Chapter 1 – Angel’s Day

He wakes up pissy, but he’s been doing it for nearly a hundred years and doesn’t bother to try and shake the feeling. Pissy will turn to anger as the day progresses, might as well enjoy just pissy for now.

He turns and stretches in the bed. 

The inevitable happens: swift, surgical almost. No real pleasure except the release of the ache. Refuses to remember hands or faces or the smell of blood.

Nothing destroys the soul so utterly as this shameful sin.  Will it be damned ye’ll be?

Maybe he will, but not for this. The devil reserved for self-abusers will have to get in line; others more important have a claim on his immortal soul.

Musing on hell as he wipes his palm on his chest, he remembers: Lindsey. Today he’s going to fetch Lindsey from whatever hell dimension he deserves to be in. They all deserve to be in hell dimensions. He deserves to be in one. Pissy turns to anger early, and with a grunt of annoyance, he climbs out of bed and heads for the shower.

Annoyance makes him think of the idiot he’s taking into the hell dimension with him.  Useful idiot. Expendable idiot. 

He showers carefully, thinking. He doesn’t try to keep his thoughts ordered but roams, free thinking. It’s better like that: things occur to him, connections are made that are useful, decisions formed.

When he’s ready, he rides down in the elevator to the office. The idiot is already there, smoking his damn cigarettes and making the place stink.

‘Put it out.’

‘Yeah, like, not.’

He grimaces. He doesn’t want to. The idiot doesn’t deserve that much attention.

‘Where’s Gunn?’

‘Waiting for us.’

Angel nods. ‘Let’s go.’

He’s actually glad Spike is with him when the bullets start flying. He can give credit when credit is due. He’s a good fighter—always was.

The dungeon is too familiar, distracting, but anger carries him through. 

He does the unthinkable and leaves someone behind. You don’t do that in war.  Yeah. In the wars he fights it’s thinkable and doable, and he does it without compunction.  

Later, compunction kicks in. It’s too late then. The decision is made. Hands are on him—only Lorne’s, and only medicinal, but they’re hands, and he wants to concentrate on that for a while. He’s not thinking of Gunn. He did what he had to do. 

The other one is harder to read. The other one has been very quiet since they brought Lindsey back, since he had hands laid on him, too—flesh of his flesh. 

He wonders if the two events are related: Spike being quiet for once, Lindsey back.  He can’t see a connection, but wonders about the nature of their relationship. What was the apartment really payment for?

He shrugs off Spike’s mood as easily as he shrugs off his shirt to Lorne’s ministrations.  The idiot goes home. He wants to lie down and sleep. Hard decisions were made, and he made them. Someone had to. Gunn will find his redemption his own way. He’s lucky.

The next day should be about Illyria, or Lindsey, or the reason for the whole fucking mess, but it’s not; it’s about a pissant demon that’s been cutting people up in the tunnels under L.A. It’s what they do, though; so, he gathers the team, and they head out. It almost feels good: Wesley, Lorne, and the idiot… who is still very quiet.

‘What’s up?’

‘Fuck off.’

It’s one of their better conversations, and Angel loses interest almost as soon as the predicable reply comes his way.

Wesley pairs off with Lorne; Angel takes the idiot with him – he needs to suffer – and they climb down into the lower levels. 

It’s very dark, only his preternatural eyesight showing him a dry section alongside the slimy trickle he doesn’t want to think about. He’s spent his whole fucking life not thinking about slimy trickles and trying to look at home in these damn tunnels.

He’s not worried about the demon they’re hunting. He has good backup. Spike might be an idiot – he is an idiot – but he’s great backup.  

The desperate fight in the dungeons comes back to him, and he muses on it pleasantly as he strides along. Every time Spike went down, he was there; every time he went down, Spike was there. He likes the symmetry in his mind, the visual balance between dark and light.

Suddenly, something slams into his face and blood spurts.  He attacks on instinct; something goes down.  There’s something else, and he shouts for Spike to cover his back, turning it on the second something, knowing that Spike will be there for him.

Sharp pain turns to agony as something emerges from his breastbone— splits it, crunching on marrow.  He falls to his knees and looks helplessly around, for one second thinking that Spike must have gone down, too. That causes a new pain, but not a physical one, and anger surfs in quickly, covering it.  But Spike isn’t down; he’s leaning on a wall, lighting a cigarette.

He holds out a hand for Spike’s help – he’s great backup, after all – but as a third something takes him down, Spike is watching his thin stream of smoke, his eyes narrowed and thoughtful; then, shrugging, he ignores the outstretched hand and wanders back off into the dark tunnels on his own.

Sometimes, survival is more painful than dying. When it happens too often, you get used to it: the endless survival that hurts so much. It’s what he does this time: survives. 

He limps back to Wolfram and Hart, very real anger driving him on through the pain. 

They’re all there… Wesley, Harmony, Lorne… and Spike.

Everyone looks sad, except Spike, who looks interested, staring curiously at each in turn.  Spike stares more when he steps out of the elevator and begins to limp toward the office.

‘Angel! Spike told us he lost you somewhere in the tunnels!’ Wesley is flustered, genuinely rattled. 

Lorne seems to pick up on Angel’s wrath, rising nervously. 

Spike pushes off the wall, and to Angel’s furious eyes he looks mutinous. He’s too tired to care what Spike is.  He goes up to him. ‘Get out.’

Spike stares. Angel wonders if Spike knows this is the end between them. He can’t be trusted now, can’t be good backup.  What else is there?

In the general consternation, Spike just shrugs and leaves, giving the whole place a finger.

His departure seems to cause more consternation, and Angel wonders if they actually like the idiot— the idiot he’d begun to trust enough to turn his back.  He wonders if Lindsey is somehow behind this, runs his mind lightly over their relationship once more, but it’s all too raw now, everything hurts too much.

Later that night, when he’s patched up and lying in bed, the anger in his heart fades for the first time in many years. Something more painful takes its place. He can’t name it yet, for it feels like sorrow, and he can’t work out why he should feel that now….  They’ve known each other a long time…. He thought they’d come to some kind of neutral, level ground where they could tolerate each other’s existence. Perhaps he’s been wrong. Perhaps Spike has never stopped hating him and has just been waiting his chance. 

That doesn’t feel right. He’s had better chances, and not taken them. He’s been there, at his side, fighting. Backup. He’s been his backup. Now he’s alone. It must be sorrow. Angel’s surprised. He doesn’t think Spike could ever make him feel that. 

He sits up and runs fingers through his hair. Why can’t he shake the thought that this has something to do with Lindsey, or Eve? (Whom he almost hates more, if that’s possible.) Again, the nagging thought that maybe Spike knows more about Lindsey than he’s letting on crosses his mind. Lindsey targeted Spike before. Has it all been a conspiracy…? Sending the lawyer to hell…. Rescuing him again…. Spike there for both occurrences….  Is he being played again?

The questions won’t let Angel sleep. 

It doesn’t look like a reward for the great betrayal of having him killed: this dank apartment.

He knocks and waits.

When there’s no reply, he kicks open the door and proves it’s still a public building.

Spike’s sitting on a small, dingy bed, his head lowered, and to Angel’s eyes he seems… deflated.

Not fooled, Angel goes over and hauls him to his feet. ‘Now we talk.’

‘I’m sorry, Angel. I’m sorry. I made a mistake.’

‘Huh?’ Angel is floored, and that doesn’t happen very often these days. He isn’t expecting this, and an evil worm of thought wriggles into his mind that this is a newly souled demon still struggling with that profound transformation. But he can’t afford to think of Spike struggling, alone, without the help he could have given him. It’s like not knowing someone’s name whom you’ve known for years: too late to ask. It’s too late to think of all the things he’s not done for Spike over the centuries. 

He lets Spike go and dusts him down. ‘You’re damn right it was a mistake.’

‘Are you okay?’

Angel half-cuffs him, but that would be too affectionate, so it’s more of a genuine head punch. ‘I don’t have time for this shit, Spike. Did Lindsey put you up to this?’

‘The Lawyer?’

‘No, Spike, the other Lindsey we rescued from hell today.’

He sees Spike’s face flicker with some emotion and assumes it’s guilt, but Spike shakes his head in what seems to be genuine denial.  ‘I just got confused, Angel. For a moment, I was confused.’

Spike is standing too close, and Angel backs off. It occurs to him that the look Spike gave him in the tunnels was anything but confused; it was pure malice. But he doesn’t tell Spike this.

Instead, he says, ‘I think it’s time you left L….’

‘No! I mean… I want to help. I do, Angel. Please.’

Angel frowns. He’s confused now, and he doesn’t like that feeling with the idiot. Simple emotions are best for Spike: annoyance almost all the time, flaring anger sometimes, vaguely amused tolerance the rest. This is unnerving, this confusion, so he turns it into anger and feels happier.

He pokes Spike in the chest to emphasise his point. ‘One more fuck up and you’re out. I’m fighting a battle for the world here, Spike; I can’t carry you!’

Spike shakes his head, and for a bizarre moment, Angel thinks of a cartoon cat who made denial of guilt an art form, but it’s ridiculous: he’s wasted too much time on Spike as it is. 

He steps away and for the first time takes a real look around. It’s worse than Gunn had told him. Thinking of Gunn makes him take a short, sharp breath, and he says, more to himself than to the idiot, ‘I’m not abandoning anything of mine to hell. We’re going back to get him. I’m not leaving him there, contrary to what everyone thinks.’

He’s bumped hard as Spike pushes past him, going to the fridge.  ‘Can I count on you to back me up, Spike?’

There’s no reply; a small nod has to suffice.  

‘Why do you stay here? It’s grim….’

Spike turns. ‘Where else can I go?’

‘Jesus.’

He roams back up toward his apartment through the empty offices of his new empire, feeling anything but regal. Not empty. There are lights in the lab, and he pushes in to find Wesley staring dreamlike to the floor below. He has the tang of whisky on his skin, and it makes Angel want one, want him for a brief flash of demonic need that he pushes to the back of his mind.  That was another life. He has this one now, and it’s just so damn peachy.

‘Wesley.’

‘Angel.’

They turn back to watch the demon— beautiful, mysterious and wearing the body of someone they both loved. Love. Angel is careful to make that correction. He will get her back. He’s her handsome man, and he will save her again.

‘What’s wrong with Spike?’

‘Huh?’ Angel doesn’t like being questioned about Spike. He doesn’t like talking about him, for even that implies something that doesn’t exist: interest.

‘He seemed very distressed.’

Angel turns and studies Wesley’s profile. ‘He tried to kill me.’

‘He’s always trying to kill you.’

‘No. For real this time. He watched and walked away.’

Wesley turns too, and Angel can see that he’s processing this in his quiet, thoughtful way.  ‘In that case, I think it was very unwise to let him go out of your sight—your control.’

Angel doesn’t point out that Spike has never been under his control but says cautiously, ‘I can’t trust him anymore.’

‘You never did trust him, Angel. Now you need to find out why he suddenly turned on you.’ He turns back to watch his obsession. ‘To understand your enemies, you have to keep them close.’

‘Machiavelli, Wes? Whisky makes you vicious.’

‘Actually, Sun Tzu, but I expect the Italian plagiarised the idea.’

The demon is watching them both curiously from the floor, her hypnotic eyes lulling them, dulling the edges of their anger for a moment.  ‘Bring your demon here, Angel, and watch him.’

Angel feels something more from Illyria, something undefined, but it stirs his blood, nevertheless.

‘He won’t come.’

‘Perhaps you should make him. He tried to kill you, after all.’

Angel murmurs, ‘Should I punish all my enemies?’

Wesley gives a bitter smile. ‘When you’ve worked out who they are, perhaps you should.’

The doorjamb is still splintered, the lock still broken, so he just pushes and goes in.  

Spike is pacing, talking to himself, but he shuts up quickly.  Angel expects anger; he’s ready for anger. Eager, quick hope flashing in Spike’s eyes he does not expect, and it throws him.  

Spike is silent, seemingly waiting for some cue.  Angel narrows his eyes. ‘I’m not leaving you here, Spike. I want you where I can keep an eye on you.’

Still silence and Angel’s ire rises. It’s so much easier to go immediately nuclear with Spike. This edging around the promise of violence is too confusing.  ‘I want you to come back and stay in the spare apartment—while we question Lindsey.’

Angel thinks he sees a smile, but Spike dips his head, so he can’t be sure. It makes his anger rise even more: a sense that Spike has won some contest he didn’t know they were playing.

‘Okay.’

Once more, Angel feels wrong-footed. He expected a long drawn-out argument, which he would eventually win. ‘Okay…? You’re agreeing?’

Spike shrugs and appears ready to leave.

‘That’s it? You’re just going to come with me…. You try to kill me; now you’re agreeing to live with me?’

