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quinaraI hope everyone's enjoying reading along! Here's chapter eleven. :)
Turn and Face the Strain.
[Sequel to The More Things Stay the Same and As Good as a Rest.]
When Buffy thought about falling in love again, she didn't expect it to be nearly so complicated as it actually turns out to be.
Also, she didn't expect it to be Spike. (She's not sure he did either.)
[Notes + Chapter One: I'm Not a Political Animal, But.]
/
[Chapter Ten: That’s Where Even Your Best Political Minds Can Drop the Ball.]
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Chapter Eleven: You’re Not Taking the Pulse of the Public.
“Well, I’ve got naff all my end. Sorry, love.”
“No… That’s fine. We can still go with the original plan. Cordy and I’ll hang here until Kate shows up and then we’ll catch up with you at Wesley’s.”
“All right. But I was thinking, yeah, d’you want me to have a look-see round the hotel first, before I meet you? Might be able to sniff something out or what have you.”
“Yeah, sure. That sounds like a good idea, actually; we don’t have much else to go on. Whatever you think might help.”
“There’s probably nothing to find, but… Don’t fret; we’ll track down the big lug somehow. Worst comes to worst, we can start buying up supplies of hair gel – smoke him out of the woodwork.”
“Not funny, Spike…”
“Oh, right? Then why are you laughing?”
“That wasn’t laughing! That was dismay.”
“Yeah right it was.”
“You just get on with your sniffing, Scooby-Doo. Velma and I are gonna wait for, uh, whichever one Kate is and get on with reading the fairground owner’s diary, or whatever.”
“You wish you’d never started that analogy, don’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“Though Daphne and the dog… It’s kinky, I’ll say that for it. Want me wagging my tail, do you?”
“OK, I am so hanging up now.”
He rode fast to LA. He’d called Tara, who’d told him that if Kate had a cell phone, she didn’t know the number – and then the police department, but they’d basically said that even the SDPD wasn’t stupid enough to give out an officer’s number to anyone who called up claiming to know them. Willow had offered to hack into the police database, but he hadn’t been sure how that stood up in Buffy’s moral code… According to Red, they did it all the time, but he was sceptical. Data was still property, right? You couldn’t not be evil by nicking it or kidnapping it or whatever hacking amounted to in the great Buffy Summers system of metaphor.
Anyway, Dawn had been sobering up a little crotchety after her beer, so it seemed best to make himself scarce. He didn’t hang around.
“Ride careful.”
That was what Buffy had told him, which warmed the cockles of his heart even if nothing else did. The advice was all relative, naturally, because had no real intention of riding any differently from how he usually did down the highway, which was probably reckless for a human but perfectly reasonable, he thought, for a supernatural creature like him who’d been dodging stakes from the day he’d been fledged. They might have all come from Angelus, who was easy to predict, but that didn’t matter in the scheme of things.
As it was, the journey went by in one long blast of wind through his jacket. He missed his coat, but the bike was still good: it let him filter quickly and comfortably through some truly horrendous traffic, zip through the suburbs and into the city proper.
Before he headed over to Wesley’s apartment, like he’d said to Buffy he would, Spike aimed for the scene of the crime. The plan in his head was to be useful: there could well be something there a vampire nose could pick up that Buffy’s delicate slayer-nostrils hadn’t managed to get a handle on. And so he rode right down behind the hotel, up the alleyway to get his bike as close to the building as possible. The exterior was much as Buffy had described: windows gutted out, smoke marks up the façade in a way that proved how long it had taken for someone to call the authorities – but, going in through the back, it looked as though the garden had survived at least. The fountain was entirely intact, lawn well mown; the jasmine was blossoming in the moonlight.
There was, however, something definitely amiss. One of the balconies on the second floor had what looked like a pennant flying from the balustrade, drooping and waving gently in the breeze. Heading closer, Spike realised that it was a collection of bedsheets tied together, the four corners of one single sheet knotted at the corners to larger, king size lengths of cotton which stretched up the side of the building, like a hammock on suspension lines. It didn’t quite reach the ground and it reeked of smoke, but it looked strong enough to hold something reasonably light. Yeah, this hadn't been mentioned at all; he wondered if Buffy and the others even knew it was here.
Lying on the patio next to the sheet contraption was the more obvious paraphernalia Spike expected from a burnt out building: a pile of things to land on. The selection was fairly scanty, like whoever had used it had been forced to act in a rush, but there was a child’s mattress there, Spike discovered as he rooted through the pile, which, yeah, had definitely belonged to Angel’s kid, then another single mattress and then all manner of duvets and pillows, with the corners of their covers cleverly tied together so the collection was more compressed and squishy than it would have been with all the same things flat.
It didn’t look like the sort of thing Angel would have put together, if only because his Angelness would have been able to comfortably lift a few more decent-sized mattresses and throw them out of the window, which would have been far safer. One of the duvets was clearly his, and clearly needed a wash, but the others seemed to belong to the uninhabited parts of the hotel, and smelled, to varying degrees, of smoked mould – which, Spike decided very quickly as he dropped the bedding and snorted rapidly to clear his nose, he didn’t want to smell again.
Someone had escaped from here, it seemed to him, and it hadn’t been Angel. They’d had to lower something down before they took a jump, and if Spike was going to exercise the analytical part of his brain that every now and then managed to surprise him, the obvious answer was the kid. Connor. Someone had been left on babysitting duty when all this had gone down, and even though they’d had enough time to concoct all this business, they hadn’t had the opportunity to escape through the lobby or whatever rudimentary fire escape system this old place had. That meant arson, most likely, not that it hadn’t been the most likely option already. It probably meant human as well, though, because most demons had the wherewithal to do their own bloody murdering rather than spark a match and see.
The question now, then, was whether Angel’s arsonist had known his son was in the building when they’d set it on fire. Because, if he had, then Angel was going to kill him, soul or no soul. And if Spike wasn’t lucky, he was going to get him, Buffy and everyone else to help.
Fuck.
That couldn’t happen, Spike thought as he looked around the garden. Not that he gave a shit about whoever had done this – they’d played their hand the moment they’d thought they could push Angel this far and not see the demon come out. Maybe that was their plan; who knew? The point was, he wasn’t having Buffy party to anything she would see as murder. She wouldn’t let herself be party to it in the first place, if she knew it was going on, but if they weren’t careful then it would be set in play without their help. Angel would always be the most manipulative bastard around, after all.
Making his way round to the front of the building, Spike tried to work out what he needed to do. When his luck held, he could sometimes come up with a plan that didn’t entirely leave him in the shit, so maybe this was an occasion to try and give it a go. He needed to get hold of either Angel or his arsonist before Buffy was too embroiled in the picture, which meant he should probably try and track the bugger down before he met up with the others at Wesley the Watcher’s apartment.
