near Wesley. The little boy was still working on his translation in between very quietly drinking his chocolate milk, savouring each sip the way he savoured every cuddle from Buffy and Willow. Giles knew very well that Nesquik was available in England, as was Ribena, but apparently they had not found their way to Wesley’s schoolroom.
“Now Rosenberg at least shows some sparks of normality. You should be encouraging her to dump her loser deadbeat friends.”
Giles mentally counted to ten as Snyder moved behind Wesley to look at what he was doing.
“Is there something I can help you with, Principal Snyder?” he enquired.
Snyder peered at what Wesley was doing and then frowned. “Are you a practising Satanist?” he demanded.
Wesley gazed up at him fearfully. “No, sir.”
“What are you writing?”
Wesley swallowed. “I’m translating some Suetonius, sir.”
“What language is that?”
“Latin, sir.”
“Satanists use Latin.” Snyder glowered at the child. “I know you’re never too young to be playing your records backwards and pledging yourselves to Lucifer. What does that say?”
Haltingly, Wesley began to read out each word: "Suscepto... igitur... civili... bello... ac... ducibus...”
Snyder looked around suspiciously, as if expecting the Goat of Mendes to appear. “All right, that’s enough of that.”
Giles loomed over him in what he hoped could in no way be mistaken for anything other than a threat. “If you’ve quite finished quizzing my nephew, Principal Snyder, I do have rather a lot of work to be getting on with.”
Snyder gave Wesley’s translation a last suspicious look and then walked out, muttering that he knew ‘Summers’ was around here somewhere.
Given the trouble Wesley had been given by reading the words aloud, Giles wondered if he had set him much too difficult a task but when he looked over his shoulder he saw that he had written a translation in his childish but confident hand that was remarkably accurate.
"Having begun the civil war, and having sent officers and troops into Italy before him, in the meanwhile he went across to Alexandria, to accept the keys of Egypt."
Giles couldn’t help wondering exactly how much the child knew. “Can you translate that into Greek? Don’t worry, if you can’t. I’m just curious as to how far you’ve got with your studies.”
“Yes, Mr. Giles. Do you have a Greek dictionary I could use?”
“Yes.” Giles picked the book off the shelf and then hesitated. “Wesley, what dictionaries do you usually use in your lessons?”
“Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and German.”
Giles picked up the Greek and Hebrew dictionaries and carried them back to the table. He wondered why he had never asked the adult Wesley what exactly he knew. So irritated by what he conspicuously didn’t know and wouldn’t admit he didn’t have - experience in the field - that it hadn’t occurred to him to find out just how useful Wesley was capable of being. He could in no way approve of the punishing schedule of lessons to which this child had been subjected by his clearly stern - and quite possibly even cruel - father, but it had certainly been more intensive than even Giles’ own system of learning.
On a whim he carried through a tower of books and put them on the table. “Wesley, leave that translation for a moment. Can you tell me which of these books you have at home?”
Wesley looked at the books carefully and pointed them out. “That one. And that one. And this one. I don’t know that one. I’m not allowed to touch that one.” He put his hands behind his back as he said it and Giles looked at the volume to check. It was a guide to demons with some particularly grisly woodcuts. It was also extremely rare and valuable. He wished he could believe it was off Wesley’s reading list because of the first attribute rather than the second, but somehow thought Wyndam-Pryce senior more the type to think that it would just be molly-coddling a boy to protect him from pictures of hideous demons eating the entrails of screaming victims.
Wesley went on picking out books which showed that he was currently studying the languages he had mentioned plus cuneiform, was apparently expected to recognize Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and to have at least a working knowledge of some of the simpler demonic alphabets. This was a level of study Giles had not reached until he was twice Wesley’s age. But then, of course, Giles’s father had been a responsible, kindly and sane man who did not resent his son having a childhood, even if it had not always felt like that at the time. Giles thought back to the resentment he had felt at having his destiny dumped into his lap at the tender age of ten. At the time he had thought his father selfish in the extreme to have robbed him of the rest of his childhood. Now he was grateful for the years he had been left in blissful ignorance. Roger Wyndam-Pryce seemed to have been standing over his child’s crib since he was born, with a stopwatch in one hand and a cane in the other, demanding that Wesley grew up at once and knew everything that an adult would know.