An expression flickers over Spike’s face, but all he says is, ‘I said I was sorry ‘bout that.  We’ve tried to kill each other before, Angel. It’s nothing new.’

Angel can’t deny this. To deny it, to say that things are different between them now, would imply that they were: different. Between them. Which they’re not. He says instead, ‘I’m fighting something bigger than either of us now, Spike. I can’t afford to let our petty history distract me from that.’

He turns and leaves the apartment, not entirely happy about turning his back on Spike again, but making a show of doing so anyway.

They walk silently through the tunnels, Angel sensing that the dawn is soaking the streets above them.   

He knows Spike is watching him covertly, turns to challenge this but finds that he’s not, that he’s walking along staring at his feet, deep in thought.

‘What?’

Spike jerks his head up. ‘What?’

Angel sighs. ‘Tell me what’s between you and Lindsey.’

‘Me and Lindsey?’

‘Spike!’

‘There’s… nothing. What’s Lindsey got to do with this? Is there something between you and Lindsey?’

‘Huh?’ Angel feels like he was having one conversation but has now been switched to this one. He’s so lost the thread that he repeats uncertainly, ‘Huh?’

‘You. And him.’

‘He’s a pissant lawyer that’s fucked me around for the last seven years. What can I say?’ As if answering his own question, he adds, ‘I tried to save his soul once.’

Spike stops, and Angel glances back at him, but whatever Spike’s expression had held, it’s gone by the time he looks at the familiar face.  ‘You tried to save him?’

Angel shrugs and carries on walking. ‘He seemed to want to change. I tried to give him that chance.’

‘Do you think people can change?’

Angel lies because he can and because he’s pissed off and because this is Spike, and he enjoys the familiarity of lying to Spike.  ‘No.’ People change all the time; they’re born beautiful and yours, and then they try to kill you. New lives. He wishes he could give himself one.

‘No!’

He turns, hearing something strange in Spike’s tone, and Spike looks back at his feet. ‘What’s it all for if people can’t change?’

‘Lindsey is an evil bastard, and I only rescued him from hell because I need him.’

‘What if he wants to repent? Angel, what if he wants to repent, to make it up to you, to be your… help you? Would you save him?’

‘Why are you so concerned about Lindsey, Spike? I still think there’s something you’re not telling me.’

Spike is quiet for a while then he says hesitantly, ‘It just seems kinda… harsh. Hell. No?’

Angel snorts softly. ‘Piece of cake to where I was. And when I’m finished with him, he goes right back.’

‘No!’ Spike twitches as Angel turns back to him. ‘I mean….’ He pouts and is silent.

Angel joins him in the silence, glad of his own thoughts, which are mean and enjoyable. He’s convinced of Spike’s interest in the man, knows there are things he’s not being told, things he’s missing. He plays the last few months back in his mind, looking for clues, evidence. He feels he knows the lawyer, but he had never sensed any of those… proclivities… in the man. In Spike? He frowns. He should know Spike better than the lawyer—a century of familiarity—but he doesn’t. He can’t begin to imagine what goes on in Spike’s head. If Spike is attracted to the man, what he might he do with that attraction? Where might it take him?  

He does the unthinkable and lets his mind roam over the past, freethinking once more.  He can’t make any connections. He has no idea what Spike thought about anything other than a shared passion for the beauty of blood and the excitement of the hunt. He obviously has no memories of Spike that do not include him, and he suspects that with him there Spike had no other focus. 

‘I don’t think you should judge him on the past, Angel, but on what he’s like now.’

‘What?’ This uncannily echoes what he’s thinking and it unnerves him. ‘I don’t remember this much charity when you tried to fucking kill me yesterday!’

‘I didn’t. I left you to die. There’s a difference.’

Angel shoves him but doesn’t feel like wasting any more energy on him, and strides on.     

There’s a moment of pure awkwardness when Angel pushes open the door to the spare apartment. ‘Okay. This is yours.’ For the first time, he notices that Spike hasn’t brought anything. ‘I’ll send someone for your things.’

‘What things?’  Spike ducks his head slightly and enters, keeping his coat on, wrapping his arms around his body. ‘What now?’

‘Now? Now, you keep out of my way until I need you.’

Blue eyes flick over, and Angel catches the full force of a Spike look he hasn’t been given for a while. He senses he’s stepped across some line that he was unaware of.  He debates leaving but says more softly than he’s spoken since his anger the day before, ‘I need all the people I can have on my side in the coming fight.’

‘I’ll do anything I can.’

Angel is strangely touched by this, feeling that Spike is genuine for once. He pouts, wanting to say something more about need, but the memory of holding out his hand and not finding Spike taking it is too raw.  Instead, he turns away. ‘If you need anything, you know where I am.’ It’s a huge concession, given the sorrow that he suddenly feels again.

He finds it distracting, knowing that Spike is across the hallway. Anyone else there would affect him the same, however—a presence in his emptiness.  He can’t settle to anything, feels he ought to go and torture Lindsey (wants to go and torture Lindsey) but is confused by his motives, so suppresses the need for blood until he can focus it on the fight.  He thinks about reading; he debates sketching, but settles for listening to some music and drinking. 

‘That’s nice. That used to be one of your favourites.’

Angel opens his eyes, admitting what he’s known for a few minutes: that Spike is watching him from the doorway.  ‘It still is.’

‘Drink would be kinda nice….’

Angel waves at the bar. 

He watches Spike pour and take a first drink, wondering what he’s supposed to say or do. Sit down; stay and talk to me for a while. Tell me why you tried to kill me.

‘I want you to help me question Lindsey tomorrow.’ That would tell him just where they stand together: see if Spike can torture his lover.

Spike shrugs. ‘Only if I get to hurt him a bit. He pisses me off.’

It’s not the answer he was expecting, but it seems genuine enough. Before he can refuse, Spike sits down on the couch—not next to him, but close enough to appear next to him to a casual observer.

‘So… what’s the real reason for me being here?’

‘What I said: I want to know what you’re up to.’

‘I’m sitting here, having a drink and a nice chat with you, Angel.’

Angel stretches out his long legs and closes his eyes, listening to the music. Just so they are very sure where they stand, he murmurs, ‘I won’t let my guard down around you again, Spike. Just so as you know. I don’t make the same mistakes twice.’

‘You made me.’

Angel snaps his eyes open and gives him a cold look.

Spike purses his lips, staring at his drink. ‘You turned one lunatic, then you went and kinda did it again. Think you’d have learnt the first time—bad seed.’

‘You call yourself mad?’

Spike chuckles. ‘I think you do.’

‘I call you an idiot.’

Spike nods. ‘That’s fair.’

Angel knows as soon as he says it that it’s not, that Spike is anything but stupid, but he doesn’t say this.  ‘Why are you still here in L.A., Spike? You come back from death a second time and then stick around here! There’s a whole big world out there.’

Spike smiles, but Angel sees the amusement is a private one. ‘I don’t think a big world suits me. I think I’m too small for that.’

The track changes, a soaring aria that makes Angel’s heart ache for something he will never know, and he wants to rise and turn it off, but Spike has closed his eyes and seems to be enjoying it, too; so, he leaves it, watching the striking profile.

He can’t remember the last time Spike was so restful. He’s not smoking or digging at his nails or chewing his lips or hugging his body as if it would split apart and disgorge all his secrets.  He’s just sitting there, head resting on the back of the couch, listening.  Angel refreshes the drinks and does not disturb him.

He drinks more than he usually does, that subtle awareness that drinking alone is a bad habit to adopt now muted by Spike’s company.

He finds it hard to believe that he once chose this creature to be his… company. A deliberate choice to take and make his.

He wonders why he shuts him out now. Perhaps his habitual reserve makes him wary. He trusted a man once with his intimacy: his son. It’s hard to recover from a betrayal that profound. But he didn’t trust Spike in the past, either. But then Spike did not have a soul… before.  Angel can’t work out why he won’t share with Spike now. Then it puzzles him that this worries him, particularly now, when Spike’s here under such a cloud. Now, the last thing he should want is to share with Spike about Connor—tell him how he has betrayed everything and everyone in one catastrophic, passionate decision—now, having seen the true face of his enemy.  But however hard he tries, he cannot really see the familiar profile next to him as his enemy, despite the number of times he has said it out loud. Speaking something does not make it true, and more than twenty years of… company… undermines the thought that this man can ever be his enemy.

He stares at Spike with as much confusion as Wesley does Illyria.  

‘I should go.’

Angel starts, wondering if Spike sensed the scrutiny through closed lids.  ‘Yeah.’

Spike opens his eyes, resting them on the ceiling for a while before placing his glass on the floor. ‘Thanks.’

Angel thinks briefly that Spike doesn’t have a lot to thank him for, but he doesn’t say this, watching the slim form depart.

He feels them like thoughts that slip away, nagging, like a sneeze that won’t quite form, like an orgasm not reached: things he should have said.

With a sigh, knowing he’s had too much to drink, he strips off his shirt and turns the shower on to warm the water. The wound is still ugly on his chest, blood seeping through Lorne’s bandaging. Other hands flicker into his memory, and he groans softly, eyes closed, summoning the images forcibly, swelling, an ache forming in his balls. 

Ignominy is on thy features: the pallor and joyless posture of the sinner.

Angel idly wonders if the whisperings of the priests add to his enjoyment of the act—what pleasure there is, standing alone in a shower, beating off.  Although, this time, there is more pleasure.  Released, the suppressed memory of hands is as pleasurable as the fingers that once brushed his skin. It’s been so long since he felt touch that was loving, touch that wanted his body because it felt good and not because it was strong and could take beating after beating and still take more.

He leans one hand on the wall, working urgently with the other, head tipped back to the hot stream, waiting for another that will come from him. Memories tumble in his mind, clamouring for dominance: blood, penetration, sucking, flesh parting, screams…. They blend harmoniously for a rush like no other, and he groans, spasms coursing through him, leaving him wrung out and shivering.

There’s too much steam; he doesn’t see Spike until he’s walked right into the bedroom. Naked.

He curses (more embarrassed than angry) and can’t remember where he’s left his towel. The steam’s welcome now, and he retreats to its privacy for a moment before emerging, wrapped.

‘What the hell do you want?’

‘There’s no hot water my side.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no….’

‘I heard you, Spike! You can’t use my freaking shower! What do you think this is?’

Spike shrugs. ‘Okay. I’ll smell then. Done that before, I reckon.’  He turns to go.

Angel swears. Loudly. ‘Don’t touch my things!’ He seems to think this slightly ambiguous and adds wanly, ‘Soap….’

Spike nods, and Angel sees that damn blue cat again, lying nimbly through the affirmation.  He narrows his eyes and murmurs, ‘Don’t touch the water either.’

Spike’s mouth opens slightly as if about to reply to this, but he snaps it shut and goes toward the bathroom.  He turns and grins sheepishly. ‘Towel?’

Angel growls softly, and Spike makes a show of shifting—swiftly—to the bathroom. 

Angel catches himself smiling.

He’s in a dilemma now: not able to get into bed before Spike leaves but not wanting to hang around in a towel. He opts to dress in a pair of loose, black, cotton pants, ones he used to train in. When he trained. When he had Cordelia to train with.

Thoughts of Cordelia keep him neatly distracted for the first few minutes of Spike’s shower. By the time the sounds from the bathroom push these out, he’s caught in a confusing emotion between thwarted desire for her and desperate loneliness at her loss.  It’s not a good place to be in to overhear someone shower.  He listens to droplets fall on warmed skin, pictures them running like rivulets of pleasure down flesh of his flesh.  The steam oozes with evocative scent (mine?), which he is sure Spike can smell, and then a subtler one—shared history.  He closes his eyes and eases his neck gently around, as if under the water, too. Semi-naked, he feels his nipples tweak and harden. Other things harden, too, one recent spill seemingly having no effect on his arousal. 

He puts his hand down to thin cotton, stroking gently. 

Is it the sinning ye be at, Boy? 

Yes, Father, it is. I sin.

There’s no time, though. Reluctantly, Angel fetches a shirt and leaves it loose and long over his erection.

He feels a profound sense of depression, his ordered, tightly controlled life wriggling like sin around him.  He doesn’t know why he touched himself thinking of Spike under a shower. It revolts him, makes anger return, and that feels good. That familiar emotion provides the order and control he needs. 

By the time Spike emerges, all wriggling has ceased; all unwanted thoughts are in their box. 

Until he sees the naked flesh, that is. 

Then they spring out like a scary child’s toy, laughing manically at him.

He steps back, insides of knees colliding with the bed, sitting. ‘Jesus! Spike! Cover up!’

Spike appears unconcerned, but Angel notices one tiny flush of red on perfect cheekbones that belies this apparent nonchalance. That he’s rigidly staring at Spike’s face and nowhere else suddenly occurs to him, and trying to be more natural, he lowers his eyes. 