How he might actually go about that, of course, was another question entirely. Standing on the steps of the Hyperion’s front entrance, Spike couldn’t really get a sense of anyone who’d left – certainly not a recent sense that would take him anywhere useful. The amount of cologne Angel wore meant there were more than enough traces of it still around, probably left by his hands on the brass plates of the door, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere either, even with a full CSI kit and a lab full of computers.
There was, however, one avenue that Spike wanted to try before he forced himself to abandon the the capabilities of his nose. A whole fire department of extra humans had been through here, wreathing the place in tape and warning signs, so a straightforward sniff around inside wasn’t going to get him anywhere. But, at the same time, it wasn’t like Angel not to have more than one escape route, and if Spike was lucky, then this one would be a lot more personalised…
Kicking through the barred front door, Spike found himself face to face with the destruction inside the lobby. It hadn’t been long since he and Buffy had been here the last time, when he’d spent not an unpleasant afternoon lying on the couch in the middle of the room with least poncy parts of Angel’s library, so he could remember what it was meant to look like. Now, and it made his stomach turn a little to see it, the whole place was gone: the ottoman was charred to nothing apart from its metal frame and the reception desk had cracked and crumbled into itself like firewood. Maybe he couldn't find it in his soulless heart to care that much, but it was quite a sad sight, really.
As he walked across the floor, flaked pieces of paint and stucco crunched under Spike’s feet, fallen from the charred walls and ceiling. Ignoring all of that, however, he headed to the side of the reception desks, where the offices were. All of the back rooms looked just as wrecked as the main one, with enough books blackened and burnt to make him feel a an actual twinge of sympathy, because, yeah, it was a bit sad. Not as sad as when all of his own stuff had gone up in flames, but it was a terrible business, this burning of possessions.
Distracting himself with the search, it wasn’t long before he found what he was looking for: the entrance to whatever it was that served as the Hyperion’s basement. Jackpot. Sure enough, as he walked down the stairs, he found the thing you found in all good basements: a sewer entrance.
The LA brand of sewer smell was different to its upstate competitor, but it was still more than distinguishable. Now that the air wasn’t quite so crowded with the scent of smoke and general panic, Spike thought he was able to catch some sort of trail that Angel might actually have left when he was last out of the hotel. He’d spent so many years trailing through sewers – and, hell, London under the reign of old Vicky – that it was easy to filter out the smell of excrement, so he was fairly certain this was what he needed to follow. Letting his sense of the old hotel fade - and with it his disturbing feelings of upset - he stomped off down the watery pathway.
It felt better to be on his feet, to a certain extent, and stalk through the night like a creature who belonged to it. The sewerways in Los Angeles seemed to be as demon-friendly as the ones back in Sunny-D, even if he had no way of knowing where he was going here, apart from in the most general, Angely direction possible.
What was most certainly to be noticed in the LA route, however, was the bloody disconcerting friendliness of the few demons he encountered along the way. It wasn’t long after sunset, of course, so the bigger bads could be presumed busy sleeping in, getting drunk, having a shag or all manner of disreputable activities, while the people he was running into here were those with sunny dispositions and get-up-and-go personalities - the sort who'd rather operate in the daytime if they could.
Still, the third time this happened, when he passed a particularly ugly bugger with massive horns and what were possibly camel humps running down his arms, Spike had an idea.
“Hey!” the demon said with a smile, waving the hand that wasn’t holding a brown paper bag of shopping.
This time, Spike didn’t scowl and push on his way, but came to a pause. He couldn’t bring himself to smile, so didn’t try and force it, but he managed to affect a curious expression all the same. “Hello mate,” he said, leaving the demon space to pass but stopping close enough to him that he felt obliged to stop all the same. “Could I ask you a quick question? It won’t take a tick.”
A bemused, nice-but-dim expression passed over the demon’s face. “Sure, pal,” was the first thing he said, even as he grimaced slightly. “Shoot.”
“All right,” Spike agreed, trying to make himself seem like the least threatening creature of the night no demon should fuck with or lie to possible. It wasn’t an easy ask. “You don’t happen to know a vampire called Angel, do you? Got a soul, big hair, personality a bit like a mushroom?” The demon clearly did know him, because he froze up - Spike had a feeling it was the mushroom description that had tipped it – so he quickly tried to capitalise on the moment. In a reassuring way. “Now, now, I don’t want any trouble,” he said, gesturing with his empty hands. “I’m…” Ah, self-definition, now that was a tricky one. “I’m family of his, from out of town.” That worked, just about. “Something’s happened where he was living, it looks like; I’m trying to track him down, find out if anyone’s seen him.”
“You’re not…” the demon began, far too terrified for something that looked like it could squash a bus; his groceries were jittering. “You’re not one of them, are you?”
“One of who?” Spike pushed.
The demon looked nervously over his shoulder before replying. “One of… Oh, man, there’s been so many people in town recently. And I – I got no beef with Angel, you know? Not that I mean…!” He was clearly trying to stay on Spike’s good side, but wasn’t quite sharp enough to speak and say nothing. “I don’t want any trouble. Angel’s never bothered me; I ain’t ever bothered him. I don’t know…”
“You know something happened to him at the hotel, don’t you?” Spike summarised, pinning the demon still with a glare that was still at least two parts swagger from the old days, even if it was one part leniency. Why he wasn’t just beating the lumpy git until he talked, Spike didn’t know, but it didn’t seem particularly sporting – and the poor bloke’s food would get all squashed. He knew how that went: there was nothing more annoying than making it to the shops only to get beaten up and lose your haul on the way home. Right now, there was no call for it – and Spike didn’t fancy getting egg on his new jeans. “I’m not out to get him,” he explained then, still trying to be reasonable, even as the demon trembled in the sewer’s gloomy light. “As I said, he’s family. All I need is to find him, if you know where he is.”
The demon looked torn, glancing back and forth down the tunnel like he wished he’d taken another way home. “I heard…” he eventually said, and Spike tried to nod encouragingly. “I heard he was hiding out somewhere, maybe Echo Park? People are getting out of there, man, don’t wanna get burned out. Some of us asphyxiate real easy.”
Echo Park, eh? That wasn’t all that far, but it was more than Spike wanted to walk right now. Luckily enough, it was on the way to Wesley’s apartment, so he wouldn’t even be going off-route; he’d get the bike and see what he could find out before he headed on to meet up with Buffy. “Cheers, mate,” he told the demon anyway, slapping a hand to one of the lumps on his arm – remembering too late that that sort of thing tended to be some sort of sex organ far more often than you liked.
Fortunately, it didn’t look as though he’d just given the demon an unsolicited handjob, even if he did immediately sneeze. “No problem,” he got out, sniffly. ACHOO. “Really.”
Giving him a salute, Spike headed on his way to the sound of repeated sneezing.