Wesley had also confirmed that he wasn’t prohibited from contact with the grislier books because of their contents, only their value, as he continued to point out those with which he was familiar. Some of them had some very nasty accounts in them of things vampires had done to their victims.
“Do you have ever have nightmares?” Giles asked.
Wesley’s eyes widened. “No,” he said at once. “Never. Only cry-babies have nightmares.”
Giles felt another of those hot spikes of anger and took a moment to collect himself before saying carefully: “What happens to cry-babies who have nightmares?”
“They have to f-face their fears.” The boy’s lip trembled and his eyes were full of fears that did not seem to have been banished by being faced.
“How would they do that, Wesley?”
At once the boy’s gaze darted to the stairs and the cupboard underneath them. Giles had to think about it for a moment and then thought he understood. It bothered him more than he could say that it really didn’t take him that long to put himself into the mindset of Wesley’s father. “Do they have to - become used to the dark…?”
Wesley nodded mutely.
“I see.” Just for a moment - and it really was a moment - Giles thought about paying Ethan to go and do something very chaotic to Roger Wyndam-Pryce, and then reminded himself that he was one of the good guys and Ethan was one of the bad guys and he absolutely could not descend to his level, however tempting it might be.
“How do they become used to the dark, Wesley?”
Wesley swallowed and tears sprang into his eyes again. He bowed his head and whispered: “They have to go under the stairs.”
Giles closed his eyes, understanding some of the boy’s paralysed terror of earlier. Because what was more reasonable when a little boy was afraid of the dark than to terrorize it out of him by locking him up with the shadows and the spiders, and presumably punishing him even more cruelly if he dared to have hysterics or beg to be released?
He came to a decision and rose to his feet. “Wesley, would you like to go to the park?”
Wesley looked up at him in shock and then at the clock. “Isn’t it...lesson time...?”
“I have a headache and I’d like some fresh air. Would you like some fresh air?”
Wesley looked at the doors to the library and then back at Giles. “Yes, please.”
Giles held out his hand. “Come on then.”
Shyly Wesley put his hand into Giles’ and then gazed up at him, still a little fearful but with a glimmer of hope behind it that Giles might not actually be going to tell him off or punish him if he did something wrong. In another child that would not have seemed like much of a breakthrough, but with Wesley Giles could only look on it as something of a personal triumph.
***
Giles felt they had done rather well. He and Wesley had visited the park and eaten ice creams with only moderate spillage on to their clothing and a much briefer-than-usual spasm of blank-eyed terror from the little boy at the upset before he had listened to what Giles was gently telling him and realized that he wasn’t going to be punished for the fact that ice cream melted in the sun and gravity pulled things downwards. Giles had side-stepped not being an ogre rather neatly he thought by segueing into talking to Wesley about gravity and how it worked, meaning that the poor child didn’t suffer too much of a shock to his world view while out with a tweedy male authority figure. He discovered that Wesley actually knew rather a lot about a number of things, but didn’t cope well with being put on the spot. If he was just left alone he could recount what he knew quite well but any suggestion that he was being asked to perform in front of others and he started to gibber. Giles had learned that by trial and error. The information was in Wesley’s head but direct questioning made the boy freeze up.
After a couple of false starts when he had tried to ascertain what Wesley knew about Sumerian culture and the Rosetta Stone and had reduced the poor child to blushing, fumbling incoherence, he had learned to be a little more lateral in his approach. After the gravity conversation Giles had essayed a hopefully casual: ‘Now, was it Newton or Einstein who was obsessed with alchemy, I always forget…?’ Which disclosed the fact that Wesley actually knew rather a lot about Newton and alchemy and how it related to spell-casting, and - when eating an ice cream in a sunny park - could talk about it quite coherently whereas if Giles had demanded that he explained it he had no doubt that the boy would have gone to pieces.