Oh, God! 

‘Lend me a towel, Pet?’

Angel doesn’t refuse him a second time, throwing his discarded one from the bed.  For some reason the flush deepens, but then Spike nods his thanks and wraps it slightly more times than he could. ‘Ta, Mate.’

‘I’m not your mate.’ Mate: n. one of a pair; colloq. partner

‘Sorry. It’s just a thing people say. You turning in then?’

‘It’s late.’

‘So, we gonna tackle this Lindsey bloke tomorrow?’

Angel nods, distracted by what he has just seen and increasing discomfort under his shirt.

‘Bags I get first dibs.’

‘Huh? Are you speaking English here, Spike?’

Spike pauses. It’s good pause; Angel gives him credit for that. ‘Actually, Mate, I think I’m the only one who really can.’

Angel watches him depart and, once more, discovers he’s smiling. He’s supposed to be profoundly depressed and finds this sudden amusement very inappropriate.

Spike wakes him up, and for an instant, Angel remembers being woken by another child demanding his attention.

Pissy doesn’t even have time to bud before anger blossoms.

He growls menacingly at the slightly bouncy figure standing at the end of the bed. 

‘Come on! We get to go torture the little fat git today!’

‘You think Lindsey is fat?’ This is so not what he means to say (needs to say); so, he adds in a less puzzled tone, ‘Get out.’

Spike claps his hands, grinning. ‘I’ll make some brekkies. Come ON!’ He spins around and begins to rummage in the kitchen. 

Angel peers under the sheet and grimaces, calculating the distance to the bathroom.  

‘So, what? We play good cop, bad cop? Cus, like, I’m being the bad cop, yeah? You can butter ‘im up, and I’ll shaft ‘im.’ He pauses, straightening. ‘Figuratively, course.’

Once more, Angel is maddened by the need to smile. He groans at some inevitability of Spike, this childe of his, then wraps the sheet around his waist and goes into the bathroom.  He perches on the edge of the sink, thinking puppet. It always works. Things quickly subside.

When he comes out, Spike is drinking from a bloodbag, staring out of the vast floor-length windows. ‘It’s too high up here.’

‘One day it will all come crashing down; so, I wouldn’t worry.’ He stands before his closet, choosing carefully. What do you wear to torture someone?  He strokes his hand over well-loved leather pants then slips them on.

Bare-chested, he walks back to the nightstand to fetch a slim, gold chain. He likes the feel of metal on naked skin.  The bandaging now distasteful, he peels it off, revealing an ugly wound.  He feels Spike’s eyes on him and turns quickly. For a moment, he thinks that Spike was quicker, turning back to the view, but he realises that, once more, he wasn’t being watched at all. Why this annoys him is a mystery, but he uses the irritation to stoke his habitual frustration with Spike.  ‘Are those the same clothes you had on yesterday?’

Spike pouts. 

The pout almost undoes him.  Cursing his endless susceptibility to this ploy, he rummages in the drawer.

‘When we’ve finished with Lindsey, go get something new. Something clean.’ He tosses Spike an envelope. 

Spike inspects the contents and blows softly through pursed lips. ‘’K. Means I can get more blood on me now then.’ He twitches up his eyebrow and licks his lips.

‘You seem very keen to lay your hands on him.’

‘Angel, do you have a problem with something? Every bloody time we talk about him, you accuse me of fucking him.’ Spike suddenly flushes deeply and turns back to the stare out at the view.

‘What? You are such an… idiot!’ It’s such a weak rejoinder that Angel suddenly chuckles. He shakes his head and pulls on a dark shirt. ‘I don’t like him. It pisses me off to think….’

Intense blue eyes return to him.  ‘What? What don’t you like thinking about, Angel?’

‘You. Now, let’s go.’ He makes no attempt to untangle the confusion that wraps itself around his simple admission and strides to the elevator.

Spike lights a cigarette when they’re in and says casually, ‘You seem very laissez faire about this torture gig, Mate.’

‘Don’t call me that. I’m only one thing, Spike, and that’s determined to do what I have to, to save the world.’

‘Oh, yeah. Well, if you want tips on that, let me know.’

‘Are you trying to piss me off?’

‘No. I don’t really need to try all that hard, do I?’

Angel glances over. He bows his head. ‘You try my patience.’ Fond tolerance is not what he was going for, but he hears it nevertheless.

Stunned, he finds Spike’s hand on his arm. Even stranger, he doesn’t immediately snatch away. ‘Let me do the torture thing, Pet. You do the talky talk thing and then leave, yeah?’

‘Huh?’

Spike’s face appears troubled to Angel. Genuine. He moves his arm away, but it’s a gentle movement. 

‘I don’t want you to do it.’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Spike? I’m, what? Too out-of-control to torture the likes of that fucking loser?

Spike pouts, studying his cigarette. ‘Precious. You’re too precious.’

Angel can’t think of a reply to this, and Spike adds softly, ‘To the mission, that is.’  When Angel hears that qualification, he doesn’t particularly want to reply.

They’ve put Lindsey and Eve in separate cells—where they can see each other, but not communicate in any other way. It’s supposed to be a hardship for Lindsey, something to soften him up. Angel thinks it would have been more effective, in that case, to make him share with her, but he keeps this thought to himself… until he doesn’t. Until, uncharacteristically, he shares it with Spike in a low murmur as they stand contemplating the day ahead.  He’s pleased by Spike’s reaction: a small, intimate snort and a crinkling around his eyes as he regards Eve through the haze of his cigarette smoke.

Angel feels a shift occur in the room—subtle but very real.  It’s no longer Lindsey and Eve confronting him; it’s him and Spike confronting them.  It’s not backup; it’s much more than that.

The questioning lasts all day. They take it in turns, and although it’s not hunting, it’s as close as they’ve come to sharing that intimacy for a very long time.  The suspicions that Angel’s harbouring about Spike and this pissant man don’t seem real here.

Spike seems utterly dispassionate. Angel senses no arousal, except perhaps in Lindsey, but he already knows the lawyer is fucked up, so tries to ignore the fact he likes the interrogation.

He’s impressed with Spike’s professional manner, the way he’s concentrating on his task.  Only once does he notice Spike turn away, hiding his face. This disturbs him on some level, although he can’t exactly say why.

He wants Eve left alone with her lover then—seeing him and not being able to comfort. He feels this might encourage them both to talk—end things quicker—so he touches Spike on the back, a small, light tap, and leaves.

Once more, he’s pleased Spike immediately follows.  He suspects Spike is thinking about more rigorous questioning, relishing another chance for some authorised torture, so says pointedly,  ‘I don’t want him tortured—not yet, anyway.’

He’s flattered by Spike’s careful attention to this, his thoughtful nod—silent acceptance of his wishes.

Angel walks slowly back up to his office. There’s something he wants to say, now he feels that Spike is actually listening, but he finds it hard to form exactly the right words. He opts for simple ones. ‘I shouldn’t have let you torture the doctor.’

For some reason, Spike continues to walk slightly behind him, and although he slows down, Spike does too. It’s annoying trying to have a conversation about redemption whilst trying not to walk into things.

He glances over his shoulder again. ‘You are the last person I should have asked.’

He sees from Spike’s expression that he’s evaluating this, remembering a similar conversation.

He quirks up one lip, amused by the repetition, and adds, ‘You’re too precious.’

He’s very tempted to add to the mission but doesn’t, and this deliberate omission puzzles him.

They’ve reached something of an impasse now: no information, nothing else to go on.  He sits heavily on a couch in his office and leans back, tired.  ‘He won’t talk.’

Spike sits down next to him, staring fixedly, which is unsettling. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t treat him as the enemy, but as someone who’s trying to do something good—in his own way.’

‘Good? He’s a weird way of showing it.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t know how. Maybe he never learnt, and now he’s stumbling around in the dark.’  

Angel turns his head and regards the lowered profile for a while. ‘Spike…?’

Suddenly, Spike looks away and stretches his fingers, staring at his nails.

‘Hmm?’

‘Are we talking about the lawyer?’

Spike rises and begins to pace. 

‘Why did you leave me there?’

Spike spins toward the door.  ‘I have something I need to do, Angel.’

He strides out of the office, a look of determination fixed on his face, and Angel has the disturbing thought that Spike is heading toward something that, ultimately, will defeat him.

His plan seems to have worked somewhat when he stands outside the lawyer’s cell that night. The man seems dejected, not meeting his gaze.  Angel doesn’t speak. He just stands there, staring, injecting the man with a sense of his malevolence… until Spike’s words come back to him.  Although he’s still sure that Spike wasn’t talking about Lindsey at all, he says softly, ‘Nothing is so bad, Lindsey, that you can’t repent of it.’

The man’s eyes flash up to his for a moment, and Angel knows that Spike was right. He leaves the unspoken promise of his blessing and approval behind him as he strides back to the elevator. He knows the man will not sleep easy this night.
 
As he emerges into his hallway, raucous music assaults his ears.  Wincing, he peers into Spike’s room. Spike, clutching the neck of a bottle, is weaving a strange, drunken dance around the furniture, and singing in a falsetto voice to the appalling sound.  Bare chest and feet… still wearing over-familiar jeans…. Angel looks over to the clearly new CD player and suspects there was no change.
 
Spike doesn’t stop dancing until Angel cuts the music off; then he takes a long swig from the bottle, eyes narrowed.  Suddenly, he waves his hand dismissively. ‘Buying clothes is so boring.’ He pouts, and at that tiny shape of Spike’s lips, all Angel’s anger dissipates. Without it, he feels strangely bereft, no other familiar emotions rushing in to fill the gap. Feeling more naked than Spike, he says defensively, ‘At least wash the ones you do own?’

‘Oh, so fucking prissy aren’t you? These days.’

Angel’s taken aback; he hears malice in the tone, and without his anger—his armour—it hurts.  ‘What’s wrong, Spike?’

Spike begins to reply, but Angel cuts him off. ‘I’m not talking about clothes or what you did with the money. I’m talking about you, and I’m not leaving this room until you tell me the truth about what happened in the tunnels. It’s why I freaking brought you here, and I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong.’

Spike lifts his eyebrows a fraction. ‘Phew. It’s gonna be a weird eternity then.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, you and me… in this room… forever. Course, I could suggest some things we could do to amuse ourselves….’ He pauses, one of his best, one of the ones that Angel is really coming to appreciate. ‘Seems I remember passing the time quite pleasantly—in the old days.’

Jack-in-the-box memory squeaks from his lock-up, but Angel mentally stamps on him, grinding him silent.  Instead of rising to the provocation, he answers calmly, ‘I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong.’ His calmness deserts him somewhat when Spike is suddenly in his face, poking his chest. 

‘Why do you assume there’s something wrong with me? I’m not the one who was left in the tunnels!’ 

There’s possibly some logic to this—in Spike’s mind at least—but Angel can’t see it. He captures Spike’s accusatory finger, holding it just tight enough and just close enough to a backward bend that Spike gets the message. ‘Tell me!’

‘Torture me, Angel! Why not? We’ve been so soddin’ close to it all day. Do you think I don’t smell your need? We’re animals. Let’s behave like them. Let’s runt and fuck and play in shit!’ The final word ends up as spit on Angel’s face, and he releases the finger to wipe at it absentmindedly.  For a bewildering moment, he looks around, reassuring himself that this is real—this edifice of civilisation. Spike’s words have taken him back to another place, a place where things were very, very simple indeed.  

Suddenly, the figure so tense and angry in front of him collapses: shoulders sagging, head dropping. ‘I’m sorry.’ Spike shakes his head. ‘I don’t want this.’

‘What do you want?’

Maniacal laughter isn’t the reply he expected, and Angel takes a step back.  Suddenly sober again, Spike carefully lays his bottle down on the coffee table and turns away. ‘I’m kinda tired, Angel; I’m going to bed.’

Angel feels slightly foolish now, his threat not to leave clearly impractical. He pouts for a while, watching the slim figure as he sorts through the CDs thoughtlessly.  ‘If you want to tell me, Spike, you know where I am.’ As an afterthought, and because he can, he adds, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

There’s a twitch from the tense shoulders, and Angel feels an odd relief flooding through him when he realises that they’ve relaxed fractionally.  Taking an opportunity that he senses won’t come very often, he goes up close and says in a low voice, ‘Go use the shower first—if you want. I’m gonna read for a while….’

Spike turns his head so fast there’s an audible click. Angel would give up a considerable slice of his immortality to be able to read the expression on that beautiful face. Trying to say the right thing, but having little experience of that, he enunciates carefully, ‘I won’t runt and play in shit with you, Spike. Not now. We’re more than that now. Both of us. Equal and the same—souled and….’ He smiles ruefully. ‘Precious.’

