Trial Run

By Inca

One

Sunnydale, California. 1982.

“Imagine a human who was perfectly honed. Imagine a human without the distractions of media, or science, or a family.”

The three men seated around the huge glossy table listened, eyeing the booklets in front of them with a carefully guarded interest.

“Imagine a human,” Travers said, “Who was shaped by you. Who would grow with the ideals you wanted from him, or her. Without free thought, because they never had need to develop it. Who held only the thought to obey you and only you.” He leaned forward, hands on the cold wood of the table; smiling with barely contained excitement. “A perfect soldier.”

Travers paused, breathing a little heavily, watching them from behind his glasses, waiting for their approval. The muscle in his thigh ticked a few times before settling down.

“Mr Travers,” one of the heads of the operative, Major General Martinez, said after a moment, “We already undergo mind control techniques…”

“Which are sloppy, and… and delicate!” He said smiling. “Those soldiers know, maybe only subconsciously, but they know in their very being, that there is something else in the world. I am talking about a human, who would not.” He breathed the emphasis. “They would not know any other than what you tell them.”

Colonel Jensen spoke up, pulling his thin glasses from his face and dropping them to the table. “I’m not sure what you mean… how are you planning to instil the military’s ideals in someone, or … deprive them of free thought?”

“Not deprive!” Travers said, a little alarmed, eyes flicking to the man’s fingers playing with the frames of his glasses. “No, not deprived, simply, not burdened.”

“Fine. How are you planning to ‘not burden’ someone with it? And…” he looked down at the prospectus. “And ‘not burden’ them with family, or anything along those lines.”

“It’s quite simple actually. Of course people need at least a few interactions with other humans. We are social creatures. But the aim of… is to limit this. To cut out the possibility of physical attachments, of …uh, well, adverse thoughts from other peers or even thoughts from books–”

“Yes, but how? Are you going to keep them locked up, never allowing them to ever go outside?” Major Martinez said with an arc of a patronising brow.

Travers smiled brilliantly. “Why would a perfect soldier need to?”

The three men all leant back in their chairs, watching him with a guarded eye.

“I’m not talking about abuse or deprivation gentlemen, in fact… there is nothing further from the truth in what I propose. If a boy never sees the sun, never hears of the sun, how would he know it was there? He certainly wouldn’t miss it.” He smiled at his metaphor, pausing for a moment to let that sink in, before he continued, taking out his handkerchief and mopping his brow. “I am just saying, remove the temptations and distractions from someone’s life. Drugs. Sex. Groceries, money, today’s ideals of vanity, the marketing machine. You would have… the simple foundation of a human. Malleable, ready to learn. Perfect.”

Major Martinez cocked his head a little, watching him with hard eyes. “You think you could keep a person like a mouse in a cage? Train them to run a specific wheel?”

“Yes. With no harm to the person of course. In fact, without knowledge of war or death, they would in theory be living a better life than the rest of us.”

The men all began leafing slowly through the booklets, eyeing the plans for a largish living area, in one of the Initiative’s underground wings. A bedroom, a bathroom, a tiny indoor garden, a small lap pool and gym for fitness.

“And you think,” The last man, Colonel Terry said after a moment, breaking his silence, “That a person wouldn’t begrudge anyone the fact he couldn’t go outside, existed solely under the thumb of someone else?”

Travers smiled weakly, but knowingly, like a tired parent. “You don’t seem to get the major point, Colonel Terry. The person would never know.”

---

Re-enforced steel and concrete walls. Passcode and DNA recognition for clearance. UV replication lighting. One hundred and twelve cameras. The base of Project O-1 took only eight months to prepare, in the B-14 area of the Sunnydale Initiative, one hundred feet below ground.

---

Sunnydale, California. Present Day.

The world is one hundred and thirty-three steps long. Angel knows. He has counted many times. From his bed to his shower it is fourteen steps, toe to heel. The shower sprays ten minutes from the moment the buzzing wakes him up. The buzzing starts at seven thirty and goes for five minutes. From when the shower stops, about fifteen minutes will pass until his breakfast arrived. He can dress in that time and wait by the silver door. The silver door will click and then he can open it, and the food will be on the tray in the tiny room in between two doors. The other door never opens for him. Only Father could open it.

Breakfast always came with fruits and cheeses, but was cereal for three days, pancakes for one, cereal again for another two days, then eggs and bacon for one. The back to cereal for three days.

At ten o’clock, which is two hours after breakfast appears, the door to the exercise area opens. The exercise area is twenty-five steps long, but another fifty wide. He would swim or use the three machines for hours on end. Exercise bike, weight machine and treadmill. They make him tired though. He showers afterwards.

He remembers Father telling him to leave the room by four, that it would close at that time. Angel had stayed behind a few times, once on purpose to see what would happen, the others he’d been caught up in the machines. He’d been locked in the room until ten the next morning. He is usually out of the room by three thirty.

The world has six parts. Where he sleeps and bathes. Where he swims. Where he eats and creates. Where the plants are. This is the four-part world. The tiny room between two doors is the fifth part. And where Father is, when he isn’t with Angel, is the sixth and last part of the world. Father has promised him, one day he will see it too. But he isn’t old enough.

It is where food comes from as well. Father makes it, like Angel makes pictures.

In the eating area, there are books. Books about his body, his bones, his organs. Pictures of what’s inside him. Father wrote them for him. There are mathematics books, and some English ones. He has made a book of his own pictures. He remembers when Father saw the first picture he’d ever created; he had drawn his fingers. Father was excited.
He draws better now. And Father always seems interested in that. He likes to draw the plants. They’re alive like him. But in a different way. They ate water. The place where the flowers are is a lighter colour, brighter lights, and they’re hot. There are tiles on the floor like in the bathroom or around the pool. It is wide, sixty steps across and twenty steps long.

The ceiling is high. If he stands on the table, he can scrape the top of the world with his fingertips. And sometimes, just…sometimes… he wonders if there’s anything else but this.

---

Angel broke away from his thoughts. They were cloying sometimes. Cloying was his new word; he got new words to use with his cereal once a week. He was sitting at the table, his lunch half-eaten in front of him. One day of tuna on bread and salad and cheese, one day of rice and vegetables, one of sliced meat and cheeses, one of hot thick soup, one day of crunchy chicken with potato and one day of stew.

It was tuna today.

He didn’t like tuna. It tasted horrible. He opened the bread and picked out the little tangy tomatoes from the fish and ate them, scraped the tuna off the bread into a little pile as he always did, and ate the bread. He only ate the tuna when he was really hungry, from exercising too long, or too hard. But he didn’t do that on tuna days, because he didn’t want to get hungry, because he didn’t want to eat the fish.

He ate the cheese with the bread to cover the fishy taste, and picked at the salad. Father hadn’t appeared in two and a half weeks, although the food always came on time, every day. He wondered what he was doing. He’d asked him of course, asked him many things, was always asking him questions, he knew everything. But Father was select what he told him. So he didn’t know what he did in the sixth part. It itched him a little, but he couldn’t get in there. He’d tried.
He’d figured that since the food appeared in the tiny room, and that Father made the food, it must in some way come from the sixth part. So he’d waited in the tiny room, to see where the trays went after he put them in there. But nothing had happened. He’d tried many times, for hours he’d waited. But the doors stayed closed. So he’d realised it only worked when he wasn’t there. Like his hair got shorter sometimes, or new clothes appeared in his closet when the food made him sleepy. Like the pool area was cleaned only when it was closed to him.

He often wondered what it would be like. The sixth part. Would it be a mirror image of the first four parts of the world? And therefore… would that mean there were actually nine parts to the world? His brain felt strange, water clogged, like his ears sometimes felt when water from the pool got stuck in them.

He finished off his lunch and wondered what he should do. Draw? Go back into the gym? Go to see the plants?

He stood, took his tray with the tuna smelling plate on it and opened the silver door, placing it on the little shelf inside the tiny room. He came back into the four-part world and heard the little click that meant the door couldn’t be opened again until dinner. He knew that as well as he knew he had five fingers. It was a fact. An unarguable fact.

He wandered out into the plant area, baring his teeth at the mirrors that bordered the world to make sure no seeds or anything were stuck in them. He had spiky face. His hair got confused and grew over his body. He remembered having tiny hairs on his legs and arms, but they got dark. Under his arms and between his legs and now it was even starting to grow a little on his chest too. Grew on his chin and cheeks quickly. But every two days it would disappear while he slept. He would wake up tomorrow and it would be gone. It was strange like that. He figured it went back into his face. The plants were still there, nothing is new. He checked everyday, because sometimes when he slept new things would appear on the table or next to his bed. Little puzzles. A new book. A new plant. He loved it when that happened.
A bit pouty from the realisation today wasn’t going to be exciting; he sat down on the ground in front of a rose, and watched it for a while. It was still. Like it too only moved when he was asleep. He’d kept track of the bloom, opening up a little more each day until it was fully spread and beautiful. He’d thought yesterday was as big as it was going to get, but today… it seemed to be bigger. He smiled.

“Are you going to keep growing?” He asked it. “I stopped growing years ago.” Flowers grew, bloomed, the blooms drooped and fell and then they slept for a while… and then bloomed again. It was fascinating.

The rose was quiet. Angel reached out and ran his thumb along the soft petal. It didn’t speak. He felt that chest hurting he felt sometimes. He felt strange, although not really strange because his eyes weren’t leaking. Just… strange. He got excess energy a lot, and a new puzzle or game or book would usually help with that, calm it down like the pool calmed down a while after he jumped into it, smoothing out his ripples. But the strangeness didn’t go away until Father came to see him. He wanted to talk to him. Or…

He bit his lip.

Or Will. He wondered where he had gone. The empty feeling intensified. It always seemed to when he thought about Will. Where did he go? Was he in the sixth part?

Will was … he wasn’t Father. He wasn’t sure what Will was. Like him, he supposed, which is probably why he wanted to know where he was.

He’d talked to him twenty three times. He had a tally on the side of the bookshelf. He hadn’t seen him since before his seventeenth year though.

Did he sit and wonder where Angel was? Did he like tuna? Angel had to know. Even though it was the question he’d asked Father most; he couldn’t stop asking for some reason.

He doesn’t understand what ‘gone from the world’ means; even when Father explains it to him. He must still be in the sixth part. His tuna on bread disappeared today, he ate it, but he knows it will be back in seven days. The tuna sandwich sleeps in the sixth part for seven days. Maybe like Will?

But Will didn’t come back at a set time. Tuna came back every seven days. He saw Will mostly when he was sixteen. Two times before his thirteenth year. But mostly around his sixteenth year.

So where was he? He must be in the sixth part sleeping with the sleeping tuna. He had only ever come through with Father. They both had blue eyes. He had brown. He wondered why that was. Was that why Father and Will were in the sixth part and he was in the four part world?

It almost hurt his brain to try and think about it.

---

Travers looked down at his laptop screen, squinting at his words for a moment before rubbing his eyes. He’d been here for a while, studying Angel’s reaction to his loneliness. He’d finally dragged himself out of bed and caught the last few moments of his morning shower, and had dressed in loose dark cotton pants and a loose white shirt that appeared to be his favourite outfit.

He was sitting in the garden now, watching the roses with that same zoned out expression everyone on Project O-1 had come to expect from him over the past few years. He seemed to take his solitude harder and harder as he had grown, which was interesting. Travers had thought, they all had thought, it would get easier.

He checked the temperature of the enclosure. 78.8

Perfect. Everything always had to be perfect for him.

Angel was fascinating. He cried sometimes, but didn’t understand why he was doing it, wandering around his world with tears on his face. Travers had purposefully never taught him about loneliness or being alone. He thought it was natural. Which was what made the crying so interesting. He didn’t do it very often.

He never taught him the word ‘yearn’. He hadn’t taught him the ideas of many things.

He’d signed on with the Initiative because they had the money. And you needed money for an experiment like this; it was as simple as that. This world changing experiment on human behaviour.

The speakers picked up Angel’s words clearly. “Can you eat tuna?”

Angel often tried to personify things around him to tamp out the isolated feeling. He talked to himself sometimes, to hear a voice, to hear something apart from the silence. He went through a stage in around year fourteen where he left the shower running for weeks on end. For the noise. He wanted sound. The enclosure didn’t allow for any, really, it was padded with concrete. Angel wasn’t allowed music. When Angel slept the silence was enveloping.

Angel didn’t exist. His name was a little joke. They’d paid for him, a mother who was going to abort her child had needed the money more. So he lived even though he should be, by all rights, dead. Of course there was a false record of the woman aborting her child, no one would be foolish enough to leave any trail.

Travers itched to speak to Angel again. He had scheduled his reappearance for later today, but could not wait. He smiled at Angel’s face on the large flat screen on the wall above his head, watching him as he sedately eyed the flowers, curled up on the warm electric-heated tiles next to them.

Twenty-three years, Travers mused as he sipped the last of his coffee and took his walking stick in hand, using it to aid his weak knee as he walked over to the containment doors. A life’s work. He picked up his test briefcase. Angel’s life. His entire life.

He slipped through the first containment door, cold and lit sharp blue. The door closed behind him and he keyed in the code for the next door. Sharp jab in his finger, a tiny pinprick of blood, and he saw his DNA rise and twist on the tiny screen above. The door opened, and he stood in the ‘tiny room’ as Angel called it. The fifth part. Travers smiled and undid the lock. He imagined Angel’s ears pricking up at the small sound he was so attuned to, hearing it easily through the quiet of his world. Imagined him running over, hopeful and sure enough, when Travers pushed open the heavy steel door, Angel was there, huge smile on his face.

“Father!” He cried, stepping forward and wrapping his long arms around his neck. His fingers slid into Travers’ hair, like he was savouring every feeling, every touch. He heard the small sniff of Angel trying to smell him, clinging to him and fingers tracking over him.

Travers loved that Angel acted so much like a baby monkey. It’s not like he was trying to act like them; of course, Angel didn’t know what monkeys were. It was a throwback gene, trampled out by society, so raw in the man before him.

“You’ve been gone for a long time.” He said.

“I have. How are you?”

“Well.” He paused. “Excess energy.” He admitted after a moment, looking down at him from his six-foot-one height with an almost apologetic look, still clinging loosely to his shirt.

He was bored. Rising problem in the past two years. Maybe he could arrange a new exercise machine for him. The last one kept him amused for at least six months. “I’ll try to find something to settle that. What else has happened?” He asked, placing his briefcase on the table.

He smiled and bounded along the enclosure towards the ‘outside’ area. He was kneeling before the roses by the time Travers got there, limping along with his cane.

“Look. It blooms.”

Travers knew the state of the rose very well, he watched the enclosure all day and some of the night, but he feigned surprise.

“Father? Why I don’t I eat water?”

“You do.”

His handsome face registered perplexity for a moment before he stood back up. “Why doesn’t the rose eat eggs? Or cereal?”

“The rose is smaller than you. It doesn’t need to move. It only needs water to live.” It wasn’t a correct answer, but it was simplistic.

Angel watched the flower by his bare feet. He touched the pot a little with his long toes, thinking. “If I didn’t move, would I live on water?”

“But you are always moving. You breathe. You blink.”

Understanding flooded his face. He nodded. “You always know so much.” He said, with a note of awe in his voice.

“I’m older than you. I’ve learnt.”

“I don’t learn anything it seems, unless I learn from you.” He looked a little pouty, as Travers liked to call the put out expression on Angel’s face. His eyebrows drew together and his lower lip jutted out a little. Had done so, ever since he was a little boy.

“You will.” Travers promised.

Angel stared up at the concrete ceiling for a moment. “Father?” His eyes tracked back down to watch him. “Why does your hair change colour and mine doesn’t?”

“I’m older.”

“My hair will turn white one day?”

“Yes. And you’ll wrinkle like me.”

“Wrinkle?” Repeating a word was Angel’s way of telling him he didn’t recognise it.

Travers ran his fingers over the crinkled skin near his eyes, circling it gently to show him. “Wrinkles.” He said happily.

Angel copied the motion on his own face and then reached out and repeated it on Travers. Baby monkey. Learned by copying. “Feels different.”

“I once had skin like you. No wrinkles.”

“Did you look like me?”

“No. But I was young once too.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You weren’t created yet.”

Angel nodded and played his finger around the edge of his eye again. He wandered over to a wall and looked at himself, stretching his pale skin. “You get more wrinkles.” He mused, looking at him in the reflection.

Travers laughed. “I do. And my hair turns whiter and falls out. It’s what we do.”

Angel smiled. “I remember you had brown hair like me.”

“I did. When you were very little.”

“Little.” He bounded over like a colt and started playing with Travers hair. He was quiet for a while. Travers felt fingers along the ever-increasing bald spot at the back of his head. “You used to be bigger than me.”

That was true. Angel had been a small boy but had grown into a lanky awkward pre-teen. His big hands and feet had given indication of what his size would be. He’d grown into them. At twenty-three he was still softening from his teenage growth into adult maturity. He was lean, due to his tendency to pick at his meals like a bird and then exercise for hours.

Angel rested his chin on Travers shoulder.

“You’re quiet today. I thought you’d be full of questions.”

“I am.” He stayed silent though and started to feel Travers belly and chest through his shirt.

Travers sighed. “You’ve been thinking about William again haven’t you?”

“I dreamt about him. Where did he go?”

“I’ve told you, you don’t listen.” He said, almost petulantly. Angel was so stubborn and obtuse when it came to his son. He should never have let Will in to see him. It looked like Angel refused to give up on the thought there could be someone else in the world.

“Why did he go? Why did he come, and how did he get here? Does he eat like me? Or is he like a flower, and just eats water?”

He’d once taken pity on Angel, when he was around five, had felt a tinge of sorrow for the lonely boy and let his son in to interact with him. Angel had clung to the then twelve-year-old boy like he was a life preserver, pestering the boy with question after question as he sniffed him and tried to wriggle over him. William had always seen Travers experiment as he grew up. He was seven when it started, and he’d sit with Travers in the control room and watch his experiment like it was his favourite television show. He’d grown older, and passed through school and then high school. Once, when Will was around eighteen he’d made a comment along the lines of the idea that keeping a human underground wasn’t humane, but Travers had dismissed it as some sort of teenage rebellion, playing Devil’s advocate just to distract him into an argument. He’d gone into college, majoring in some humanities and psychology degree.

Travers didn’t really know, or understand his son. He was always doing strange things, like dying his hair white, or getting into fights, or picketing or giving someone in the society more rights. William had turned out to be a bundle of irrepressible energy. Schools would ring him up while he was trying to concentrate on Angel and complain to him about his errant son.

His estranged wife usually dealt with things like that; Travers was not ashamed to say he didn’t care for what his son did. It just wasn’t important in the big scheme of things.

From about nineteen onwards, Will had asked him repeatedly to let him in to see Angel. He never told him anything about the outside world, maybe fearful of what would happen but that day, damn him! Travers scowled a little as Angel impatiently waited for an answer.

“William is gone. He is just gone.”

“But why?” He whined.

“Because I say he is. I promise you he is gone.” He should have never let him see someone else. He was stupid and weak for compromising his experiment like that. He didn’t want to teach Angel about death but couldn’t stop him from asking about the damn boy. A scientist had to be clinical and removed. That’s how you created an unbiased result. He would never, ever be so foolish again.

“Does he like tuna?” Angel whispered needily after a hesitated moment.

Travers breathed in, closing his eyes to resist the urge to show his frustration. “Have you been drawing recently?”

Angel blinked. “Yes.”

“What did you draw?”

He paused, and then stood up, walking towards his small bookshelf and taking out a sheaf of papers. It was his drawing book. His creations. Travers smiled a little. Angel wriggled back down beside him and showed him the pages. Mostly the flowers. One of the pool, one of the shower. He’d been drawing a lot. He was getting good at it, at replicating what he saw. No one had taught him to draw, or even doodle. He’d been given the pencils to do puzzles and he’d created art. It wasn’t something that was taught, it was something inside. Fascinating.

Travers smiled at them and slid his penlight from his pocket and performed the usual checks on Angel’s eyes. His pupils retracted against the light healthily.

“Checks.” Travers said, groaning as he got to his feet, his old bones groaning bitterly.

Angel stood up and helped him. “Now?” He asked, unhappily. “Let’s go to the pool. I broke my lap record, I could show you.”

“Checks.” He repeated, hobbling over to his suitcase on stiff knees.

Angel sulkily slid along behind him, reaching the table and hopping up onto it. He swung his feet as he watched Travers ready himself, nervously peeking into the briefcase. About a year ago, Project O-1 had drawn a tiny amount of bone marrow to examine and Angel was still nervous about it happening again. They needed an array of factual evidence to be presented every quarter. Angel was healthier than most men his age were, but that didn’t mean they should stop any tests. Of course, they wouldn’t need to draw bone marrow for a long time. But other things needed to be checked more regularly. Travers checked his blood pressure first, stethoscope pressed against the crook of his arm. He let the air out of the armband with a hiss, watching Angel clench his fingers a little.

“Feeling well?”

“Yes.” Angel said boredly, leaning forward with his chin up so Travers could examine the glands in his neck.

Travers pulled out a hypodermic needle and a small airtight jar. Angel reached into the suitcase and was wrapping the strap around his bicep, buckling and pulling it tight. He wriggled his hand around and tapped at his inner elbow as the blood trapped and his veins puffed a little.

As usual, he made a little unpleased noise as the needle slid in, and then silently watched the barrel fill with thick red. He rubbed at his eye with his free hand, as Travers finished drawing the blood and let out a small abrupt yelp when the steel slid roughly from his arm. Angel knew pain, but Travers had taught him that pain was alright. Travers had always thought pain was exacerbated by society’s views.

“Say ‘ah’.” He murmured, light poised to look down Angel’s throat.

Angel opened his mouth as far as he could, trying to curl his tongue out of the way so Travers wouldn’t use the tongue depressor.

He fitted the long thin head onto the light and looked into Angel ear canals, tipping his head from side to side.

Angel had never actually been exposed to natural sunlight. It’s true human’s didn’t need sunlight to create organic tissue, but the scientists had mocked up something close to the real thing in UV heated lamps, to see what would happen. Angel was pallid, he looked sickly a lot, even when he felt fine and was energetic. His skin was regularly needed for biopsy exams, but Travers decided not to take any today.

He pulled out a urine collection jar and handed it to him. He slid off the table and rubbed his arm a little as he wandered towards the toilet. Travers massaged his sore knee as he waited, stretching and moving towards the bookcase. He frowned at some loose leafs of paper and pulled them out to see. William’s twenty-two year old face smiled up at him. Travers rolled his eyes and ripped up the paper, pushing it into his briefcase as Angel wandered back with the jar. Travers held out a sanitary zip lock and Angel put it inside, face bored and downcast.

“Good boy.”

Angel beamed. He lit up when he smiled.

