Title: A Simple Reaction
Author: Dusk (Dusk@goldserve.net)
Pairing: A/W
Rating: NC-17 (maybe - but it's me writing it, so it's not exactly graphic. I'm playing it safe.)
Archive/repost: AngelSlash (elsewhere, ask.)
Website: http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/dusk/
Disclaimer: The boys aren't mine. I don't profit from borrowing them for the evening. But I think we all enjoyed ourselves.
Summary: Angel sits in the dark, and Wesley has no life. (So, nothing new there.)
Comments: Feedback always appreciated. First attempt at A/W. This is another of those 'things you think of to look cheerful while dealing with the general public'. Today I thought, I came home, I wrote it down, and look! A fic happened. Magical.
Posted: March '01

***

Angel stood in the dark, staring out the window with his eyes closed. The air was cool, but not cold, with a small breeze that he could occasionally feel ruffle his hair.

Humans had evolved for daylight, for escaping, for hiding from predators. Vampires were hunters; they'd never been anything else. The didn't rely on sight to tell them what the world was like. Without light, a human was lost, disorientated. Racial memories of terrors in the darkness prevented them from ever being truly comfortable.

A vampire, without light, was in his natural habitat. They couldn't really *see* in perfect darkness. They didn't need to.

Of course, he didn't hunt. Not anymore. Didn't mean that he lost the instincts, the skills, or the desire. Underused senses screamed silently and continuously to be exercised, building to a thundering peak until nothing else mattered but setting them free.

So he sat in the dark. Or stood, it didn't matter. From inside, or outside. That didn't matter either.  Cataloguing the temperature of the air, the sounds spreading out around him for a distance he couldn't really calculate in mortal measurements, only in lives and territories. The scents of the same. 

He could still do it, track his prey across a city, or a wilderness, though a hundred conflicting scents and sounds and trails. 

Proving he could still do it meant he didn't have to do it for real.

Not so much brooding as running, chasing, leaping, catching, killing, drinking... without ever leaving the safety of his own head.

Safety - not for him, but for everybody else in his city.

He could spend hours like this. He did spend hours like this. So it wasn't his mortal acquaintances' idea of a good time; it wasn't even his, actually, but it was the closest he'd let himself come nowadays.

It wasn't brooding, it was nothing so cerebral as conscious thought. More the opposite, a deliberate cessation of higher brain functions. 

It meant he didn't have to think about anything. At all.

It was a heady feeling, having all that sensory information at his fingertips yet never acting upon it. He could smell fear, and anger, and lust. A few other trace emotions, but those were the dominant three. Humans never changed.

There was a shift in his immediate vicinity and he was abruptly drawn back from the greater perception of the city to the closeness of just one room, dry and dusty and stifling. Still disorientated, he shook his head. Dust, and the harsh scents of chemical dyes used in clothing. Wood polish and leather, and paper combined with the subtle musk of a living....

Wesley. He tilted his head to one side, then the other. Triangulating with sound and scent. Behind him. Close. Getting closer. He could turn and attack and the human would be dead before he even knew he was in danger.  He could drain him and grind his bones to dust between his teeth.

He could. He didn't.

"Wesley," he affirmed aloud, remembering with difficulty how to articulate. A collection of sounds, barely more than a low rumble. He didn't know if the human's hearing was even acute enough to hear it.

The emotions he'd revelled in outside still hung around him like a cloud. Fear soon faded... since it was against his nature as a predator. Anger, sweet and bitter, but not his. Lust....

Lust was fleeting but it never died, not totally. It moved from person to person like a disease, living independently of it's temporary hosts.

Or not so temporary. Give it long enough, it could grow, like an acorn into an oak, rooting itself into it's host....

Wesley was close enough for Angel to locate him just by the heat of his body. His scent was stronger than anything else in the otherwise empty room.

"Wesssllleeeey," he sounded again, tasting the sound carefully.

"Angel, are you all right?"

So Wesley had heard that. Angel didn't really attach any significance to the collection of sounds he uttered. The heartbeat was thumping just inches behind him, relaxed, not speeding with adrenaline. There was no danger for Wesley to react to. None that Wesley was aware of.

