As Gunn opens the office door, he hears Cordelia's voice saying " - know anything about throwing a party, so why don't you just oh hi Gunn!" She slaps the phone book closed and shoves a bunch of papers in the desk drawer.
"We're having a party?"
"Er," says Wes, and looks at his feet.
"Yes!" Cordy's got one of her audition smiles stuck on her face. Lots of teeth, nervous eyes. No wonder she never gets call-backs. "For, um -"
"Twelfth Night," Wes finishes. "January sixth, also known as the Feast of the Epiphany. Traditional end of the holiday season."
"Today's the eighth," Gunn says.
"Really? How can we have . . . Cordelia, you must have been looking at last year's calendar."
"Me? But it was your lame - oh! Gosh, I'm sorry, Wesley. It was all my fault." She's not very good at fake apologizing, either. Cordelia, Gunn figures, is way too much herself, way too 300 percent sure of what she thinks and feels, to ever be much of an actress.
"Now y'all are just pathetic," he says. "So what's up with the surprise party thing anyway? My birthday's not til -." Oh, shit. They wouldn't. They really wouldn't.
Would they?
"Do <em>not</em> tell me there was gonna be a surprise Martin Luther King Day party."
"Told you it was a bad idea," Cordelia mutters, and punches Wes on the arm.
"Ouch! You did not!" Rubbing his arm, Wes puts the desk between himself and Cordelia. "We thought it would be . . . morale-building, Now that we're an independent team, cohesion is more important than ever." Wes, now--he's got a halfway decent line of bullshit. Half the time he probably believes it himself. Gunn's not sure if that means he's really fucked up or just better at acting than Cordy.
"Gotcha. We were gonna have cake and streamers for cohesion."
"Precisely." Then, for some reason Gunn's not sure of but that has to do, maybe, with the way Wesley does take all the teamwork and morale and cohesion and communication stuff seriously, Wes shakes his head with a little, embarrassed laugh. He sits on the edge of the desk and says, "Anyway, we didn't know when your birthday was."
It's kind of funny. Funny enough that Gunn smiles, because they're good people to work with and they're trying hard to be his friends. "Well, great as it is, you two noticing I'm black and all, I don't think Martin Luther King Day's a party kind of holiday."
"I had an Arbor Day party once," Cordelia says. "Any day's better with champagne."
"There was gonna be champagne?"
"Have you looked at our bank account lately? But Chilean sparkling wine's on sale at the liquor store. Four dollars a bottle."
That's about as close to champagne as Gunn's ever been, or is likely to get unless Julia Roberts starts having vampire problems and needs the services of the Still Doesn't Have A Name Agency. But it doesn't matter anyway, because there's not going to be a party. "People say it's all about the spirit of a holiday, right? Christmas is about every damn Who in town singing around the tree, not about the presents. Well, the spirit of Martin Luther King Day, shouldn't that be about . . . about fighting bad guys? Making sure ordinary people can go about their business, safe and sound?"
"In other words, we're not going to get a day off," Wesley says.
"Well, on the plus side, we won't have to drink Chilean sparkling wine." Cordelia takes some bits of newspaper from the desk drawer and throws them into the trash. "I wish you'd come in before I clipped all those coupons."
"How long do they last? My birthday's February eighteenth." Or maybe by then Julia will have called and they'll drink champagne all night.
No. Probably not. But maybe they'll have made the world a little better.
Date: 4/20/2007
Notes: Written for my daily ficlet project, to a prompt by Executrix.
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