Travers tucked all his new specimens away and locked up the case. His knee was aching. He needed some painkillers. His thigh muscle twitched a little and he grunted lightly in discomfort. He turned towards the door.

“Already?” Angel asked from behind him, upset.

“Yes. I will be back soon.” He said with a smile.

Angel rubbed at his arm again, flexing it a little. “Alright.” He said unhappily.

Travers slipped out of room, locking the door behind him, clutching the briefcase tight. He entered the key code and slipped out to the third door, quickly unlocking that as well. He walked back around to his seat, giving the briefcase to Philip, one of the workers.

“Usual tests.” He groaned as he eased back into his soft leather office chair. “No skin sample.”

Philip ducked off and Travers pulled out some aspirin, swallowing them neatly with a tiny sip from his water.

Angel was moping. He was rubbing his arm and looking sorry for himself, and after a few more minutes of staring at the door, he wandered towards his bed and flopped down on it, curling up under the covers. Travers flicked to a camera view that showed his face, but he wasn’t crying, just mainly upset looking, his fingers tautly clamped around his inner arm.

Angel stayed in the comfort of his bed for a few hours. He got up after a while, to grab a book of human anatomy, only to return to his mattress. The shick of pages turning filled the microphones. It seemed as though Angel wasn’t going to be doing much for a while, so he left Philip in charge and wandered out into the compounds halls to stretch his legs, under the pretence of going to the lab across the lot to check on his samples.

His cane clicked against the cold floor as he walked, nodding to the various scientists hidden in the ground as he was. He turned at the elevators to the surface and rolled his shoulders. He walked into the lab and sniffed in displeasure.

His son was sprawled disgracefully across the counter, giggling with the lab clerk. He clicked past him, hearing their conversation silence satisfactorily. William had been employed, against Travers’ better recommendations, to head some sort of behavioural area for recruits undergoing mind implants. Why William even wanted to work with the Initiative after openly sneering at their operations was beyond Travers.

“Dad.” He said from behind him, with mock indignity. “Nice to see you too.”

He turned to look at his son, displeased at the smirk on his face. “Aren’t you meant to be working?” He asked airily.

“Lunch break. Gotta eat, yeah?” He said, cocking his eyebrow, unfazed. He held Travers’ stare.

Why William chose to speak in the lower class accent of his mother was also beyond Travers. The clerk quietly slipped from her desk and tottered away into a back room.

Travers blinked.

“What’s wrong? Angel causing trouble?”

Travers’ eyes fixed on Will’s knowingly and he had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. “How old are you, William?”

He sighed and closed his eyes slowly, lips tensing a little. “Thirty. Thirty this year.”

“Maybe it’s time you grew up.” He said, turning around and pushing through the door into the lab.

He heard the door slam open and William’s heavy boots clomp away. Travers rolled his eyes as he approached the man who usually dealt with extracting results from Angel’s tests. Thirty years old and acting like a spoilt brat.

He lost his thoughts of impertinent sons as he looked closely at a display of Angel’s skin samples. Professor Mawley made his way over with a smile, ready to discuss the new batch of tests.


Two

Will cursed. “Fuck him.” He hissed as he crossed his arms tightly, riding the elevator to the surface.

“Just fuck him. Fuck him sideways and fuck him backwards through a fucking wall.” He hissed at himself, slowly calming down.

He needed a fag. Couldn’t smoke in the compound, bastards had put smoke detectors everywhere. Even the broom cupboards. Will watched the small screen showing how far the elevator was to the surface, the little red dot rising steadily as his boot tapped on the ground. The doors dinged open and he strode out, pocketing his pass and heading out through the glassed in ultra-mod lobby of the above ground public area and into the sunlight. He immediately pulled a cigarette from the soft pack his pocket and shoved it between his lips, lighting up. Thick heavy smoke filled his lung and he closed his eyes, leaning back against the scratchy bricks as the sunlight warmed his face. He was tired. Maybe after his fag he’d go back down, lock the door and have a nap in his office. He wasn’t needed anywhere until about four, he had to check on Private Lloyd and put up with his screaming for about half an hour then he was free for more time.

Will hated his job. He hated his job and the initiative and the entire military in general. But he had to be able to have access to the underground areas. No pass, no entry, and he needed a job to have a pass. The place had tighter security than most Vegas Casinos, he’d been scoping the place out for years. He’d practically lived there when he was growing up, sleeping in the family bunkers. His mother was sick, she lived with full time nurse care and his father lived on site so he could be close to Angel.

Angel was his obsession. He was Travers’ grail.

Will had yet to figure out what it was exactly his father hoped to find from keeping a bloke in a cage. He acted like his experiment, his Project O-1, was going to cure cancer, was going to help explain parts of the mind. Will wouldn’t deny it gave great insight to ideas about effects of society on humans, but who bloody cared? The results weren’t worth the cost. Angel was a human. He was a man now. The Initiative wanted to see if they could control soldiers from birth without them going insane. That’s all they wanted and Will didn’t even think it proved that. There was no way Angel could assimilate into society, he didn’t even know there was one. He knew there were humans, but god, he thought there were only three. Will couldn’t even fathom Angel’s reality.

And Angel was only the trial run. Two more cases had been started, five years after Angel, Projects O-2, and O-3. Two more humans caged and experimented on. But they were a little different. They didn’t know there was a world above but they did know there was more than their enclosures. They knew there were humans but were basically told most humans were evil sociopaths and their existence seemed more focused on killing targets. Trained to be assassins in theory, without mercy or conscience, but it seemed to be making them crazy instead.

Will had seen the project outlines, had been in the observation rooms for both. They didn’t have names like Angel, they were simply called Two and Three. Two was a girl, and Three was a boy. He hadn’t seen them for a few years, but both had been skinny and had a look about them, like angry cats. More inhuman than Angel turned out. Where the others guarded themselves secretively, hissing and spitting at their carers and their tests, Angel seemed to have a more open, doe eyed way about him. Of course, Two and Three had interacted with each other; Angel didn’t know anything else.

He puffed on his cigarette, blowing smoke towards the sky. For a human Will had only had the slightest of interactions with, Angel sure did take up a bloody big chunk of his life. And it continued still.

He dropped the cigarette butt to the concrete and crushed it into dirt and ash with his toe. He breathed the fresh air deep, and turned back inside, making his way back to the elevator. He entered the code and scanned his pass and was travelling back down. He felt tired. He’d been up late last night, into the early morning and was running on empty. He blinked quickly and sharply snuffed some conditioned air trying to wake himself up. He slipped out of the elevator and was back in the B area of the Initiative, all cement and concrete and bustling. It was a big area. The elevators were in the middle of a field-sized base of concrete, a junction point. From there, many little snaking corridors wriggled off. He headed left towards his office, located in the B-7 area. He sneaked into his office and locked it behind him, turning off all the lights to make it look like he wasn’t there. It wasn’t a huge office, but it was carpeted and painted. A small desk and a chair up one end, an over-packed filing cabinet. There was a small basin and mirror, and his razor sat next to the taps for when he pulled an all nighter. His small couch sat behind the door, and a thin chest of drawers that held underwear and clothes and toothpaste were next to it. He slumped onto his still surprisingly comfortable couch and curled up, using a balled up tee shirt as a pillow. He tried to relax and get some rest but it wasn’t working.

He managed to slip into the fugue state between sleeping and waking for a while, wallowing in limbo for an hour, eyelids closed, but still registering the buzzing and talking from the corridor. He might’ve dreamt. He didn’t know. If he had, the dreams were feathery and meaningless, not even enough to stop his brain from ticking.

The alarm on his phone snapped him out of the fog, and he sat up, rumpled, rubbing at his eyes. The air seemed sweaty and stifling, and when he wiped his fingers over his face there was traces of sticky drool on the corner of his mouth. He must’ve slept.

He blinked and stood up, stretching, hearing his bones crack and pop soothingly. He yawned and rubbed at the crick in the back of his neck, trying to unbunch the tense muscles as he made his way to his four o’clock. The corridors were long and uncarpeted, but warm, due to the heating system. It was a particularly light concrete, not stifling, and corkboards and posters were hung sporadically outside areas, to give the tunnel a more human feel.

Private Lloyd stayed in the B-5 area, in a fairly modest room, with a bed and a table and a lot of space. Will was still rubbing the burning knot in his neck when he reached the outer bounds of B-5. The research rooms.

Will nodded at the emotionless guards of the B-5 area, scanning his pass and entering his code before walking through the heavy security doors. Past the security, as in all areas, the place became nicer, and carpeted, decorated by the groups of worker bees that ran each station.

The cement walls of B-5 had recently been painted a lemon yellow, and the area still stunk of paint even with the advanced ventilation systems. He wandered to the B-5 offices and went inside, hello-ing his way to the coffeepot.

He poured himself a cup, no milk or sugar and sipped the sour hot quickly, slapping himself awake with caffeine.

“Hey Professor Travers.” A younger doctor nicknamed Sim said.

“Name's Will." He said with a sigh. It wasn't terribly hard to remember, was it? These people were meant to be smart.

Sim nodded, smiling widely at his faux pas, his shortish black shiny hair bouncing a little. Nice conditioner, Will thought absently. Peroxide was no good for hair. He’d stop doing it, but he liked that his father found it undignified. Thirty years old and still trying to irritate him, maybe he was right, he should grow up.

“Here for Lloyd?”

Will nodded, sipping the heavy strong liquid in his styrofoam. “How’s he been?”

“Not any better, not any worse. Taking meds. Not causing trouble, can’t complain.” Sim smiled.

Will didn’t smile back. “I’ll go see him then.” He said.

Sim wandered along with him, peeking in at all the ex-soldiers on the way. It was a holding bay for them. Another doctor, an older grey haired man Will didn’t know, called Sim away from him and they parted company quickly. Will continued down the hall, head getting a little dizzy from the paint smell, counting the anonymous doors until he reached his destination. Will scanned his pass at the door and entered the unlit room quietly, turning the dimmer up so he could see.

Lloyd was crouched in the corner next to his bed, huddled uncomfortably.

“Hello Private Lloyd.” Will said, walking in after closing the door, and seating himself at the table. His eyes tracked over the mural of lilies on the wall. No actual paintings, no actual anything in this room. Not even carpet, just lino. “Anything good happening today?”

Lloyd looked over his shoulder, hunched over something he held tightly. His nerveless face and flaccid tongue never failed to unsettle Will a little. Lloyd made some sort of grunted howl and hunched back over his prize.

He was insane. Completely. Private Lloyd had undergone a generic, everyday mind alteration a few years ago, which had been horribly botched, frying his brain with faulty instruments, and left him with half a working body and a just-functioning mind. He couldn’t feed himself or talk or understand speech, he’d lost those abilities. He couldn’t see, and could barely walk. Will thought the only human thing to do would be euthanasia. Private Matthew Lloyd had been reported as dead anyway. And Will was pretty sure the young man he’d been would have never wanted to live on as this.

Will sipped his coffee.

“Lloyd?”

His bald cross-stitched head didn’t move. A new scar on his skull indicated fresh tests. Will sighed and sipped his coffee. He eventually strayed from his corner, scurrying along the wall dragging his dead leg along, stopping at halfway. He was holding his pillow scrunched up under his hunched body and his fingers were claws around it.

“Pillow.” Will commented. He’d seen Lloyd fourteen times now, and could not find a way to communicate with him without causing him distress. Sitting at the table seemed to be all Lloyd would tolerate.

He sipped his coffee, watching Lloyd pant and slobber over his treasure as he scrabbled around the room. He felt a strong fiery slice of pity for him, all the time, and tried to spend at least half an hour with him, even if he didn’t know if Lloyd knew he was there. He stayed, watching him, trying different avenues of speech, different tones and pitches, all without result.

He stayed until Lloyd’s bladder released, gag inducing strong liquid coating his bare feet as he gibbered in the corner. Will picked up his empty mug and left, telling the nurses on the way out and ignoring the various screeching bungled experiments on either side of him.

He walked back out into the cement corridor and then back to his office to have another go at sleeping.

---

Time didn’t exist underground. It was invisible. Day and night were one and the same, no windows, just concrete, and artificial track lighting as far as you could see. People buzzed the same at all hours. Nine in the morning looked the same as eleven at night.

Will sat on his couch after waking and he tried to feel what time it was. It was a game he’d played with himself since he was a little boy. He had returned from Lloyd at about four thirty and slept for a while. He didn’t know how long. Two hours? Maybe about half an hour to slide into sleep… he decided on around six. Give or take fifteen minutes.

He pulled out his cell phone and looked at the face. Just past nine.

Better luck next time. He stood, his shoulders achy from being scrunched up on the couch, and turned to the little basin to cup the cool water, slurping it into his sore throat. He looked in the mirror, and was amused by his cracked out looking appearance. His whitened hair was strewn about and curly. He had a halo of brown roots around his whiskery face. He tilted his head. He’d turned thirty only a few weeks ago. He still didn’t feel thirty. It seemed unreal to be thirty. He leaned close, the muted lighting around the edges of the office brightening his face as he did.

He had tiny wrinkles around his eyes. Black tired circles underneath made his eyes very blue somehow. He splashed water over his face and towelled it off, feeling a little rejuvenated. He decided to slowly wander down to the B-14 area. He had an appointment to keep.

Running his fingers over his scratchy stubble he cricked his neck and moved out. It didn’t take long to get there, so he dawdled, feeling the grey concrete oppressively cold around him as lab coats and military wandered past him with a purpose. He sighed out and turned into a small lounge to wait it out. He looked at the clock again and turned to the news channel playing on the small television. Flopping down into a chair, he watched the report with a few other initiative employees. He didn’t concentrate, he was still feeling a bit zoned out. He hadn’t been getting much sleep lately.

At about twenty five past, the weather report for tomorrow started playing and he left the lounge, heading onwards towards his father’s area. No guards on this area. Passcode recognition instead. He buzzed it through and slipped into the section quietly. B-14 was carpeted with a generic dark blue, and the walls remained harsh concrete. It was quiet here, in the halls. Not much movement. B-14 was constructed around observation zones, and everyone was tucked away, observing. Watching.

He headed down the halls to the Project Origin wing, buzzing his all clearance passkey once again and slipping into the staff room, a junction point for the three experiments. No one was in there. No one was ever there; the joined staff room was completely void of papers or coffee mugs. The scientists here were serious business. No time for relaxing with a newspaper in the staff room.

He checked his watch again.

Almost nine thirty. He slid down to the deck of Project O-1 and buzzed Philip’s cell phone. He got an answering buzz and slipped inside.

“Hey.” Philip said with a nod of his head, arranging cleaned food dishes on a tray. The observation room, ob-room, was a long circular chamber wrapped around Angel’s ‘enclosure’. They watched him like he was a creature in a zoo, through two way mirrors plated around the walls. Television screens lined the walls away from the glass, showing camera views of every thing possible. At the moment, a few of them were showing Angel’s cleaning rituals.

Four main professors maintained Project O-1. They oversaw everything from his diet to the clothes he was allowed to wear. His father, Professor Travers, ran the experiment.

“Hey.” Will answered. “Anything new?”

“Nah, not really.” He answered blandly, his eyes wide and silently signalling. Damn. That meant there was something very, very important that Philip didn’t want to say.

He looked into Angel’s rooms, walking around to get a better view of the floor beside the bed. He’d been tranquillised, the sleepers mixed through his dinner, and was lying passed out on a sheet of plastic on the floor as his father and two others fussed around him. One was shaving his face carefully, another was clipping his fingernails and checking sutures and scars, and his father was watching them, a tranquilliser gun aimed at Angel’s chest in case he started to stir. He wouldn’t. Those drugs put him out until the next morning.

Will turned to the screened wall behind him. One was filled with Angel’s pretty face, drugged out, serene against the plastic sheet they’d layed him on, bits of white shaving foam still clinging to his smooth skin.

One of the tenders towelled them away roughly, scraping the cloth around his face and chin to remove all the remnants.

The room was silent, artificially filled with sounds from the enclosure. Crackles as they shifted Angel on the plastic sheet, the clip-clip of the nail scissors. They sat him up and pulled his shirt off, rolling him onto his stomach, positioning his head so he could still breathe.

Will thought Angel was beautiful. He’d always thought he was a nice looking boy, but around sixteen, he just started looking… beautiful. He’d had the usual awkward grace that tall thin teenagers seemed to have, like a puppy with paws too big, and then suddenly, one day Will was watching him and he’d just seemed to grow into his body. The too sharp lines of his face just seemed to fit more as he grew into a man, thin rake of a chest had started to muscle, and he’d grown into his too big teeth. Human nature had just fitted everything together to create something Will found absolutely beautiful. Will couldn’t help but analyse him like that. He’d grown up watching him.

He hadn’t been like other boys in his school years, bravado making them seem older, baggy pants and jackets wrapping them up. Will guessed he’d also gone through the same clumsy looking phase that Angel had, he just hadn’t seen it happening to himself.

He watched the long smooth back on the clear display screens, mentally sighing a little at the multitude of pink shiny scars laced across him from different tests. Still beautiful. And even though Will was thirty, and he’d taken psychology course after course to try to understand himself and his father, he still felt like a nasty pervert for thinking that.

It had always been tattooed across his brain that Angel wasn’t a normal human; he was more animal than human. His father had told him that over and over. He’d had to try to deal with that mental block at the same time as getting tingly feelings about someone who was sixteen, seven years his junior, and who acted a lot younger.

He hadn’t gotten over either, apparently. He still felt greasy when he thought fuzzily about him. The fact that Angel was male, had ticked his brain over to the idea that he was probably gay, or bisexual, but he’d been trying to package away his feelings so fast, realising he liked men had barely even caused a blip on his radar. The screen behind him showed them snipping some tiny black stitches out from his back and sticking another patch over the wound. He looked away from their examination and started riffling through the papers on the desk.

Diet, still feeding him bloody tuna, even though he’d hated it since he was about ten. Approximate weight for the month, urine scans. Nothing new. Phil was fiddling with a needle sterilisation machine while he snooped. He sneaked a glance up at the two-way mirror before him and saw they were clipping his pubic hair, which meant they were almost finished. His lips tensed at the way his father always seemed to pick the most undignified position to put Angel in. Was it that hard to treat him with a little respect? Three seconds to give him a little dignity instead of hiking his legs open.

He bit his tongue as usual and turned back to Philip. “You gonna make the meeting?” He asked vaguely.

“Probably.” Philip answered just as vaguely, a little practised disinterest in his voice. “They gonna be there?”

“Uh, yeah think so.” Fred had made it back from setting up everything in Salem. That’s whom Philip was talking about.

“Great.”

He turned back to Angel and wished him a silent goodnight, before heading out. He nodded at Philip and he nodded back seriously. Damn. He was keeping some big news. He hoped it wasn’t bad. He left the rooms, aware of the cameras on him in the hall. He knew they were there, but for twenty-three years those cameras had filmed him wandering up and down this corridor. No one seemed to care about him, his father had never actually banned him from seeing Angel, and Will still visited his father to keep up appearances, so no one would really look twice if they saw him hanging around. Which is exactly what he wanted. Hiding right out in the open.

He slipped back along the halls and wandered the long walk back to the elevators. He caught the lift up with his head full of duelling thoughts and left the deserted dimly lit lobby, using his card to get out the doors and into the brisk dark night. He walked along the gardens surrounding the modern design of the above ground Initiative, and around to the car park. There were still quite a few cars on the above ground lot. There was another parking lot underground, and another below that, and those were probably filled still. But the general public didn’t know that.

He wandered over to his pre-loved Oldsmobile 442 and unlocked it, slipping in. He got a huge salary from the Initiative, and while most of his money went to other things… he did love cars. The engine purred when he flicked the ignition on, familiar and loving and warm.

He slipped through the empty streets, heading back into Sunnydale centre, driving back to his apartment building. He parked and slipped out of the car, standing for a moment to admire it, and buffing a few spots of dirt from the window with his black shirt. He patted the long hood as he jogged past and went to the front vestibule, unlocking the many locks and going inside. It was a small building, three floors, seven apartments and he owned it all. He headed to the second floor, which had been gutted and turned into one long room, support walls remaining to prop the place up. The space was buzzing. About twenty people were still there, and Fred was fielding questions, looking tired, her thin dark hair tied up in a ponytail. She was only about twenty-two, but she was smart. Smarter than Will.

Print outs of Angel, and Two and Three were pinned on every wall, blueprints of the underground Initiative tracked along one wall, over the blacked out windows. Gunn was looking at a new batch of firearms on a table, surrounded by Chinese containers and coffee mugs.

Fred saw him and scurried over, a flustered smile on her face. “The place is set. There are a few people up there fixing the escape tunnels, in case we ever need ‘em.”

He sighed with relief and grinned at her. “Great. You talked with your aunt?”

Fred’s extra large family populated a lot of the part in Salem, Oregon, which they were planning on using. Though Fred herself was Texan, accent and all, her mother had hailed from Salem and if her family was half as lovely as Fred, they wouldn’t have a problem hiding there.

Though they weren’t telling Fred’s family what it was they were going to be doing there, Fred had vouched for them, saying they wouldn’t spread word about them, and would keep everything hushed if she asked. Which she did.

She pointed at a new picture tacked up on the wall. A big old inviting house with wood shutters. “It’s near the water.” She said, smiling still.

He nodded. “It looks great.” He murmured, breathing in the destination.

“Fred?” A young girl of about Fred’s age piped in, stealing her away. Will remembered her, Mary. The daughter of a man who had been killed by the Initiative. Everyone who worked here had some grudge against the Initiative. Grudge and knowledge. No one in this room, no one who helped them was ever going to breathe a word about what they were doing.

It was basically suicide if they did. The Initiative would take out every single person. They all knew that.

“Will!” Gunn called cheerfully.

He turned and wandered over, pausing to let a man run past with folders of paper. “What’s up Charlie?”

He held up a glass vial of yellowish liquid in his long brown fingers.

“That the-”

“Tranquilliser. Yup.” He held up a fluffy ended dart. “We have these, you just poke them into any skin, preferably upper arms.” He put it down and held up a modified gun, He picked the dart and pushed it in with a click. “And we got this. Long range. Bit nastier, so don’t aim for any faces.”

Will picked up a dart and held it close. The red fluff on the end smelled dusty. If any of them gave them trouble on the way out, which, after a lifetime of captivity they were kinda expecting, they were going to give them a quick jab with a sedative to make them pliable enough to get them free. Will hoped they’d come easily, but he was expecting trouble from at least one.

They were going to be asking a lot from them all, to suddenly accept a different reality as they ran.

Will was fourteen when he’d first decided he was going to break Angel out from his prison. Angel was seven. Will had come to visit his father and had seen him inside the cage, cutting skin off Angel’s hand as the boy sat and tried not to cry.
One of his father’s experiments along the lines of pain could be overcome, and society ideas about pain made the feeling worse than it was.