Spike pushes past him and heads across the hallway, but Angel isn’t disappointed at the reception of his words. He saw a faint glistening in Spike’s eyes and feels that the push was more to keep dignity intact than it was dismissal.  He’s far more disappointed with himself for leaving out something fairly critical in his repetition of Spike’s words. 

Once more, he has to listen to Spike showering, but this time, his thoughts are not distracted at all. They’re all focused on the steam drifting into the room. He goes close and holds his hand to it, watching it condense on his cool skin. It seems to be the only connection he can make with his troubled childe: this second-hand water.  He brings his fingers to his lips, to see if he can taste Spike in the dampness. He can’t read him to see what is wrong; he can’t hear the truth behind his clever deflections; he would never touch him; so, this tasting seems to be the only thing left, the only way to reach him. 

The water is nothing more than water, and he learns nothing from it. He discovers more from suddenly realising that he’s standing in his room, licking water that Spike’s bathed in.  But this discovery is only about himself, not Spike, and leads to no useful conclusions except that he’s so lonely he’s willing to find comfort in used steam. 

This time, Spike calls out for a towel from the shower, and Angel tosses one over the top for him, hearing a muffled curse.  When Spike emerges, he holds out a bloodbag. ‘Hungry?’

Spike blinks. His hair is flattened to his scalp, water drips down his neck to naked shoulders, small rivulets on flawless skin.  Wordlessly, he takes the offered food and tears at the plastic with sharp, expert teeth.  Angel remembers those teeth tearing at him—demanding damnation. He feels light-headed and feeds deeply, draining the bloodbag without stopping, blood oozing through his body like memories of long summer afternoons spent behind closed curtains in another country where the sun was fleeting and precious.

A strange, peaceful mood settles over him, and he senses that Spike feels it, too—that it might emanate from Spike. He can’t understand the contradictory emotions of this pale form. Hearing unexpected wistfulness in his voice, he murmurs, ‘You used to talk to me.’

Spike blinks again. ‘You used to listen.’

Angel looks down at his feet. ‘Are the souls barriers?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe. You’ve not heard me since you had yours.’

‘But you have one too, now. Shouldn’t that make us equal again? Make us….’ He trails off, utterly unable to compare what they had been then, the ways they communicated then, to what they must limit themselves to now.

‘I hear you well enough, Angel.’

Angel’s angrier now.  It’s such a relief to have that emotion safely back. ‘You think you know me so well, Spike. You know nothing.’

‘Can I borrow a sweater?’

It’s like a stab. ‘What?’

Spike shrugs. ‘I’m cold.’

Distractedly, Angel goes to the closet. Before he can hand Spike one of his old, no longer wanted sweaters, he hears soft words. ‘I know you’re angry all the time and that you don’t want to be here, doing this. I know that something binds you to this place, something that the others don’t understand. I know you want to unburden yourself, Angel, like a penitent in a long-remembered confessional, but you can’t find absolution—all you get is sore knees, and there are so many better ways to get those. I know you’re even lonelier than I am.’

Angel feels the anger leave him once more, but this time, it’s thumped out by a huge punch of self-pity. It’s the worst feeling of all; he can’t afford to be this vulnerable: words creeping in under his defences. In this mood, he’ll make decisions that could damn them all. He’s been here, done this.  ‘Don’t.’

The voice is so much closer now, so close he thinks he can smell the soap scenting Spike’s skin, so close that the shower-warm body warms him.  ‘I know that you’re scared.  I know that you’re not as tough as everyone thinks—as everyone needs to believe. I know you doubt yourself, and in that uncertainty, you doubt everyone else, too. I know you don’t like me. I know you used to like me… once. Have I left anything out, Angel? Is there anything more of you that I’ve not thought about and pondered and tried to understand?’

Angel tries to release his grip on the sweater, to hand this over as if it’s what they’re talking about. If he can do that, he can stop this conversation. It has to stop. That’s not in doubt.  But his hands won’t obey him. The soft wool has become a lifeline, and he clutches it desperately.

‘Why do you shut me out, Angel?’

At that, Angel finds the strength to act. He turns and spits, ‘You left me to die, Spike! That’s why! I can never trust you! Every time I’ve trusted you, you’ve turned on me!’

‘Trust! Trust! This isn’t trust! You treat me like a fucking guard dog! You keep me on a leash and let me off to bite people when it suits you! You weren’t trusting me in those tunnels. You were employing me and expecting a certain return for that contract: my loyalty! You didn’t earn it; I gave it freely. Well, I took back my sodding gift.’

‘You never talk to me; you never tell me what you’re thinking. I never know what you’re thinking, Spike! I’m sorry! I can’t be the intuitive person you seem to want me to be! You have to….’

‘Intuit this, you bugger.’  He’s flattened against the closet doors, kissed, a half-naked, wet body slamming to him, powerful, urgent and needy. 

Before he can react, before he can decide how he’s going to react, it’s withdrawn: the power, the urgency and the need.  With a last furious look and a challenging tilt to the head that clearly says: you hear me well enough now, don’t you? Spike stomps out. Angel can’t decide whether he’s more surprised by the kiss or by the fact that he understood something Spike was thinking at last.

It’s as if a spotlight has illuminated the private places of his mind. It’s an intense feeling of raw vulnerability. He’s surprised he doesn’t feel anger, but he doesn’t. Spike told him nothing but the truth, as if this truth has been written on his face all this time—as if Spike has somehow learnt to read it.  If he feels anything, it’s shame. He’s acutely ashamed that Spike seems to read him so well, but unless there’s a tongue down his throat, it seems he cannot reciprocate that ability.

What he thinks about the kiss is less certain, and he pours a drink with an unsteady hand, pondering this. He likes the word ponder: it implies calm, rational consideration—not the urgent pounding that is actually in his head: a wild beast, caged, fighting against restraints until freedom or death.

Pondering is better than giving in to this passion seething under the surface of his controlled facade. Passion. No one needs to tell him about passion.  

What just happened was more than a kiss—he knows this. It was a demonstration of something, a declaration. Whether this was to demonstrate something about Spike, or him, he’s not so sure. 

He glances across to the doorway, still open from Spike’s dramatic exit. 

He’s just across the hallway. 

They need to talk. He needs to calm the situation—maybe get Spike to see the value of pondering, too. He takes a first step toward the door then hesitates. 

Did he kiss back? It seems kinda important…. 

Maybe it should be more important whether he wanted to kiss back—but it’s not. It’s only important whether he did. On reflection, and with some more pondering, he decides that he didn’t. 

Perhaps that’s why Spike pulled away so quickly. Or perhaps he had never intended or expected the kiss to be returned.  This last consideration—that Spike had not seen something in him that would imply the kiss would be returned—gives Angel moral ground just high enough to cross the distance to the opposite room.

Spike has his music on again, and this time, Angel leaves it. It’s some modern thing—irrelevant.  The slim figure is leaning on the huge picture window, staring out over the lights of the city.  ‘Go away, Angel. It’s late.’

Angel tips his head to one side, frowning deeply. He has the impression that Spike means too late. It’s distinctly unnerving: this hearing hidden meaning behind Spike’s words.

‘You’re right, Spike. I do use you. I’m sorry. I kinda though we were using each other. You’re here willingly, though. I don’t force you to stay.’

‘No, you don’t.’

Again, beneath this wavers: but you don’t want me to either.

Angel takes a leap of faith and replies to the words he didn’t hear. ‘You’re wrong. I do want you here. I need you here now.’

Spike turns slowly from the window, and to Angel’s considerable delight he looks… unnerved. He presses his advantage. ‘I think you’ve always liked the fact that I can’t read you.’
 
Spike purses his lips and goes toward the bathroom.

Angel smirks. ‘Haven’t you forgotten there’s no hot water this side?’

Spike starts, and a flush is clearly discernable on his cheeks.  Angel laughs. ‘Goodnight, Spike. I’d appreciate your help tomorrow, but if you don’t want to, I’ll understand.’

He goes toward the door, but just as he reaches the threshold, he stops and without turning around says, ‘I do like you, by the way. I still think you’re an idiot, but I’m almost kinda fond of you.’  Half turning, he gives Spike a penetrating look over his shoulder.

He can’t sleep that night. There are hundreds of things whirling around in his mind, most of them things he wants to say to Spike. Now he’s begun looking for sub-text hidden beneath Spike’s words, he starts to enjoy it, playing back long scenes between them, probing for truth beneath insult and hostility.

Should it unsettle him? This realisation that their whole relationship has been something other than he thought it was. It doesn’t. It intrigues him. For the first time in too long, he doesn’t lie awake listening for soft breathing that he’s sure will stop, fearing a tiny mouth trapped against too tight bedding, knowing himself as helpless to save his child from suffocation as he was helpless to save him from hell.  

Now he lies sleepless, thinking about passion. Only, this time, it’s not his that he contemplates. 

At one point in the night, sometime towards dawn, he stands over a sleeping figure sprawled naked but for a sheet scrunched around his waist.

Spike snaps his eyes open, staring back. 

Angel concentrates. Fear, desire, confusion, love and hate—he sees them all in that intense expression.

With a nod, he turns and walks back to his apartment.  

Understanding his childe for the first time has made life more interesting; it hasn’t made it any easier.

Angel catches Spike still dressing the next day, hung over and sour, fingers running distractedly through sleep-rumpled locks.  He chucks him a bloodbag.  ‘Good morning.’

Spike fumbles the catch, swears then holds the side of his head.

Angel chuckles and goes to fetch his coat.

They stand side-by-side, waiting for the elevator. Angel starts to hum tunelessly, a low sound guaranteed to irritate.  He smiles inwardly when it produces a snapped, ‘Must you?’

He lets the smile appear on his face, tasting Spike’s imminent denial, waiting in gleeful anticipation.

‘I was drunk last night, ‘k?’

Bingo. ‘Okay.’

Spike turns, and Angel can see outrage mixed with a fair slice of embarrassment. ‘Is that all you’re gonna say? Okay?’

Angel twitches his expression into a thinking face. ‘Yup.’

Spike narrows his eyes, stomping off, apparently looking for stairs. With an evil, triumphant glance at Angel, he wrenches open a door and storms… into a maintenance closet.

Angel is still laughing when they step into his office. 

He tests his new perception of Spike though, carefully studying the seemingly angry, closed-off expression. It’s there: a glimmer of humour, sparkling like sunlight on the blue of Spike’s eyes.

Apparently knowing that he’s been sussed, Spike murmurs, ‘Ponce,’ under his breath.

Before he takes his place behind the desk, Angel murmurs back equally softly, ‘Not the one doing the kissing, Spike….’

They can say no more; Wesley comes in. Angel waits for the others before realising that this is it: Wesley and Spike. Memories of Gunn begin to fester, and his uncharacteristic flash of humour vanishes. He glances up at Spike and, this time, catches his childe’s scrutiny. Without a shadow of a doubt, Angel knows that Spike felt his mood shift. They continue to study each other for a moment longer.

When Angel returns his gaze to Wesley, it’s with the unsettling thought that he’s just had a conversation with Spike without either of them speaking.

Wesley sits down carefully as if he’s feeling fragile. ‘Any luck with Lindsey?’

Angel pouts. ‘Possibly. We’re going down to see him again now.’

‘We?’

Angel glances at Spike. Wesley only raises his eyebrows and nods.  Angel adds in a low voice, ‘I’m going back for Gunn, Wes. Work it. With Illyria. She was a freaking God; make her perform some miracles for us.’

‘Actually, I think she was….’ But Angel doesn’t stay to listen. He feels an unusual sense of restlessness, as if he needs to keep ahead of something.  At the moment, all he’s ahead of is Spike, and it seems more like running away than leading.  As running away from his childe is clearly unthinkable, he slows down and lets Spike catch up.  He can see Spike’s hand, swinging at his side as he walks. That hand touched him so quickly the previous night that he didn’t have time to feel it—he’d been too occupied being kissed. He tries to recall the feel of Spike’s fingers on his face and rubs his hand over his cheek, as a man might check for stubble. 

‘Do you think he’ll talk today?’

Spike’s question interrupts Angel’s train of thought, and he’s forced to stop thinking about spidery finger strokes on achingly untouched skin. With that lingering intensity distracting him, he murmurs, ‘I thought about what you said yesterday, Spike: about seeking redemption.  So, I offered Lindsey an alternate future to being my enemy. I’m hoping he’ll have thought about it all night.’

‘Oh.’

Angel turns and regards the lowered face. He tries to see beneath the surface of Spike’s apparent nonchalance.  He thinks Spike is pleased that he took his advice then remembers that Spike had possibly not been talking about the lawyer.  He adds less confidently, ‘I think everyone can repent. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t.’