There was no conscious decision made, simply a reaction to the combined scent, sound, presence and complete lack of fear. It was stupid, not to fear him. It was potentially fatal. It was...

... arousing.

He wasn't facing the window now, the breeze was behind him, he could feel it on the back of his neck. His hands were full of heated hair and skin. The heartbeat spiked, a flash of fear, yes, but scent didn't lie, and that wasn't fear he smelled. His mouth was caught up in another, warm and wet and tasting just like blood and coffee and human male. He felt Wesley react, slowly but as fast as he could, flailing his limbs, thumping Angel in the chest, but that stopped almost immediately, all movement ceasing.

Angel pulled his head back fractionally, his eyes opening but not focusing, testing with scent and sound again. The speeding heartbeat was already returning to normal, Wesley was making no move to leave and not just because he knew Angel could stop him without even trying. Still no fear.

"Angel?"

"Wesley." Enough words, they said nothing, meant nothing. Angel dropped his head again, lips whispering silently against Wesley's throat, and this time Wesley wasn't taken by surprise; nothing but a minute shift of muscles under the skin, under Angel's lips, as he swallowed. Hands were raised tentatively to Angel's arms, pausing there a moment before moving back down to rest on Angel's hips.

"What...."

That was as far as Wesley got; Angel's attention was caught by the movement of mouth and tongue and he lifted his head to quiet them. Wesley wasn't pulling back, or staying still, he was opening willingly, slowly, to Angel's insistent lips. 

"Oh, God... Wesley...." Angel murmured, pushing his hips against Wesley's, the new scents and breathy moans released by this action filling the air around them like smoke, made tangible.

"... Angel...." Wesley breathed into his ear.

"... Wesley...." There was a slow trail off of movement. Something clicked into place in Angel's brain, something that overrode the sensory clouding from a night of hunting and tracking. He cleared his throat. "... Wesley?"

There was a questioning note to the word, now.  Wesley shook his head to try and clear it.

"I think so," he said weakly.

Angel didn't move his hands from their perches, one on a shoulder, another on the waist. He didn't move his head, staying cheek to cheek with the human he was wrapped around. He stayed exactly where he was. 

"Why are we... you... what are we doing?" he settled for, suddenly unsure how much of this was real, how he'd gone from a simple few hours alone to... this.

"I have no idea," Wesley told him honestly.

"But you...."

"I...?"

"You were... were you...? Yes, you were." I can smell your feelings, he didn't add aloud. You were reacting to me. "Why?"

"For heaven's sake, Angel, you can't just assault a man like that and expect him to do the honourable thing and back off."

"I can't... I what?"

Wesley's breath was hot against his ear. "When somebody... when...  look, you react automatically, all right? If you didn't like it, you shouldn't have groped me in the first place."

Angel still didn't move. "I groped you," he stated, hoping to clarify things. It didn't help.

"Thoroughly, yes."

"And you...?"

"I let you."

"Did I give you a choice?"

"I know you don't think much of my ability to defend myself, but no, I don't think I would tolerate sexual assault without causing at least *some* physical damage on my attacker. Yet you appear to be intact."
 
"Good."

"Yes, it was."

Angel relaxed minutely. Wesley was makes jokes. He hadn't fucked everything up beyond redemption.

"You hit me. I remember you hitting me."

"Well, yes, I did. Briefly. I was rather taken by surprise, after all. I just came up to see how you were doing. You've been up here all night."

All night. The air outside the window was very slowly warming, he could feel it now that he was paying attention. Had to be nearly four in the morning.

"You're alone here? Why are you here at all?" That sounded wrong. "At this time," he added.

"Cordelia declared her social life of paramount importance and left some time ago. It's possible she had a date, but she told me to mind my own business. Gunn probably didn't have a date, but he went for a beer and some sleep, since nothing much was happening here. Said to page him if any demons needed a good... ass-kicking. His words, not mine."

"And you're here."