He’d long since got over the idea that his father was the bad guy.

And maybe a little insane.

The kind of tests he called for. Endless wankery, unneeded antecedent tests. Endoscopies, cameras stuck into every orifice of Angel’s they wanted. Prodded and poked and anaesthetised. Biopsies. His father seemed to think Angel wouldn’t be able to identify a sickness in himself, and had decided to test him for every disease known to man just to make sure he didn’t have anything wrong with him. Some sort of sick reverse Munchausen by proxy.

And after years of thinking on the subject, he couldn’t help but think his father got some sort of sadistic thrill out of keeping Angel tested on and under thumb. His father had always thought he was above other men. And the way he ruled Angel with degree of fetishistic control only played into the theory. Sedating him with hidden drugs, the ‘checks’, the idea that Angel had to be creepily perfect in all aspects and how he tended to try to keep Angel puerile, let him grow and mature but refused to let him have a sexual awakening by keeping certain threads in his testosterone levels dulled with drugs. The aloof way he could decide not to go see Angel for two weeks even though the man was going mad from isolation, and mostly, the way he’d taught Angel to call him Father.

He went to creepy lengths he didn’t need to for a mere experiment.

Of course he could never tell his father any of his theories. He was his father after everything was said and done.

Will lived in fear that one day his father was going to order a test that would leave Angel in a research cell in B-5 crawling and gibbering like Lloyd. Or that the Initiative would no longer think Origin had any merit and put the test subjects down. It was a tight squirming fear in his chest, and it had eaten away at his life for too long.

He started putting together plans. He’d never mention Angel’s existence to anyone who might talk about it, letting the world know Angel existence was as good as giving him the last lethal injection himself. The Initiative would play cover up and Angel would be gone.

He had to be so careful with who he told. He started finding out about people, angry people who hated the inscrutable power the Initiative had, who would help him. He’d found Fred in one of his many protests, a girl who’d seen soldiers kill her Uncle for talking truth and her mother for being in the room they invaded. He’d found Gunn in a bar, drunk and crying over his sister who had joined the Initiative and had been killed during an experiment. Will hadn’t had the heart to tell him that he’d known what had happened to his sister. She was probably dead now.

Fred and Gunn had led him on to more people who wanted to help, who had been shocked to hear about Angel, who knew the Initiative was cold and cruel but never dreamed they were evil.

They were going to break the Origin subjects out. Most of the anonymous people who helped would stay behind, and work on destroying more of the system. Will was leaving. Fred and Gunn and Philip too. They couldn’t stay anyway.

During his plans, Will often wondered what would happen to his father if he succeeded. Would the Initiative kill him, or simply give him new toys to play with? He didn’t want his father to die, although he’d never see him again to know if he died. He didn’t really know what to think about that, he’d never understood his father, and, now, he guessed he'd never get the chance to figure him out. Will was a bit detached.

He preferred to think about Angel, instead of his father.

Fred was standing on a chair, trying to get everyone’s attention, so he tried to push his thoughts aside and listened to her, playing with the fluffy tranquilliser dart in his fingers.


Three

Will sat down on the cushions in the corner of his sleeping part and leant his head against the wall. His hair was all short, and when Angel ran his hand over it, it felt spiky like his toothbrush, but softer. The hair wasn’t dark like his, it was more red-brown, lighter and he looked at Angel strangely, big blue eyes wide.

“Your hair feels funny.”

Will watched him. He was tall. He looked different, not little like Angel, big like Father, but not the same like him either.

“Are you older, like Father?” Angel asked, trying to slip over Will’s thigh to get closer to his face. Will’s hands deflected his knees, pushing him back to the cushions as he watched him. He tried to get closer again and Will’s arm pushed him back a little. It became a game, and Will’s smile slipped onto his face.

“I’m seventeen.” Will said.

“What am I?” He asked.

Will watched him and then smiled wider, squeezing his ribs and making him laugh. “You’re ten. Don’t you know how old you are?”

Angel thought for a moment. “Not really.” He said after a moment. How old? Father was older, he knew that. It meant bigger. Older meant going into the other place, where Will had come from. From behind the silver door.

Will pushed him off his thigh again, and rolled him onto the ground as he laughed. He wriggled out from beneath him and launched himself onto Will, grabbing him around the neck and holding on.

“Fly, Angel.” Will said, his smiling teeth right before Angel’s eyes.

“What’s fly?” He asked, a second before Will threw him across the sleeping part, feeling wonderfully weightless for a moment before he tumbled onto his soft bed, covers rolling up around him as he laughed.

---

Angel’s eyes flicked open at the harsh buzzing that invaded his dreams. He blinked blearily at the grey roof and groaned, rolling over and curling up on his side. He tried to shrink further into the covers to get away from the loud noise but it wasn’t working. He wanted to stay in bed so he curled up in his blankets and waited for it to stop.

It did.

He sighed in relief and closed his eyes again, pulling one of his pillows down along side him so he could curl around it.

“M’tired.” He murmured. He scratched his cheek and realised his spiky cheek hair had gone back under his skin. He sleepily checked his fingernails. They too had shrunk back under his skin a little. The hair on his head seemed the same length; he’d have to check though. He slipped his hand into his pants and felt around. The hair there had gone back into his body, not curly anymore, just spiky. He wondered why it and his head hair didn’t go all the way in like his face hair. He slipped his hand back out of his pants and curled his arm around the comfy pillow. He felt good this morning. He smiled a little and pushed his face into the pillow. It smelled fresher. It did sometimes. Most of the time it smelled like … well him, he supposed.

He let another sigh out, a short fulfilling one, and tried to remember what breakfast would appear today. Cereal again. Hopefully he’d get a strip of bacon. He liked bacon.

He heard the shower hiss on across the room.

“Mmmm.” He mumbled. He didn’t want to get up. He wanted to stay.

He ignored the shower and fell back asleep with the hiss.

When he woke again, he looked at the clock and realised only about twenty minutes had passed. He sniffed and sat up, the covers pooling into his lap. He scratched his chest and lazily stood up, stretching his arms up over his head and twisting himself around, waking up. He’d missed his shower, but that was okay, he got another one at five o’clock. He walked slowly to his toothbrush, and brushed his teeth in big circles watching himself in the mirror.

He wanted eggs for breakfast. Really, really wanted eggs and bacon. Mmmm. Lots of bacon. His mouth was practically wet for eggs and bacon. But he’d only had eggs two breakfasts ago. He wouldn’t get them for a while.

He made a little unhappy noise and spat the last of the toothpaste into the sink. His mouth felt all clean again. He washed his toothbrush and put it back in place, and then turned, feeling a little throb from his back, near his left shoulder blade. He tried to look at it in the mirror, see what was wrong, but it had a white sticky on it. He couldn’t reach it. His new stitches must have gone during the night; it usually felt like this when the stitches left.

He wandered back into the sleeping part and pulled the covers into neatness. He stepped back from them, walking backwards to the table in the eating part, with his eyes fixed on the bed. He paused for a second, feeling all his muscles tighten to get ready, and then burst forward, jumping up and landing on the bed on his stomach, eyes squeezed tight and smiling hugely as he felt the slight roll in his stomach as he fly-ed.

He did it again and again, until he heard the click of the silver door, and hurried to it, panting and happy. His shoulder hurt a little but he ignored it. He opened the door and saw his breakfast tray filled with brown cereal in milk, and some cheeses, waters, grapes. He plucked a dried apricot from the plate and chewed on it as he settled at the table, setting everything out as he always did, bowl before him, little plate behind the bowl, spoon had to be straight next to the bowl. Cheese, fruits arranged in size order. He sat on the chair, foot on the seat so he could rest his chin on his knee. He had two cheeses today, the darker orangeish cheese and the light yellow one. He set them on top of each other and sat back to scrutinise the effect. Perfect. He spooned the non-tasty cereal into his mouth quickly, to get it out of the way, still feeling the twinge behind his left shoulderblade.

As he ate, he stared at the silver door. It seemed so big, all the time, too big to fit in the room, even though Angel knew it did. He contemplated what was behind it again, briefly. What if nothing was behind the tiny room? What if there was just… nothing?

What if he opened the door and it was just the four-part world again? What if there were a hundred four part worlds? He liked that idea more than the idea that there was only the four-part world and the sixth part wasn’t actually there.

But … it did have to be there, didn’t it? Otherwise… where did Father go? So there had to be something there. But what? A burning in his heart started, like when he couldn’t figure out a mathematics question, but much worse.

He wanted to go in there. Why could Will go in there and not him? What made them different? Where did Will go?

He realised he’d become so distracted by his thinking that he was simply sitting and staring with the cereal spoon in his mouth. He pulled it out and started playing with the cereal mush, swirling it around and making patterns.

Would Will ever come back, he wondered. He hadn’t been back so far.

He paused. But then… Father hadn’t been back since the last time he was in the four-part world. So … Will maybe could be back soon. He gave up on the cereal, not really hungry, and started breaking apart the cheese, eating it with the bread he had. He frowned at the silver door, trying to figure out its secrets.

He knew that was the only way to the six-part world. He wanted to go, he wanted to see it. He ate some grapes and stood up.

He was going to try today. He’d tried before and it hadn’t worked, but maybe… something was different now. Maybe he would see something he hadn’t seen before. He slipped some cheese into his mouth and opened the silver door, his heart beating rapidly in his chest. He stood in the fifth part and looked around. Still silver, still lit blue.

Cheese on his breath, he reached up slowly and put his hands on the wall in front of him. Cold and silver, like the door. He pushed.

Nothing happened.

He stood back, frowning at it. He looked around the fifth part, but there was nothing new. Three silver walls. He pushed at each. There was nothing else. A small tray was sticking out from the right wall, for him to put his food on. He tried moving that, but it was solid.

How did Father get through? How could Father figure this out and not him?

He looked at the ceiling. He jumped and tried to reach it but he couldn’t. He went back into the four-part world and grabbed his chair, hauling it into the tiny room. He stood on it, accidentally hurting his hip with the tray. He rubbed his sore hip, trying to take the sting away. Painful.

He reached up and put his hands on the roof and pushed. Nothing. There was a light in the centre of the ceiling and he pushed on that, but nothing happened.

He didn’t understand and it made him feel strange. Like the leaking from his eyes would start soon.

How did Father and Will get through? They weren’t here So they had to be past this tiny room. But how? There was nothing there!

He kicked the wall, hard, and grabbed the chair pulling it out of the room and back in front of his breakfast.

Father knew. Father always said he would take him to the sixth part. He just had to be patient. Patient. Patient.

Had to wait. Had to be good. Had he been bad? Was that why Will wasn’t back yet?

He pulled his foot up onto the chair and rested his chin on his knee again in thought. He carefully flicked through his memories, trying to find something he’d done that had been wrong. That last time Angel had seen Will, and Father had come in, his voice so loud, and looking so upset. He’d thrown the pointy thing at Angel, and he’d fallen asleep, and when he’d woken up, Will was gone, and Father had acted like he’d done something wrong. But he didn’t know what.

Will had been a little different the last few times. Not just his hair. He’d just seemed… like a different Will. He remembered the last time he’d seen him. He remembered it clearly.

He heard the click and looked up in surprise. It wasn’t lunch yet, so it meant Father was coming to see him. He smiled wide and stood up quickly, hurrying over to see him when he opened the door, his pencil still in his hand.

The silver door opened and it wasn’t Father. He practically fly-ed with happiness. It was Will. Angel fell onto him, wrapping his arms around him tightly. He realised Will’s hair had changed, from the red-brown colour to a bright yellowy white. His mouth fell open as he tried to look closer at it. Not white-white like the patches in Father’s hair… but still white.

Will laughed, moving him back so he could get into the four part world as Angel tugged on the new white hair. It smelled strong, a strange smell, like the pool water. It was like the white in his hair smelled weird.

“Your hair has changed. It smells weird.” He commented, running his fingers through it as Will smiled at him. He sat down at the table and started looking at the drawings Angel had been working on.

“Peroxide.” He said, smiling at a picture of himself. “Peroxide is like pencil colour for hair.”

Angel looked at the mirror, his hand around Will’s wrist holding him tightly, afraid he was going to go back to the sixth part too soon.

“Can you colour your hair pink?” He asked, pulling the other seat up close to him, so they were touching.

“Yes.” He paused. “But I’m not going to.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I don’t like pink.”

Angel leaned forward “I do.” He sniffed Will’s hair, breathing it in. It was a new Will smell and it had to be remembered. Hand across Will’s chest so he didn’t fall on him, he rubbed his cheek against his hair, trying to see how it felt on his face. It was a little stiff against his nose. When he sniffed down, he felt the heat coming off Will’s skin, and the smell was really nice, like his soap but better.

He sat back for a moment and Will was watching him, smile gone, and Angel wondered for a moment if he’d done something that was bad. He waited and then Will smiled a little, shakily, like his legs felt after using the gym machines for hours.

Will coughed a little. “Been drawing?” He asked.

It was a strange question, seeing as his drawings were across the table, but he nodded anyway.

“They’re good.” Will murmured.

Angel felt happy. Like he was glowing. Will’s hand was resting on the table. He let his fingers play along his knuckles. The skin was stuck to them tightly, like his own, not like Father’s skin, which was looser. A wriggly blue vein ran down from his knuckles to under his long shirt and he followed it softly with his fingertip until Will caught his hand and set it firmly on the table.

Angel looked up, a little worried, but Will was smiling at him so he smiled back and hooked his arm around Will’s neck.

“Look.” Angel murmured, flicking the drawing book open to a page of Will hands. “I like your hands.”

Will stared down at the page and blinked. Angel watched him closely. Will’s smile slipped onto his face and then off again. He looked… strange. Angel moved closer to him, resting his cheek on Will’s shoulder. He flipped the pages until he saw the Will eyes he’d been trying. The blue colour he had wasn’t right, it was … there was more than one blue in Will’s eyes, like there was more than one red in the rose.

Will was quiet. He didn’t want Will to be quiet, he wanted him to be laughing and playing with him. He poked his side and felt his body jerk away. He did it again; tickling up to under his arms, because it made Will giggle. He giggled and stood up, stepping back with his hands up.

“No tickling.”

“Wrestling?”

Will watched him, a little after smile on his face. “You’re too old for wrestling.”

He was sixteen. That was too old? He was sure Will was older when they’d wrestled before. He grinned and tackled Will against the wall. Will looked at him, eyes wide, and then smiled, pushing him back. Angel grabbed his arms easily, and twisted him down onto the ground. Will slipped away, grabbing for his arm, but Angel rolled and laughingly hid in the sleeping place. Seconds later, Will’s arms were around his waist. His other arm slipped under his legs and Will picked him up with a grunt, dropping him onto the bed. His foot pushed Will back and he tripped over some cushions and fell, and Angel crawled off the bed and knelt over him, sitting on his stomach, pushing his hands back against the wall.

He smiled.

Will cleared his throat. “Uh… you win.”

“What’s win?” he asked, not letting his wrists go in case Will wanted to push him off.

“It means you beat me. I lost.”

“Lost … like lost a pencil?”

“Kinda.” He swallowed, and his cheeks turned red. He looked very hot. “Okay, off now.”

Angel shook his head. Will tried to wriggle away but Angel had him caught. “I win.” He said lightly.

“Okay, you win. We’ll go have a look at some more drawings.”

“I want to wrestle.” He said, smiling wide. Wrestling was fun. He wanted to do it all the time.

Will suddenly sat up and Angel fell back jarring his head against the floor.

“Sorry!” Will said, kneeling over him, eyebrows all scrunched up. “Are you okay?” he laughed a little. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Angel blinked and shook his head. He grinned and clamped his thighs around Will’s hips and grabbed his throat, pushing him back against the wall. Will pushed his hand away and coughed a little. “Not by the throat.”

He pushed his shoulders against the wall and held them there. “Do I win?” He asked.

Will nodded, eyes down, eyelashes looking very long, longer than his or Fathers. He knelt up and blew on them, laughing as Will clenched his eyes shut tight. He had Will where he wanted him. He win-ned, so he got to hold Will in place and look at him. He brushed his nose against Will’s cheek and let his hand curl around his throat, but gently, because Will didn’t like being poked in the neck.

Will let out a strange sigh, and pushed at his hips. “Off, off me.”

Angel pushed closer and moved his fingers against the underside of Will’s chin to make him look up at him. He smiled when he did and wriggled into Will’s lap.

He paused and frowned. Something…

He wriggled his hips a bit, feeling something hard against his backside, something hard in Will’s lap. “What’s that?” he asked, reaching down.

“Bloody hell!” Will rolled him off and his shoulder smacked against the ground. Will’s face was bright rose red, and Angel laughed as he sat up.

“What?” He asked. “What’s hell?”

Angel remembered.

And Father had come in and pointed the black shiny thing at him, and it made a noise and a sharp pointy thing was in his chest, and then he fell asleep. And Will hadn’t been back since.

It was confusing. Now that he thought about it, it seemed like even Will had acted like he was bad. He didn’t stop wrestling with him when he said stop… but… that was part of it. When he kept doing it, Will would join in. So that wasn’t bad, was it?

So maybe will hadn’t left because he was bad.

Angel had long thought it had something to do with ‘Bloody Hell’. Whatever that was. Everything seemed to happen after Will said that. Father had come through the silver door.

“Bloody Hell.” He said out loud, clearly, his voice loud.

Nothing.

He’d tried before, but things were always worth trying over. Although Will’s voice was funny, he left the ‘h’ sound off words sometimes.

“Bloody Ell.” He said louder, watching the door.

He thought for a moment. Saying that had made Father come through the door and aim the shiny thing at him. And then he went to sleep. And where the pointy thing touched him, he’d hurt for a few days.

He didn’t really want that to happen, so maybe it was a good thing the words weren’t working.

He watched the door a moment longer, and then turned towards the garden. He counted his steps, making sure he was walking heel to toe.

The world seemed to have become smaller since he was younger. His feet were larger though. That probably had something to do with it. Although his feet had stopped growing now.

He knelt down in front of his rose. “Having a good morning?” He asked it.

He watched it, as it stayed silent and pretty. He suddenly wondered why it had pointy things on its stem. Other flowers didn’t have them. Big pointy things.

He grabbed some spare paper and a pen, and wrote a reminder note for him to ask Father the next time he saw him. He folded the note neatly and stuck it into the dirt around the base of the rose. He lazily ran his fingers along the small plant next to the rose. It was just leaves, not as pretty as flowers, but still nice looking, and its leaves were as smooth as mirrors. And the rose smelled wonderful. The other flowers smelled nice as well. Peonies. But they seemed to sleep a lot more than the roses. The rose wanted to stay with him.

---

Bloody hell.

Travers was not pleased. Angel remembered the curse from his idiot son. He practically glowered at Angel as he murmured to the flowers. He didn’t want such things in Angel’s head. Even if he didn’t know what it meant. It was like hearing a two-year-old swear.

He was looking into an off the books mind alteration. He was thinking about wiping the curse, and Will, from his memory. Nothing to put the experiment in danger… just a little tuck. Now would be the time to do a mind modification. Well, after the coming surgery of course.

He and Professor Weller had finally come to a decision. Weller was in charge of Projects O-2, and O-3 and the idea had been his. He’d mated his two projects a few times, and now every time they got near each other, they wanted to mate. They were losing interest in other things. He’d put them both back onto the drugs that dampened their more carnal instincts, but they still managed to get around the effects, now that they had the knowledge of what would happen. So he was planning to neuter O-3 and make a few incisions in his penile muscles to make him unable to mate even preliminarily.

Travers had never taught Angel about anything sexual. He had kept him on the drugs since the eleventh year of the experiment, and now that it looked like Angel would never need a sexual drive, he’d decided to follow Weller’s example and just abolish that factor from his experiment. The drugs weren’t good for Angel’s health anyway.

He looked down at the surgery plans, and procedures and then back up at Angel who appeared to be comparing scents of flowers.


Four

Will woke serenely, blinking calmly out of his nightmare. He sat up, realising he’d fallen asleep at his desk on the second floor of his apartment building, and that his back muscles were agonised and taut. He cricked his neck uncomfortably; noting Fred was curled up in a large armchair across the room, a medical book in her lap, her hand still limply around the pen she was taking notes with. Gunn had retired earlier to the upstairs bunkrooms. They were all burning the midnight hours recently. They were almost ready, but the news Philip had given them was past disturbing.

Anne, another girl who worked with them- one of Gunn’s friends, was asleep on the mattress in the corner, sheet pulled up to her chin. He cricked his back painfully and stood up, a mess of papers slithering to the ground. Fred jerked awake as he was trying to put them back onto the desk.

“Sorry.” He whispered, eyeing Anne and a few assorted others still asleep at the other end of the room.

Fred blinked and looked at her watch. She stretched her thin arms up over her head. “Didn’t even realise I’d fallen asleep.” She said in a groan.

She stood unsteadily, shoulders sagging. “You going upstairs?” She asked sleepily.

“Thought I might try sleeping in a bed, yeah.”

She chuckled and headed over to him, and they both slipped along to the staircase, trudging up in the dark, unable to see anything in the shadowed hall. Upstairs, they skipped the first apartment, that would be filled by now, and stumbled zombie-like into Will’s room further down the hall. A few people were sleeping on cots scattered around the barren apartment; Philip was on the sofa, feet poking out from under his blanket.

Will and Fred moved silently past. Will opened his bedroom door, thanking every god in memory when he saw the oasis of his empty bed. Too sleepy to think about anything else, Fred and Will both collapsed into the bed, pulling the covers up over their clothes and falling asleep to the tune of each others calm breathing.

---

“Come on, man.” Gunn’s voice. Gunn. Sleepy.

Will rolled away from the noise. Gunn shook his arm. “Come on, five o’clock dawg. Rise and shine.”

Gunn’s laugh nibbled at the back of his neck and he pulled the blankets up over his ears. They were ripped away.

“Gotta get to work.” Gunn said, amused more than he should be.

Will sat up, eyes closed and grabbed the blanket from the puddle at the end of the bed. “I’ll go later.” He whined.

“Get up. You’ve gotta get to work before Travers today, remember?”

Will suddenly remembered. He could’ve cried. His kingdom for some sleep. Bloody fucking hell, his left arm for some bloody toffing sleep. He opened his sore eyes. Fred wasn’t in the bed, although he had a vague memory of her stumbling upstairs with him. That could’ve been a dream…

Gunn threw a shirt over his head. “No time for a shower.”

“Breakfast?” He mewled pitifully as he pulled his old shirt off and replaced it with fresh black cotton.

Gunn pulled a unappetising foil packaged breakfast bar out of his jacket pocket. He held it up and smiled. “Mmm. Yummy!”

Will grabbed it, smiling just as sugar-faux as Gunn. “See you in hell.”

Gunn laughed and kicked his Doc’s over. He pulled his boots on grumpily, and opened the bar as he searched around for his pass. He slipped it on over his neck and bit into his cold dry breakfast.