‘Can they all be… saved?’

‘I think so. Yes.’ With a supreme leap of faith, he adds gently, ‘Even you.’

At that, Spike’s eyes flick over to him for a moment.  Something strange stabs into Angel—low down where he’s not felt such ache for a very long time.  They come to the elevator, and he punches the button.

Spike is standing with his lips pursed, staring at the door.  For the first time since the kiss, Angel thinks about it properly. He acknowledges his thoughts now are anything but ponderous.

They fire his belly.

He stares obliquely at the lips, pouting to extra pinkness.  

The elevator arrives, and they step in together, the closeness and intimacy forced by the closed space heightening his arousal.  He hears a faint sigh and looks more directly at Spike. It seems to him then that Spike is waiting for something, that he’s edgy.  He doesn’t want to do it, but he flicks his gaze quickly to Spike’s pants. For the first time, it occurs to Angel what the declaration in Spike’s kiss might have been.  Once more, the annoying hijacker memory kicks in, and he’s back in another time when promises made with smoking flesh were never fulfilled. For the life of him, he can’t remember whether it was him or Spike who reneged on that pledge.

Once he’s begun to think of Spike in this way, he can’t stop. The judge tells him to disregard the defendant’s last remark, but he can’t; he’s heard it, and it informs his verdict.  When he looks at Spike’s hair, he pictures his fingers running through it. When he drags his gaze down the back of the coat, he’s drawing a lazy finger down a prominent spine.  He slowly strips Spike, removing the layers keeping the pale flesh from retuning home, flesh of his flesh.  

The elevator stops; the doors slide open. 

Spike glances over, and there’s a flash of something knowing in his eyes, but it’s quickly obscured by disgust.  ‘You know what, Angel?’

Angel can’t reply, he’s still withdrawing his mind from Spike’s naked body.  

Spike doesn’t wait for a reply and says bitterly, ‘Sometimes you think too damn much.’

Leaving Angel standing in the elevator, he strides off to the holding cells.

For the second time in their acquaintance, Angel tends to agree with Spike’s assessment. It’s almost as worrying as realising he’s aroused to the point of orgasm merely from undressing Spike with his thoughts.

Puppets don’t work this time, but the panic of that familiar device failing does the job anyway, and arousal subsides to dull ache. Dull ache he can deal with; dull ache he can walk and talk with. It gives him something of a rangy edge, and he uses it to heighten his perception of Lindsey’s mood. It isn’t all that difficult to see that the lawyer is defeated. His denial of knowledge is genuine, and his attempts to help useless.

Dispirited, Angel nods to Spike, and they leave together.

‘I’m getting them back, Spike. Gunn and Fred. Both of them.’

‘Fred?’ Spike’s voice catches, and he bends to light a cigarette.

Disbelievingly, Angel turns to him…. He’d forgotten. He’d genuinely forgotten that Spike and Fred were close. Since her death, so much sympathy for Wesley, so much sadness for himself—her handsome man who could not save her—but none, not one ounce of sympathy given to Spike.  And Spike never asks for any. He carries his pain inside. Once more, Angel feels humbled. 

Spike pushes the button for the elevator, and they wait for it, both staring up at the numbers.  

Spike looks over at him. Angel can feel the intense gaze, but then it’s withdrawn. He turns, but the elevator has arrived, so instead of talking to Spike’s profile, he backs him into a corner and talks to him face on.  ‘What?’

Spike seems annoyed to be pinned and questioned like the defeated man beneath them.  He looks away then up into Angel’s eyes. ‘I died to save the entire world. Everyone. I burnt up for them all, good and bad. It was so simple.’

‘You died to make Buffy love you at.’  He regrets saying it as soon as the words leave his mouth—not because he doesn’t think it’s true—he does—but because it’s not the whole truth.  

He doesn’t need to read sub-text beneath Spike’s look; his childe’s emotions are on the surface, raw.  ‘I wasted my time then.’

Angel sighs, lowering his eyes to the floor but not letting Spike out of the tight corner he’s pinned him in, noticing that Spike isn’t making any attempt to leave anyway. ‘I didn’t mean it, Spike. And I know she loves you. She told me you were in her heart.’

‘Well, what’d’ya know…?’ 

Angel can hear bitterness behind the apparently casual comment. He lifts his eyes. ‘I think the more important question is: do you love her?’

More important for me, if I’m to understand the declaration you made last night.

Spike’s mouth quirks up, but it’s not really a smile. 

In a much lower tone, but still keeping Spike’s gaze, Angel murmurs, ‘I think you were right, Spike. I do think too much.’ 

Before Spike’s face can register any expression (which is just fine by Angel for it saves him from trying to read it) he leans forward and kisses him.

It’s been too long coming. He knows this now, but a century of waiting hasn’t diminished the anticipation.

He hears a high, clear note in his head, like a perfection he never sought.  It’s not just the lips, which are incredible. It’s not just the tongue, whose touch tightens his balls with urgent need. It’s his hands on the back of Spike’s neck, feeling short hair that he’s stared at for over a century and wanted to explore. He’s never kissed someone with short hair, and it’s revelatory. Both hands cup tightly around Spike’s head, adding to the pleasure—of it all: lips, tongue and short, erotic hair.  

But the elevator pings. 

The doors begin to open.

Spike pushes him away, but he’s already pulled back. There isn’t time to see Spike’s expression before they’re not alone. 

They stand side by side.  

It occurs to Angel, as he studies a large spot on the neck of the anonymous man in front of him, that he has no idea now what Spike is thinking, but that this is slightly less alarming than not knowing what he is thinking.  He can't force his mind to stay on the subject of the kiss. When he pushes it, it either slides off, or sort of mushes, so he goes back to thinking about the man and his spot.  He tries to look at Spike without moving his head, but all he can see is an impression of blond, which doesn't help at all.

One by one, people leave the elevator on different floors. He and Spike are taking the longest trip, and this thought—a hundred and twenty-year elevator ride—suddenly makes Angel snort with amusement, a sound that seems to alarm the few remaining occupants.  

One last person travels up with them to the top floor but steps off first.  Angel leans casually forward and presses the button to hold open the doors.  He turns back and looks at Spike.  'What now?'

'I think that's kinda up to you.'

'Why?'

Spike frowns, and Angel gets the impression that he doesn’t really believe what he said but is only stalling for time.  'What do you want, Spike? I asked you before, and I'm asking you again. What do you want?'  He senses they’re being watched and suddenly adds, 'Can we go upstairs and talk about this?'

'Talk?'

Angel takes a small breath but a huge leap of faith. 'To start with....'

It appears that Spike is still intuitive; he narrows his eyes thoughtfully at the invitation.  With a small nod, he strides out and heads for the office.  

Trying to walk normally with the hardest cock he's had for a very long time, Angel follows more slowly.

By the time he enters the office, his mind already exploding over implications of the after-talk activities, Wesley and Lorne are on their feet and waiting expectantly for him.  Spike is by the window, back to the room, shoulders hunched.

With a flash of intuition about what needs to be said, Angel nods at his small team but continues to the elevator, saying curtly, 'Later, guys. I have something urgent I need to do with Spike.'

Spike turns, clearly surprised, but more importantly, Angel can see genuine pleasure in the sudden softening of the blue eyes.  He smiles privately at him then adds to his colleagues, 'This could take some time.'

'We think we've found a way to rescue Gunn.'

Angel turns to Wesley, knowing Spike does, too.  'How?'

Wesley indicates for him to sit.  Angel hesitates, and not only because he’s calculating whether he can sit. 

He perches on the edge of his desk and folds his jacket discreetly.

'How?'

'It's something Lindsey said: about degrees—that the hell dimension can only hurt you as much as you could stand it.’
 
There’s a faint sound from behind, and Angel turns to see the elevator doors to the apartment closing. He curses inwardly, but doesn't feel guilty he's put Spike off, staying to hear Wesley out.  If Spike has a problem with that, it’s his problem. 

What has to be done is set in motion.

As he rides up, he realises his erection has subsided. Thinking about it, and the cause of it—the taste and feel of Spike's mouth, the feel of Spike's cock swelling and pressing into his thigh—inevitably makes it rise once more.  With a sigh, he adjusts his pants, closing his eyes.  

He's had better days.

As the doors open to their shared hallway and he begins to exit, Spike pushes past him, thumbing the button for the basement. Angel puts his foot into the closing doors, and they jerk open again. 'What's happening? Where are you going?'

'I'm leaving.'

Angel's mind leaps…leaving the apartment…leaving the firm…leaving L.A…. Leaving him!  'Huh?'  He’s surprisingly angry, even for him. 'Get out!'

'Bugger off. I'm not your minion.'

'No, you're not, Spike. You're the brain-dead dork that for some totally unknown reason—which I'm now really regretting—I just kissed in this damn elevator. Now, get the hell out of it, or I will treat you like a minion and make you. And that will hurt you a lot more than it will me. I'm having a pissy day, and I don't need this shit from you!' He graciously stands to one side and does not make Spike have to push past him.  The look he’s given almost hurts, but he ignores it and follows Spike into his room.

'Don't I have any soddin' right to privacy? You can't stop me leaving then follow me....'

'Shut up.'  He goes close, very close, forcing Spike to back somewhat quickly to the window. 'Talk! Now!'

'I'm not telling you jack-shit, Angel. You....'

Angel shuts him up with the same tactic he used so effectively in the elevator.  This kiss is very rough though; not tentative exploring by a potential lover but possession from an established one pissed off and tired of playing games.  Already hard, he feels his balls jump, twitching in response to the eroticism of joining his mouth so violently to Spike's. He’s achingly erect and grinds this hardness against the slim figure, half punishing Spike and half getting off.

He tears his mouth off, glares at Spike then goes back to the assault.  Spike finally comes alive under his hands, resistance turning to desperate reciprocation.  Suddenly, as he grinds into the slimmer body, Angel’s met by equal hardness, and they both moan obscenely through writhing lips.

Angel pushes him off, digging his nails into Spike’s shoulders, shouting, 'Tell me! I still can't read you enough, Spike! But I want to. I want to, and I can't. Please. Tell me what you're thinking!'  He returns to the swollen lips, aware kissing will defeat his object, but making this kiss so tender and gentle that the words his childe finds too hard to say will be eased out on its loving intent.

Eventually, they pull away again, lips parting reluctantly, wetly, tongues withdrawing grudgingly. He runs one finger down Spike's cheek. 'Tell me. Please. You wanted this. You kissed me, and then when I... when I finally got it, you try to leave.'

Spike tries to pull away, but Angel holds him pinned into achingly beautiful sunlight that streams unhindered through magical windows. 

Chapter 2 – Spike’s Day

Spike wakes to a new day. Every day is new now, and he smiles inwardly, stretching luxuriously in the small bed. He’s had lots of days in his long life—waking up still full of rage or blood lust, alcohol or fear—a repeating lifetime of days that weren’t new. Now he wakes up and feels rested and whole.  It feels good.  

The good feeling extends all over, and he leisurely strokes his hand down his chest, heading for his nipples, which he tweaks for a while, enjoying the message the gentle pain sends to his balls.  He misses sharing his body with a lover, but not as much as he thought he would. It’s his now, just as much as his thoughts are. 

He’s free of it all, and he feels good.  

He delays the moment as long as he can, but eventually, his hand slides lower, over the rock-hard abdomen that he can’t seem to fatten however much soft living is indulged.  He brushes his hand over the tip of his cock, which rests on his belly, leaking quietly, waiting obediently for attention. He rewards it, and it responds lovingly, rising to his touch like a cat stretching for attention.  Arching and beginning to breathe, he beats the solid rod, hard and relentless as befits preternatural flesh.  

His mind roams over favourite fantasies: hands—some gentle, most not. These rough ones are the memories he indulges most: Buffy tearing at him, thumping him into walls, splitting herself as if he was a stake that she forever tried to impale on; Dru crooning her mad songs as the moon bathed them in its icy light. Further back… pounding between memories as his fist pounds his flesh: beds filled with bodies passing long summer days; curtains billowing allowing dangerously seductive sunlight to their lair; shouting and laughter and the passing of blood between eager mouths.

His whole body taut with pleasure, he releases to the memory of a tongue easing blood into his mouth and licking it around the soft walls.  

He presses his fist hard into his groin, making his prostate pulse and his balls fill his cock. As fluid shoots out, he tears at the sheet, tearing someone’s broad back, demanding fulfilment of a promise made with burning flesh.

When he comes down, he wipes his hand over his chest, wondering if he ought to be getting off to thoughts of blood. It doesn’t seem the thing to do: now he’s saintly… now he’s so… good.  

Laughing quietly and calling himself a prat, he heads for the shower, realising it’s getting late. He has to get in early; he always gets in early. It’s important to be there first, before he comes down. It’s not just a point of pride; it’s his secret moment of pleasure in the day: when he has Angel all to himself. 