"I have no date, no life, and didn't want a beer. Staying here with a fascinating treatise on ethnodemonology seemed as good a plan as any."

"You stayed to check up on me," Angel divined from this apparently careless answer.

"I most certainly did not. You know how much I enjoy curling up with a good book."

"Which you could have done at your place. You have books. And chairs to curl up in."

"I have bony, uncomfortable chairs. You have a fine study. And a better stocked refrigerator, which is peculiar if you think about it."

"You sat in my chair. My leather chair, in my study. You ate my food, although that's what it's there for, so that's okay." 

"Um... yes, I did. To all of the above. You're out of those charming folded pastry things."

"I can buy more. Actually, I can ask Cordelia to, because she won't let me near the grocery store anymore."

"You bought strange things, Angel. I really don't blame her for putting her foot down."

"It's *my* kitchen. I should have some say in what goes into it. Do you know how long it's been since I bought real  food? Most of the things people eat now didn't exist then. I just asked the saleswoman what you three might like."

"I don't think she meant for you to buy *all* her suggestions. And yes,  life without cookie-dough ice cream and vanilla flavoured coffee. How tragic it must have been. I think we're straying from the subject slightly?"

"That's what I was aiming for. Straying. So you like the pastry things?"

"You don't want to admit that you molested me while in a brooding trance of some kind and are, even as we speak, cuddled around me like some kind of living blanket, without the slightest clue how you got there."

Angel debated how to react to that, and settled for not moving, again. "You're a very perceptive man, Wesley." 

"Thank you. You also want to know why I'm not running, screaming, from the room."

"No," Angel said carefully. "I don't need you to tell me that."

"Oh? Pray enlighten me."

"My nose is an inch away from your skin. You smell... horny. And you have a hard-on, which I am in no doubt about whatsoever, because, as you said, I'm wrapped around you like a blanket."

"Oh. That. Circumstantial evidence, at best."

"You didn't smell horny when you walked in here."

"Because as fun as ethnodemonology is, it really doesn't arouse me sexually." 

"But I do, right?"

Wesley gave in. "Apparently, yes."

"Apparently." 

"Yes, you do, very much so, and you damn well know it so stop messing about."

"I just wanted you to say it."

"You are a complete bastard."

"A very insecure bastard who just minutes ago thought he had molested you. Go easy on me."

"I'd say the physical evidence speaks for itself, for both of us. How about you stop hiding your face in my neck and actually look me in the eye?"

Reluctantly, Angel did so.

"Thank you. Now, please hurry and get to the part where you invite me into your bed."

Angel looked at him for a very long moment. "That's not what I was expecting to hear."

"Or you could get to the part where you tell me I'm insane and should leave," Wesley offered quietly. "But that one's really not as much fun."

"I don't like that option either," Angel said. "So... maybe we should sleep together...?"

"For Christ's sake, *yes* already."

"Good."

Neither moved. 

"And I'd prefer it if you were actually conscious this time. A good groping really doesn't mean as much when the groper is practically in a coma."

"Wesley... shut up."

"Shutting up now," Wesley agreed breathlessly, as Angel lowered him gently to the floor. "So... no bed, then?"

"Bed's far," Angel told him, pulling off his own shirt.

"Yes, and that window faces east. And it's open. Do you happen to know when sunrise is?"

Angel stood up, shut the window and the blind, and then dropped to his knees beside Wesley.

"Much better."

"Didn't I say something about you being quiet?" Angel began undoing the buttons on Wesley's fly.

"I never was very good at following orders, I'm afraid."

Angel finished with the removal of the pants, Wesley obligingly lifting his hips in the process, which set all sorts of interesting thoughts flying though the vampire's mind. He bent over and blew softly on the faint trail of dark hair below the navel, watching it stand on end as a shudder ran through Wesley's entire body.

He moved down, hovering above the nest of dark curls. "Wesley," he said in a conversational tone. "I want you to scream for me."

Angel bowed his head.

Wesley moaned at length, then, at some convincing non-verbal prompting from Angel, was more than happy to turn it into a scream.

[end]