It wasn’t long before Spike was in Echo Park, cruising around on the lookout for likely places Angel might have been hiding. There were quite a few of them, as it happened, which Spike wasn’t sure what to do about. There were enough shops and restaurants open at this hour, but most of the warehouses looked like they were waiting for their early morning deliveries and were pretty much shut down for the night. From the outside it was hard to tell which ones were abandoned and which ones were just shut up. The graffiti certainly wasn’t going to help him.
As luck would have it, however, on the third pass by the park itself Spike caught sight of the green bloke they’d met last time – Lorne. He had a trench coat and a trilby, coupled with some natty sunglasses, but the green was still pretty recognisable, not least as he dashed furtively across the street by some nicely flood-lit road works. Clearly Angel hadn’t been teaching his people about the meaning of stealth.
Keeping an eye on the demon, Spike eased his way out of traffic and parked the bike at the mouth of an alleyway. There was a niggle in his brain that he should really secure the bike somewhere a bit less open, because he was getting worryingly attached to the thing, but he managed to dismiss that and get on with his stalking before Lorne was out of sight.
It was like riding a bike, really – another bike – and Spike found himself instinctively slipping through the shadows on Lorne’s trail, barely earning a glance back over the demon’s shoulder.
The problem with this sort of prey-trailing, of course, was that it was boring. He’d been forced to master the technique back in the early days, and it wasn’t that hard for a vampire with half a mind about him to learn how to move quickly, silently and invisibly. If you did it perfectly, however, the prey never even knew you were coming, which as far as Spike was concerned was no fun at all. It was always nicer to give a hint that something bad was about to happen, get their heartbeats going, get the adrenaline pumping for a potentially decent fight before you had your dinner.
But now wasn’t the time for that, so he persevered, drifting ever closer to the green meanie, who spent most of his time looking in the wrong direction. By the time he actually came to the back of a warehouse and slipped inside, however, Spike was more than ready to make an entrance – have a bit of fun.
“You’re really slipping in your old age, mate,” he carolled as a greeting, striding onto the warehouse floor where he found Angel and the gang gasping in gratifying shock. “I mean, really, time was you could manage your minions better than this,” he finished with a smirk.
“Spike,” Angel growled, clutching little baby Connor to his chest. He looked - like he needed a shave, of all things, even if it would take him a little while yet to get beyond a five o’clock shadow to anything resembling designer stubble. There was a reason you never saw a vampire with a beard, after all: the hair took bloody ages to grow. “What the hell are you doing here?” Muggins continued, not quite settling into the anticlimax. That bloke Gunn and his girlfriend Fred relaxed, but Lorne still looked shifty. The Fred girl had a sling around an arm like it was broken or something, which suggested she’d been the one to escape with the baby out of the hotel. Fair enough. Wesley was missing. “If you’ve led anyone to us, I’ll…”
“Oh, please,” Spike mocked, unwilling to partake in Angel’s action-movie dialogue, calming down a little. That was the thing about family, wasn't it? Every conversation picked up from the last. “You ought to care more about your dear friend Kermit.” He sent a pointed look Lorne’s way. “Sorry, mate,” he told him, “but incognito you are not, especially in that get-up.”
“Yeah, well, can I get some credit for trying, here?” Lorne replied, dumping his shopping on a nearby table, which seemed to be the dumping ground for anything that needed to be kept off the floor. “If I knew how to blend in I’d have started on it years ago.”
Spike snorted in agreement, still fairly happy in his decision that this bloke was the best out of Angel’s lackeys. It wasn’t like he’d ever managed the trick of looking grey and meaningless either – he’d just made a feature of it when he’d been turned, rather than snivelling in the corner like a miseryguts. And then he’d left it to Mr. Grey himself…
Who was still not impressed. “Again, Spike, why are you in town?” Angel asked. “Did Buffy kick you to the curb or something? Leave you at a loose end so you had to come and bother me?”
“No,” Spike replied, possibly a bit too quickly. It wasn’t his fault it had been touch and go for a little while there. “Me and Buffy are fine, thank you. Or not, now that I think about it.” Forcibly, he recovered his swagger, two hands on his hips and his chin raised a touch.
It made Angel roll his eyes. “Then what happened to your coat?” he asked.
That almost deflated him. But Spike refused to let it, shrugging off the question and trying to forget his sudden consciousness of how scratchy the new cotton felt on his arms. “Don’t you like the new look?” he asked, straightening his collar. “I decided all that black made me look dead; thought I should get some colour in the mix.” If in doubt, act like you meant whatever it was you’d done. And mock Angel. “You should think about it, mate.”
“He has a point, you know,” Lorne added, which made Angel look even more furious. It was possible that someone with Lorne’s taste in polyester and acid bright colours wasn’t exactly who Spike wanted on his side, but he’d go with whatever he could get.
And so he smiled a winsome grin. “There; see.” Angel fumed.
“Anyway, for those of us who don’t subscribe to Vampire Vogue,” Gunn then piped up, interrupting with a hand in Spike’s direction. “What are you doing here, actually? Come to revel in the misery?”
Looking around the pathetic little hideout, which was kitted out with all of the finest equipment an outdoor activity store could provide, including airbeds and sleeping bags and a neat little gas stove, Spike couldn’t be bothered to keep up the game any longer. Because, yeah, wow, this was miserable. “Buffy’s in town,” he explained, gesturing with his left hand and letting his right settle in a pocket. “Had some legal stuff to sort out. She called in on you lot, found the sorry state your hotel’s been left in, met up with her dear old friend Ms Chase and gave me a bell. Asked me to come help out with the inevitable fallout from the latest mess you’ve got yourself into.” He directed the last comment at Angel, just to make sure he knew that Spike held him to blame for his disrupted evening.
“Right,” Angel replied, apparently a lot less interested in his tale than he’d first made out. “That explains why you’re in LA, but not why you’re here. Where’s Buffy now?”
Spike shrugged. “She was waiting for a mate of hers. Think they’re going to investigate a bit, then we’re going to meet at Wesley’s apartment…” Again, Spike looked around the warehouse, just to make certain he really wasn’t there. It didn’t look like it. There was a drum kit in one corner, which was interesting, but no watcher. “Where is the stuffy git, anyway? You didn’t eat him out of boredom, did you? I know all that scotch is probably doing something nice to his insides, but…”
“Angel would never!” the little twiglet Fred interrupted, with another gratifying gasp, like when he’d walked in. He gave her a wink, glad to have someone who appreciated him.
“Never mind about Wes,” Angel interrupted, drawing Spike’s attention back his way. He didn’t look entirely guilt-free of thoughts about eating, which was odd. Something was going on there. “What was that you were saying about Cordy?” he continued, changing the subject – even more suspicious. “Is she back? Is she OK?”