He rubs soap over his body, wondering what mood Angel will be in today. He’s always cranky, often downright mad, but occasionally, just occasionally, he softens and talks and laughs—if ruefully—and these are the moments Spike waits for. More and more, these moments seem reserved for him alone, as if Angel can’t relax enough around the others. For all their troubled history, it is history, and he knows Angel knows that his childe knows too much for him put up the defences he does with the rest of his team.

He grins again as he’s drying: team. He’s part of the team—signed on voluntarily. It makes him feel very good again.  

The task ahead of them filters into his mind: some grand rescue. He lets Angel make the plans. He just goes along to keep the poofter safe.

He hums as he stomps through the sewers, something he remembers hearing in the Bronze. That’s another lifetime though, and he tries not to recall any of it. It’s not who he is now—who he’s trying to be.

The offices are quiet, the building apparently empty, until he enters the elevator. He eyes its occupant, surprised. ‘Thought you were getting your knackers fixed in the hospital.’

Gunn doesn’t look at him; he seems focused a long way away. ‘I’m better.’

‘Oh, ‘k. So….’

Gunn doesn’t pick up the cue to make small talk. Spike shrugs and lights a cigarette. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ He’s dying for the man to say that he does. It always amuses him, that small joke.  Disappointingly, the human replies, ‘Not gonna matter soon—me getting the big C.’

Spike raises an eyebrow. ‘Uh huh. That so.’

‘You in on this rescue thing?’

‘Course.’

‘Tell Angel I’ll wait for him by the car.’

‘’K.’ He watches the man depart, unnerved by the tension he feels pouring off the dark flesh.

When the elevator opens to Angel’s floor, Spike gets his customary tingle of anticipation.  There’s always this moment, just before he actually sees Angel, when he imagines it all going another way, as if he were in a show and the writer suddenly sniffs something stronger than coffee and writes him zany scenes.  He sees them playing out in his head. Sometimes it’s a fight. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, they always end up naked with lots of blood.  Grinning slightly, he perches on Angel’s desk and blows sufficient smoke around for the non-breathing bastard to smell it.  He’s well into the first fantasy—fighting and ensuing nakedness—when the elevator opens.  

Angel scores… three! Spike grades Angel’s anger every day and awards him points as the hours tick by, adding or subtracting from the running total. At the end of the day, he mentally rewards or punishes him, which is kinda fun, because those things are always the same… fighting with lots of nakedness and blood….

‘Put it out.’

Spike chuckles inside and keeps his face straight. Score four.  ‘Yeah, like, not.’ He can sense Angel’s distraction, almost hear him thinking about the task ahead: decisions, who’s to do what, taking charge, taking the entire burden onto his own shoulders. He wishes he could make Angel see him—see that he doesn’t need to carry that burden by himself, but he never does. 

‘Where’s Gunn?’

‘Waiting for us.’  

‘Let’s go.’

Angel doesn’t appear to hear Spike’s cautious testing of the word us and replies without a flicker.  But Spike’s delighted and uses it again in his head a few times as he follows Angel across the lobby.  As he strides behind the powerful figure, his pleasure threatens to break forth in an extravagant display of delight. 

Reunited with his sire; it seems too good to be true.

Gunn is waiting for them as promised, and once more, Spike senses unbearable tension and wonders what’s going on behind the dark eyes.  

His pleasure then takes a severe denting. Gunn folds his long legs into the passenger seat, and Angel holds his seat tipped forward, waiting for him to climb into the back. With a bitter look (which, he notices, is totally lost on Angel) Spike obeys. 

He doesn’t want to travel in the back. 

He wants to sit up front—with Angel.

He’s left out, relegated to the rear, stuffed into the less important position. He tries to butt into the conversation, but as usual, Angel is in a pissy mood, so he just awards him five points and sits back, muttering under his breath. Angel doesn’t appear to feel the metaphorical daggers being thrust into his back.

When the bullets start flying, it’s the most exhilarating thing that’s happened for a long time.  Angel flying behind the sofa is almost as much fun as Angel covered in feathers, and he laughs, feeling the old rush. Only this is so much better, because he’s fighting with Angel, not… with him. That’s something he’s never allowed himself to want, until now, when it’s suddenly all his.

The high lasts until they descend the steps. It lasts a few moments longer as his eyes adjust to the gloom. It lasts for just a second more as he holds the still warm heart in his hands. Then he looks around, and it all goes: the fun, the exhilaration and the sense of feeling good for the first time in his life. He looks desperately at Angel, but as usual, Angel is giving him no attention at all. He steps back, not wanting to look at the objects in the room, but compelled to anyway.  He shouldn’t feel like this. He’s been tortured too many times to feel this kind of fear: the Trials, which laid him bare with pain, testing him beyond even his limits to endure; the First laying long knives into his gut, tracing patterns of pain on his pale skin; burning up, cell by cell, eyes exploding in the heat. He’s done all of that. So, this should not scare him, but it does.  It scares him so much that all he can think about is escaping: demon, flames—nothing can keep him in here.  He fights like a man possessed to be free, to leave this place and return to what he now has.

It doesn’t make sense this paralysing fear, until the new one, Marcus, welcomes him to the team. He thinks it’s deliberate—that the man must know what he’s thinking, because it suddenly all becomes very clear to him. He’s scared because for the first time in his life he actually is part of the team, and that gives him something to lose. 

Because, of course, he will lose it. 

He’s a demon; he’s still going to hell; soul’s not gonna change that.

He’s going to go to hell—today, tomorrow, sometime in the future of his precarious life—and he will be trapped, and the real torture won’t be the pain but the knowing that he’ll never have this again: his simple new life that brings him so much pleasure.

He doesn’t remember walking up to Angel’s apartment, doesn’t remember the casual invite, which he’s never been given before and would so have enjoyed in another time.  Most of all, he doesn’t watch Angel stripping off his shirt, which he most certainly would have watched in that other time when he was happy. It’s the smell of Angel’s blood that brings him back—snap, sharp focus. Sharp focus on Angel… Angel… Angel… Angelus!.. the demon that bit him like a rabid wolf and took his life… the demon that condemned him to hell.

Angel isn’t looking at him. Angel’s never looking at him, but that’s just fine by him now. He stares at the demon, feeling suppressed hatred bubbling out like a vast boil lanced by the knowledge that that creature condemned him to hell.  He feels sick but doesn’t want to vomit in the demon’s apartment.

He makes his way back through the tunnels and is sick in his own, vomiting heavily into the bowl, smelling his disgusting fear in the fluid. Nothing scares him, so this aching fear makes him want to curl up in a very small ball and not peek out at the world again. 

He doesn’t want to die. 

He doesn’t want to go to hell. 

He wants to be a good man. It doesn’t seem much to ask for saving the world. 

The unfairness of it all keeps him from that tiny ball; it makes him pace and shout, and cry with anger and frustration instead. It doesn’t matter what he does; he’s condemned for being a demon, but he didn’t choose to be given this demonic heritage. He’s a victim. 

He’s Angel’s victim. 

The idea doesn’t come to him like a cold, clear plan. It seeps in on bitterness that sears his soul, eroding all his better feelings with a dull, acidic burn of hatred for Angel. Then it floods out, drowning his rational brain under an ocean of illogical self-pity.   But when the idea does come, he wallows in its truth: if Angel dies, there’ll be no one left to bear witness to the fact that he’s a demon. If Angel dies, his last ties to that old life are gone. If Angel dies, he has a chance to make a new, good life for himself. 

If Angel dies, he can escape hell.

He doesn’t sleep all night but paces, talking to himself. Both of him agree that Angel has to die.

The sun comes up, and he wants to get to work. It’s what he does: getting there before Angel, so he can have the pleasure of seeing him first. But that’s all gone now; a hollow, mocking emptiness has taken its place. Now he’ll have the pleasure of seeing Angel before he dies.

It’s so ironic: he could take Angel out at any time now. Angel has let his guard down around him; he knows this.  

When he sees him, he stares, willing Angel to feel a knife in his gut, which heralds a stake sending him to hell. As usual though, Angel doesn’t notice his existence. For the first time, this really bothers Spike, and although he knows it’s illogical, he adds another entry to the list he began in the bad hours of last night: Reasons Why Angel Has To Die. 

His opportunity comes quicker than expected, but he joins the team heading into the tunnels bitter at Angel’s easy assumption that he will follow, obedient-puppy-like to his master’s command.  

‘What’s wrong?’

Puppies bite sometimes. ‘Fuck off.’ He feels a sense of satisfaction that he isn’t whining around Angel’s heels anymore, the obsequious childe seeking approval. That’s gone now; he doesn’t need anyone’s approval.  With Angel dead, there’ll be no one left he ever wanted approval from anyway.

Even as he adds this excellent new entry to his list, he’s finding complex ways to test whether this is the right thing to do—the right time to do it.  He’s making deals with God to be shown his path: if the tunnel turns to the right, I won’t do it; if Angel looks at me, I’ll let him live; if Angel chooses one of the others to accompany him, I’ll do it another time.

Angel beckons him without looking, and the tunnel bears to the left.

If the second tunnel bears….  But it’s suddenly too late to make deals with God…. No! If by the time I light a cigarette Angel is still being attacked…. He’s halfway through a final complex deal involving smoke and the direction it rises from his mouth when Angel turns, looking for him.

Two thoughts stab into his mind at the same time: it’s too late now to look for me, Angel, and Angel’s finally looking for me. 

The thoughts are so contradictory, but so the same that he needs to get away from those pleading eyes and work it all out.

He thinks he shrugs; he’s not sure; he thinks he probably did, only he’s not thinking too clearly about anything.

The voices of the humans surprise him; he’d forgotten about them in a world that had, for a moment, only held him and Angel in its painful embrace. He nods at them, and when Wesley begins to ask the inevitable questions, only then remembers that he once had a sire who is not here with him now.  Wesley takes the right-hand tunnel, looking for Angel, and Spike lets him. It seems fitting somehow: promises to God fulfilled

    
Lost in his thoughts, he doesn’t hear the humans return, but too soon their voices intrude on his privacy. He frowns, wipes his eyes and listens for a while. They’re talking about Angel. They’re agitated, angry, scared.

He follows with a kind of sick fascination as they head back to the office.  

An overwhelming fury is growing in his belly. 

What right have they to speak their grief? Angel was his sire! 

He’d known Angel for over a hundred years, yet they think they have the right to speak of his death? 

Not once, not one single time since he’s been in L.A. has one of them ever acknowledged his right to love Angel best. 

For he does, of course.

He always has. 

They bemoan him as a friend, an employer, a colleague, a champion—all the ways they will miss him—but Angel was his creator. He’s lost God, and they’re wondering who’ll sign the cheques.

He only drags incredulous eyes from them and their snivelling grief when he senses a presence in the lobby.  

The sunlight is bright behind him, flooding into the office, spilling over into the vast reception area. It wavers on the highly polished floor: water spilt on glass. 

And Angel emerges, slowly striding, floating over the water God-like. He advances, coat billowing and given independent life by the power spilling out of the illuminated figure.

Spike watches the advance like a starving disciple on the shore, and he realises the meaning of the saying that God is love. He plummets as fast into love as he’d fallen into hate, for the two have always been the flip sides of his passion.

He suddenly understands that he can’t escape hell by creating it here—by betrayal—but by beating it back with better feelings.  If he loves enough, he’ll be saved, for God is love.  

For the first time in a very long time, Angel is actually looking at him. 

Out of habit, Spike awards him a ten before the angry words even spew forth.

‘Get out.’

He feels tears threaten, in front of humans, in front of Angel, and he knows nothing he can say will make this better. 

He pulls some self-respect out of his deep reserves, summoning the Big Bad back for a suitable gesture, then storms out onto the illusion of water that won’t support him, for he’s not God, and no one loves him.

The one he talks to that night is beginning to feel just a little too real. He’s done this before though, and doesn’t find it as worrying as he should. Of all the Scoobies to be visited by the First, he was the only one to see himself, and still he didn’t get it! He actually stood and talked to himself for hours, watching those nancy-boy bloody cheekbones and didn’t get that it wasn’t real.  So, talking to another him has become something of an art form. 

The other one is advising him not to love Angel, because loving Angel is clearly even more insane than talking to imaginary selves.  But all he can see is Angel striding across the sea, coming to rescue him. If he loves Angel enough then he can push hell back, and it won’t claim him. His hell would be leaving Angel anyway; it’s so beautifully logical, it makes him cry.  