“What the bloody hell is this?” He asked drearily, chewing the honey flavoured tasteless crunch.

“Muesli bar. Bowl of cereal without the milk.”

Will stared at him and tossed the bar into the bin.

“Don’t stop to get food on the way.” Gunn called after him as he left the room.

Philip was sipping coffee watching the tiny television.

“What time are you gonna be there?” Will asked, almost jealousy watching him watch cartoons.

Phil didn’t look at him, but smiled a little into his coffee mug. “Don’t have to be in ‘till after ten.”

Will felt his face fall as Gunn came out and threw a jacket at him. “Why are you still here?” He asked laughing. “Go!”

“I hate all of you.”

“Pancakes for breakfast, Gunn?” Phil asked innocently, sipping his coffee with aggravating serenity.

“You betcha.”

“All of you.” Will repeated venomously. “Wankers.”

Anne wandered through with eggs, heading for his stove. “We’ll make you a big dinner.” Anne laughed as she passed him.

His stomach growled as he jogged down the stairs, and clenched as he went past the first floor, which smelled like mouth watering peanut butter toast. He slipped outside and jogged across the empty road to his car.

“Will!”

He turned. Fred was at the door to the apartment building, frantically waving at him with something shiny in her hand. “Oh.” He murmured, smiling abashedly. He jogged back and took the CD from her and she sighed. She turned back and he headed towards his car again, unlocking and slipping inside, CD safely on the seat next to him.

He drove to the Initiative, just on the outer circles of the town centre, surrounded by gardens and lawns, the public buildings spaced out and architecturally disarming, all with big wide windows and warm bricks. The public didn’t see the concrete underground, there were rumours, but they never saw the underground. He drove towards the carpark, practically empty at this sinful hour of the morning. The dawn had coloured the sky grey, the sun close to rising as he parked.

He slipped out of the car, the CD in his pocket, and he jogged towards the entry of the main building, scanning his card to get in, feeling like he’d only just left. Into the special lift, scanning his card and entering a code, he heaved a big weary sigh as the vertigo rolled in his belly, the red dot on the screen descending.

He felt very old just now. And really fucking tired. And hungry.

He pouted a little, catching sight of his worse for wear face in the reflection of the buttons panel. He looked like he’d crawled out of a bus shelter, his jacket was half on, the collar folded and sticking up on one side. He tried to straighten it out, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. He sniffed as the doors dinged open.

The floor was empty, save one girl in sensible heels, hurrying down into the B-3 area, her arms holding a pad of papers tight, and her hair twisted up with a pen. She didn’t glance at him as he wandered out, and along the tunnels. He heard a few people in the assorted breaks of lounges along the sides. Heard the guards talking at the entry door to B-9, but he kept walking with purpose. He blinked a few times, trying to make his eyes focus.

He headed towards B-14. His father probably wouldn’t be in yet. If he was he’d have to regroup and try again later. He slipped through the passkey doors and down the blue carpeted hall towards Angel’s rooms.

He opened the door to the ob-room. It was dark and looked empty. “Hello?” He called.

No answer. The networked computers were all screensavering, bouncing colourful images on each. He slipped around, breathing loudly in the empty space, staying out of view of the security camera. With any luck he’d be in and out without a problem, or anyone knowing he was there. If the security personnel looked, if they looked, they’d see a record of the B-14 door opening with his passkey, but that was okay, they knew he was in the building, they’d known since he’d entered the lobby, and if anyone asked, he was simply picking up some papers he’d accidentally left when he’d come to visit his father yesterday.

That’s all. Completely harmless.

Security probably didn’t even know anyhow. The log they had of doors opening, which person was where, the log was so long and convoluted, that it was really only used as a way to find someone if you were looking. He wouldn’t pop up as out of place. Not unless he was meant to be somewhere else, and someone was trying to find him.

But he made sure that never happened. He only visited his father when he had spare time. And rarely even then.

He quickly sat down at a computer, across the long circular room, overlooking the pool and gym areas, which were black and closed. He pushed Fred’s disc into the machine and ran the bug program, connecting a little black transmitting box to the computer and tucking it behind the desk, out of sight amongst the cord creepers. The CD stopped loading and he pulled it out, sticking it back into his pocket and pulled the thin files out from the back of his jeans, holding them as he walked back. He walked slowly around the side; Angel’s bedroom coming into view, the dim sleeping lights on so observers could still see him while he slept. The bed ran alongside the two-way mirrors. He walked round, blinking a little in surprise as he realised Angel was awake, lying in bed, head on the pillow with his eyes open.

For a moment, Will let himself be fooled, thinking Angel was watching him calmly through the glass.

But he knew he wasn’t, he was watching himself in the mirror, like a bird. His bare arm was curled around his drawing book like it was a soft toy as he stared solemnly at himself.

Will smiled at him anyway. “Good morning.” He murmured. “Bit early for you to be up isn’t it?”

Angel blinked at himself.

Will yawned. “Bit early for anything to be up.”

Angel’s gaze wandered up to the ceiling for a moment, before he closed his eyes and wriggled down further under his blanket.

Will watched him a little longer, his profile, the dim low light on his skin making it look gold. He turned away and left the ob-room, files in hand.

He kept walking, heading towards his office. He stopped at one of the lounges scattered about in an attempt to seem friendly, and bought a snickers at a vending machine in the corner, eating it quickly and feeling the upset acid in his stomach bubble and gurgle from being fed chocolate so early in the morning. He made it back to his office and slumped onto the couch, grabbing a bottle of water and washing it all down. He’d go out and get something good for brunch, he thought sleepily.

He lay down on his couch. But he couldn’t go right now. Too tired right now. He rested his cheek on the side of his curled up arm and fell asleep quickly.

---

When he woke from dreams of fear and black and a horribly disfigured man attacking him, he looked around groggily, feeling sweaty and sticky and stale, and completely unrested.

He was officially running on empty. So tired he felt removed from everything, like it was all happening in a movie and not to him. He wasn’t really walking around his office, looking for more water, he wasn’t really scratching the itch on the back of his neck. He felt numb. He needed good sleep. But he couldn’t get it. Not right now. He knew that, even though his brain felt like it had been numbed with ice cold water.

He was too tense and too worried to sleep properly. It was all coming to a conclusion. Or a beginning. Both of those things for Angel. They’d stepped up their plans; they were going to do it in three days. That wasn’t very long. They were prepared of course, had been for weeks now… but still. Three days.

Faced with his father’s newest wave of insanity, they had all decided to get the Origin subjects out as soon as they could. No more planning, no more waiting. They were pulling them all out in three days.

Everything was in place, but it was still daunting. They knew the plan would work, but there were so many things that could go wrong, even with their meticulous planning. And they only got one chance. If it didn’t work, Will would have to go, or stay and be killed. If it did work, he’d still have to go into hiding for the rest of his life, as would Philip. They were giving up a lot, Philip more so probably. Philip had cousins in Sunnydale, he’d grown up in Sunnydale. Will had fled to England for a long time, to be with his mother when she had moved back to her old town. She was dying. He’d told her years ago what he wanted to do and she had smiled in that painful way she had and simply nodded.

Will had no idea how he had come to be. How his parents had ever been drawn together was a mystery Will had no way of figuring out. With his father as unreachable as the stars and his mother deliriously wasting away in a bed on the other side of the world, he knew he’d always wonder and never find an answer. It was irritating, but Will was slowly detaching himself from the niggling questions.

So Will didn’t really have much tying him… anywhere really. Philip had to give up family. Will only had to give up knowledge of good burger places, and a handful of old friends. He’d practically closed himself off to most of his friends, so it would be relatively painless.

And besides, Gunn, Philip and Fred were all coming with him.

They’d tried to plan after the escape, but they had no idea what to expect. From any of them, they didn’t even know if Angel, Two and Three would still want to be known as Angel, Two and Three or if they’d want real names. They were only educated up to around a fifteen-year-olds level, didn’t even know music or poetry. When he and Fred had tried to talk about what they would need after they were out…

They needed to catch up on a lifetime.

It would take years. He’d imagined himself talking to Angel many times, trying to explain what had happened, how he’d been lied to, treated like nothing. Trying to explain the sky and the clouds and trees and cats and shops and cars and television.

He still didn’t know how to say it.

He and Fred had been compiling books on every subject they could think of. Oz, a friend of Will’s had taken a truckload of things up to Salem. He was up there now; he’d got the call that they were coming early.

Hopefully.

He sunk back down onto the couch, lost in thought.

Angel always smelled like shampoo. Always. A creamy, frothy soapy smell.

“Do you sleep in the sixth part?” Angel asked him, resting his big hand against Will’s chest to feel his heartbeat.

Will watched the back of his head. He thought hard, trying to think of what he could say. “Yes.” He said, slowly, scanning the answer for anything that might be wrong.

“Do you have a bed?”

Another moment of furious thinking. “Yes.” He said, just as slowly.

“Does your bed look like mine?” he asked, wriggling around to try and sit in his lap.

Will smiled and pushed the lean sixteen-year-old off him. Angel laughed, and immediately thought it was a game, trying to push back against him. He locked his long legs around Will’s waist. Will immediately stopped the game, hoping Angel would untwine himself and sit back down next to him.

Horrified, Will sat completely still as Angel rested his wide shoulders against the ground and blinked up at him happily. “Thigh wrestle.” He purred, rocking a little in his lap.

Will shook his head. Jesus Christ. He swallowed with some effort, trying not to flush as he managed to push one thin thigh away from his waist. He stood; stepping over Angel who was watching him sprawled out on the floor, and sat on the bed. Angel rolled up and crawled next to him, oppressively close as always.

“Are you with Father all the time in the sixth part?” He asked, his breath on Will’s ear. He ran a finger softly down the bridge of Will’s nose. Will caught his hand before it tracked across his lips.

Will didn’t know what he’d do if his father wasn’t watching. Probably let his long curious fingers track all over him. He shivered a little, unsettled.

“I do that sometimes when I’m wet.” Angel said.

“Shiver?”

He shuddered his shoulders, closing his eyes in demonstration. “Is that shiver?”

“Yes.”

“I shiver.”

Will smiled and Angel beamed back at him.

“Do you like the word ‘shiver’?” Angel asked. “I like the word ‘back’. The ‘keh’ sound. Like a cough… or a sneeze. Back.”

“You have a lot of time to think about that I spose.” He murmured, watching the side of Angel’s face subtly. He was so … darkly pretty. When did that happen?

Angel poked him in the stomach, and he tried to push his finger away. Angel laughed and poked him again, harder, making him wince at the stab of thin iron in his belly. “Ow.” Will frowned. “No.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes.” He said, laughing a little.

Angel looked concerned, and then his hand came down to massage his stomach in tiny circles. “That helps.” He said. “I do it when I’m hurt.”

Will tried to hide the compassion he felt. His father was watching everything, he knew. Angel’s hand was warm. Will felt himself getting a little hot.

“It’s better now.” He said, guiltily.

“You hurt easier than me.” He commented.

“Hey.” Will frowned a little.

Angel looked at him, confused. Then he smiled. “Fly?” He asked. He wanted Will to throw him onto the bed, like he had when he was a little boy.

Will shook his head, laughing. “You’re too big. I’ll hurt my back.”

“Hurt your back?” he asked, standing up.

Will stayed sitting. “When you pick things up that are too heavy, sometimes you hurt your back.”

Angel thought for a moment, before grabbing Will’s hands and trying to tug him off the bed. “I’ll rub it and you’ll feel better.”

“No.”

“I’m good at rubbing.” He said serenely.

Will closed his eyes for a second, smile edging onto his face. Angel’s thumbs were tracking little circles on his palms and he looked up into hopeful dark eyes. “I’ll flip you.” He buckled.

“Flip?”

“Flip, I’ll show you.”

He stood up, facing the bed. “Now stand behind me.” He did. Will grabbed his arm and slung it over his shoulder.

“Okay, I’m gonna bend, and throw you over me.”

“Okay.” He said excitedly.

He bent, feeling his body pressed against his back as he kept holding onto his arm, and levered him over his shoulder with a guiding hand on his stomach. Angel thumped down into the covers and sprung back up. “I like it!” He said. “Again?”

Will shook his hand where his wrist had twinged. “Not right away.” He sat back down and felt Angel bounce over to him. He sat behind him, and spread his legs around Will’s, hugging his stomach. “Can I flip you?”

“Maybe later. I might be too heavy.” He felt a hand slip up and pat his neck.

“And I’ll hurt my back.”

“Wouldn’t want you to hurt your back.” Will said, still shaking his wrist. He bent his hand back a little, the twinge fading as he worked it.

Angel didn’t say anything to that.

Will gnawed at the inside of his bottom lip for a moment, still stuck in the last thready moments of the memory.
Angel was…

He shook his head, clearing his mind and rubbed his face. He needed food.


Five

“Where does the light come from?” Angel asked, wriggling into Travers lap and curling his fingers into his hair.

A globe above his table had blown earlier that day. For twenty-three years they’d managed to avoid that, changing the globes frequently before they went out. Angel was a little shaken, to say the least. He’d climbed up on the table and tried to get through the cover of plexiglass to reach the light globe, hurting his knuckles as he punched it. Travers had entered immediately, sedating Angel quickly with a light sedative and changed the globe. He’d thrown the other out, as Angel lay half-unconscious on the floor, and then returned to wait for his body to work out the sedative.

“Father?” Angel asked, tilting his head.

“Sixth part.”

“The light stopped. Why?”

Travers scratched the back of his head. “Because I wanted it to.”

Angel rocked back in his lap a little. His hands settled on Travers’ shoulders as he bit his lip. “But how?”

“Questions.” Travers smiled. “So many questions.”

“The light never did that before.”

“Yes it did. You were too young to remember.”

Angel thought about this. “Light can stop.”

Travers fell back on one of Angel’s own blanket explanations. “It sleeps sometimes.”

“It’s alive?” He asked excitedly.

“In a way. Not like you.”

“Then how?”

“It’s as alive as tuna.” He said plainly, letting Angel try and draw his own conclusion.

Travers sat against the wall, propped up against the bookshelf. Angel was half sitting in his lap, half on his own knees, knowing he’d get pushed away if he rested too much weight on Travers. Angel looked thoughtful for a moment, resting his forehead against Travers’ shoulders as his hands played with the jacket he was wearing. His fingers tickled under Travers’ waistband.

“I don’t understand it.” He said finally, evidently frustrated.

Travers sighed. “Accept it. You do not have to question everything.” He said, raking his fingers through Angel’s hair. “Some things are, because they are.”

“Like what?”

Travers smiled at Angel’s obvious lack of understanding of the phrase. “Why is your skin the colour it is? Because it is. There is no reason.”

“But there has to be. There has to be reasons.” He argued.

“For everything?”

Angel paused, thinking. “Yes.” He nodded.

“There’s not. And if you try to reason everything in the world, you are always going to be searching.”

Angel had grown up so sharp-witted. He questioned things the other Origin experiments would never even dream of questioning. They accepted tautologies, they believed things were, because they were. They never seemed to ask ‘why’ things were. They got curious sometimes, but their curiosity knew limits. They just didn’t seem to care.

Angel did. He was staring at the light fitting in the wall with interest, dark eyes narrowing as he tried to figure out an answer. Travers never encouraged Angel’s questions. But he secretly enjoyed them. He often wondered what he would question if he were in Angel’s situation. Angel had always wondered about how his body worked, ever since the sixth year of the experiment. Travers had finally broken down and given him an anatomy book Origin had constructed; very select in the information it shared. Angel had devoured it, learning about skin layers and bones and tastebuds. His questions about his body answered, Angel had turned around and asked how the book was made.

Angel was endlessly fascinating.

Travers wondered how Angel was going to take his upcoming surgery. He wasn’t aware his genitals had a different function apart from waste purgation, so Travers wasn’t expecting too much trouble from him in the following days. Angel was used to waking up with plasters and stitches. All the things Travers couldn’t do had to be outsourced, and of course, Angel wasn’t allowed to interact with anyone else.

He’d had three molars removed due to decay. It was easier just to pull his teeth than fill the cavities, and Travers didn’t know dentistry so they’d had an Initiative internal dentist come round. And of course, all his endoscopies were performed while he was tranquillised.

During Travers’ thinking, Angel had laid his head against his shoulder, one finger patting the hair on Travers belly. Travers wrapped one arm around the lean body and shifted him into a more comfortable position.

---

The light had gone away. Not all of the light, just one light. It blinked out with a little tink sound and he looked up and it wasn’t bright anymore. It was amazing.

After Father had left, Angel took to scrutinising the light that had gone away, and the other thirteen lights in the world. They all glowed yellow, as usual. He wondered why the light above the table had decided to sleep then. What had made then so special? Why, out of all the times and seconds in the world, had the light chosen then?

His eyes started to water from staring at the glowing light for too long. He blinked and looked away. It was just like it always had been. He hadn’t thought about the light much, but now… why did the lights glow? He was sure he’d asked Father before. Why did the lights glow but not the books glow, or the rose or him?

It was all very confusing.

He tapped his nails together as he watched himself in the mirror. He walked over to it, bending close to look at his eyes. Sometimes, when he stood in a particular spot, like three steps away from the table, the sleeping place wall light would reflect off the mirror, so bright it was like looking at the light itself.

He cocked his head, watching the muscles in his neck tighten. Maybe light had something to do with shiny flatness? He shuffled over, three steps from the table and the reflected light caught his eye and made him look away.

You could draw light when it did that. Because that meant it was like a straight line. It had to be, to reflect from the sleeping place against that mirror. Straight light.

He bit his lip and turned, pushing the thoughts away in his mind so he could take them out later and give them more thought. He wanted to swim. His muscles still felt a little tight from where Father had stung him with the pointy thing that made him sleepy.

He tried to roll his shoulders as he made his way into the gym, slipping his clothes off and lying them neatly on the tile floor. He sat down on the edge of the pool and swung his legs into the warm water, smiling as he slipped into it, the water wrapping around him like bodies and wet arms.

He swam, wriggling through the water, laying on the deep floor of it and holding his breath, counting the seconds until his lungs burnt and he burst through the top layer gasping for air.

He liked swimming. It was that same weightless feeling that he had when Will had thrown him onto the bed, that second he’d been fly in the air. If he held his breath and lay limp, the water supported him, making him float. He could lie like that for hours sometimes, wondering if he’d fallen asleep, wondering if he could sleep without breathing water. He assumed he’d wake up if he ever breathed water. It was horrible, made him cough and vomit.

He rolled underwater, hearing the swish of himself all muted and deep. He bobbed up again for air then slipped back under, swimming down, so his stomach trailed along the tiles on the bottom. He pushed off with one hand and grabbed another breath, holding it in his full lungs. He settled on the floor, sitting, his body trying to rise up to the air again.

“What are those?” He asked Will, pulling a little at the small white shorts he was wearing. They felt like shirt material.

“Briefs.” He said, batting his hand away. “I wore them last time we went swimming.”

“No.” Angel said, walking towards the pool and slipping into the water. “You wore boxers.”

“Did I?” Will looked thoughtful for a moment. “I spose. I used to wear boxers a few years ago.”

Angel ducked underwater, wetting his hair and grinning up at Will, eyes narrow to keep the dripping water out. Will sat down on the edge of the pool and dangled his feet in the water. Angel slipped underwater again, trying to be unnoticeable as he wriggled over. He grabbed his foot and tried to pull him in, but Will had a hold on the grates running along the poolside. He stuck his tongue out at him when Angel came up for a breath. Angel tried to pull his knees in, but it didn’t work, a strong hand just gripped his upper arm and pulled him away. Will grinned down at him. Angel swam back, paddling, trying to keep his feet off the ground.

Will finally slid in, he slipped in like he was water off the edge, smooth and hardly any splash. He disappeared under the surface for a moment, and Angel laughed when his legs appeared instead of his head. His white toes wriggled.
His legs splashed into the water again and his face reappeared, his wet hair dark brown. Angel glanced at his own in the mirror. Black.

“How did you do that?” He asked.

“S’a handstand.” He said.

“Sahandstand.” Angel repeated.

Will smiled, swimming over to him. “A handstand. Standing on your hands.”

“Teach me.” He breathed, reaching out and curling his fingers around Will’s forearm.

Angel burst up from the water, grabbing onto the side of the pool and panting. “Handstand.” He whispered to himself in between the pants.

“Here.” Will said, pulling him closer. “What you do is flip over so you’re upside down. Then you hold yourself up with your hands flat on the ground and try and keep your legs up in the air.”

He listened closely, nodding. “Okay.” He smiled. He ducked underwater, holding his breath. He squirmed down towards the floor. Putting his hands on the ground he pushed his legs up, but something happened and he ended up snorting in some water. He burst through to the air and coughed, Will slapping him on the back. His eyes watering a little he looked at Will who was laughing.

“Sorry. Don’t breathe the water.” He said, still smiling.

“I know that.” He said, feeling a little grumpy.

He ducked under again, hands down against the floor, and he pushed his feet through the water, feeling them in the cold air for a few moments before they crashed back down into the water.

“How do you get them to stay up?”

“Practise. It’s about balance. Here, watch.” He slipped out of the pool, his briefs clinging to his skin. It looked… Will looked like him. He hadn’t seen him without clothes, but from what he could tell, they looked the same.

He watched him as he wiped himself off on the towel. He was all smooth, not hairy like Father and his muscles were all hard and pretty. Angel decided he liked how Will looked more than he liked how Father looked. He pressed his own belly underwater, feeling it, firm and flat.

Will took time drying his hands and then he did it. Handstanding. Angel’s mouth fell open a little. How did he do that? He was upside down, his feet in the air. He wobbled a little and then one foot came down flat on the floor and he righted himself.

He saw Angel watching and smiled hugely, laughing. He did a strange thing where he half bent over, holding his stomach. “Thankyou.” He said proudly.

He positioned himself again and put his hands forward. He glanced to make sure Angel was watching and then rocked forward again, onto his hands. Angel was mesmerised, half out of the pool, the side digging into his stomach as he watched.

Will started to move his hands, taking tiny hand steps, his feet way in the air. Handwalking. He righted himself, his face a little red. He smiled. “Like?”

Angel nodded quickly. “Teach me.”

Will laughed. “Later. Try and do it underwater first.” He walked up and jumped into the pool, holding his knees against his chest and splashing everything, including Angel. Angel smiled and shook his head, waiting for Will to come back up. He did, eyes closed, and Angel splashed him in the face as he breathed in.

Will cough-laughed and turned away, wiping water from his eyes. He turned back and slammed his first into the water, splashing them both. Game started, Angel grabbed onto the side of the pool and kicked his legs hard, water sloshing out onto the floor, against the closer mirrors, but more importantly over Will. He kept going, eyes closed, letting out a loud high noise in shock when Will grabbed him from underneath, pushing him to the side. He slipped out of his hands.