“Sounds like she’s fine,” Spike offered. If Buffy had said something about her, then he didn’t remember it, so that probably meant she was all right. “Back from her holidays; got her cell phone; pissed off at you for not turning yours on or whatever it is you’ve done with it – and why is it you’ve got a mobile again? Who’s gonna call you, your dry cleaners? Can’t you wait for your machine to take it?” Angel didn’t seem to be enjoying this line of questioning, but as far as Spike was concerned that was for the best. The only way to get anything useful out of Angel was to knock him far enough off balance that he couldn’t help let something slip; it had always been the same. “That’s not it, is it,” Spike continued, therefore. “You probably have a delivery service tacked on, don’t you, so the shirts come straight from the iron into your sweaty little hands?”
And yet, this barrage of unconstrained wit didn’t garner much of a response, which left them all standing in the silence once again. Spike found it quite unnerving, all the dead air and Angel looking at him like he was a fly in the already cruddy ointment of his day.
What now, then? If Angel wasn’t going to talk, then he had a bit of a problem, because there wasn’t much else for him to do here. Buffy almost certainly had a plan, because she always had a plan, and while it might help that he’d tracked Angel down, that was all done and dusted. What was he supposed to do now? Go and get her so she could berate Angel herself, see if she could get more out of him? Tell Angel to sit tight and get on with the rest of the mission, whatever that was going to be?
He wasn’t cut out for this sort of business.
“For Christ’s sake, Angel,” he said after a moment of awkwardness, not quite able to take it. “What the fuck is going on? Why is your place burnt down – why are you hiding out here like some sort of baddie of the week? This is ridiculous.” Airbeds! They’d been sleeping on bloody airbeds! If that wasn’t enough to convince anyone that something was really not right, Spike didn’t know what was.
Staring back, Angel himself seemed to be taking the whole thing much more seriously. He had a look in his eyes that reminded Spike of what he’d thought back at the hotel, that someone was going to be in very deep water over this, and Angel wouldn’t give a shit what anyone else thought. Of course, Spike remembered, he’d sicced Dru and Darla on those lawyers last year, so it wasn’t even out of character. Not that Buffy knew that bit.
It was slightly galling how wonderful she probably thought Mr. Soulful was, but then, given the alternative was likely just miserable, he had a feeling he preferred it that way. “Will you bloody say something?” he demanded finally, unnerved not least by how quiet the rest of the gang was being. It was like they were afraid.
“OK, Spike, I’ll say something,” Angel snapped, venom bubbling over into his voice. “What d’you wanna hear? How hard it is to keep a baby warm and safe and happy in a place no better than a goddamn cave?” He lurched a bit as he said it, which of course had baby Connor awake and crying in his arms right on cue, accompanying the rest of Angel’s hissed rant as he bobbed, trying to calm the boy back down. “What it’s like to have your home destroyed?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Spike could see Fred the mini-mum using her good arm to elbow Gunn towards some kit that probably contained milk or whatever it was that babies drank. Lorne was shaking his head, hat in hands. “Yeah, well, you don’t have to worry about…” he began, not looking at Angel as he very ill-advisedly began to give away that particular shit turn of his last few days.
Conveniently, however, Angel cut him off. “Or how about what it’s like to find out someone you trusted has been talking to your enemy, carrying on conversations behind your back about who knows what?”
Ah, so that was where old Wesley was. Been done for fraternising, had he? It seemed a bit unlikely, as far as Spike was concerned, but you never could tell with watchers, ex- or no. “Is that why you voted him off the island, then?” Spike asked, cringing inside as the phrase left his lips but hoping Angel would still be twenty years behind the times (as usual) and not know what he was talking about. “A couple of words in the wrong ear and that’s it?”
“You wouldn’t know what it’s like, Spike,” Angel growled. Yeah, yeah. “You’ve never cared about anything.” Well, that was a bit much. “You can’t tell me it was wrong to cut him out, not now Holtz has done what he did.” Oh, so it was Holtz then, Spike realised. This was not good. And Spike didn’t seem to be the only one who knew it; the others were definitely making themselves busy – even Connor was mewling his way to quietude. “If he’d been around, kept us in the hotel…” Oh. It sounded like Wesley hadn’t been around before the hotel had got burnt up, so that was even worse, if Angel thought they’d been in on it together. From the dangerous look on his face, after all, it certainly looked like he did. “He could have killed my son,” he spat out, merciless. “You tell me how I should trust him after that. I will never have people near my family who –”
“What? Show a bit of initiative?” Spike interrupted. He was feeling seriously out of his depth here, but he kept on anyway, refusing to be drawn into Angel’s game of doom and gloom and noir threats over whiskey and darts. None of this made sense. The watcher had been so happy when he’d thought Angel and his son would be safe, last time Spike had been in town – and even with Holtz, Buffy had said he’d wanted the baby safe and Angel dead, not the other way around, hadn’t she? “Give me a break.” Angel wasn’t thinking at all, was he? But then that was the problem with hero-types, Spike knew. They expected absolute control over every single thing you did and said and thought, made you public enemy number one the moment you stepped out of line, pinned anything they could on you.
Or, well, hero types like Angel, anyway. Villain types like him too, now Spike came to think of it…
“What makes you so certain he had some nefarious plan?” he tried, certain that the big man would never listen to him, but not above venting a little bit. “Maybe he was trying to help out.” That made Angel snort, which got Spike’s back up even more. It was like Buffy and the eggs all over again, which, in retrospect, had been a bad idea – but the thought behind it had been in the right place. Buffy at least was woman enough to consider that lesser mortals might be trying to do the right thing. Immortals too. All right, maybe sometimes with her it was down to a bloke’s luck on the day whether or not he got the benefit of the doubt, but there was at least some leeway to be had there.
Angel, on the other hand, was nothing but negative, all the time. And he was far less attractive. “You really don’t know the first thing about trust, do you?” Spike found himself blowing up, frustrated in the face of all these ridiculous standards people like Angel thought they could throw around. “Minions is right; that’s exactly what you want,” he decided, nodding to himself. “People who won’t wipe their own arses without your say-so, reporting in 24/7. No independent thought allowed.” According to Angel’s code, Spike was certain, he would never be good enough.
Problem was, with codes like that, one person at the top defining the rules, you had no check for when things started going off the rails. “I won’t let anyone put Connor in danger,” Angel insisted, inevitably, staring daggers Spike’s way.
It was his tough luck Spike had always gone in for anarchy. “I’m not gonna let you kill him,” he said straight out, meaning Holtz but happy to have Angel think he meant Wesley too, if he was that far gone. He looked as surprised as Spike would have been at himself a few years ago, but that was the thing, wasn’t it? Times changed and people with them. “Just thought you should know.” He was deadly serious on this point, too aware of how Buffy would take it if it happened on what was now her watch. Their watch. Whatever. He wasn’t having it, was what this came down to. “I will stop you.”
Angel said nothing, staring him down.
.