Crying like this is painful. He’s not done it since he helped carry a dead slayer to her house, since he helped lay her on her bed with her familiar, girlish things around her. Since he helped bury her. Sometimes, it feels as if those tears never really stopped. He doesn’t think he can stop now. He doesn’t know if he’s gone mad again, or if he was never sane and this is sanity for the first time. He’s created his own hell here on earth. Shut out. Banished from his new life. No longer one of the team. 

He didn’t need to die after all. 

He’s in a living hell. 

Suddenly, the door flies open, and Angel storms in.  Spike can’t believe he was so intent on his own misery that he didn’t sense Angel’s presence. 

He tires to hide the evidence of his misery, keeping his face neutral, wondering if Angel can smell his tears.

Then for one moment, as Angel closes the gap between them, Spike thinks that Angel regrets his hasty words… regrets banishing him… has come to take him home. 

The hope makes him defenceless when Angel’s hands land on him, hate-filled and heavy.  But he says what’s in his heart—foundations of honesty that have been exposed by undermining tears. ‘I’m sorry, Angel. I’m sorry.  I made a mistake.’

His mistake has been hating instead of loving, which he does now almost without his own volition.

‘You’re damn right it was a mistake.’
 
The smell of Angel’s blood is overwhelming. Does communion have this affect on the faithful? Can they smell their God? He wants to taste Angel too, his gaze dropping irresistibly to the centre of the broad chest.  He wants Angel to show him, to lift his shirt and reveal the bleeding centre of his flesh. ‘Are you okay?’

He could have dodged, but he wants this punch too much, absorbing the feel of Angel into his skull, enjoying the slight ringing in one ear: bells summoning the faithful.

‘I don’t have time for this shit, Spike. Did Lindsey put you up to this?’

He’s listening so hard to the distant peel that he doesn’t get the question at first. He can’t think whom Angel is talking about and frowns, running over their shared acquaintance in his mind. But it’s not easy remembering so many in such a short time, and he gets distracted, billowing curtains shinning dangerous light on things best forgotten.  Finally, he gets it: Doyle. Identities confuse him though; is this is Angelus? Who should he be today?

‘The Lawyer?’

‘No, Spike, the other Lindsey we rescued from hell today.’

It stabs his heart—this reminder of Angel’s saving grace dribbled out to his favourites.  Why can’t Angel save him? He’s condemned to hell just as effectively as the lawyer with the two names, two faces, two chances.  He wants his own second chance; he wants Angel to crash into his hell and rescue him. 

The redemption offered by Angel’s blood makes him tip, hypnotised toward the larger body. His mouth waters; his tongue quivers with need, but he’s not sure whether this is for forgiveness or… something else.  Before he has time to find out, Angel steps back. 

The loss is like a slap to his face. When Angel tells him it’s time to leave L.A., repressed tears from that imagined slap make his voice shaky. ‘No!’ He tries to summon one tiny sliver of self-respect. ’I mean… I want to help. I do, Angel.’

He hears I need your help, Angel and wonders if Angel does, too.

‘Please.’

Angel no more seems to hear this plea than he’s heard any other Spike’s tried to send him over the years.  

Angel pokes him. He looks down. Suddenly, in his imagination, the finger pokes him elsewhere.  His face flares with embarrassment, and he hopes it doesn’t show on his preternatural skin.

With a jolt, he realises Angel’s still talking, and he shakes his head obediently in denial of something he didn’t hear.

As soon as Angel turns away, Spike closes his eyes and lets out a small breath, releasing tension in his buttocks, clenched at that embarrassing repositioning of Angel’s finger. 

‘I’m not abandoning anything of mine to hell.’ 

Spike’s eyes fly open.

Love soars in his heart—mine!  Can Angel read him at last?  

‘We’re going back to get him. I’m not leaving him there, contrary to what everyone thinks.’

Would he could knock Angel out of his life. Shoving him hard out of the way has to suffice.  

‘Can I count on you to back me up?’

If he cries anymore, he’ll lose the foundations of his sanity as well. Keeping his back to Angel, he just nods. 

It’s good nodding; it can mean so many things.

‘Why do you stay here? It’s grim….’

I was living in a crypt. I huddled alone in a school basement.  Now I live here.  The place changes; the loneliness doesn’t.

‘Where else can I go?’

Angel’s odd reply to this confuses him; he’s not sure whether it’s a curse or a suggestion, and he mulls this over as he watches Angel leave. 

Sometimes he thinks he’s spent his entire unlife watching Angel leave. 

With a sick feeling in his gut that spreads rapidly throughout his body, he knows that this will be last time he ever sees Angel.  

So many times they’ve met and parted, met and parted over the long decades. In a huge world, they seem to orbit each other intimately, held in some perpetual bond of nature that they can’t break. 

What has happened this time though is more final than it’s ever been before. It’s the first time he’s turned on Angel without provocation since he’s been souled. 

Angel’s forgiven him so many transgressions in the past because of that very absence. If Angel doesn’t admit that the lack of a soul makes a difference, he can’t go on believing that his soul makes him different. 

It’s a quirk of logic that Spike’s exploited frequently. 

Now he’s destroyed the delicate balance between them. Like figures on a seesaw, one soars high, one sinks down.

Now that it’s finally over, Spike allows himself to think over the past as he makes his way up to the roof.

An hour to sunrise, the city is hot already, and he sits on the edge of the parapet, smoking quietly, remembering.  In his memory, the beds were always vast, big enough for four, but this confuses him because everything was smaller then. He supposes he makes the space around them seem larger because what they did together seems so significant to him, even now.  They were like wild animals, as he’d always imagined those to be—a city dweller, picturing warm dens and safety in the entwining of sleeping limbs.  But his memories aren’t pure; he knows this; they’ve been contaminated by the longing of dreams, so that when he pictures a mouth straying to his in the bed, he can’t be sure whether Angel’s lips ever did meet his, or whether this is just fleeting resonance of sleeping desires. There were hands on him, giving him more pleasure than he had known existed, but he sees Darla lying alongside him, similarly pleasured, so the hands on him could not be Angel’s—they would surely have been on her softer flesh. But a stray joker, Drusilla, hovers un-allocated in his memory of their daytime lair, and it’s entirely possible that Darla moaned and arched for her, and that his pleasure was from Angel’s skilful, loving touch. 

The memory of blood in his mouth, eased in on Angel’s insistent tongue, is real, but they were demons: feeding and passion often indistinguishable. He thinks too much like a human; he always has; he knows this. But it seems to him that feeding someone from your mouth, opening blood-red lips wide and allowing fluid to pour between you suggests more than a casual act done by a thoughtless demon.       

It seems fitting to sit waiting for the sun thinking about the past. It was the best time of his life—human or demon: following in Angel’s wake…his childe…his protégée. Long nights of hunting and feeding, playing in the destruction they caused wherever they went carouse through his mind; long days, indolent, full of blood, intimate–like animals–licking and nuzzling and sleeping out the fearful sunshine loll in his memory.

Fear of that sunshine comes back to him now—Angel’s lessons, Angel’s strictures, Angel’s care. 

He’s disobeying it all! 

Guilt burns as Angel’s anger echoes in his mind: Is it the dust ye be wanting, William? Have you seen the likes of us burning? It’s not a pretty sight, boy, and I did not turn that face to see it burn up so soon. 

Angel tried to put the fear of sunlight into him, like a priest, bemoaning the wrath of hell.  

Ironic, really, that he actually burnt up saving the world.

An icy chill prickles down his spine despite the hot sun-prick on his skin. 

Hell. 

It always seems to come back to hell. 

If he goes now, he won’t have a chance to escape its fiery maw.  Killing Angel… loving Angel—either way, he might escape his fate.  

He knows burning and doesn’t want to do it for an eternity.

Reluctantly, he leaves the roof, a small puff of flame dancing on his hair as he descends.  Is this how the lawyer felt, day after day, as he descended to his darkness?

He knows he’s actually mad, as opposed to the confusion that’s surrounded him since rescuing Lindsey, when he sees the other self he talks to substantial and in his room, waiting for him. 

He’s still got those sodding nancy-boy cheekbones, so he narrows his eyes menacingly at this poofy apparition.  ‘Fuck off! I died destroying you.’

‘I’m not the First, Wanker. Stop talking to yourself.’

Spike sighs; he sounds like a bloody ponce, too.  ‘I’m not in the mood for this.’

‘Got something better in mind? Like crying maybe?’

‘Fuck off! You’re not supposed to piss me off as well! Everyone else does that!’

‘See! You’ve made me cry now!’

‘Hey! That’s my line!’

‘I AM YOU, you stupid Wossock!’

‘Oh. That’s not either of us….’ Spike holds his breath, staring at Angel. Another apparition—it must be.  He’s banished from God, so Angel can’t be here now.

Maybe he can conjure this ghost so thoroughly that he can talk to its unreality, too. 

Maybe it might actually come to understand him; the real one never has.

‘I’m not leaving you here, Spike. I want you where I can keep an eye on you.’

Is it the dust ye be wanting, William? Have you seen the likes of us burning? It’s not a pretty sight, boy, and I did not turn that face to see it burn up so soon. 

They’re not quite the same words—the accent is different—but Spike feels the intent is pretty much the same.  He doesn’t hear Angel’s next words; he’s too busy remembering Angelus’s: Ye be too pretty, Will, to burn. Remember that. I like my pretty ones around me. Will you remember, William? Down the long years ahead of us?

‘Okay.’  But he hadn’t. He’d forgotten on the long years of Angel’s derision.

‘Okay…? You’re agreeing?’

He’s so lost the thread of Angel’s words that he just shrugs, agreeing to pretty much anything. It’s got to be better than burning up alone or talking with poofy ghosts.

‘That’s it? You’re just going to come with me…. You try to kill me; now you’re agreeing to live with me?’

Live with you? In a vast bed, billowing curtains cutting us off from the world outside….

Angel didn’t mean this. That’s obvious from the anger on his face, which is all for the present. Billowing curtains belong to the past. He needs to banish them to that distant realm.  He needs to differentiate between Angel and Angelus, the added syllable critical.  Angel never seemed to be bothered by us; why should I?  

He wants to assuage Angel’s anger, but it’s not possible, so he offers a platitude instead. It doesn’t work either, and anger flares. Spike mentally awards Angel a fifteen—his biggest score for months—and almost smiles, feeling more himself than he has since coming down off the roof.

The remark about petty history plummets his mood back into dark places. Perhaps it is: petty. Perhaps he’s the only one clinging to memories of hands and lips and burning flesh: promises unfulfilled.

He watches Angel covertly as they walk through the tunnels. He wonders if Angel sometimes watches him like this: clever, sneaky, seeing beneath the skin.

Depressed by the conclusion, he knows Angel doesn’t. 

‘What?’

Spike’s not sure that Angel hasn’t been talking all the way along and tries desperately to guess what might have been said. He goes for a neutral repetition, stalling for time. ‘What?’

‘Tell me what’s between you and Lindsey.’

He doesn’t believe it! The fucking lawyer again! Not only is Angel not thinking about him, he’s thinking about that short, fat, greasy-haired, cocky, snub-nosed, dumb-ass lawyer!  With the poofy earrings….  Worse! Angel’s thinking about him with that short, fat, greasy-haired, cocky, snub-nosed, dumb-ass lawyer! With the poofy earrings….

‘Me and Lindsey?’ His skin shudders at the thought; his gut heaves in disgust; his…. He runs out of suitable ire as another thought slides in unpleasantly on his pleasant wrath: Angel isn’t thinking about him at all…. Angel’s thinking about the lawyer. 

Petty history…. 

It suddenly occurs to him that Angel might have used that term deliberately, setting up a contrast between their history and his with someone else—Angel’s history with this evil little piss-breath lawyer! 

Angel and Lindsey. 

It’s so blindingly obvious he’s surprised he didn’t see it before…

‘Spike!’

… Angel, vast, heavy and urgent; Lindsey performing like a bitch in heat beneath him.

He spits out an accusation, voicing some–if not all–of this suspicion.

Angel’s mouth actually quivers slightly as he tires to find suitable words.  ‘Huh?’ The reply would have been endearing—in another time and place. Not now though. 

You can’t fool me with that innocent…

 ‘Huh?’ 

… actually, that is pretty endearing…. 

Spike narrows his eyes and regards Angel for a moment, demanding the truth with his gaze.  ‘You. And him.’ 

‘He’s a pissant lawyer that’s fucked me around for the last seven years. What can I say? I tried to save his soul.’

Spike stops. Even that miscreant, rodent-faced lawyer…. Even Lindsey, Angel tries to save.  Why didn’t he come for me when I huddled alone in a sodding basement? Why won’t he help me now?

Angel glances back at him, but he hides his bitterness behind his cheekbones. (He knows people get distracted by those.)  ‘You tried to save him.’ He puts the emphasis on save, not on him.