“I thought you were over there.” He said facing him, trying to explain himself.

Will smiled. “You thought wrong.”

Angel smiled and dived underwater, grabbing at his ankles. Will slipped away, swimming fast. Angel swam after him.

Angel blinked out of the memory, realising he was back in the soundless present. He was so still the water didn’t make sound around him. He blinked, looking down at himself, up to his chest in water. His memories were still in the room, faded, echoing off the tiled walls. He looked to the spot where Will had handstood. Biting his lip he stared at it, before pulling himself out of the pool. He stood in the same spot and dried his hands like Will had, being careful, knowing the tiles could be a little slippery when they were wet. Maybe this time would be the time. He smiled hopefully.

Taking a breath he put his hands out in front of him for a moment, before bending a little and rocking onto them. He quickly pushed his legs into the air, feeling like he had it for a moment before the all too familiar sense of not-balanced took him over and he slammed painfully to his side with a loud smack.

Pain and hurt swamped over his shoulder and arm, gluggily spreading towards his hip as well. He knelt on the floor, hugging his shoulder tight. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, his lower lip in a pout.

He smiled. He’d just have to keep trying. Maybe he should try to handstand at least once a day. Maybe, he could do it on his bed. Cause his bed was soft. He pondered that for a moment, before standing, a little chilly from drying naked. He went into the sleeping part and jumped up on the bed. He tried to handstand on it, but the mattress sunk around his hands and tumbled him to the side. He landed on the pillows. The second time he tried, his heel hit against the mirror and he curled up on his pillows as he tried to soothe the pain away. Handstands were painful.

Will had done them so easily. And he was so drawable when he did. Face towards the ground, his whole body stretched from his neck past his stomach to his legs. He’d said he did gymnastics when he was younger. Angel understood ‘gym’. Nastics? Nastics must mean stretching. Gym stretching. Or it meant upside down.

His foot hurt.

---

Angel spent the rest of the day in the pool and trying to draw what he looked like in the pool. Wet. Slippery-haired.

He’d watched the lights a little more, especially out near the rose. Warming. The rose didn’t seem to care about the light. He’d picked it up and moved it and nothing had changed. It hadn’t differed in any way. He’d pouted and put it back near the warmth.

He’d had dinner, which had been hot thick soup, and he was lying in bed, his arm around his drawing book. He stared at the ceiling. The lights had started to rest; they weren’t as bright after dinner.

His sleeping pants were all twisted around his calves but he couldn’t be bothered trying to straighten them out. He lay and waited for sleep to cover him. But it wasn’t ready. So he was bored. Too tired to do anything, not tired enough to start dreaming. He sighed and closed his eyes.

His mind was still wide-awake, that was the problem. All that excitement over the light sleeping earlier, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He lazily watched the light in the sleeping part ceiling. It glowed dimly. Did lights sleep when he did?
Sometimes when he worked really hard in the gym, he had a nap before dinner. Maybe the light had been working really hard?

It hadn’t really seemed any brighter…

Maybe it hadn’t been tired the last time it should’ve slept, like he wasn’t sleeping now, and instead fell asleep during the day. That could work, couldn’t it?

He had so many questions. Why did the light look white… or yellow? Why did it make things brighter? Why did the brighter lights near the rose feel so warm? Why would it be warm? Why weren’t they all warm?

He sighed again, louder, using more energy. He wished Father had been more interested in the light.

A sudden muffled clatter pushed Angel’s heart into his throat as he sat straight up like he’d been stuck with a needle.

“What was that?” He whispered, arm tightening around the drawing book. He blinked rapidly. He… heard something. Noise. There was never noise. Not unless Father was seeing him.

He slid out of bed, heart pounding in his chest. It had come from the door. He looked back at the clock. Ten forty three. There was nothing more. Angel walked closer to the door, a strange feeling settling over him. A calm feeling. Something was happening. Something … new. He pressed his hand against the door, feeling the familiar cold silver. He waited.

His stomach was in knots. What had the clatter been? It sounded like something had fallen. The strange feeling warmed him up, from his eyes to his toes. But he still felt cold, his bare arms, his nose.

The click. The door.

He couldn’t breathe.

Something.

Something was happening. He had a knowing feeling in the pit of his stomach. This wasn’t normal. Different. He held tight to his book and stepped back. Father had never seen him after nine thirty. That was the latest visit he’d ever had. When things were different he always thought about him. He was stuck in his brain ready to pop up whenever something interesting and new happened. His heart was screaming a name at him, but he didn’t want to think it. His heart felt like it was filled with the hot soup he’d eaten for dinner.

The silver door slid open, slowly, as it always did. And there, like he’d never been gone for seven years, was Will.

Will.

Pale, strong and different.

Angel felt his eyes start to leak, and he opened his mouth to say something but there was a tight ball of muscle in his throat. He looked different, shorter. His hair was still white. But it was Will. It was definitely Will. And he was here. His mouth moved but Angel couldn’t hear it right then.

He reached out to touch his cheek and suddenly realised. The fifth room was all wrong. Not a tiny silver-walled room anymore, it was now stretched out. Angel sucked in a breath, holding it, his eyes widening. He could see the sixth part. He could see it. Will had come back to show him the sixth part.

Will grabbed his forearm and pulled him. They stepped through the tiny room.

“The sixth part.” He whispered. “Is it time? Am I old enough?”

And then they were out. And the sixth part was black. “So dark!” Angel’s eyes started leaking more. There were light pictures in boxes everywhere. It smelled strange.

“It’s so big.” He said, his voice sounding flat and unattached. The sixth part stretched around, it was a curve. He looked back and realised the mirrors... they weren’t mirrors anymore. They were… they weren’t there. He laughed.

“So big.” He looked down and saw Father, sleeping on the ground. He’d never seen Father sleep before. Will’s hand was around his forearm, warm and slick, like he’d been in the gym.

He must be dreaming. The sudden thought filled him with sick. “I’m not dreaming am I?” He asked looking at the light squares “I don’t want to be dreaming.”

“No Angel. You’re not dreaming.” Will’s voice was deep and soft, and familiar, in an unfamiliar place. He held tighter to him.

He realised the light squares were actually pictures of the four-part world. Of his bed, of his table… good pictures. Better than his own.

“Who drew those?” his legs felt like they were filled with water. He suddenly needed to urinate. Badly.

Cups on tables, lots and lots of tables. More of the light boxes. His food plates! “My plates! That’s my cup!” He said, walking over to the tray.

Will held his arm tightly, pulling him back. He cupped Angel’s face in his hands. “Angel. Listen to me. We’re taking you out. You can trust me. You have to do what I say. And things are…” He suddenly looked like his eyes would start leaking as well. “Things are going to be strange. You’re going to see things you’ve never seen.”

Angel thought he was going to throw up. In a good way. He had to sit down. He looked at his hands and realised they were shaking. His teeth chattered, but he wasn’t cold. He must be dreaming. He didn’t want to be. He looked around the big sixth part again.

“Will.” A voice.

He span around, his eyes opening wide at what he saw. A man. Another man! Like Will, but brown. Brown skin, dark eyes like his. He fell forward onto him, pressing his hands against the brown man’s cheeks. Felt the same as his. White teeth smiled at him quickly.

“You’d be Angel, I’m guessing.” He sounded so strange. Had he been in the sixth part all this time? With Father and Will? Why hadn’t he come to the four-part world?

Angel started laughing and he didn’t think he could stop. Ever. He was in the sixth part! He wanted to handstand and fly over and over until he blacked out.

“I’m Gunn. Nice to meet you.” He turned to Will. “Two and three are out.”

Will nodded and turned Angel’s chin towards him once more. He smiled as the brown man, Gunn, headed towards a door. A door? Another one? Angel’s head was filled with dirt. He couldn’t think.

“We’re going.” He said. His eyes were so blue.

“Going?” he said.

“Please. Just follow me.”

Angel smiled. “Alright.” He nodded.

He’d seen the world.


Six

Will sat in a worn old chair, cradling a mug of coffee in his hands, sapping all the heat from the liquid to warm his cold fingers.

“…the crawl will be about fifteen feet, and the duct will drop you out in security wing B-15.” Fred said, her pointer tapping the map of the Initiative floor he and Phil had worked out over the past four or so years.

He glanced back down into his mug as Fred went over the plan once more, under the electric lights; hair tied back in a severe ponytail, her face hard with determination. The people listening were still life, apart from an occasional tapping foot or nervous scratching finger in the crowd, they were a mish-mash of painted nervous faces.

“…Everyone understands that this will be one of the most difficult days of your life.” She said solemnly. “But remember why we’re doing this. Angel, Two and Three…they need us. They need help.” She paused, taking a breath. Her lower lip shivered a little. “The only thing we haven’t figured out, is the security response time. They could react as soon as we’re in the building; they could not react at all, never knowing we’re inside.” She looked a little guilty. “But we’re out of time.”

A few people nodded.

“Stick together. That’s the main thing. We’re gonna be in and out in twenty minutes. We make it to the escape near B-12, and we’re home free. Group B will exit back through B-15 and then quickly disperse once you reach Sunnydale centre, and Group A… well,” She smiled widely, “Hopefully y’all will never hear from us again!”

Will’s eyes strayed to the gun and air taser he had on his lap. He sipped his coffee and made a quick prayer to anyone who was listening, praying that the Initiative would never know what hit them. They had planned so much. Please let this work.

The people started standing up; silent apart form the scurrying of feet and the clicking of checking weapons.

“Try not to shoot any of us, okay?” Gunn called across them from the door. A titter of nervous laughter responded.

Will walked through the tight nervous crowd towards Gunn. Fred followed him as well as the two others from their group. “Good Luck!” He called. “And … thankyou.”

The remaining ten people of B smiled at him. He nodded and he and Fred quickly hurried down the stairs. Fred slipped her lab coat on; her guns securely tucked into her waistband underneath it. Gunn along with Alex, a friend of his, were decked out in military uniforms Philip had gradually nicked from the laundry area.

Group A slid into the jeep waiting on the street for them. Five of them, himself, Fred, Gunn, Philip and Alex. They were silent as Gunn drove quickly towards the Initiative.

Alex and Will sat in the back, Philip between them, all dead quiet for almost ten minutes.

“Twinkie?” Alex said, breaking the silence as he held up a packet.

“Sure.” Will said, taking one of the little packages. He tore it open and bit into it, munching on the cream and cake as he heard Alex doing the same.

Fred turned around in her seat and took two as Gunn accepted one as well.

“Love Twinkies,” Alex murmured.

“I don’t like the cream.” Philip said conversationally.

“I don’t really either,” Will confessed. “But I eat them anyway.”

Philip smiled. “Why?”

“Don’t know,” He shrugged. “I guess I’m just used to eating them. Grew up eating them, so I still do. Don’t really like Taco Bell but I eat there as well.”

“I love Taco Bell.” Fred interjected, watching him in the rear view mirror.

“See, I like the bean and chicken but I hate the beef ones.” Phil said.

“What, taco or burrito?” Fred asked, turning her head a little.

“Oh, taco.”

“I like the potatoes.” Gunn said.

“The cheesy ones?” Will asked. “I get them with extra sour cream.”

“I eat all of it.” Alex said. “You all are just picky. There are children in Ethiopia that don’t even have Taco Bell.”

“I eat all of it.” Fred said. “Well… I don’t eat the apple pie. I like the Mc Donald’s one better.”

“I like the new deli choice at MC D’s.” Phil mused. “Specially the bacon and egg roll in the morning.”

“Nah, Big Mac or one of those chicken burgers.” Gunn said.

“Yeah, I eat Big Mac’s too.” Will said. “Gotta put my fries on it all the time. Really like the mc muffins in the morning though.”

“Man Im hungry.” Gunn laughed.

“Me too.” Will said, his mouth watering as he thought about burgers.

“Me three.” Alex said.

“Okay,” Philip said, “We break out the subjects of the horrible morally bankrupt insane experiment, …then we get ‘Donalds.”

“I’m down for that.” Gunn said, taking a left and heading into the Initiative compound.

“Can we go to Taco Bell?” Fred asked.

“I’m not making two stops.” Gunn said, smiling at her.

She punched him playfully. “Real nice.” Will watched them, hiding his smile. Those two had grown so close over the course of all this.

They drove up the drive to the above ground building, silent again as they headed across the wide parking lot, stopping the car close to the hidden emergency exit.

They filed out and headed inside, taking a side door, Will buzzing them in with his pass. The lobby was as wide and silent as a graveyard and their feet were loud on the floor. They headed into the elevators, Will buzzing his pass. They all tried to look nonchalant as the elevator descended, all eyes watching the tiny red dot on the screen, showing where they were. Will looked at his watch. Ten thirty three. He breathed in as the doors opened. He saw Fred check her own watch.

He nodded to her and they walked past the scattered workers, invisible in their lab coats and military uniforms, fake passes clipped to Fred, Gunn and Alex. They strode down the halls and Will and Philip nodded to the people they knew, ignoring the ones they didn’t. There were always so many new faces down here that no one noticed theirs. Will breathed a sigh of relief.

He had known no one would notice them, but it was dizzying to actually have it work out that way. He even smiled at one of the guards as he passed the entrance to a wing, buzzing inside as he smiled back, none the wiser. They headed along to B-14 and entered on Phil’s pass.

They walked quickly towards Origin, not meeting anyone on the blue carpeted halls. Heading towards the Ob-room, Phil looked up at the small windows on the wall towards the ceiling. Will followed his eyes. Lights were on.

“Someone’s in there.” Phil whispered.

Will sighed internally. He’d prepared himself for this. It was probably his father. Shit. Will nodded to Phil and he opened the door.

His father turned around in surprise as Will levelled the air taser at him. His father’s surprise turned to a murky aggravation. “What are you doing, you fool?” He hissed.

“Im taking Angel.” he said, not taking his eyes of the man before him.

His father’s eyes ticked to Phil with hatred as he too levelled his air taser. Alex brought out his handgun as Will walked closer to him.

“You think you can get out?” He asked, unafraid of the guns pointed at him, emotionless and unfazed. “You can’t.”

“Do it Will.” Gunn hissed. “He’ll be fine.”

“I wash my hands of you.” Travers said plainly, “This is your own foolish mess, and it’s going to earn you a bullet in your thick skull.”

Will rolled his eyes. “Okay, Dad,” he sighed. “Hope the rest of your life treats you well.” He pulled out a dart and stabbed him in the arm with it.

A wash of heavy unnamable emotion clouded his chest as his father’s eyes rolled back in his head. His body slumped to the side and he fell to the floor unconscious.

“Okay, Gunn, Phil,” Fred’s voice said. “Come with me.”

“Alex,” Will said, “You go too.” He said, staring down at his father. He couldn’t remember ever seeing him sleep. He looked… human. Will’s emotions warred with each other for a moment, fogging everything out.

The footsteps left and he headed towards the security door, grabbing the large thick splay of keys from his father’s pocket. He undid the first door, slipping through to the middle door. The small screen above the keypad asked for a code. He pulled out the small reader box Fred had given him, clicking the on button of the small pager-looking thing. The box connected with the invisible bug program he’d installed on the computers, and the coded number combination flicked up onto the thin screen. He held his breath and typed it in.

The door clicked and opened.

He punched his fist in the air in a silent cheer of victory, accidentally letting go of the keys and the reader box, sucking in air as they slammed to the floor noisily. Fuck! He hurried back out; hoping that Fred had closed the door behind her. She had. Good.

The overhead lights in the ob-room suddenly flicked out. Group B had cut the secondary power. His heart picked up.
Okay, fast now. He exhaled to calm himself and ran back past the still powered computers for the final door.

He pushed his hand through the hidden opening in the wall feeling around for the little pin. He pressed his finger down onto it, wincing with the sharp little sting as it jabbed him to steal a drop of blood. There was nothing for a moment, Will’s heavy breathing loud and noisy, bouncing off the wall he faced. And then the door clicked and opened electronically with a little woosh of air.

Angel was already standing, waiting for the door to open and when he saw Will, his dark eyes immediately filled with tears. Will smiled at him, all his words lost. Bloody hell. His brain was all clogged up.

He couldn’t think. It had worked.

He was taller, his arm hugging onto his scrappy art book tightly, nervous and happy, and he seemed so much bigger. He’d seen him throughout the last seven years but he hadn’t seen him… up close. He was so beautiful.

Angel’s lips quivered and he tried to say something but nothing came out.

Will smiled again. “Hello.” He said weakly.

Angel didn’t seem to be able to hear him, instead he raised his hand, eyes a little scared, and gently touched Will’s cheek, his eyes so grateful Will’s heart felt like it was shattered.

His gaze moved slowly over his shoulder, and a frown edged its way onto his face. His eyes widened and Will suddenly remembered what was happening and grabbed Angel’s hand, pulling him through.

“The sixth part.” He whispered in his low smooth voice. “Is it time? Am I old enough?”

Will just lead him out, pausing a little, filled with pity as Angel looked around wide-eyed. “So dark!” He said, his voice cracking as he started to cry.

He was in shock. Will bit his lip, tightening his hand around Angel’s forearm, trying to show him he was there, not wanting him to be scared.

“It’s so big.” He whispered, the words mumbled against each other. He laughed. “So big.”

He looked around, unblinking, trying to absorb everything. He looked through the two-way mirror into his rooms, and then down at his father who was on the ground.

“I’m not dreaming am I?” He asked vacantly, staring at the wall of television screens. “I don’t want to be dreaming.”

“No Angel. You’re not dreaming.” He said softly, watching him trying to take everything in. He seemed fascinated by the screens.

“Who drew those?” Will looked towards the screens. He sighed. Not now. He couldn’t explain now. His stomach was in knots.

Angel’s head turned, surveying the tables filled with computers. “My plates! That’s my cup!” He said excitedly, heading towards them.

Will tightened his hold and drew him back. He tenderly cupped Angel’s face, trying to get him to focus on what he was saying. . “Angel. Listen to me. We’re taking you out. You can trust me. You have to do what I say. And things are…” He paused, feeling so horribly sad for the excited look on Angel’s face. “Things are going to be strange. You’re going to see things you’ve never seen.”

Angel nodded slowly, eyes still wide, his body just hanging on through the shock. The door behind him opened.

“Will.” Gunn said.

They’d freed Two and Three. Will was trying to calm his heart down when Angel stumbled past him and pressed himself against Gunn, hands all over his face.

“You’d be Angel, I’m guessing.” Gunn said, a little amused.

Angel was practically thrumming with excitement.

“I’m Gunn. Nice to meet you.” He turned to Will. “Two and Three are out.”

Will nodded as Angel watched him. He walked over to him, gently extracting him from Gunn. “We’re going.” He said. Angel watched him adoringly.

“Going?” he echoed.

“Please. Just follow me.”

Angel smiled. “Alright.” He nodded.

The headed out the door and Will’s arm was suddenly squeezed by Angel’s large hands. Angel was staring down the long corridor looking fearful.

“Angel, it’s alright.”

“Two and Three did this as well.” Gunn said, watching Angel. “Alex had to pick Three up and carry him because he wouldn’t move.”

“They don’t know anything else,” He said quickly, “Angel, come on, follow us, okay?”

Angel’s eyes flicked to his warily. “Big.” He mouthed.

“I know it’s big. It’s okay. We’re fine.” He said soothingly. Angel was shivering a little.

“They’re waiting up here.” Gunn said, heading quickly off.

Will turned to Angel who was shivering a lot now. “Trust me.” He pleaded.

Angel nodded and held tight to Will’s arm as they headed along the hall. They slipped into the staff room, and his heart jumped with joy when he saw Two and Three, scurrying around pulling magazines apart as Fred watched out the door. It was working. Years of planning… and it was working. Two and Three were dressed the same as Angel, sweats and thin white tee shirts. They paused as Will and Angel came through the door. They seemed to draw closer to one another.

His arm was almost torn off when Angel jerked back in surprise as he took in all the people.

“Hey Angel.” Fred said warily, careful big smile on her face.

Will let out a little whimper as iron fingers clamped tight on his bicep, twisting a little. He turned to see Angel against the wall, gaze alternating between staring at the floor and flicking up to side eye everyone like a scared deer. “People…” He whispered.

“I know.” Will said. “There’s a lot of them.”

“So many…”

Phil smiled at Will. “I think we’re gonna have a problem with him.” He said kindly.

“He’s fine, he’s just a bit scared.” He said. “Come on.” Angel wouldn’t leave the safety off the wall.

“Stick him.” Alex said.

“Angel, it’s okay, okay?” Will promised him. “We have to go. If you don’t leave here now, you’ll never leave here.”

He paused. “Never?” he asked shakily. He seemed to get better every moment that passed. It was just the initial shock. Will bit his lip. Damn. He probably felt as if he was being beaten, receiving shock after shock like that.

He left the wall with a held breath, staring at the ground, one hand tight on Will’s shoulder, the other clamped around his drawing book, tethering himself with the only familiar things he had.

They moved out. Angel was numb. Two and Three clung to each other, taking the shock of the new corridor and filtering it through the both of them, drawing strength from one another.

They slipped out of the B-14 area, and moved. They had no plan from now except to get to the emergency exit near the B-12 wing. Fred pulled her gun out; Alex had his by his leg, as did Gunn. Philip was watching Two and Three like a hawk, making sure they did nothing but move quickly, herding them as they looked around dumbly.

Will smiled at Angel, behind the group walking by Angel as he took jerky steps, eyes on the ceiling. “Big.” He said after a moment, his mouth not working properly.

“I know.” Will said sadly. Angel had officially entered shock. He shivered, and was having trouble moving. Will pulled him along and turned towards the emergency exit tunnel. He entered, closing the door behind him. Angel clung to him.

Fred and the others were moving down the dingy dim-lit hall, and Angel started activating again, calmed a little by the small tunnel. They picked up pace, running a little to catch up to them. They passed through a sliding door, setting an alarm off with a deafening whoop. A red light flashed over the door. Two and Three cringed at the loud noise, cowering down onto the floor as Philip and Fred tried to get them moving again. Angel was set on run and he moved past them, Will running with him for a moment before stopping him, to turn him around when he realised the other’s footsteps had stopped.

He moved back. “What’s happening?” Will called.

“What do you call them?” Angel asked him, recovering from his shock a little, still absolutely baffled by everything.

“Hold on.” He said to him, before turning back. Philip was grabbing Three off the ground and he was fighting to stay on the ground with Two.

“Fuck!” Will hissed running back.

“What’s going on?” Gunn called back.

Two and Three were fighting like scared cats. Three’s fist slammed into Philip’s face and sent him windmilling to the floor. Two’s foot caught Fred in the stomach and she cried out. Three hunched down over Two, trying to protect her from what he was seeing as a threat as Will ran up. He found his sedative darts, sticking one into Three’s leg. Two jumped up, grabbing at Three as she kicked Will in the face sending him back onto the ground. He looked up to see Angel looking down at him.