[Chapter Twelve: The Next Thing You Know You’re LBJ.]
Turn and Face the Strain.
[Sequel to The More Things Stay the Same and As Good as a Rest.]
When Buffy thought about falling in love again, she didn't expect it to be nearly so complicated as it actually turns out to be.
Also, she didn't expect it to be Spike. (She's not sure he did either.)
[Notes + Chapter One: I'm Not a Political Animal, But.]
/
[Chapter Ten: That’s Where Even Your Best Political Minds Can Drop the Ball.]
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Chapter Eleven: You’re Not Taking the Pulse of the Public.
“Well, I’ve got naff all my end. Sorry, love.”
“No… That’s fine. We can still go with the original plan. Cordy and I’ll hang here until Kate shows up and then we’ll catch up with you at Wesley’s.”
“All right. But I was thinking, yeah, d’you want me to have a look-see round the hotel first, before I meet you? Might be able to sniff something out or what have you.”
“Yeah, sure. That sounds like a good idea, actually; we don’t have much else to go on. Whatever you think might help.”
“There’s probably nothing to find, but… Don’t fret; we’ll track down the big lug somehow. Worst comes to worst, we can start buying up supplies of hair gel – smoke him out of the woodwork.”
“Not funny, Spike…”
“Oh, right? Then why are you laughing?”
“That wasn’t laughing! That was dismay.”
“Yeah right it was.”
“You just get on with your sniffing, Scooby-Doo. Velma and I are gonna wait for, uh, whichever one Kate is and get on with reading the fairground owner’s diary, or whatever.”
“You wish you’d never started that analogy, don’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“Though Daphne and the dog… It’s kinky, I’ll say that for it. Want me wagging my tail, do you?”
“OK, I am so hanging up now.”
He rode fast to LA. He’d called Tara, who’d told him that if Kate had a cell phone, she didn’t know the number – and then the police department, but they’d basically said that even the SDPD wasn’t stupid enough to give out an officer’s number to anyone who called up claiming to know them. Willow had offered to hack into the police database, but he hadn’t been sure how that stood up in Buffy’s moral code… According to Red, they did it all the time, but he was sceptical. Data was still property, right? You couldn’t not be evil by nicking it or kidnapping it or whatever hacking amounted to in the great Buffy Summers system of metaphor.
Anyway, Dawn had been sobering up a little crotchety after her beer, so it seemed best to make himself scarce. He didn’t hang around.
“Ride careful.”
That was what Buffy had told him, which warmed the cockles of his heart even if nothing else did. The advice was all relative, naturally, because had no real intention of riding any differently from how he usually did down the highway, which was probably reckless for a human but perfectly reasonable, he thought, for a supernatural creature like him who’d been dodging stakes from the day he’d been fledged. They might have all come from Angelus, who was easy to predict, but that didn’t matter in the scheme of things.
As it was, the journey went by in one long blast of wind through his jacket. He missed his coat, but the bike was still good: it let him filter quickly and comfortably through some truly horrendous traffic, zip through the suburbs and into the city proper.
Before he headed over to Wesley’s apartment, like he’d said to Buffy he would, Spike aimed for the scene of the crime. The plan in his head was to be useful: there could well be something there a vampire nose could pick up that Buffy’s delicate slayer-nostrils hadn’t managed to get a handle on. And so he rode right down behind the hotel, up the alleyway to get his bike as close to the building as possible. The exterior was much as Buffy had described: windows gutted out, smoke marks up the façade in a way that proved how long it had taken for someone to call the authorities – but, going in through the back, it looked as though the garden had survived at least. The fountain was entirely intact, lawn well mown; the jasmine was blossoming in the moonlight.
There was, however, something definitely amiss. One of the balconies on the second floor had what looked like a pennant flying from the balustrade, drooping and waving gently in the breeze. Heading closer, Spike realised that it was a collection of bedsheets tied together, the four corners of one single sheet knotted at the corners to larger, king size lengths of cotton which stretched up the side of the building, like a hammock on suspension lines. It didn’t quite reach the ground and it reeked of smoke, but it looked strong enough to hold something reasonably light. Yeah, this hadn't been mentioned at all; he wondered if Buffy and the others even knew it was here.
Lying on the patio next to the sheet contraption was the more obvious paraphernalia Spike expected from a burnt out building: a pile of things to land on. The selection was fairly scanty, like whoever had used it had been forced to act in a rush, but there was a child’s mattress there, Spike discovered as he rooted through the pile, which, yeah, had definitely belonged to Angel’s kid, then another single mattress and then all manner of duvets and pillows, with the corners of their covers cleverly tied together so the collection was more compressed and squishy than it would have been with all the same things flat.
It didn’t look like the sort of thing Angel would have put together, if only because his Angelness would have been able to comfortably lift a few more decent-sized mattresses and throw them out of the window, which would have been far safer. One of the duvets was clearly his, and clearly needed a wash, but the others seemed to belong to the uninhabited parts of the hotel, and smelled, to varying degrees, of smoked mould – which, Spike decided very quickly as he dropped the bedding and snorted rapidly to clear his nose, he didn’t want to smell again.
Someone had escaped from here, it seemed to him, and it hadn’t been Angel. They’d had to lower something down before they took a jump, and if Spike was going to exercise the analytical part of his brain that every now and then managed to surprise him, the obvious answer was the kid. Connor. Someone had been left on babysitting duty when all this had gone down, and even though they’d had enough time to concoct all this business, they hadn’t had the opportunity to escape through the lobby or whatever rudimentary fire escape system this old place had. That meant arson, most likely, not that it hadn’t been the most likely option already. It probably meant human as well, though, because most demons had the wherewithal to do their own bloody murdering rather than spark a match and see.
The question now, then, was whether Angel’s arsonist had known his son was in the building when they’d set it on fire. Because, if he had, then Angel was going to kill him, soul or no soul. And if Spike wasn’t lucky, he was going to get him, Buffy and everyone else to help.
Fuck.
That couldn’t happen, Spike thought as he looked around the garden. Not that he gave a shit about whoever had done this – they’d played their hand the moment they’d thought they could push Angel this far and not see the demon come out. Maybe that was their plan; who knew? The point was, he wasn’t having Buffy party to anything she would see as murder. She wouldn’t let herself be party to it in the first place, if she knew it was going on, but if they weren’t careful then it would be set in play without their help. Angel would always be the most manipulative bastard around, after all.
Making his way round to the front of the building, Spike tried to work out what he needed to do. When his luck held, he could sometimes come up with a plan that didn’t entirely leave him in the shit, so maybe this was an occasion to try and give it a go. He needed to get hold of either Angel or his arsonist before Buffy was too embroiled in the picture, which meant he should probably try and track the bugger down before he met up with the others at Wesley the Watcher’s apartment.