They had eaten in a MacDonalds where it had taken a little while for Wesley to comprehend the concept of ‘you can order anything you like’. Giles thought about what that said about Wesley’s father, who certainly wasn’t going to be needing to sell off the family silver to get his roof repaired any time soon, that the eight year old Wesley knew how to hex a demon in ancient Aramaic but didn’t understand the concept of being able to order any dessert from the menu however much it might cost.
They had visited a book shop where Wesley had been persuaded after a little bit of verbal sleight of hand from Giles that it was all right for him to go and pick out five books that were just to be read for enjoyment because this was a special treat and anyway, Wesley had completed all his studies already, years before, and become a grown up, and been made a Watcher, so was surely entitled to the reward of a few books. He had picked them with as much care as if these were the only books he was ever going to be allowed to have in his life that weren’t connected with schoolwork, and then brought his selection to Giles in some trepidation, presumably in case Giles thought they were frivolous or showed signs of being the choices of a bedwetting cry-baby who would have to go into the under the stairs cupboard to learn a little more about being a man. Giles presumed that at some point in the future he would stop being angry about the under the stairs cupboard thing, just not at any time soon. He was also upset to realize that if the adult Wesley had mentioned in passing his father’s idea of fitting discipline he would just have thought Wesley was whining again; thinking of the adult; not fully taking on board that even annoying twenty-six year olds really had once been frightened little eight year olds.
Giles had then realized that he had also qualified as a Watcher and was therefore also entitled to buy some books and did so, realizing that he also never bought books just to read for fun, or to read aloud to small children for fun, and it was perhaps high time that he did both of those things.
Once the idea had occurred to him, he realized that there were a vast number of books that he had enjoyed when he was a child and thought that he would definitely enjoy reading aloud to another child - The Narnian books, Alan Garner, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Silver Sword, E. Nesbit, The Otterbury Incident, Stig of the Dump, even - rather shamefacedly - some of the books his cousin Emily had loaned him when he was staying with her parents, such as - shame of shames - Ballet Shoes, most of which had been written by, well, girls. E. Nesbit, he remembered, had always been acceptable as no one knew what the ‘E’ stood for so one could pretend it was Eric or Ernest rather than Edith.
That settled it. Even if Buffy did call in reinforcements in the shape of Joyce, Wesley was coming home with him that night. Now decided, Giles went shopping for pyjamas and a toothbrush. He had just put their books and other purchases in the boot of his car when he noticed the toyshop. It wasn’t Hamley’s but it was big and brightly painted.
“Did you have a teddy bear, Wesley?” he asked.
Wesley nodded. “Yes. Cuthbert. I don’t suppose I still have him, do I?”
Giles thought it unlikely. “Well, just in case you don’t, shall we try to find something similar?”
Wesley looked confused. “How?”
Giles nodded at the toyshop and Wesley looked as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “But it isn’t Christmas.”
“No.”
“And it doesn’t help one to become a good Watcher to play with a lot of silly toys.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Giles was starting to enjoy himself. “But I think we should do it anyway.”
He personally thought that it would have been worth paying a great deal more than even the rather large amount he ended up expending in the toyshop just to see the look on Wesley’s face as he was led into a place piled high with pointless frivolity and told that he could choose a birthday present.
“But it’s not my birthday.”
“Well, it is your birthday one day this year and I may not be around for it, so go and choose something.”