“Wrestling!” He smiled shakily, identifying the situation as best he knew how.

Will shook his head, sitting up. Fred had her arms wrapped around Three’s stomach, trying to calm Two down as she tried to pull Three away from Fred and round the corner back the way they came, Philip was trying to find a dart and Gunn was running up behind him when it happened.

Two’s thin arms flew up into the air as the automatic fire rattled their eardrums. Fred and Three fell back, and Will, stunned motionless, watched Two’s body jerk as the Initiative soldier standing behind her filled her back with bullets. She fell to her knees, blood spurting out of her mouth and the soldier aimed his gun at Will as she toppled forward onto her face. Phil slammed the emergency door closed, running along as he slid it closed, cringing as the bullets rattled off the steel. He slammed the auto lock on.

“We have to go, now.” He said, white as death.

Gunn grabbed Three’s unconscious body off the ground, carrying him as he ran.

“Come on.” Will rasped at Angel who was watching the door.

They ran along, pelting up the staircase. The elevators were down; Group B had made sure of that. They were all panting and scared.

“What are these?” Angel asked in a breath.

“Stairs, we have to run up them.” He answered, hand clenched around his forearm, refusing to let him fall behind.

They pounded up the stairs, huffing, speeding up as they heard yells from beneath them. The soldiers were in the stairwell. They twisted round and round, feeling like it was never going to end, ever, they’d just be running for the rest of their lives when he suddenly slammed into Gunn’s back.

He’d stopped, they’d reached the top and he kicked the door open, pistol raised. Alex followed him, and Will bent down to pick Three up from the floor. He carried him outside as Gunn ran to the jeep, opening it.

He realised he was alone when he reached the car, and looked back.

Angel had stopped and was standing halfway between the car and the building staring up at the stars. Will shoved Three into the seat and ran back. He tugged Angel’s arm fiercely and Angel tried to move with him on useless numb legs but fell onto his knees. Tears were streaming silver down his face, and his eyes were completely vacant and unfocused.

Gunn jabbed him with a sedative and picked him up, pushing him in next to Three, Will sliding in beside him. They all slammed into the jeep, Alex driving, as Gunn yelled and shot two soldiers coming after them. Alex sped out of the lot, hammer down as he careened out of the compound gates. They roared along the streets, Fred sitting over his and Angel’s legs, Phil crouching over Three’s legs, holding onto the headrest to steady himself.

They all panted, close to hyperventilating. He looked at Fred, seeing her lips quivering like she was about to cry.

They drove towards the river, to the coast road, hauling themselves out of the jeep and pushing the two unconscious bodies into the van they had ready as Fred drove the jeep into the river underneath a bridge to hide it from view. Gunn slipped behind the wheel as Philip, Fred and Will sat in the back.

The van purred to life and Gunn drove out towards the highway.

Philip hovered over Angel and Three, making sure they were okay with the sedative and checking them for any damage. Will watched him for a moment, kneeling next to Three’s thin arm. He pulled out a stethoscope and listened to their hearts as the van drove smoothly over the road.

After a moment, Phil put the stethoscope away and pulled out a blanket, throwing it over them as they slept, and pulled some socks onto their bare feet. When he was finished he climbed over the seats in front and sat between Gunn and Alex, silent as the two men were.

Fred fiddled with one of her bags as she perched on the end of the mattress they had in there, Angel’s feet beside her, her lip still quivering, her nose Rudolph red.

Will shifted over to her, and wrapped his arm around her thin birdlike shoulders. She had spatters of blood on her face and he wiped them off before she saw them. She never cried, just stayed resting her head against his shoulder as the van drove out of Sunnydale.


Seven

He opens his eyes and he looks at the low grey ceiling of the small moving room. He’s still too sleepy to move properly, his legs and arms are asleep as he rocks on the mattress. He looks to his right and sees eyes looking at him. The sleeping man watches him through slitted tired eyes.

He looks down to see the back of Will’s white head. He’s sitting at the end of the bed with the smallest man, arm around his shoulders. They look like they’re asleep; heads slumped against each other. Smallest man. Will. Gunn. Spiky face man, not-spiky face man, and sleepy man.

Except sleepy man is watching him, so he can’t be asleep. Sleepy man’s eyes are leaking and Angel feels bad so he smiles smally at him. Sleeping man smiles back a little, water running down his cheek and across his lips.

Angel closes his eyes again. Tired.

---

Something. Noise? Lots of noise.

Angel sat up, realising he was alone in the small grey room. His back was sore, and the room was hot. Very hot. His body felt like it had been on the gym machines for hours, sweat under his arms and on his lip. His heart pounded, thumping against the inside of his chest.

It was strange, his whole chest was tense, worried something might happen. Like when he’d seen the shiny white dots all over the ceiling last night, and they’d looked so far away that he’d felt crushed by the space between them. He held the blanket close to his chin, warily looking around. Everything was so new. Sleeping man wasn’t next to him anymore. Will and the small man were gone.

He swallowed.

Was he alone?

A whooshing sound. And muffled … voices?

He knelt on the bed, feeling the bed covers twisted around his feet. He looked down and realised it wasn’t the bed covers, his feet had been covered with little white blankets. He pulled them off and wriggled his freed toes. He pressed his hand against the wall and it was warm, and felt strange, not made of mirror but still smoothish. There were bags scattered around the small area. He pulled one close, sitting on the bed with it between his knees. He knew bags. Puzzles came in bags.

He didn’t know if he actually wanted to do any puzzles right now, but he’d like to see them anyway.

The bag was filled with clothes. He frowned and pulled the shirts out. A spiky thing on a stick. Hmm. He put it aside. This was a puzzle. A long light brown strap with a silver thing on the end. Short pants with only one big leg hole. He held it up. Blue. He put it aside.

A shiny metal string with an even shinier thing on the end.

The wall swung open in front of him and Will slipped inside, a bright light behind his body. He smiled at him, big white teeth, and then looked at his puzzles.

“Um…” He knelt down, taking the shiny string from his fingers. “This is special, be careful with it.”

“What is it?”

“Necklace.” His eyes flicked up. He smiled again and held the string… necklace up to his chest. “Neck decoration.”

Angel nodded. Interesting. He’d never seen that before. He held up the spiky stick.

“This?”

“Hairbrush.” He picked up the stick and ran the spikes through Angel’s hair. It tickled.

He took the hairbrush back and started petting his hair with it. Like he was scratching his head. Will took it back and put it in the bag again. “You never used to need them, but bags are good to carry things from one place to another.”

“Like puzzles.”

“Not only puzzles. See, look,” He picked up an empty one and put Angel’s drawing book inside. “See? You don’t have to carry it anymore.”

“Carry the bag instead?” He asked confused.

Will paused. “Okay, normally people own more than one thing.” He said handing the bag over. Angel took it, frowning at it in his lap.

Will sat down next to him after a moment. His fingers tapped against his knees for a moment as he stared at the door-wall he came through.

“Do you have any idea where you are?” He asked.

“In a grey room. Sixth part.”

Will nodded. He looked at Angel for a moment, blue eyes serious, before turning away and looking in a big bag. He came back with a book, a colourful one. Angel tried to take it from him, but Will pushed his fingers away. It had a blue and green circle on the cover.

“The World,” he read.

Will nodded and opened the book. It was a black page with little different coloured circles in a line, all leading to a huge yellow circle.

“This is the Solar System.”

“Solar system?” He said. “What’s that?”

“It’s where we live. These are planets. We live on,” He pointed at a blue and green circle. “This one. Earth. This is the world.”

Angel blinked. “Alright….” The world was a circle? Well… that was a surprise. He wondered if you could go out and walk around on top of it. It was hard to think of the world being a circle, but he was willing to listen. He wanted to know about the sixth part. He’d waited all his years.

Will sighed, pausing for a second before turning a few pages. It was a light blue page with green bits on it. “This is the world. The planet.”

Angel touched the page, feeling how smooth it was.

“These are continents. Land. We’re on this one. America.”

“America.” He repeated happily.

“We are here.” He pointed to where the green and blue met. “I want to show you this. We’re on a beach. Where the sea, which is the blue, meets the land. It might give you an idea about how big the sixth part really is.”

“How big is it?”

“You can’t imagine,” He sighed again, rubbing his nose. “It’s huge Angel. Let’s go outside, okay? I’ll be with you. And it’s alright if it’s too much. There’s not too many people around.”

“Outside.”

“Out of the rooms. Into the open,” He smiled. “Come on. We can get some food… maybe. If you, you know… stay awake.” They stood and Will tucked the book under one arm, and his other arm around Angel’s waist. They walked to the doors and Will pushed them open.

Bright. Too bright, like staring into a light. And then it all came into focus. A fat black line on the ground. Big, huge grey and brown blocks over the line, little rooms with wheels rolling past them. And space. So much space his knees stopped working and he fell, Will’s arm holding him up from the hot black ground.

So big.

Too big.

“Big, big…”

“I know Angel, come over here.”

A blue ceiling as far as he could see, little white things in it, green jaggedy things at the end of sight, rising up to mesh with the blue. Plants… plants everywhere. On the ground. Tall, tall thick flowers that jutted from the ground.

He started leaking, and shaking, and Will pulled him off the black hard line a moment before he fell forward and vomited. He knelt, face wet, eyes closed as Will rubbed his back. He held onto Will’s knee, refusing to let him leave.

So big. Huge. He felt so bare. His stomach was twisted tight.

He couldn’t…

He couldn’t look. It felt like he was falling. He stayed, feeling Will’s hand on his back, hot and calming. How could Will look at all this?! How could he…

Calm. His heart was in his throat, and drops of sweat ran along his scrunched up eyes. It was so warm.

He had to think. Blue high ceiling. Wide green ground. Alright. Hard to think about… but alright.

His hands felt gritty. Like soil was on them, but finer. He rubbed his fingers together. Gritty. The soil fell off, leaving only a few crumbs behind.

He squinted open his eyes, seeing his vomit in a puddle beside him.

“This is sand,” Will said softly.

He looked up at Will. He was smiling, his face covered in the warm light. He looked past him and his jaw felt all slack and numb.

Blue. Dark blue. It just kept going. A thousand four-part world’s area of dark blue. It sloshed onto the sand. It was water.

“Water?”

“Sea. Yep. The sea is made of water. And there is a lot of it.”

Angel stood. A strange invisible soft breath swirled over him, like when he breathed out, but much bigger.

“This is a beach. Do you understand scale?”

“Scale? Weights?” he said, staring at the line where the dark blue water met the ceiling.

“Okay, look at this.” He was holding the book open at the blue and green page. “This is a map. This shows everything. Where we are standing, is there.” He pointed.

Angel thought he understood. Maybe. “It’s a map of this?”

“No, this is in the map. Ocean…. Land.”

“Ocean and Land.” He murmured, still trying to catch his breath and be heard over his thumping heart and the swish of the water. “Alright. So if this map shows where we are… where’s the black line?”

Will closed his eyes. “No, you… hold on.” He turned back to the grey room and Angel clung to his arm, following him. He stepped inside and tugged Angel’s drawing book out of the bag. He flipped through the pages, and held up a drawing Angel had done of Will, toe to face.

“Picture of you.” Angel said.

“Yes, but it’s not the same size as me, is it?”

Angel smiled a little, the familiarity of drawing and Will calming him a little. “No, that wouldn’t fit on the paper.” He said.

“No. So it’s a picture of me… the right proportions, just smaller, right?”

“Yes, to fit on the paper.”

“Right. That’s called, ‘to scale’. It’s the same as me, but smaller.”

“To scale.”

“Yes.” He put the drawing book down, and held up the map again. “This drawing is to scale. The world is so big it couldn’t fit on the paper, right?”

Angel nodded, realisation flooding through him. “They made it smaller, and couldn’t fit everything in. Like I couldn’t draw all your eyelashes on that picture because … too small.”

“Right, so you can’t see the road or the sand, cause they’re too small.” Will beamed. He took Angel’s hand and led him back to the sand. He picked some up between his thumb and forefinger and dropped a few tiny specks onto the page. “Everything you see,” he said, pushing a grain over to the part he had been pointing at. “All of this, this part of the sea, this part of the land, on this map is smaller than that grain of sand.”

Angel’s eyes went wide. “The map is ‘to scale’?”

Will nodded. “The world is big.” He said after a moment.

Angel looked up at the ceiling. A huge bright light hurt his eyes and he held his hand up to shield his eyes. He couldn’t even see the end. He could never touch the ceiling. Thinking about it made his stomach flip inside and he felt like he was going to be sick again.

And then it just went numb. All over. Like his skin went to sleep and he couldn’t really feel… but still could.

He looked at the map. Strange shapes. What had Will called it? Land. Strange land shapes. He looked around again. There were little plants at the edge of the sand. Little bushes. He went over to them, Will following.

He ran his fingers over the leaves, feeling the smooth slide of them. “Bushes.”

“Yeah. Plants grow out here.”

“Who looks after them?”

“The Earth. It’s good like that. Sun,” he pointed to the ceiling; “it rains out here.”

“Rains?” The light was warm on his back.

“Water falling from the sky. You’ll see it sooner or later.”

“It’s hot.” He said.

Will thumped down into the sand, sitting. “It’s hot today. Are you hungry?”

He looked at Will silently.

“It’s past your breakfast time.”

Angel looked around for a clock, but Will held out his arm, showing him his watch. Ten-forty. He wasn’t that hungry… he didn’t think. He was unsure of everything. He felt like he was dreaming, like he’d made everything up.

It was cereal today.

He covered his face with his hands and tried to think. Land. Sea. Solar System. What? So hard. He felt his nose was all wet and his eyes started to leak again.

“Don’t cry.” Will said softly. “It’s a good time.”

“What’s cry?” he said, Will’s face all blurry through the water.

Will pulled out a white soft looking piece of paper and wiped the damp of his cheeks with it. “The wet. They’re called tears.”

“Tears.”

“People cry when they’re sad. Or stressed, or overwhelmed. Like you are.”

“Overwhelmed?” He said in a high voice, and he could tell the leaking was about to melt into his chest and make him cough and splutter.

Will’s arm wrapped around him and it felt so right, to have a body to lean against. The hollow feelings that made the water sort of… filled up nicer than when he leaked alone.

“Overwhelmed means… too many things to understand at once.”

“I’m overwhelmed.” He agreed quickly.

“I know. And you’re going to feel like this for a while. Maybe a long time.”

“How long?” He said, feeling the sand all sticking between his toes, and on his hands. He pushed his face against Will’s neck and he felt so… with someone. Not by himself. Just having someone close while he was leaking made more water tears slip out from his face, even though he felt better.

“I don’t know. But just… try to accept everything. Even though it’s hard. I won’t lie to you… ever.”

“Lie.” He repeated softly.

“I won’t… not tell you the truth.”

“Why would you not tell the truth?” He asked confused.

“Not telling the truth, is called lying. It’s …bad.” He made a little sound like the start of a new word, but it cut off, and his arms got tighter. Angel wanted him to keep squeezing, harder.

Angel couldn’t find any words. But there was so much noise. The sloshing of the water. Rooms whooshing along the black line. “Why do you know all of this?”

“I live here.” He said. “Well not here but … out in this. In this world. It’s hard for you now. But you’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t think so,” He whispered. So noisy. So many things he didn’t know. He sat down next to Will and rested his head on his chest. The warm made him sleepy. “Why did you live out here and I live in the four part world?”

And how small the four-part world seemed now. Just where he was, hundreds of four part worlds could fit, lined up. He felt dizzy again. He had to stop thinking about it all. He liked the sea though. It sparkled under the light.

He felt Will’s chest rise and fall. And that was calming. The breath swept over again, moving his hair.

“Who’s doing that?”

“What?”

“That… that breath.”

“Breath?” Will’s body tightened a little. “What do you mean?”

“Like,” He puffed air onto Will’s face and watched him squint against it. “that.”

“Wind?” Will asked, looking confused. “There’s some wind today. You get it a lot near beaches and bays. It comes off the water.”

“Wind. Who’s blowing it?”

“No one.” He smiled. “Wind just travels around the world. I’ll explain it better to you later. I have books.” He stood, pulling Angel off the sand. “We’re going to a restaurant.”

“What’s a restaurant?” Angel asked.

“People live all over the world. There are… a lot of people. See these?” He asked, pointing at the big blocks next to the grey line. “These are buildings, and this is a restaurant. Well… a café. People go here to eat, when they don’t want to make food for themselves.”

They went through a door made of see through cold. The people he had seen last night were in the corner of the room. “The world has a lot of rooms in it, doesn’t it?” The room was filled with tables and chairs. Angel laughed; it was all so … new!

“More than anyone could ever count.” He smiled.

Angel turned and jumped at the person he suddenly saw. How many people were in the world? He just kept seeing more. This one had long, long brown hair, and lots of shiny chains around his neck. His lips were bright red, and he was wearing a thin colourful towel around his waist, with a yellow shirt with writing Angel couldn’t read. It was all stretched around the … mounds on his chest. The mounds bounced a little, like his hair when he walked over to them.

“Hey,” he said, “Want a table, or are you with them?” he asked pointing at the group.

“With them.” Will smiled.

They walked over. “Hey Angel.” Gunn said with a smile. His skin was darker than everyone else’s. Will and Angel slipped into a strange seat. It was a one long cushion winding around the table. Food was already on the tables. Eggs and bacon. Toasts. Sausages.

Angel’s brain paused. “It’s cereal today.” He blinked. “Have I fallen asleep for a few days again?” He asked Will.

“No, in the sixth part world you can eat whatever you want, any time you want.”

Angel’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“What if I wanted eggs every morning?”

“Well you could have them… but I don’t know if that’s healthy.” The smallest man said in a voice different to anyone else’s. “Hi, I don’t know if you know my name. Fred.” He smiled.

“Your name is Fred?” He asked.

He nodded, and he too had long brown hair, but it was straight and thin.

“My name is Angel. His is Will,” he said, pointing.

He smiled. “Fred and I know each other. I know everyone here. Gunn, Alex…” Alex waved and Gunn nodded as he bit into some toast. “Philip,” The non-spiky face man grinned at him. He was lighter coloured, like Will, and his eyes were brown… but a lighter brown than he and Gunn.

He looked back at Alex’s eyes. Brown too. “We all have brown!” He said excitedly.

He peered at Fred, who’s eyes went really wide. Brown. He liked that.

“This is Three.” The man who had been next to him. The sleeping man. Three. He was huddled in the corner of the seat, looking as flipped as Angel felt inside. “Three also lived in a four part world until last night.”

Angel smiled at him, hoping he’d smile back. He did, a little. “Three is a number.” He said.

Three looked at him and blinked. His eyes weren’t brown. They were a light green.

Angel looked down at the food and took some bread, eating it quickly, before grabbing some eggs with a spoon and putting them on the plate in front of him. He ate.

“So Angel, how are you liking the outside world?” Philip asked him.

“It’s big.” He said, excited about talking to someone new, pushing the food into his mouth. Eggs tasted nicer out here. “And … big. And colourful. I think I’m getting sleepy from leaking.”

Philip blinked.

“Crying.” Will said.

“Well, you are stressed.” Philip said. “Hopefully things will be a little smoother for you now.”

“Ohyeah.” Alex said.

“Ohyeah!” Angel repeated excitedly. How strange. Angel liked it. “Ohyeah.”

The people laughed a little. He smiled. “I didn’t know there were so many people in the world. Why are you dark brown?” He asked Gunn. “I’m light brown.”

“Different races.”

“Races.”

“Yeah. We’re all people. But there are different races. Im African-American.”

“What am I?” He asked. He leaned over the table and picked up the half-filled glass in front of Fred, sipping it. He laughed and covered his face with his thin hand, his hair falling forward. Angel smiled.

Gunn laughed for a moment, quietly. “You’re Caucasian.”

“Caucasian. Caw. What’s Will?”

“I’m Caucasian as well. It basically means white. Well… lighter coloured.”

The man with the necklaces came over. “Anything else you all need?”

“What race are you?” Angel asked, turning in his seat.

The man looked at him for a moment, before smiling. “Family comes from Mexico.”

“Mexico.”

“South of the border, homes.” He said, his voice getting a bit different.

Will and Alex gave him some green paper. “Thanks.” Will said. “Bathroom?”

“Down the hall.”

Angel looked at Three, who was still quiet and huddled in the chair looking like he was going to leak.

“Why does everyone speak different?” Angel asked.

“We come from different places.” Philip said, smiling. “The waitress had a bit of a Mexican accent, Fred comes from Texas. Gunn and I are from California… that’s where we are now. You, because Travers still retained a little of his English accent, sound a little English as well.”

“You sound different, where are you from?” He said, turning to Will.

“I talk like my mother,” he smiled.

Angel smiled too. “What’s a mother?”

The people went a little quiet. “Later, Angel. Have books on that too.”

Gunn and Alex started laughing. “Okay, I need to pee.” Gunn said.

“Same.” Fred said, picking up some bread and eating it as he slid out of the booth. He headed off down the hall.

“You finished?” Will asked him.

He nodded. He hadn’t been that hungry anyway. Philip was talking to Three very quietly; Angel couldn’t hear what he was saying. He leaned over the table a little, to get closer, but Will’s hand curled around his arm.

“Do you need to pee?” He asked, taking him to yet another long room. So many doors everywhere. What was behind them? Angel wanted to open them all. He felt dizzy with happy.

“Pee?” He asked distractedly.

“Um, urinate.”

He thought, suddenly feeling a squiggle in his bladder. He nodded. “Okay, down here.” He led him along and opened a door and there was a toilet.

“It’s different.” He said pushing his pants down.

“Uh yeah.” Will quickly left.

It wasn’t like a normal toilet. The seat was black. He urinated, staring at the strange wall. Brown… with little white lines running through it.

“Will?” He asked.

“Yeah?”

“What’s wrong with the wall?”

“It’s a brick wall.”

“Brick wall.” He murmured. He reached out with one hand and felt it. Rough. He stepped away. It didn’t make the whoosy water sound. He frowned and leant over it again. Nothing. “Will?”

Will opened the door a little. “Yes?”

“It won’t whoosh and take the yellow away.”

Will sigh-laughed a little and came in. “Flush.” He pressed a button on top of the toilet. “You have to flush in the outside world.”

“And the taps?”

Will smiled. He put his hand on the little silver knobs and turned. Water came out. “Have to turn them on too. Unless you’re somewhere real bloody nice.”

“Bloody?” He paused. “Bloody hell!” He cried, smiling.

Will laughed. “Where’d you learn that?”

“You said it the last time I saw you,” he said. “I learnt.”

Will frowned at him, still smiling a little. “I never said that last night.”

“No, last time before that. When you had the thing in your pants.”