How he might actually go about that, of course, was another question entirely. Standing on the steps of the Hyperion’s front entrance, Spike couldn’t really get a sense of anyone who’d left – certainly not a recent sense that would take him anywhere useful. The amount of cologne Angel wore meant there were more than enough traces of it still around, probably left by his hands on the brass plates of the door, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere either, even with a full CSI kit and a lab full of computers.
There was, however, one avenue that Spike wanted to try before he forced himself to abandon the the capabilities of his nose. A whole fire department of extra humans had been through here, wreathing the place in tape and warning signs, so a straightforward sniff around inside wasn’t going to get him anywhere. But, at the same time, it wasn’t like Angel not to have more than one escape route, and if Spike was lucky, then this one would be a lot more personalised…
Kicking through the barred front door, Spike found himself face to face with the destruction inside the lobby. It hadn’t been long since he and Buffy had been here the last time, when he’d spent not an unpleasant afternoon lying on the couch in the middle of the room with least poncy parts of Angel’s library, so he could remember what it was meant to look like. Now, and it made his stomach turn a little to see it, the whole place was gone: the ottoman was charred to nothing apart from its metal frame and the reception desk had cracked and crumbled into itself like firewood. Maybe he couldn't find it in his soulless heart to care that much, but it was quite a sad sight, really.
As he walked across the floor, flaked pieces of paint and stucco crunched under Spike’s feet, fallen from the charred walls and ceiling. Ignoring all of that, however, he headed to the side of the reception desks, where the offices were. All of the back rooms looked just as wrecked as the main one, with enough books blackened and burnt to make him feel a an actual twinge of sympathy, because, yeah, it was a bit sad. Not as sad as when all of his own stuff had gone up in flames, but it was a terrible business, this burning of possessions.
Distracting himself with the search, it wasn’t long before he found what he was looking for: the entrance to whatever it was that served as the Hyperion’s basement. Jackpot. Sure enough, as he walked down the stairs, he found the thing you found in all good basements: a sewer entrance.
The LA brand of sewer smell was different to its upstate competitor, but it was still more than distinguishable. Now that the air wasn’t quite so crowded with the scent of smoke and general panic, Spike thought he was able to catch some sort of trail that Angel might actually have left when he was last out of the hotel. He’d spent so many years trailing through sewers – and, hell, London under the reign of old Vicky – that it was easy to filter out the smell of excrement, so he was fairly certain this was what he needed to follow. Letting his sense of the old hotel fade - and with it his disturbing feelings of upset - he stomped off down the watery pathway.
It felt better to be on his feet, to a certain extent, and stalk through the night like a creature who belonged to it. The sewerways in Los Angeles seemed to be as demon-friendly as the ones back in Sunny-D, even if he had no way of knowing where he was going here, apart from in the most general, Angely direction possible.
What was most certainly to be noticed in the LA route, however, was the bloody disconcerting friendliness of the few demons he encountered along the way. It wasn’t long after sunset, of course, so the bigger bads could be presumed busy sleeping in, getting drunk, having a shag or all manner of disreputable activities, while the people he was running into here were those with sunny dispositions and get-up-and-go personalities - the sort who'd rather operate in the daytime if they could.
Still, the third time this happened, when he passed a particularly ugly bugger with massive horns and what were possibly camel humps running down his arms, Spike had an idea.
“Hey!” the demon said with a smile, waving the hand that wasn’t holding a brown paper bag of shopping.
This time, Spike didn’t scowl and push on his way, but came to a pause. He couldn’t bring himself to smile, so didn’t try and force it, but he managed to affect a curious expression all the same. “Hello mate,” he said, leaving the demon space to pass but stopping close enough to him that he felt obliged to stop all the same. “Could I ask you a quick question? It won’t take a tick.”
A bemused, nice-but-dim expression passed over the demon’s face. “Sure, pal,” was the first thing he said, even as he grimaced slightly. “Shoot.”
“All right,” Spike agreed, trying to make himself seem like the least threatening creature of the night no demon should fuck with or lie to possible. It wasn’t an easy ask. “You don’t happen to know a vampire called Angel, do you? Got a soul, big hair, personality a bit like a mushroom?” The demon clearly did know him, because he froze up - Spike had a feeling it was the mushroom description that had tipped it – so he quickly tried to capitalise on the moment. In a reassuring way. “Now, now, I don’t want any trouble,” he said, gesturing with his empty hands. “I’m…” Ah, self-definition, now that was a tricky one. “I’m family of his, from out of town.” That worked, just about. “Something’s happened where he was living, it looks like; I’m trying to track him down, find out if anyone’s seen him.”
“You’re not…” the demon began, far too terrified for something that looked like it could squash a bus; his groceries were jittering. “You’re not one of them, are you?”
“One of who?” Spike pushed.
The demon looked nervously over his shoulder before replying. “One of… Oh, man, there’s been so many people in town recently. And I – I got no beef with Angel, you know? Not that I mean…!” He was clearly trying to stay on Spike’s good side, but wasn’t quite sharp enough to speak and say nothing. “I don’t want any trouble. Angel’s never bothered me; I ain’t ever bothered him. I don’t know…”
“You know something happened to him at the hotel, don’t you?” Spike summarised, pinning the demon still with a glare that was still at least two parts swagger from the old days, even if it was one part leniency. Why he wasn’t just beating the lumpy git until he talked, Spike didn’t know, but it didn’t seem particularly sporting – and the poor bloke’s food would get all squashed. He knew how that went: there was nothing more annoying than making it to the shops only to get beaten up and lose your haul on the way home. Right now, there was no call for it – and Spike didn’t fancy getting egg on his new jeans. “I’m not out to get him,” he explained then, still trying to be reasonable, even as the demon trembled in the sewer’s gloomy light. “As I said, he’s family. All I need is to find him, if you know where he is.”
The demon looked torn, glancing back and forth down the tunnel like he wished he’d taken another way home. “I heard…” he eventually said, and Spike tried to nod encouragingly. “I heard he was hiding out somewhere, maybe Echo Park? People are getting out of there, man, don’t wanna get burned out. Some of us asphyxiate real easy.”
Echo Park, eh? That wasn’t all that far, but it was more than Spike wanted to walk right now. Luckily enough, it was on the way to Wesley’s apartment, so he wouldn’t even be going off-route; he’d get the bike and see what he could find out before he headed on to meet up with Buffy. “Cheers, mate,” he told the demon anyway, slapping a hand to one of the lumps on his arm – remembering too late that that sort of thing tended to be some sort of sex organ far more often than you liked.
Fortunately, it didn’t look as though he’d just given the demon an unsolicited handjob, even if he did immediately sneeze. “No problem,” he got out, sniffly. ACHOO. “Really.”
Giving him a salute, Spike headed on his way to the sound of repeated sneezing.