They looked all through the toyshop and Giles noticed a number of things that he thought might be entertaining and many games he hadn’t played in a long time. Wesley gazed at the Playmobil castle and knights on horses for a while, looking as if he had time-slipped from the Victorian age rather than the 70s, it was clearly so remote from his experience of being a child. It obviously didn’t occur to him even for an instant that he could have something that expensive and he looked at the card games instead, although his gaze kept going back wistfully to the castle. Meanwhile, Giles had found a set of draughts in the proper wooden box, Snakes & Ladders, Ludo, Cluedo, and Monopoly, all of which he piled into his shopping trolley. He added a very grand kite in the shape of a Chinese dragon.
When he looked up he saw that Wesley was gazing at the Playmobil castle again, which had been set out on a table to entice children to play with it. Giles noticed that as well as the castle there were a number of knights on horses, various royalty, wizards, ghosts, and a cave for the wizard to mix up his potions. Wesley watched two other children playing a wonderful game of storming the castle with the attacking knights for a while, looking more and more wistful. Giles watched him examine the game carefully and then look back at Giles, and held his breath wondering if Wesley was going to take him at his word and ask for the castle. He crossed his fingers behind his back and could barely contain a smile as Wesley walked up to him, looking nervous.
“Did you find something...?” he asked in his most encouraging tone.
“Yes. Can I…?” Wesley faltered and then swallowed and then abruptly held out two small boxes, both of which contained a Playmobil jousting knight on a horse. “Could I have two knights so they can fight each other?”
Giles looked at his anxious face at what he clearly thought was a very risky request that could well lead to a scolding.
“Or I could just have one,” Wesley said hastily.
Giles took the knights from him and said, “Two is fine. In fact - more than two would also be fine. In fact, come with me - ” He took Wesley by the hand and led him over to where the bank of mediaeval Playmobil figures were stacked up ten feet high, picked up the largest castle he could find, and put it in the shopping trolley. Wesley watched him open-mouthed.
“A whole castle…?” he breathed.
“Someone’s having a special birthday.” Giles turned to see a woman regarding the heaped trolley with a smile.
“He works very hard all the year,” Giles explained. “He deserves a little fun. In fact, he deserves more fun than any child I’ve ever met.”
Giles noticed that as well as the castle he had selected, and the wizard with his potions in his cave, there were siege towers, catapults, a drawbridge, special sections of the castle wall that gave way when catapulted, a round tower, a guard tower, a battle tower, a castle gate, mediaeval houses, jousting equipment, a ghost, all kinds of knights with and without jousting equipment and various weaponry, a dragon that fitted - so the box assured him - the dungeon of the castle, and a dragon-slaying knight with a horse with extra special battle armour. They all went into the trolley. Next to that was a much twee-er fairy tale castle with various equally twee dining rooms and bedchambers, which he thought would be rather fun to overrun with marauding plastic clip-together mercenaries. He had no shame about also plundering from that section a magic tree, a crystal cage, a unicorn, an oak tree with a secret hideaway, and various small plastic royals who could be either defended or have their heads lopped off depending on whether Wesley felt like overturning hereditary tyrannies or bravely defending the monarchy in any given game. It was a matter of seconds to add a magical fairy bower.
Giles beamed across at Wesley. “Well, that’s the equipment for your Middle Ages studies sorted out. Now, I think Viking Culture would also be important. There are a lot of excellent curses and spell reversals hidden in Viking runes.”
Wesley was still gazing at the heaped trolley in disbelief. “You can’t buy all of it,” he protested.
“I can do what I like,” Giles assured him. “One of the benefits of being a grown up.”
“But it’s too much.” Wesley reached out to touch the castle and then moved his fingers back.
Now whistling nonchalantly, Giles added a Viking Longboat, Viking Longhouse, Viking Camp, a smaller boat, a superbly green sea serpent and various assorted Vikings. “There you go. All historically accurate, I have no doubt. Shall we find the checkout?”
Wesley took his outstretched hand automatically but he kept looking between Giles and the heaped trolley in disbelief. Giles felt his small fingers grip his more tightly as they got closer and closer to the checkout, looking up at Giles as if he was trying to decipher the language in which he was written.