Will looked a little shocked for a moment, before he coughed, starting to laugh a little. “um…” he shook his head. “Later. I have to pee.”

“Alright.” Angel now understood that pee meant urinate. He wished everyone would just use one word to describe things. He washed his hands and stood. Will looked at him.

“Uh, wait outside.”

“Outside?”

“Outside the door?”

“Why?”

“Because,” He smiled a little, “I like my privacy.”

“What’s privacy?”

“Peeing by myself.”

“Why would you want to do that?” This was all very strange.

“Hey Will!” Gunn’s voice called. “What are you doing in there?”

Angel smiled at him for a moment before Will caught him by the arm and moved him outside the door. The door closed in his face. He tried the handle but it was locked. Why did Will want to pee by himself? The lock on the door made Angel suddenly want to see it. Why did he lock the door to pee? He tried the handle again.

“Hey.” Gunn said laughing. “He’ll be out in a minute.”

“Why does he pee alone?”

“Because… I don’t know,” he laughed, “Maybe the man didn’t want you watching.”

“Why?”

He’d seen himself pee. Would Will peeing be any different? “Are you going to pee?” He asked Gunn.

Gunn scratched his neck, teeth white in his smile. “Was planning to.”

“Are you going to lock the door?”

Gunn threw his head back and laughed deep and loud. “Well now that I know you’re so interested, yes. I am.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Privacy?”

“Why do you want to pee alone?” he asked, getting a little irritated. These answers sent him around in circles.

“Listen, calm. People pee alone when there’s only one toilet.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay, you’re different. Most people pee alone. ‘Cept if there’s urinals. Then we pee together.”

“Gross.” Fred said as he came out from a door, his nose wrinkling up over his smile.

Gunn slipped through the door. Angel tried the handle and he heard Gunn laugh from the other side. “Damn, man! First lesson Im gonna get Will to teach you is privacy.”

Fred smiled at him. “Angel don’t worry. It’s normal human curiosity. You just want to go in there because you can’t. Trust me, they’re not doing anything different than what you do.”

“Then why can’t I go in?” he said logically.

Fred closed his eyes for a moment, still smiling. “I know you don’t understand, but just accept it? It’s what we do here in the sixth part.”

Will came through the door. He smiled at Fred who nodded, tucking his hair behind his ear.

“Sixth part has privacy?” Angel asked Will, searching his eyes.

“Privacy is important here.” He said leading him back to the tables and chairs room. “Privacy isn’t just peeing alone. It’s showering alone, keeping your own belongings to yourself. If you don’t respect other people’s privacy, they can get annoyed at you.”

“Oh.” Angel said, thinking hard. He didn’t want people getting annoyed at him.

“I know where you lived those things didn’t matter. Everything you saw was yours. But it’s not like that here. You can’t intrude into other people’s privacy. It’s a very basic rule, so… remember it.” He smiled. “The more you get to know people, the more of their privacy they give up. And you become friends.”

“Friends.”

“People you want to spend time with.”

“Are we friends?”

Will smiled at him. He nodded. Angel smiled.

“Good.” He paused. “If I get to know you more… will I see you pee?”


Eight

Rustle squeak. Rustle rustle sigh squeak.

“Angel,” Will murmured, his eyes still glued closed. “Go to sleep.”

“I can’t,” Angel whispered.

“Shut him up or I’m getting one of those tranq darts to do it for you.” Gunn hissed from across the motel room, sitting up in the dark, his voice angry and rasped as the digital clock clicked over to three forty three in the morning.

“The bed’s all soft,” Angel said, lack of sleep not affecting him at all.

“He can have the fold out,” Gunn said, flopping back down with a sigh.

“Want to sleep where Gunn is?” Will yawned.

Rustle squeak. “It’s too dark,” he said after a moment. “Where is all the light?”

Will’s eyes opened blearily and he cleared his throat, rolling over and flicking the bedside lamp on dim.

“That’s it, I’m bunking with Fred.” Gunn barked, jumping up in his boxers and storming out of the room. He slammed the door behind him as Will rolled back in his bed. Angel was watching him from the twin bed beside him, face half covered by pillow. “It gets dark.”

“No lights at night. And no moon tonight.”

“Moon.”

“The moon is a little ball of rock… well it’s not little,” he yawned again, eyes tearing up a little. “It’s in space and it rotates around the Earth. When it covers the sun, we have night.”

“How can it cover the sun?”

“Okay… it just gets in the way, you know?” He trailed off, eyes closing again.

“Gets in the way?”

“Angel, can I tell you tomorrow? Im so tired.”

“Alright.”

Will waited tensely for a moment, just waiting for Angel’s deep voice to pull him from the insomnia fog he was floating in.
It did.

“Earth rotates around the sun. Moon rotates around Earth. Does anything rotate around Moon?”

“No. And nothing lives on it either,” He said, pre-empting Angel’s next question. He’d asked the same question about every planet during the hours they spent sitting in the back of the van.

They’d finally stopped for the night, but Angel hadn’t settled. He wondered if Three was having as much trouble. He knew he should be more helpful, that this was Angel’s first whole day out in the actual world … but it was almost four in the bloody morning and he hadn’t slept well in weeks.

“Why are there no books in here?” He asked after a moment.

Will’s eyes opened scratchily. “This is a motel room,” he said to the ceiling, his voice measured and soft. “All different people stay here. The person who owns it, doesn’t live here… so there are no books.”

His whole body felt like it was filled with heavy liquid. Like the mattress was wrapping around him. Angel breathed softly, through his nose.

“I’ve never slept with anyone before,” Angel mused, his voice deep. “I can hear you breathing.”

Will’s eyes flicked open. He didn’t answer, but rolled over to look at Angel’s profile in the soft glow of the lamp. He was watching the ceiling, a small frown on his face.

“I can’t sleep with all the noise.” Angel said after a moment. “You, the whoosh whoosh, the voices… it’s too noisy to sleep.”

“You’ll get used to that,” he hadn’t even noticed. “And I’m not noisy.” He added.

“Yes you are.”

“You’re noisier than me,” he said, a little grumpily, rolling over again.

“You breathe and it’s all I can hear.”

Will self-consciously tried to quiet his breath, holding it and letting it out slowly.

“Can you hear me breathing?” Angel asked after a moment.

“Yes.”

“Is it loud?”

“Not really,” Will paused. “Wait till I snore.”

“Snore?”

He chuckled. “Yep. Wait. I do it when I’m asleep.”

He yawned again and wriggled deeper into the covers, his feet icy under the too-thin blanket. Angel was quiet long enough for him to slip into the almost surreal state between his subconscious and waking, and then after a long time, he slipped away.

---

Birds. He moved, hearing a small noise gurgle in his throat as he woke up. He opened his eyes and saw grey.

What?

He sat up and the pillow fell off his face, bouncing onto his thighs. The room was bright with morning sunlight and Angel was standing at the small window peeking out, one long bare arm holding the curtain slightly open, his new jeans wrapping snugly around his hips.

Will felt groggy and covered in sleep sweat. He coughed, smokers cough, his lungs unsettled in his tired body.

Angel looked back at his, eyes bright. “Is snoring the loud jerky humming from your throat?” He asked.

Will blinked stickily. He nodded, scratching his ribs through the tee shirt as he cracked his neck. He needed a fag.

“I heard it,” Angel said. “It didn’t stop. I put the pillow over your mouth and that helped.” He grinned.

Will blinked at him. “Don’t do that again.” He said, smiling, morning breath smelling like ash and old rancid cigs. “Not good to have air passageways covered.”

Angel smiled obliviously and pointed out the window. “How many different races are there?”

Will tried. His brain tried to turn over into thinking, but it was still resting in sleep. “What?”

“There are little people. Brown and fluffy looking.”

Little brown people? Children in fluffy sweaters? Will kicked out of the bed, catching the eight twenty readout from the bedside clock. He ripped the curtains open. They were on the first floor of the run down Nile’s Motel, overlooking a grassy overgrown play area. He didn’t see anything.

“There.” Angel said, pointing to the left. “Can you see them? What are their names?”

Will squinted against the glare, scanning the empty park, his gaze settling on two stray ibises picking through the grass with their long curved beaks.

He smiled.

“Those are birds.”

“Birds?”

“Like chicken. You know chickens?”

He nodded, eyes getting wide with excitement. “They taste good.”

“Uh… don’t eat ibis.”

“Ibis?”

“There are all different birds. Humans are a species, birds are a different species.”

“What about races?” He asked, frowning a little in confusion. “Where do they fit in?”

“Okay… well ibises and chickens are different races in the bird species.”

Angel scratched his head, fingertips lost in his shaggy hair, eyes stuck on the birds. “What do chickens look like?”

“Well… chickens don’t roam around free like those birds. They stay in farms,” Will said, stretching hugely.

“What are farms?”

“Places that keep animals and vegetables for food.”

He scratched his lower belly and grabbed his bag, pulling out his toothbrush and some paste. He handed a new toothbrush to Angel.

“Toothbrush,” Angel said, taking it from him.

He nodded and headed into the tiny bathroom. He blanched a little when he caught sight of his reflection. Light to dark of Angel’s perky morning self, his face was covered with bristles, eyes red and eyelids heavy. He looked like he’d been on a crack bender. He flicked the tap on and rinsed his mouth out before lathering his brush with toothpaste and handing the tube to Angel.

He brushed, eyes closed, hearing Angel brushing to his side. He spat; hearing Angel spit a second later and rinsed his brush and mouth again.

“Okay, I’m gonna have a quick shower. Then you have one,” He said as he grabbed a towel from the rack.

“Alright.”

He stood, looking around the bathroom with big dark eyes.

Will paused. “See, that privacy thing should be happening again.”

“Are you going to pee in the shower?”

“No, but I will be naked, so go sit out on the bed for a couple of minutes.”

Angel paused, almost looking like he was going to protest, before he turned and stepped out. Will flicked the shower on hot, letting out a little happy sigh moan as the hot water steamed over his aching body. He washed quickly, allowing himself only a few minutes of relaxing bliss before wrapping a towel around himself and stepping back out to Angel.

“Okay, you step in, tell me when you’re done.”

Angel nodded and stepped into the bathroom as Will collapsed onto his bed, worn out already. The door closed behind him.

“Will?”

“Yeah?” he called.

He heard a whoosh of water.

“Ignore that,” Angel called back.

Will closed his eyes for a second before he heard a pained sharp shriek from the bathroom. He jumped up and slammed the door open, seeing Angel hopping around naked, holding his bright red hand.

Steam poured out of the shower in clouds.

Will closed his eyes, swarming with guilt at his stupidity.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said pulling Angel across to the taps and pushing his hand under cold water. “I should have explained. Hot and cold water. Have to use both.”

Angel hissed a little as he bent his fingers. He frowned down at his fingers. “Is that why there’s two taps?”

“Yes, yes, that’s why there’s two,” Will nodded, hovering over his shoulder, “Does it feel better?”

Angel nodded. The bright red had dulled a little. “Ow.”

“Scalded.”

He nodded. “Yes, I burnt myself once with soup.”

“I remember. You dropped it on your leg.”

Angel turned to him, peering at him. “How did you know that?”

Will smiled a little. “Saw it. Through the mirror.”

Angel’s face lit up a little. “You could see me?”

“Not all the time… but sometimes. I was there.”

“Watching me? In the last seven years?”

What should he say? He couldn’t think, holding Angel’s hand under the icy water.

“Yes,” he said, feeling the hot steam billowing over him and sticking to his skin.

“Oh.”

Will watched him, worried he might get upset, but he just seemed pleased. His hand looked better.

“Lucky you didn’t just step in,” Will said.

Angel nodded. “I wanted to see if it felt the same.”

Will stepped over to the shower, flicking it off. “Okay, the left tap is usually hot. But they’re usually coded anyhow. H, red, hot are all hot. C, blue, are all cold. Always turn the cold tap on first, and slowly add heat.”

He demonstrated. Angel reached out with his other hand and hesitantly touched the spray. “That’s better.”

He stepped in, his nude body sliding past Will, muscles bunching in his wide shoulders as he leaned on the wall for support as he stepped into the shower-bath. Will quickly ducked his head and left the room. He waited for Angel to finish, fully awake now. The water stopped and Will heard wet feet slapping on the tiles.

“Will?”

“Okay…” Will paused, “have a towel on?”

“…yes.”

He slipped back inside, smiling at Angel who was still dripping wet in a horribly enticing fashion. His hair was black spikes, down over his ears and the nape of his neck. He grinned; wiping his hands on his towel covered thighs.

“Okay,” Will said looking towards the sink, “Gonna teach you how to shave.”

“What’s shave?”

Will pulled his electric razor out, plugged it in and flicked it on. Angel jumped a little at the buzzing and then laughed.

“Bzzzzz…”

“This,” Will said, rubbing his chin, “is called stubble.”

Angel rubbed the lighter stubble on his own face.

“Men get it, and usually shave it off. Don’t shave it and you grow a beard… which some men like.”

Angel looked baffled. “Shave…”

Will picked up some lotion and rubbed it across his stubble, handing it to Angel, watching him copy the action.

“Now,” Will clicked the shaver on and Angel watched it glide up his neck, under his chin, leaving a hairless trail in its wake.

“That’s how you make it go back in!” Angel cried, snatching the razor from him.

“Not… not making it go back in,” Will corrected, “Cutting it off.”

He showed Angel the little cut stubble fragments. Angel seemed a little stunned.

“Cut it off?” He looked at himself in the mirror, touching his stubble. “But… how does it come back then?”

“Grows. Hair grows. Just keeps growing, have to trim it to keep yourself looking groomed.”

He touched his hair. “But I…”

“People did it for you.”

“When?”

“When you slept.”

“Why?”

Will paused. He didn’t want to answer that question yet. He didn’t know if Angel was ready yet. Will reached out and took the shaver from him.

“You find out which way your beard is growing, and shave the opposite way.”

Angel watched him dumbly, and then took the shaver back and tried it himself. They shaved, Will finishing off and then helping Angel, giving him tips he’d learnt over the years.

“Do fingernails grow too?” He asked as Will patted his face dry.

“Yes. And you trim them too.”

“Oh.”

Angel touched his fingernails for a moment, and then stepped close, breathing coolly on Will’s neck, reaching out to feel Will’s fingers.

“Your fingernails are different. Smaller.”

Will nodded, fidgeting away when Angel’s flat belly pressed against his hip. He saw Angel smile out of the corner of his eye as he packed away the shaver and lotion, and saw his fingers tickling across the counter.

Angel’s arm wrapped around his waist and pulled him close, playfully, standing on his toes and rubbing his warm tight belly against Will’s hip. Will wriggled away, and Angel caught him again, in a much less innocent seeming position, Will’s back to his chest, pulling him back to hold him, his thigh between Will’s. He laughed as Will flusteredly extracted himself from his arms and scurried like a scolded dog into the other room. He knew he was flushing.

“Let’s wrestle more!” Angel laughed, coming into the room.

Before Will could say no, a large body slammed him into the wall, knocking the air out of his lungs painfully and jarring his chin. He was pulled backwards and flung face-first onto the bed, bouncing a little as his towel loosened. Angel jumped up behind him, standing over him victorious.

“I win.” He crowed.

He slammed down, sitting on Will’s back, making him arch up in pain. “Angel!”

“I win.”

He yelped as Angel pulled at a tuft of his armpit fuzz. “I don’t get hair like that.” He murmured.

Will rolled him off and stood up, jaw aching. “No more jumping me, alright?” He barked, glaring at Angel.

Angel’s eyes went wide and he cowered a little, drawing his legs up in his towel. He sat silently, chastised.

Will's frustration melted. He was sleep deprived. He shouldn’t snap at him. “Listen, I was a kid when we used to wrestle. So were you. We’re not kids anymore.”

“Only kids can wrestle?” he asked, still looking timid.

“Well no… but now … you cant just slam people into walls because you want to play a game. Both people have to agree. I know that’s not how I used to do it… but that’s the way adults do it.”

A knocking started on the door. “Will?” Fred called. “I have breakfast burritos.”

He smiled at Angel and turned to the door, unlatching and opening it. Fred was standing in the small outdoor walkway, holding out a fast food box with a paper bag and some orange juices.

“How did it go last night?” She asked, smiling.

Will nodded. “Uh… pretty well.”

“You look tired. And your chin is all red.”

He nodded again, holding his fingers up to his jaw.

Fred, realising he wasn’t chatty, carried on. “So, Phil is talking to Three in their room and Gunn and Alex are stocking up on food.” She paused. “Twinkies until the next rest-stop, I’m guessing.”

Will snorted. “Okay, well we’re moving soon?”

“Um..” She looked at her watch a little nervously. “Yeah… we all had a late start today. We should’ve been gone hours ago.”

“It’s fine, we drove longer last night. We’ll go. Fifteen minutes.”

She nodded. “I’ll round up.”

Will headed back inside, feeling his face flush a little as Angel dropped his towel and pulled his jeans back on. He pulled a white shirt on over the top and sat on the bed, watching him happily. Will handed him a burrito and Angel stared at it.

“Is this food?”

“Fast food.”

Angel opened it and bit into it, chewing for a second before leaning over and letting it fall out of his mouth onto the floor.

Will shook his head, laughing. “You can have something else.”

Angel scraped his tongue with the bed sheet, looking up at Will with disgusted dark eyes as he put the burrito in the bedside drawer and closed it.


Nine

Will was driving the van car, eyes on the road. The headlights shone out across the black line, cutting through the too-dark. Will had been teaching him car parts.

Steering wheel. Dashboard. Gear stick. Radio.

Radio. Angel smiled at the little rectangle near Will's hand. Singing. There was just music at the moment, hardly any words; something Will called 'easy listening', for when you were up late. Angel thought listening wasn't very hard at any time.

He liked the radio. Will had a song too, it had played and he'd sung it softly as he watched the road. Fred was sitting next to him, asleep, curled up in the seat. He was very small; thin, like Angel was when he was younger. Maybe Fred was younger then.

He thought about that as the music blew gently through the van-car.

"Will?"

"Mmm?"

"How old is Fred?"

Will's eyes rested on the sleeping man for a second. "I think 'bout twenty three."

"As old as me?"

Will nodded. "Around that. Not actually sure."

"What about everyone?"

"Well Gunn is around twenty-five. Same as Alex, they're about the same age. Phil is twenty-seven. Three is eighteen."

Three was eighteen? He was the youngest. Angel was older.

"What about you?" Angel asked, watching Will's hand move on the gear stick.

"Thirty."

"You're oldest," he said, smiling. "You're old."

"I'm not old."

"Older than me."

"A lot of people are older than you," Will said, watching the road with a little smile on his face.

"Do you not like being old?" Angel asked.

Will shrugged. "People don't like being called old. It's usually a bad term."

Angel found that amusing. So strange. "But if they are old, why does anyone care?"

"Because it means you're not young."

"People want to be young?"

"Yeah… youth is … is seen as the best time. Of your life."

"But you know more things the more you live. I think older would be better."

"Yes, but society hasn't warped your brain yet."

Angel smiled. He didn't understand that. Warp. "What's warp?"

"Um… twist."

Angel sat quiet for a moment, taking that in. Young is better. Being young. Being youthful. But why? What was so different?

"I don't understand; why do people want to be young?"

"I don't know. Vanity. People want to be beautiful."

"Vanity."

"Thinking yourself to be very beautiful."

Angel frowned, tucking his hands into the long warm coat Gunn had given him. Rose. The rose was beautiful. He must have it wrong. "What's beautiful?"

"You know what beautiful is. I've heard you use the word."

"Roses are beautiful. How can a person be beautiful?"

Will seemed to be confused, his brows drawing together. He sighed and spoke again. "People like to look at beautiful things, like you like to look at your flowers."

"Yes."

"But were some of your flowers prettier than others?"

He thought about that. Did he think some flowers were prettier? "Yes, the rose was the prettiest."

"Okay then. But other flowers were still pretty, you just preferred the rose."

"Yes."

"Some people prefer roses, and some prefer daisies or whatever else you had. People prefer to look at some people over others." He paused, quickly glancing at him. "Not that you should base anything on looks."

"Looks?"

"Attractiveness. Just because someone is attractive, doesn't mean they're any better."

Attractive, pretty, beautiful, looks. Four words with one meaning. "Alright."

Angel stretched his legs a little. It was hard to keep all his muscles awake in the small space. "Do you think people are attractive?"

"Well... yes."

"Like roses or daisies?"

Will let out his little sigh laugh. "I don't know."

"I don't understand how any one person can be more attractive than anyone else."

"Well people like all different things. Some people like blue eyes, so people with blue eyes would seem more attractive. Some people like long hair, so people with long hair would seem better looking."

"What do you like?"

Will looked at him, eyes wide and blue, looking like he hadn't heard him. Angel was about to repeat the question when Will looked back to the road, his hands tight on the steering wheel, flexing a little. "I don't have a preference."

"Me neither," he said happily. He understood that a rose was prettier than a daisy but people all looked the same anyhow, like all daisies looked pretty much the same. Almost. Well Gunn looked different. And Will. And Fred okay people looked all different, but they still had eyes and noses and mouths. They were all put together interestingly so how could one be nicer to look at?

That idea would require more thought.

He turned in his seat, careful not to touch Fred, and opened the long dark material hanging from the ceiling behind the seats.

Gunn and Philip were sleeping. Alex was sitting against the wall with his eyes closed, his head bobbing a little. Three was watching him from the corner of the van-car.

He slid over the seats and past the sleeping men, crawling over to Three's side. "Hello."

"Hello," Three answered. His voice was very soft.

"Why are you always sitting by yourself? You should put Fred in here and you sit with Will in the seats. That's where I'm sitting."

"I don't like seeing the road. How fast we go," he said jerkily, pulling his knees up to his chest.

Angel frowned. It was dark back here and he could hardly see Three's face. "I want to see everything."

"Don't you find it scared-making?" he asked. "Or did you go in cars before?"

"No. I was in the four-part world. There were no cars or car-vans there." He paused, eyes on the sleeping men. "There wasn't much of anything. It's much more interesting in here."

Three rested his thin chin on his knees.

"What's scared-making?" Angel asked.

"When you know something bad is going to happen."

"But Will is here. He only does interesting things, not checks or skin samples."

Three didn't answer. After a moment he started leaking, silver lines on his cheeks. Angel remembered he felt better leaking when Will held him, so he wrapped his arm around Three's shoulders and pulled him close.

"She died," he said, snuffling into his shoulder. It was strange to see someone else leak.

"What?"

"Two. She's dead."

"What's dead?"

He started doing the coughing leaking. "You don't know death?"

"No. Who is it?"

"Death is when your body stops working. And it's painful and it hurts and then you're gone forever."

Body stops working? "That can happen?" he asked, brushing his cheek across Three's head. His hair was thick, thick and dark.

"It happens to everyone after a while."