It wasn’t long before Spike was in Echo Park, cruising around on the lookout for likely places Angel might have been hiding. There were quite a few of them, as it happened, which Spike wasn’t sure what to do about. There were enough shops and restaurants open at this hour, but most of the warehouses looked like they were waiting for their early morning deliveries and were pretty much shut down for the night. From the outside it was hard to tell which ones were abandoned and which ones were just shut up. The graffiti certainly wasn’t going to help him.
As luck would have it, however, on the third pass by the park itself Spike caught sight of the green bloke they’d met last time – Lorne. He had a trench coat and a trilby, coupled with some natty sunglasses, but the green was still pretty recognisable, not least as he dashed furtively across the street by some nicely flood-lit road works. Clearly Angel hadn’t been teaching his people about the meaning of stealth.
Keeping an eye on the demon, Spike eased his way out of traffic and parked the bike at the mouth of an alleyway. There was a niggle in his brain that he should really secure the bike somewhere a bit less open, because he was getting worryingly attached to the thing, but he managed to dismiss that and get on with his stalking before Lorne was out of sight.
It was like riding a bike, really – another bike – and Spike found himself instinctively slipping through the shadows on Lorne’s trail, barely earning a glance back over the demon’s shoulder.
The problem with this sort of prey-trailing, of course, was that it was boring. He’d been forced to master the technique back in the early days, and it wasn’t that hard for a vampire with half a mind about him to learn how to move quickly, silently and invisibly. If you did it perfectly, however, the prey never even knew you were coming, which as far as Spike was concerned was no fun at all. It was always nicer to give a hint that something bad was about to happen, get their heartbeats going, get the adrenaline pumping for a potentially decent fight before you had your dinner.
But now wasn’t the time for that, so he persevered, drifting ever closer to the green meanie, who spent most of his time looking in the wrong direction. By the time he actually came to the back of a warehouse and slipped inside, however, Spike was more than ready to make an entrance – have a bit of fun.
“You’re really slipping in your old age, mate,” he carolled as a greeting, striding onto the warehouse floor where he found Angel and the gang gasping in gratifying shock. “I mean, really, time was you could manage your minions better than this,” he finished with a smirk.
“Spike,” Angel growled, clutching little baby Connor to his chest. He looked - like he needed a shave, of all things, even if it would take him a little while yet to get beyond a five o’clock shadow to anything resembling designer stubble. There was a reason you never saw a vampire with a beard, after all: the hair took bloody ages to grow. “What the hell are you doing here?” Muggins continued, not quite settling into the anticlimax. That bloke Gunn and his girlfriend Fred relaxed, but Lorne still looked shifty. The Fred girl had a sling around an arm like it was broken or something, which suggested she’d been the one to escape with the baby out of the hotel. Fair enough. Wesley was missing. “If you’ve led anyone to us, I’ll…”
“Oh, please,” Spike mocked, unwilling to partake in Angel’s action-movie dialogue, calming down a little. That was the thing about family, wasn't it? Every conversation picked up from the last. “You ought to care more about your dear friend Kermit.” He sent a pointed look Lorne’s way. “Sorry, mate,” he told him, “but incognito you are not, especially in that get-up.”
“Yeah, well, can I get some credit for trying, here?” Lorne replied, dumping his shopping on a nearby table, which seemed to be the dumping ground for anything that needed to be kept off the floor. “If I knew how to blend in I’d have started on it years ago.”
Spike snorted in agreement, still fairly happy in his decision that this bloke was the best out of Angel’s lackeys. It wasn’t like he’d ever managed the trick of looking grey and meaningless either – he’d just made a feature of it when he’d been turned, rather than snivelling in the corner like a miseryguts. And then he’d left it to Mr. Grey himself…
Who was still not impressed. “Again, Spike, why are you in town?” Angel asked. “Did Buffy kick you to the curb or something? Leave you at a loose end so you had to come and bother me?”
“No,” Spike replied, possibly a bit too quickly. It wasn’t his fault it had been touch and go for a little while there. “Me and Buffy are fine, thank you. Or not, now that I think about it.” Forcibly, he recovered his swagger, two hands on his hips and his chin raised a touch.
It made Angel roll his eyes. “Then what happened to your coat?” he asked.
That almost deflated him. But Spike refused to let it, shrugging off the question and trying to forget his sudden consciousness of how scratchy the new cotton felt on his arms. “Don’t you like the new look?” he asked, straightening his collar. “I decided all that black made me look dead; thought I should get some colour in the mix.” If in doubt, act like you meant whatever it was you’d done. And mock Angel. “You should think about it, mate.”
“He has a point, you know,” Lorne added, which made Angel look even more furious. It was possible that someone with Lorne’s taste in polyester and acid bright colours wasn’t exactly who Spike wanted on his side, but he’d go with whatever he could get.
And so he smiled a winsome grin. “There; see.” Angel fumed.
“Anyway, for those of us who don’t subscribe to Vampire Vogue,” Gunn then piped up, interrupting with a hand in Spike’s direction. “What are you doing here, actually? Come to revel in the misery?”
Looking around the pathetic little hideout, which was kitted out with all of the finest equipment an outdoor activity store could provide, including airbeds and sleeping bags and a neat little gas stove, Spike couldn’t be bothered to keep up the game any longer. Because, yeah, wow, this was miserable. “Buffy’s in town,” he explained, gesturing with his left hand and letting his right settle in a pocket. “Had some legal stuff to sort out. She called in on you lot, found the sorry state your hotel’s been left in, met up with her dear old friend Ms Chase and gave me a bell. Asked me to come help out with the inevitable fallout from the latest mess you’ve got yourself into.” He directed the last comment at Angel, just to make sure he knew that Spike held him to blame for his disrupted evening.
“Right,” Angel replied, apparently a lot less interested in his tale than he’d first made out. “That explains why you’re in LA, but not why you’re here. Where’s Buffy now?”
Spike shrugged. “She was waiting for a mate of hers. Think they’re going to investigate a bit, then we’re going to meet at Wesley’s apartment…” Again, Spike looked around the warehouse, just to make certain he really wasn’t there. It didn’t look like it. There was a drum kit in one corner, which was interesting, but no watcher. “Where is the stuffy git, anyway? You didn’t eat him out of boredom, did you? I know all that scotch is probably doing something nice to his insides, but…”
“Angel would never!” the little twiglet Fred interrupted, with another gratifying gasp, like when he’d walked in. He gave her a wink, glad to have someone who appreciated him.
“Never mind about Wes,” Angel interrupted, drawing Spike’s attention back his way. He didn’t look entirely guilt-free of thoughts about eating, which was odd. Something was going on there. “What was that you were saying about Cordy?” he continued, changing the subject – even more suspicious. “Is she back? Is she OK?”