The sales assistant’s eyes widened a little at the sight of so many toys but she began to ring them up while Wesley watched each one go through in silent amazement.
Giles refused to flinch at the eighteen hundred dollars total. It was absolutely worth it to see Wesley’s eyes go as big as saucers. The little boy still did not seem quite convinced that they really were buying all these toys. Only when Giles had solemnly wheeled them out to the car park and was lifting carrier bag after carrier bag into the boot of the car, did Wesley seem to believe it.
“You spent all that money,” he gasped.
“I missed your other birthdays,” Giles pointed out.
Wesley was doing frantic maths in his head. “But that still makes two hundred and twenty five dollars per birthday!”
“Not if you divide it by twenty-six,” Giles pointed out, closing the boot and opening the passenger door for him.
Wesley struggled in silence with the maths for that until they were pulling out the carpark before squeaking, “But that’s still about seventy dollars for each birthday!”
“Doesn’t that sound about right?” Giles enquired.
“But you spent it on toys!”
“Is there something you would rather have?” Giles remembered the teddy bear. “Damn - I mean - drat - I was going to get you a teddy bear...”
Before he could turn the car round, Wesley said, “No, please, it’s all right. I don’t mind.”
He seemed quite panicked by so much money having been spent on him; the action so very much a departure from the proper order of things that he couldn’t seem to comprehend it, darting worried looks at Giles, who he was perhaps now mentally consigning to the realm of the insane.
Giles drove them to the adult Wesley’s apartment. “Let’s see what you brought with you, shall we?”
Wesley looked nervous about entering what was to him obviously a very scary place, sticking close to Giles, who had to admit to feeling rather pleased that the boy was now using him as a buffer between scary things and himself, rather than treating Giles as if he were one of the scary things the world contained.
The room was Spartan and very neat. The adult Wesley had clearly not burdened himself with too many possessions either, but there were some books, one of them a dog-eared copy of The Once and Future King, which Wesley pounced upon eagerly. He opened it with trembling fingers and then gave a little cry of surprise as he saw his name written neatly in the flyleaf.
Feeling a little like a trespasser, Giles opened the suitcase and had a look inside. “I’d really like a photograph to show you,” he explained. “So you can see what you look like as an adult.”
That wasn’t entirely the truth. He wanted a photograph of the adult Wesley to remind himself that while this child version existed the adult one did not; he was lost in the limbo of Ethan’s spell. Giles very much feared they were all going to need reminding of their obligations to that adult version before too long.
The suitcase contained very little; reference books, notebooks, nothing else. Giles opened the wardrobe and found that Wesley had his one suit hung up in it next to three neatly pressed shirts. Rummaging in his chest of drawers produced some underwear, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that it was hard to imagine the stuffed shirt of the library ever wearing. In his shoulder bag there were a few crucifixes, two stakes, and three bottles of holy water, an address book, in which were three photographs, and a very battered-looking teddy bear.
“Cuthbert!” Wesley fell on the teddy bear joyously and hugged him.
Giles was thinking: That pompous annoying little twerp that I find so irritating was once the little boy whose father used to lock him in the dark, who never had a proper childhood, and who still loves his teddy bear. For some completely illogical reason the realization that Wesley had kept his teddy bear made him feel ten times worse about his lack of patience with the young man.
Wesley giggled and Giles sat down next to him. “What is it?”
Wesley held up Cuthbert and Giles saw that the bear had a little shoulder-bag of his own. Wesley peered into it and then pulled out a tiny crucifix and miniature perfume bottle onto which a label with a large black cross had been stuck.
“Did you make him that?” Giles enquired, smiling.
Wesley shook his head. “Not me - me. When Uncle Richard gave him to me he didn’t have a bag with him. He was much fluffier the last time I saw him too.” He examined the bear critically, small fingers stroking the bare patches. Cuthbert looked like a bear who had been very well loved.