"Really? Everyone stops working?" He didn't like that idea. He thought about the light going out in the four-part world. Sleeping. And how Two had fallen on the ground. Like he was sleeping.

"He went to sleep."

He looked up from his hair to see Alex slumped onto the floor, his mouth open.

"Sleep's different than dead," Three whispered, his fingers strangely tight on his shirt, balling it in fists, like he was going to haul himself up with it.

Three shuddered a few times, like he was cold, but Angel felt the wet of his leak on his chest. He ran his fingers through his thick hair. It took a long time for Three to stop leaking. In the end he was curled up warmly in Angel's lap, his forehead resting on Angel's shoulder. Angel liked it. Normally when he tried to sit on Father, he'd get moved. It was nice someone wanted to sit on him. Different. Warm.

The wall wasn't very comfortable so he lay on the floor, his head resting on some clothes. Three seemed like he was asleep, even though he had his eyes open, and he let Angel hug him lying down. He liked it. He didn't think he'd ever been this close to anyone. His nose was in Three's hair.

It just smelled like hair. Not sweet smelling like Will's hair. When he got to sniff it, that was. He wanted to compare, but Three was clinging to him, making snore type noises, little grunty ones as he leaked.

So did everyone's hair smell different? The way everyone looked different? He wondered how his hair smelled. It was longish, not like Fred's more like Alex's. Not as short as Will's. Will's was short, white and close to his skull and kind of stiff-shiny. Not like before when it was browny-red and tufty. Toothbrush hair. He smiled.

"Do you get made-scared?" Three asked him after a long time of leaking. He sniffed a little, like he was going to sneeze.

Scared. Feeling something bad was going to happen. "No, a little when I first left the four-part world. But I'm not scared-making now."

"I am," Three said, whispering, watching Angel closely.

"Why?"

"Because, I don't know anything here."

"Neither do I. But why should that scared ... make?" He asked, struggling with the word.

"Because… because… what if something hurts us?"

Angel thought about that. He wasn't scared-making... made scared of that. He'd have to ask Will about that word. Phrase. It was tricky.

"But things always hurt," he explained, happy that he knew something someone else didn't. It made him proud. "Things always hurt, like falling over or …" He tried to think of something else that hurt. "Or when you got to sleep and you're skin falls open and things. But that would hurt anyway, do you understand?"

"Yes. But what if these people are against the Initiative? And they kill us?"

Angel blinked. Initiative… initiate? Against something started?

"I don't know those words."

"You don't know the Initiative?"

"No."

"It's where we were. They looked after us."

Looked after? "Father," Angel said, trying to make it make sense.

"Yes, Father, he was part of the Initiative." Three seemed happier. "Did you know Father?"

"Yes. Father is… Father." He blinked. He suddenly realised Father wasn't with them. "Do you know where he is?"

Three's hands weren't clenched in his shirt anymore; he was still puffy from leaking but he seemed a little better. His face was resting on Angel's forearm, and he could only just make out his features in the darkness. "In the Initiative," he said softly.

"The building."

"Did you stay in the same small rooms?" Three asked.

Angel nodded. He hadn't thought they were small. Not then. Now he was glad he wasn't there now. After seeing something so huge and new, he couldn't go back to sameness. He suddenly felt a niggle in his belly.

"I did too. Do you have a Two?"

"A Two?" he asked distractedly.

"I had Two to talk to when she was let in. Who did you have?"

"Father, and Will. He would come in sometimes." He shifted, getting up.

"Where are you going?" Three asked.

"I have to ask Will if I have to go back to the four-part world." He turned away and shuffled past the sleeping people, slipping back through the material and over the seat.

Will beamed at him when he came back. "Hello. Have a nice rest?"

He smiled back. He always did when Will smiled. It was like his smile made him react that way. "I didn't sleep. I was talking."

"To who?"

"Three," he said. "Am I going back to the four-part world?"

Will blinked at him. "Did Three tell you that?"

Confused, Angel shook his head.

"No, you're not going back. We're going far away from it, in fact."

Angel felt confused, inside his chest. It was a strange feeling. He'd like to be able to go there again… but not stay there forever, still come out in the van-car with Will.

"I can't have both?"

Will watched him for a long time, seriously. "Do you not like it out here, Angel?"

"I like it out here. But I feel strange about not going back."

"You miss it."

"Miss?"

"To miss something is to want something you had."

He thought about that. He could use the word miss on something else. "I missed you when you were gone."

Will smiled again, not as big as before, but softer. "I missed you too."

"You wanted to talk to me?"

"Yes."

That was interesting. He knew he wanted to talk to Will all that time but it hadn't occurred to him Will might want things as well.

"What else do you miss?"

"Where I grew up." He paused. "So I guess I can understand why you miss your four-part world."

"Can I ever go back?"

Will didn't say anything for a moment, the lights from the other cars sliding over his face. "No. You can't."

Something stirred inside his chest. "What about Father? Will I see him again?"

"No."

He slumped in the chair. He hadn't thought about that. Never again?

"I'm sorry."

That word again. Will had used it a lot. "What is sorry?"

"It's… you say 'sorry' when you hurt someone."

"You didn't hurt me."

"Or when you tell them something that hurts."

"You didn't hurt me," he repeated.

"There's emotional hurt too, pet. Not just physical."

"Hurt my emotions," Angel said, testing the words out, rolling them around on his tongue.

He looked at Will who was back to watching the road. He couldn't see the blue in his eyes; his head was resting against the seat and he was watching the road down his nose. Black eyelashes. He reached over to touch them but Will caught his hand.

"Remember what I said about the person driving?"

"Don't touch them?"

"That's right." He smiled. "No touching."

"Why don't you like me touching you?" he asked.

"Because I'm driving."

"No, other times too. You always tell me to stop."

Will sighed. "People don't just touch each other Angel. There has to be a reason for it, like a hug to say goodbye to someone."

"But how will I know what you feel like?"

His lips smiled, his teeth shiny white. "I don't know."

Angel quickly reached out and ran his fingers down Will's cheek. "I like to touch you."

He did. His skin was smooth. "I think everyone should be able to touch everyone, whenever they want to."

Will laughed again, moving the van-car off the big road. "We're stopping!" he suddenly called.

Fred jerked awake next to him. "Mpphgff?" he said.

"What does that mean?" Angel asked him.

He blinked sleepily at him before curling up the other way as Will stopped the car. Angel scrambled over Fred's lap, causing him to call out, and jumped outside. Another building. Met's Inn.

"In…n." What was the extra 'n' for?

He went over to the wall to feel it. Rough yellow walls in the black night. The lights lit up the van-car and the walls. Sick looking plants were in a small garden to the side. He went over to see if there were any roses.

"Don't go too far," Will said softly.

He turned back and smiled, watching Will pull bags and people out of the van-car for a moment before he headed towards the flowers again.


Ten

"We've searched all of Sunnydale and Los Angeles, we are now fanning out across neighboring counties," General Hopkins said in his sharp brisk snap of a voice, "systematically searching from one suburb to another. It will take time... but we will find them."

"It's too slow!" Travers hissed.

He stood up, jarring his cane on the floor with a loud clink that echoed off the silent concrete walls. "I want them back. The smaller the contamination, the better we can remove it completely."

The silent heads around the table stared at him solemnly, backlit and threatening, crew cut with a thin veneer of civility in their eyes. The men were smart. They wanted to remove all threat.

"Professor Travers, I understand your behavioral experiment is of significant importance..." Colonel Matthews said. "But you have to appreciate the fact that we have a potentially hazardous situation on our hands. If either of the remaining Origin subjects were ever exposed to the media..."

Travers sighed, impatient. "Which is why we have to get them back."

"Eradicate them." Colonel Boon rasped from the shadows. "Eradicate them all."

Travers glared at him. Neither of them spoke for a glacial moment. "Bring me the test subjects. I want them. Eradicate the ones that stole them if you must, but bring back the subjects." He turned without another word, and left the conference room, leaving the boorish soldiers to their tactics and war games.

He returned to his dark study in the concrete underground walls, sitting down in his creaking leather chair. The furniture in the room was as old and bone weary as he was. He sighed softly, clicking on the lamp as he leaned forward and plucked the small sterile jar from the shelves. He rested back in his chair and cradled it on his lap, looking at the tiny contents fondly.

He was at a loss without his work. He was floundering. He rolled the jar in his hands, making Angel's tiny baby teeth clink and clatter against each other.

A few of the bigger molars they'd removed and strengthened with lacquer clinked against the smaller; the chalk white browned where the bones had clung to his jaw.

Perfect teeth. Every one.

---

Will woke up with something warm and heavy wrapped around him. He blinked, the rays of sunlight spearing through the crack in the curtains, hurting his eyes. A big hand was cradling his throat. He looked down to see Angel's leg thrown over his waist. His back was skin to hot skin with Angel's chest.

He felt a tightening squiggle in his stomach he hadn't felt in a long time.

As Angel breathed he could feel his arm shifting slightly on his chest. Will's body became hypersensitive, goose bumped and ticklish, his nipples peaked.

He swallowed, his throat dry, feeling a hot blush creep over his face as he heard Fred shift on the other bed, letting out a fluttering sigh. He was rigid. Could Fred see them?

He closed his eyes pretending to be asleep as Angel's heated breath puffed against the back of his neck. He heard a little snore, more of a snuffle, from across the room as Fred shifted in her covers.

A little mumble from Angel, his body shifting a big soft cotton-covered bulge against Will's backside.

Will sat up slowly, swinging his bare feet out onto the floor, hunched back over his own half hardness. He sighed, feeling young, very young, confused as he had been when he was a boy.

He snuck a look over his shoulder and his stomach turned to Jello at the sight of Angel bed-mussed and sleeping peacefully on his pillow. His lips were parted enough to reveal a sliver of flat, shiny teeth.

Eyes on Angel's face, he gingerly stood, not wanting to wake him up, too embarrassed to talk to him or answer his maddeningly innocent questions. He grabbed some jeans and fags and hurried outside, pulling the pants on in the rising sunshine, wincing as he maneuvered his interested cock behind his fly.

He pulled out a cigarette, lighting it quickly, bare chested and shivering as the cold of the night clung to the morning air. He puffed smoke signals as he wandered around on frozen feet. Cars and trucks zoomed past sporadically, leaving a heavy silence in their wake, a waiting silence, anxiously waiting for the next car to speed past.

He wandered out onto the grass, shivering a little as the freezing dew slipped between his toes, waking him up. It smelled crisp, even next to a semi-highway. Out of Sunnydale, they'd traveled a coast road for a while, before heading across California up into Nevada.

He breathed deep, filling his lungs with burning tar smoke and wide-open air. It was nice. Being out here. Away from everything he'd ever really known.

Apart from Angel.

Will's whole world had been flipped around.

Will was never one to be kept inside. He didn't like the indoors, liked to stay out for long days of drink and smoke and come back to sleep before tumbling out again. For the past few years though, it had felt like he was living in a cage. The Initiative buildings were dark and cruel looking, all concrete and track lighting. He hated it. But he was out now. Not like he could go back, even if he wanted to. He puffed on his cigarette. He frowned; holding his fingers out as his eyes caught something. The tips of his fingers were turning a little yellow on his left hand. Too many cigarettes lately.

He brushed it off easily and took another satisfying pull of smoke, feeling it expand lovingly in his lungs.

He sat down on the edge of the concrete path running round the hotel, knees up, staring into the small group of shops across the parking lot from him. He puffed slowly, watching the closed shops and wondering who worked there, in the tiny rest stop in the middle of a highway.

They must be close to a town.

A few fast food joints, a motel and a gas station across the parking lot. He sucked in ash to the filter, stabbing it out in the dirt and pegging it into a stinking dumpster he found hidden in the back.

Unwilling to go back just yet, he wandered over to the strip of shops and peered in the dark windows. He wanted pancakes. He'd have to wait a bit longer for them though. Maybe once they reached Salem. Shouldn't be too long now.

Please, he prayed silently, closing his eyes, please let Oz have bought shaker pancakes.

His mouth watered.

He walked back to the room, quietly letting himself in as the day started to heat up. Angel was sitting cross-legged on Fred's bed, and she had her head propped up on her elbow as she giggled.

They both turned around as he entered.

"Hey," Fred said perkily, "where'd you go?"

"Went out for a smoke."

"Smoke?" Angel asked.

Will pulled out a fag and held it up. "Smoke."

"What does it taste like?"

"Horrible." Fred said, fondly chastising. "Smoking is a nasty habit."

Angel turned back to him. "Why do you smoke?"

"Because," he said, smiling to take the edge off the shortness, stepping past them both and into the bathroom.

He slipped into the shower, washing quickly and brushing his teeth as the spray poured over him, the heat of it feeling icy on his frozen feet until the blood warmed.

He slipped his jeans back on, balling the boxers up ready for laundry. He went back out into the room, seeing Fred sipping some milk-less tea as she curled up on her bed, watching Angel play with the kettle.

"Hot water in that." Will warned, throwing his boxers towards his bag as he walked over.

"I know," Angel said airily, not turning around, "Fred told me."

"Oh."

He glanced at Fred who smiled and went back to enjoying her tea. He pulled a shirt out of his bag and tugged it on.

"Are you showering?" he asked Fred.

"Nah, I'm forgoing for tea." She sipped, closing her eyes and scrunching up her nose in pleasure.

"Angel, are you showering?"

"Yes," he said, clicking the kettle on and off.

"Well go, we're leaving soon."

Angel nodded and put the kettle down, turning and slipping into the bathroom. Will paused, waiting for the water to shush on, and the sibilant hiss of it spraying innocuously over Angel's body.

"I'll go see the others."

Fred nodded, sipping her tea and grabbing some jeans. Will pulled some ragged old boots on, grabbed his wallet and key and slipped out again. He knocked on the next door. No answer. He knocked again, louder.

"We're up, we're up." He heard Gunn call from inside. A few heavy footfalls and the door opened, revealing Philip in an unnaturally sloppy state, his dark hair sticking up in peaks, his eyelids still puffy with sleep.

"When are we leaving?" He croaked. Three came up behind his shoulder, peering out at Will with scared-cat eyes.

"Maybe half an hour?"

Three slipped past Philip, flicking wary looks in Will's direction. He was already dressed, sans footwear, and he slipped along the wall a little, looking shyly out at the bright sun. Philip watched him, looking like he was about to fall asleep on the door.

"We'll get something on the way," Will said, watching Three's thin body slither along the wall away from them.

"Coffee," he mumbled, closing the door.

Will smiled and headed after Three. "Do you want to come get coffee with me?" he asked him.

Three spun around, watching him with his wide watery green eyes. He had a suspicious look on his face again, like he was trying to sniff out danger. He nodded jerkily and Will breezed past him, heading out over the grass towards the just opening shops. Three followed closely, entering the shop moments after Will.

"Hey," Will said to the small girl who was manning the till with a sleepy distant look in her eyes.

"Can I help you?"

"Yeah... can I get... six coffees, five with milk, and an orange juice?" Angel was the only one of the party who didn't like coffee. He said it tasted like sweat.

He'd turned out to be a particularly finicky eater. Three was more easy-going. Will grabbed a handful of sugar packets. He couldn't remember who took sugar.

Three was looking at a tray of doughnuts and cakes behind glass. "Can I have one of those?" He asked, pointing at a carrot cake slice wrapped up in plastic.

"And one of those," Will said.

The woman pulled it out and handed it over to him. "Thank you," Three said quietly, biting into it with relish.

"Like cake?" Will asked.

Three blinked at him for a moment and then nodded.

"It's nice," Will said.

There was a silence between them, allowing them to listen to the sound of the Styrofoam mugs being filled. The woman filled up two cardboard carriers and set them on the counter, taking the money from Will. Three picked up one carefully, and Will took the other carrier, heading back to the rooms.

"How are you doing?" Will asked quietly.

"It's strange," he said, staring down at the coffees he held.

Will nodded. "I'm sure it is."

He didn't ask if it was better. Didn't want to know the answer in case it wasn't the one he wanted. They walked back to the side-by-side rooms. Gunn's room was open, and he looked inside to see Philip shoving toothbrushes and toiletries away, looking much more human with his hair wet and combed.

"Coffee?" He asked.

"Coffee."

Will set it down and threw some sugars next to it. Three set his down as well, slipping a container out and sugaring it for himself.

"Where are Gunn and Alex?" Will asked.

"Van."

Will was just about to pick up two coffees and the orange juice when he heard a small Fred sounding shriek from behind the next room. He hurried out of Philip's room and slammed inside his own, hearing Fred screech again as Angel rolled her over his head and threw her behind him onto the bed. She bounced, her thin limbs at all angles before Angel grabbed her by the ankle and started pulling her off the covers. Will jumped over the bed and grabbed Angel pulling them both back onto the ground before he realized Fred was cackling with laughter.

She pulled herself upright, her thin hair flyaway, red faced as she tried to catch her breath. She tugged her denim miniskirt back down over her thighs and smoothed her hair.

"Next time," she said still breathing hard with residual laughter, "the answer is no."

"You're not strong," Angel said proudly, still held down by Will's hands. "I win."

"Yes, okay! Win, you win!" Fred said, rubbing her upper arm.

"What happened?" Will asked, confused.

"I won wrestling."

"He asked me to wrestle," she said embarrassed. "I didn't think he was going to bounce me on my head."

"Angel, you can't-" Will started, before Fred cut him off.

"It's okay Will," She said soothingly. "I should have said no."

Angel turned to him, confused. "You're upset. I asked him and he said yes."

Will frowned. Fred frowned. Angel looked confused. Will felt a little weight floating around in his stomach.

"You said it was alright if both agreed. He agreed," Angel continued, gesturing at Fred.

Will felt the dead weight settle in at the pronoun. "She agreed. Fred is a girl..." he said slowly.

Angel blinked as the seconds stretched out, Will positively fearing what the next question would be.

"What's a girl?"

Oh god no.

"He doesn't know what girls are?" Fred asked, her eyes flicking to Will.

"Yes... no, Angel," He turned to him, pulling him up from the floor. "Angel, I saw your books. You had books on human anatomy."

Angel nodded happily. "Yes."

"Yes," Will said.

"Angel, you know how male bodies work?" Fred asked.

"Yes."

"What about female bodies?"

Will slumped onto the bed at the slight confusion that creased Angel's brow, and covered his face with his hand. He groaned. Too early.

"What's a female body?"

Will smacked his hand against his face.

"Will?" Angel prodded.

"Okay, later," Will said briskly. "Later. Coffee's in the next room, get in the van, we'll do this later." He said, his mind running a mile a minute.

He hadn't thought that... he just hadn't thought. Of course his father wouldn't want Angel knowing there was another gender. It would raise more questions than it would answer.

"Is this about hair?" Angel asked, narrowing his eyes in thought.

"Grab your bag," Will said as Fred made a quick exit out the door. "I'll tell you it later."

Will jumped up and grabbed his and Angel's bags, shuffling out the door with them.

"Fred's a girl... are you a girl?" Angel asked, coming up behind him.

Will shoved his bag at him and he caught it, still looking at him waiting for an answer. Will sighed.

"There are different types of humans-"

"Races." Angel identified.

"No... well yes. But…okay. There are men and women." He said, cutting off with a sigh as he heard Gunn cracking up behind him.

"Take the bags," he snapped.

Gunn nodded and ran forward with a huge grin on his face. He winked at Angel. "You're gonna enjoy this talk, Angel."

Will pulled Angel away. "There are two sexes."

"So how does race fit in?"

"Okay, Fred is a Caucasian female. You are Caucasian male."

"Alright."

Will nodded.

"So why are there two? If he has the same skin colour?"

Will's lips tensed into a thin line as he fretted about how to explain. "Okay, no. Girl's are 'she', men are 'he'."

"She."

"She instead of he. Her instead of him."

Angel nodded again, looking more confused then when they had started. "So how can you tell when someone is a girl?"

Will blinked. "You can't tell the difference?"

Now Angel looked worried. "Am I meant to?" He whispered.

Will sighed. "It's probably hard because you've never seen people, so everyone looks wildly different." He paused, thinking. "Okay, what are the differences between Fred and me?"

"He's... she's thin. And has long hair."

Okay those weren't very good indicators. "What about her face? What's different?"

Angel's eyes ticked over to Fred and Gunn who were watching them from the truck. "It's... smaller?" He said, obviously reaching to find something different.

"Angel," he sighed, already tired. "Can we do this later?"

"It's not smaller!" Angel said, worried.

"No, no, it's not you," he smiled, "It's just... it's a difficult explanation and I need to think about how to say it to you, so we both don't get confused."

"Alright..."

He paused. "Now?"

"No," Will laughed, curling his hand around Angel's wrist. "Come on."

"Why are there different sexes?"

"To mate, Angel. We need two to have sex. Sex brings about babies... most of the time, and that's how humans keep their population alive."

"Because people get dead."

Will stopped. "You know about death?"

He nodded. "Three told me," he said solemnly.

Will paused. "Well he's right. People die. If there was no way to get more humans, we wouldn't exist."

"And you need two people to make another person."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"It's a whole... that's what I have to think about explaining."

Angel nodded. They headed back to the van. Fred was sitting in the driver's seat, sipping her coffee. Everyone else was just hanging around it, smirking at them.

"Did you have The Talk?" Gunn asked, trying not to laugh.

"No, not exactly," Will said guiltily. "I don't have time right now."

Alex nodded, smiling.

"I don't," Will said defensively.

"Okay," Gunn and Alex chorused.

Will needed coffee. "Is my coffee still in your room?"

"Yeah, we left the doors open, Phil's returning the keys."

"Great." He jogged over to the building, slipping inside and grabbing his coffee and Angel's juice. Damn he was hungry.

He slipped back out and saw the van's back doors were open, and Angel Gunn and Alex weren't around. He headed slowly over, seeing Fred sitting behind the wheel with the door open to let air through. He walked round the back and looked in, seeing Angel, Gunn and Alex all sitting on the edge of the mattress, looking at a magazine in Angel's hands.

Angel looked up at him, lips parted, completely shocked. Will closed his eyes, stifling laughter. He knew what the magazine was without even seeing it.

He felt a bubble of chuckles rising as he stepped in, catching sight of the close up shot of cock in cunt.

"Why are you giving Angel porn?"

"He wanted to know what sex was," Alex said, laughter imminent. "We thought a visual aid would help."

Fred stuck her head through the curtain, eyes wide. "What did I just hear?"

"Tweedle Dee and Dum here are giving Angel skin mags," Will said, pulling it from Angel's fingers.

"Whose was it?" She said laughing, her cheeks reddening.

"Wasn't mine." Gunn and Alex said at once.

"I think it was Will's or something." Gunn said.

Will slapped him over the face with the copy of Hardcore Extreme, before throwing it on Alex's lap.

"Wait!" Angel cried, a little disgusted, his confused tone making everyone pause. "How is peeing in someone going to make a person?"

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