What Was It About Wesley? by TalesofSpike
 
 
Chapter #1 - What Was It About Wesley?
 








Note: Thanks to my beta t_geyer for her unending patience, perseverance and support.
for Jerusha

Happy Birthday, honey! Feel better soon!

Set some time after 'The Moonlight Gamblers', so the kitten that Spike procured for Rosa is now a mostly grown up, very fluffy black and white cat.

Not for the first time, he looked around the room and wondered what exactly Wesley Wyndam Pryce had that made all the women in the room so damned attentive. Look at them all just watching him prowl the room, text in hand, as he explained the latest in a long line of prophecies.

He had found the damn thing. He had all but dumped the book in the watcher's lap, but they never gazed at him like that. It had been altogether too long since he'd had bevies of beautiful women hanging on his every syllable. Okay, to that dim furball moggie, who was meant to belong to the watcher's step-daughter, it was just that he was the only moving target in the room and, as such, if she could by some miracle hamstring him with her half-hearted swipes at his legs, he was fair game. Give her a ball of wool and she would probably give it the same attention, but even Bee was looking at him as if he'd done some marvellous thing, when she could have read that book as easily as yesterday's Sunnydale Times... if she hadn't been too busy getting acquainted with the witch... Normally, she would have been the one getting the book pushed at her.

Maybe it was the jacket. Personally, he thought brown suede was just a touch Grizzly Adams. Obviously the slayer, her sister, the ex-demon, the witch, the demi-angel, the lawyer, the sproglet and the old demoness disagreed. Alright, so some of them were sitting with their significant others, hand in hand, or in some cases on their significant others, but even when they were absent mindedly playing patty-cake, their eyes were on the watcher. It had to be the jacket. Maybe the next time he was left alone in a room with it, it could meet with an unfortunate accident.

It couldn't be the eyes, because his were an even brighter shade of blue.

Once upon a time, he had thought it was the stubble... Then Rosa had complained that it was scratchy and said that she wouldn't make with the hugs until he got rid of it. Get rid of it he had... and still the females had queued up to worship at the altar of Wes.

Alright, so he was fluent in fifteen languages and could get by with dictionaries in twice as many more. He knew more than that. Did he brag? Did he draw attention and adoration to himself?

Alright, so he had that damn accent, all David Niven meets the RSC but that hardly explained it all. You could bet the slayer wouldn't be half as interested if it was her old watcher, the one that had moved off to Cleveland to start the council anew on the hellmouth. Anyone with any sense would have realised that was where it was needed in the first place. She'd never have given the old man the same attention.

The only female in the room who wasn't taken in was the mutt... and that was because she'd managed to nudge the slayer's behind far enough to one side to get her head on the vampire's leg. Good job black canvas didn't really show the drool patches.

Damn! Bonus points to the watcher. He'd not only managed to translate the prophecy. He'd actually worked out what it meant. Okay, so the watcher got there second... but he'd been hoping for just a little longer to bask in supremacy before the humans worked it out... After all, it wasn't all going to happen until Friday, and it was so much more fun watching them race around when they worked it out at the very last minute.

With a final disgusted exhalation of breath he leapt onto the sofa and draped himself half over Bee and half over Tara. Almost as if she knew what was wrong, Bee reached immediately to tickle behind his ears. Tara's fingers scratched at the base of his tail and Rupert rolled onto his back with a purr.

Okay, the watcher didn't get everything his way. He didn't get to share a bed with two beautiful blondes every night... and translations aside, he couldn't be all that smart. After all, Wes still thought that he was just a cat.