The photographs showed one of a group of people in formal wear evidently on their way to a dance. Wesley looked very much as Giles knew him and he held it out for the little boy to see. “That’s you, Wesley. That’s what you look like - grown up.”
Wesley gazed at the photograph a little fearfully and then in some relief. “I don’t look like Daddy,” he said after a moment. He went on gazing at it. “I look more like Uncle Richard.”
“Is Uncle Richard nice?” Giles prompted hopefully.
Wesley looked up at him out of troubled eyes. “He was very nice, but then he died.” His lip trembled for a moment and then he said quietly: “Boys don’t cry. Only girls cry.”
“Boys cry all the time,” Giles told him. “So do men. There’s nothing wrong with feeling grief at the loss of someone we love. It would be worse to not feel anything.”
“A vampire killed him. Mummy said he didn’t suffer. Daddy said he was very brave. He said that it’s important to be brave.” Wesley looked up at Giles and whispered: “I’m not very brave. I don’t like pain and I get scared.” He winced as he made the admission, steeling himself to do it. “Sometimes I get very scared.”
Giles said hoarsely: “You’re eight years old, Wesley. You live in a world where you know there are demons and vampires. Of course you get scared. Everyone gets scared. I get scared all the time, that something’s going to happy to Buffy or Willow or one of the other children, or to me.”
They looked at the other photographs together; one of a middle-aged couple; the woman pretty but thickening around the waist and with a timid expression; the man unmistakably the Roger Wyndam-Pryce Giles had met in London.
“Mummy and Daddy.” Wesley gazed at the photograph for a moment and then sighed and put it away.
The last one was one of Wesley in cricket whites in front of wicket. He looked about fifteen, gawky, narrow, with unruly dark hair, an expression of great concentration on his face. Wesley turned the photograph over and saw a press clipping sellotaped to it. It made reference to the lower sixth having won a victory over the touring team from another school. Wyndam-Pryce had apparently bowled out six men and scored a hundred and twenty runs.
Wesley smiled as he read through the clipping and beamed up at Giles. “I can play cricket!”
“You can do lots of things.” Giles looked around the Spartan room.
“What other things can I do?” Wesley asked.
Giles grimaced internally: Fold at the first sign of pressure; make an idiot of yourself over women; put people’s backs up for your country; follow orders from people across the sea who have no idea about the situation we’re dealing with...
Wesley’s face fell. “I can’t do anything, can I?”
“Of course you can.” Giles put the photographs away carefully. “You’re a Watcher, remember? Not to mention you were Head Boy of your school.”
“Head Boy?” Wesley gazed at him wide-eyed. “Really?”
“Really,” Giles assured him.
There was another pause before Wesley said very tentatively: “Do you...like me? The big me?”
Giles didn’t hesitate. “Yes.” Mentally he was adding I do now, but he had spoken with such emphasis that the boy was reassured. He gazed up at Giles for a moment, lit up with pleasure, and then had to duck his head in embarrassment to hide a pleased little smile.
Giles found he needed a moment to get his voice back under control and then he said brightly: “Shall we go and find Buffy? Introduce her to Cuthbert?”
Wesley smiled at that idea and then faltered looking at the bear. “Mr Giles...?”
“Yes, Wesley...?”
“Do you think Willow will think I’m silly for still having a teddy bear…?”
Giles wasn’t sure if Wesley meant that ‘still’ to refer to the grown up Wesley or the one who had attained the grand old age of eight. Either way he was quite certain that Willow would not think it silly at all. He was very much afraid that she would find it adorable.
“I think you’re safe,” he told him and got a smile in return that he had to admit he found absurdly sweet.
When they walked out of the apartment, Wesley slipped his hand into Giles’ without needing to be prompted, and with Wesley carrying his shoulder bag with Cuthbert safely secured inside it, they drove back to the school in companionable silence.
***