“Sounds like she’s fine,” Spike offered. If Buffy had said something about her, then he didn’t remember it, so that probably meant she was all right. “Back from her holidays; got her cell phone; pissed off at you for not turning yours on or whatever it is you’ve done with it – and why is it you’ve got a mobile again? Who’s gonna call you, your dry cleaners? Can’t you wait for your machine to take it?” Angel didn’t seem to be enjoying this line of questioning, but as far as Spike was concerned that was for the best. The only way to get anything useful out of Angel was to knock him far enough off balance that he couldn’t help let something slip; it had always been the same. “That’s not it, is it,” Spike continued, therefore. “You probably have a delivery service tacked on, don’t you, so the shirts come straight from the iron into your sweaty little hands?”
And yet, this barrage of unconstrained wit didn’t garner much of a response, which left them all standing in the silence once again. Spike found it quite unnerving, all the dead air and Angel looking at him like he was a fly in the already cruddy ointment of his day.
What now, then? If Angel wasn’t going to talk, then he had a bit of a problem, because there wasn’t much else for him to do here. Buffy almost certainly had a plan, because she always had a plan, and while it might help that he’d tracked Angel down, that was all done and dusted. What was he supposed to do now? Go and get her so she could berate Angel herself, see if she could get more out of him? Tell Angel to sit tight and get on with the rest of the mission, whatever that was going to be?
He wasn’t cut out for this sort of business.
“For Christ’s sake, Angel,” he said after a moment of awkwardness, not quite able to take it. “What the fuck is going on? Why is your place burnt down – why are you hiding out here like some sort of baddie of the week? This is ridiculous.” Airbeds! They’d been sleeping on bloody airbeds! If that wasn’t enough to convince anyone that something was really not right, Spike didn’t know what was.
Staring back, Angel himself seemed to be taking the whole thing much more seriously. He had a look in his eyes that reminded Spike of what he’d thought back at the hotel, that someone was going to be in very deep water over this, and Angel wouldn’t give a shit what anyone else thought. Of course, Spike remembered, he’d sicced Dru and Darla on those lawyers last year, so it wasn’t even out of character. Not that Buffy knew that bit.
It was slightly galling how wonderful she probably thought Mr. Soulful was, but then, given the alternative was likely just miserable, he had a feeling he preferred it that way. “Will you bloody say something?” he demanded finally, unnerved not least by how quiet the rest of the gang was being. It was like they were afraid.
“OK, Spike, I’ll say something,” Angel snapped, venom bubbling over into his voice. “What d’you wanna hear? How hard it is to keep a baby warm and safe and happy in a place no better than a goddamn cave?” He lurched a bit as he said it, which of course had baby Connor awake and crying in his arms right on cue, accompanying the rest of Angel’s hissed rant as he bobbed, trying to calm the boy back down. “What it’s like to have your home destroyed?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Spike could see Fred the mini-mum using her good arm to elbow Gunn towards some kit that probably contained milk or whatever it was that babies drank. Lorne was shaking his head, hat in hands. “Yeah, well, you don’t have to worry about…” he began, not looking at Angel as he very ill-advisedly began to give away that particular shit turn of his last few days.
Conveniently, however, Angel cut him off. “Or how about what it’s like to find out someone you trusted has been talking to your enemy, carrying on conversations behind your back about who knows what?”
Ah, so that was where old Wesley was. Been done for fraternising, had he? It seemed a bit unlikely, as far as Spike was concerned, but you never could tell with watchers, ex- or no. “Is that why you voted him off the island, then?” Spike asked, cringing inside as the phrase left his lips but hoping Angel would still be twenty years behind the times (as usual) and not know what he was talking about. “A couple of words in the wrong ear and that’s it?”
“You wouldn’t know what it’s like, Spike,” Angel growled. Yeah, yeah. “You’ve never cared about anything.” Well, that was a bit much. “You can’t tell me it was wrong to cut him out, not now Holtz has done what he did.” Oh, so it was Holtz then, Spike realised. This was not good. And Spike didn’t seem to be the only one who knew it; the others were definitely making themselves busy – even Connor was mewling his way to quietude. “If he’d been around, kept us in the hotel…” Oh. It sounded like Wesley hadn’t been around before the hotel had got burnt up, so that was even worse, if Angel thought they’d been in on it together. From the dangerous look on his face, after all, it certainly looked like he did. “He could have killed my son,” he spat out, merciless. “You tell me how I should trust him after that. I will never have people near my family who –”
“What? Show a bit of initiative?” Spike interrupted. He was feeling seriously out of his depth here, but he kept on anyway, refusing to be drawn into Angel’s game of doom and gloom and noir threats over whiskey and darts. None of this made sense. The watcher had been so happy when he’d thought Angel and his son would be safe, last time Spike had been in town – and even with Holtz, Buffy had said he’d wanted the baby safe and Angel dead, not the other way around, hadn’t she? “Give me a break.” Angel wasn’t thinking at all, was he? But then that was the problem with hero-types, Spike knew. They expected absolute control over every single thing you did and said and thought, made you public enemy number one the moment you stepped out of line, pinned anything they could on you.
Or, well, hero types like Angel, anyway. Villain types like him too, now Spike came to think of it…
“What makes you so certain he had some nefarious plan?” he tried, certain that the big man would never listen to him, but not above venting a little bit. “Maybe he was trying to help out.” That made Angel snort, which got Spike’s back up even more. It was like Buffy and the eggs all over again, which, in retrospect, had been a bad idea – but the thought behind it had been in the right place. Buffy at least was woman enough to consider that lesser mortals might be trying to do the right thing. Immortals too. All right, maybe sometimes with her it was down to a bloke’s luck on the day whether or not he got the benefit of the doubt, but there was at least some leeway to be had there.
Angel, on the other hand, was nothing but negative, all the time. And he was far less attractive. “You really don’t know the first thing about trust, do you?” Spike found himself blowing up, frustrated in the face of all these ridiculous standards people like Angel thought they could throw around. “Minions is right; that’s exactly what you want,” he decided, nodding to himself. “People who won’t wipe their own arses without your say-so, reporting in 24/7. No independent thought allowed.” According to Angel’s code, Spike was certain, he would never be good enough.
Problem was, with codes like that, one person at the top defining the rules, you had no check for when things started going off the rails. “I won’t let anyone put Connor in danger,” Angel insisted, inevitably, staring daggers Spike’s way.
It was his tough luck Spike had always gone in for anarchy. “I’m not gonna let you kill him,” he said straight out, meaning Holtz but happy to have Angel think he meant Wesley too, if he was that far gone. He looked as surprised as Spike would have been at himself a few years ago, but that was the thing, wasn’t it? Times changed and people with them. “Just thought you should know.” He was deadly serious on this point, too aware of how Buffy would take it if it happened on what was now her watch. Their watch. Whatever. He wasn’t having it, was what this came down to. “I will stop you.”
Angel said nothing, staring him down.
.
[Chapter Twelve: The Next Thing You Know You’re LBJ.]
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