He listens carefully to Angel’s reply, mulling over the sudden softness in his voice.  He tries to picture Angel and the human as they’d been before he knew them: Lindsey, successful and powerful but desperate to change; Angel, still optimistic, still believing in the power of redemption.  He wants that Angel for himself. He wants that Angel to save him, too. Very softly, he asks, ‘Do you think people can change?’ hoping that Angel will see that he has and offer him the redemption of his all-embracing love.

‘No.’

The reply frightens him, and he feels hot tongues of flames lap.  ‘What’s it all for if people can’t change?’ I’ve changed Angel, but you refuse to see it! I’m a good man. I can be a good man.

‘Lindsey is an evil bastard, and I only rescued him from hell because I need him.’

It infuriates Spike that Angel returns to the lawyer again.  But he sees the parallels; he sees that he is just like that to Angel: evil, not to be trusted, only here because Angel needs him in the fight.

Desperate, he murmurs, ‘What if he wants to repent? Angel, what if he wants to repent, to make it up to you, to be your… what can I be to you, Angel; what’s the limit of our possibility?  ….help you? Would you save him?’

‘Why are you so concerned about Lindsey, Spike? I still think there’s something you’re not telling me.’

Spike decides to kill him again.

He doesn’t care about his recent good intentions to love Angel till the flames go out. Now he just wants to kill him. 

Sod bloody flames.

Flames…. Tongues of pain flicker around him…. Confidence wanes….  He’s felt God’s flame and doesn’t want to sample the Devil’s.  Seeking reassurance, wanting Angel to tell him that hell isn’t all that bad, he purses his lips and says with as much confidence as he can manage, ‘It just seems kinda… harsh. No?’ 

‘Piece of cake to where I was. And when I’m finished with him, he goes right back.’

‘No!’ He wishes he’d never asked. Not this Angel, anyway. He should have asked the original one; Angelus would not have spoken so lightly of hell. He wanted his pretty things around him.  ‘I mean….’ He doesn’t really know what he means, except he wishes someone in the world still loved him.  For it had been–with Angelus–love of a kind.  There was intense friendship, and that was a kind of love: feeding together; sharing blood, which was so similar to other fluids that rolling it around in their mouths they had shared knowing looks—looks that even now, all this time later, he recalls as if it were yesterday. The memory hardens him; it’s an itch that needs scratching—inside.

The terrifying thought suddenly occurs to him that perhaps Angel is focused on the past but that this might not be a good thing. Perhaps Angel’s focus isn’t on remembrance of days but of nights, nights when they were demonic—when he was demonic. Maybe Angel only remembers him with victims, drawing out torment for his sire’s pleasure, offering the first taste of blood—obeisance even then to his God.

Perhaps Angel’s never been able to separate what his child undoubtedly was from what he has become. After all, Angel didn’t have the benefit of seeing him chipped, when he hung in that half-life between being bad and good: wanting to be both but choosing the latter—of his own free will, renouncing what he had been.  

‘I don’t think you should judge him on the past, Angel, but on what he’s like now.’

‘I don’t remember this much charity when you tried to fucking kill me yesterday!’

Ah. Clearly, he hasn’t renounced hard enough. It seems he is still evil.  If he were the good man he wants to be, he’d have grasped Angel’s outstretched hand and saved him. Instead, he turned his back and walked away.  

He’s so deep in his misery and regret for opportunities wasted that they’re standing by Angel’s private elevator before he realises where they are.  

Why isn’t Angel taking him to the holding cells?

Why haven’t they stopped at the laboratory where Wesley obsessively studies Illyria? Where he had pictured Angel coldly studying him…. 

Instead, they wait together for Angel’s private elevator.  

Despite what he’s done, it seems that Angel is bringing him home after all.

He doesn’t deserve any of this. He deserves to be staked, or something slower… possibly crucifixion–yeah, his smoke drifting up, a sacrifice to God–or hanging and drawing and…. He’s well into pleasant possibilities when the swelling in his groin actually begins to hurt, and for the life of him, he can’t decide if this is due to the death fantasies or the close proximity of Angel.  As Angel is standing in front of him, staring morosely at the doors, Spike has a good opportunity to adjust his jeans and study him without the covert effort this usually takes.

He likes the back of Angel’s neck. It reminds him of the way Angelus used to sweep up his long hair and tie it, arms lifted, muscles rippling.  Sometimes, as they lay bed, he would help untangle the long strands, taking over when Darla got bored, spreading sable hair over the pillow, Angelus watching him with his unfathomable gaze, accepting this obeisance as nothing more than his due.  

But he prefers Angel with short hair. 

On this worryingly poofy thought, the elevator doors open, and he trails after Angel, hoping his blush isn’t actually visible on his face. Errant fingers relieving internal ache… thinking about Angel’s hair….  

He seriously needs to get a girlfriend.

‘Okay, this is yours.’

The mirror effect of the two rooms confuses Spike for a moment; it seems so fitting—always mirroring each other.  He steps inside. It’s too empty; he’d much rather be stepping into the one on the other side. 

‘I’ll send someone for your things.’

He wants to shout no! but murmurs weakly, ‘What things?’ This is a second chance; this is the tangible promise of Angel’s forgiveness, and he doesn’t want to contaminate it with his old things—things that belong to another lifetime. 

‘What now?’

‘Now? Now, you keep out of my way until I need you.’  The word need pulses through Spike’s brain; his balls give an urgent hitch. He has the startling vision of himself as Angel’s bitch, being here for him when he’s needed: for relief, for fun, for any damn thing that Angel wants. He wants to prostrate himself to Angel’s pleasure, just as he did to Buffy’s: being there when she needed to get off… violent kinks that she could never have shown to anyone else but him—the dead man.  

Maybe Angel will come up at the end of long days and take him with her level of loveless violence that was only fractionally better than masturbation.

‘I need all the people I can have on my side in the coming fight.’

Spike smiles inwardly. It seems to be his mission in life to be the sidekick champion. Angel doesn’t even want to fuck him into compliance first, sucking his loyalty out and holding it, swilling in his mouth, hostage to his obedience.  But then Angel doesn’t have to. He has a far more binding hold on his childe than Buffy ever had: love.  ‘I’ll do anything I can.’ I’ll die for you, Angel, if that’s what you finally need from me. She did, and I didn’t balk at her terms.

For the first time in so long, Angel catches his gaze and holds it, not censorious, not angry. Spike sees sadness in his eyes, and more than anything, more than dying for Angel, he wants to take that sadness away.  But as he suspects he’s a fairly major cause of it, he doesn’t attempt to tell Angel this.  

‘If you need anything, you know where I am.’

Spike senses that Angel was going to say something else, and he desperately wants to know what it was.  

He wonders if it was also about need. 

When Angel is gone, Spike sits carefully on the couch, staring at his hands—the ones that didn’t reach out.

With a sigh, he leans back and closes his eyes. His soul is leaking. He pictures it quite graphically in his mind like a bright pool of reactor fluid, leaking out and poisoning him. It’s supposed to stay locked up somewhere inside, where he can control it, like humans do: still doing all the wicked things they do without compunction. He doesn’t want to feel this guilty about Angel. He doesn’t want to want him so much all the time. He wants to be what he was: hard, resilient.  He doesn’t want to be this lonely.

Bach soars from the opposite apartment, and for one bizarre moment, Spike hears it as Angel’s soul leaking from his perfect body, curling lazily into his room on its perfect notes.  He tips his head up so it can find him more easily. 

It’s not the sort of music to listen to when your heart is achingly alone. He needs Angel, even if he’s only full of anger or derision.  

Hating himself for being so weak, he gets up, shrugging off his coat and going silently across the hallway. He leans in the open doorway and watches.  If he didn’t know better, he’d say that Angel looks sorrowful. But he knows he’s not. Angel has too many other emotions trapped inside his head to ever be full of just one.  The burden that Angel carries is palpable: dragging down his shoulders, lowering his brow. If his eyes were open, Spike knows he would see a weariness of soul that almost matches his own. And still, Angel will not share with him.  He created him to be his companion, yet when he needs that friendship most, he closes his eyes and sits alone in the dark, listening to Bach. 

When he realises he’s been sensed, he debates leaving—he can’t think of a single excuse to be leaning there, watching.  But something in Angel’s silence doesn’t want him to leave. With a huge leap of faith, he says neutrally, ‘That’s nice. That used to be one of your favourites.’  He holds his breath, waiting to see what Angel’s reaction will be to this transgression on his territory.

‘It still is.’

The breath is let out slowly. He deducts ten. The remaining five is a pretty good score for Angel at the end of such a bloody awful day.  Not only was he not banished back to his own room, Angel made this huge concession and spoke of something personal.  The fact that Spike knew this small detail already, and that it hardly compares to twenty years spent sharing a bed, he relegates to the back of his mind. This is something momentous, and he wants to enjoy it. 

He inveigles a drink—Angel can hardly refuse to feed his captive.

‘I want you to help me question Lindsey tomorrow.’

Spike keeps his back turned to Angel, his expression hidden. He’s trying to be a good man. He thought Angel wanted him to be a good man, but he uses him to do these things.  He used him to torture the mind-fucker doctor; he uses him to punch the hell out of Illyria, who still has Fred’s nose, even if it is a little blue.  He doesn’t want to hurt people anymore. He wants Angel to use his other attributes, but they’re so dormant, even he’s not sure what they are anymore.

His life is constant repetition: everyone he loves wanting him to be good and then turning on that goodness, needing him to be bad again. He pictures himself going back into the apartment and shrugging on his coat, becoming the Big Bad for Angel, which is all anyone seems to want from him.  

All it got him was fire.  

He wants a different kind of burning now.  

For all this, though, he hears a different, better note somewhere deep in his heart. Angel needs him. Angel is suggesting they do something together at last. He has a memory of striding across the lobby with him and laughs inwardly. 

What does it all come down to in the end except being there for Angel?

He tosses down his drink and lies. ‘Only if I get to hurt him a bit. He pisses me off.’

He’s not sure what to do now and pours himself another drink, feeling, absurdly, that he’s abusing Angel’s hospitality with this, more than he did by trying to kill him, which seems unreal now—now that they’re here together, entwined by Bach.

He can’t stand forever, and the couch is very big. He makes his way toward it as if approaching a cobra: waiting for it to rear and strike him with angry, dismissive words—Fuck off, Spike; I’ve had a pissy day, and I don’t need this from you now.

Amazingly, he’s allowed to sit, and he’s so tense he misses his aim and ends up far closer than he’d intended. There’s a disturbing distance between them now: too much to make them seem friendly, far too little to maintain their habitual reserve.

Encouraged by the intimacy of sitting alone with Angel, being allowed to share his whisky, his music and his couch, Spike says softly, ‘So….’ hoping that Angel will pick up the cue for conversation, wondering if he can turn it so they’re talking of promises made between the other people they’ve been—how they’ve come to be here, like this: intimate strangers. When Angel doesn’t play, he adds sadly, ‘What’s the real reason for me being here?’

Because I want the reassurance of what we once had. I need you bound to me again, Spike— ties of loyalty that won’t break.

Hearing the words he wants to hear, he almost misses the actual reply. ‘What I said: I want to know what you’re up to.’

Surprised, Spike fancies he can hear his better version hidden beneath Angel’s translation. It cheers him up to the extent of cancelling Angel’s remaining five points and offering a small, weak joke.  ‘I’m sitting here, having a drink and a nice chat with you, Angel.’

It doesn’t get the reaction he was going for—Angel laughing, turning to him, realising he wants him and taking him on the couch (he blames his zany writer again, accusing him suspiciously of sniffing coke)—and he hears Angel’s bitter, careful declaration with growing anger.  He mulls it over for a while, swilling its acidic taste in his mouth, along with the whisky. It’s so egotistical: I don’t make the same mistakes twice. 

It seems to him that they’ve both been making exactly the same mistakes their whole lives, which is why they’re sitting together on a couch, neither having had a shag for many months.  He points this out, reminding Angel of one of his many, repeated mistakes.

‘You made me.’

He’s crossed the line now, gives Angel ten points to be going on with, knowing he’ll earn them soon, and adds, ‘You turned one lunatic, then you went and kinda did it again. Think you’d have learnt the first time—bad seed.’

Annoyingly, Angel doesn’t anger, so he takes the points off him again. Points win prizes, and he’s not giving them away for nothing.  

‘You call yourself mad?’

No, Angel, I only lived with a chip in my sodding head for a year, shagged a robot, tried to love a slayer, got my bloody soul back, went insane in a basement, had some of my best ever conversations with myself and didn’t even sodding realise it was me, and died to save the world. So, no, not mad.

It’s so bloody ironic that he chuckles and replies, ‘I think you do.’

‘I call you an idiot.’

Something tingles seductively, deep in Spike’s groin, making him shift slightly on the couch. That’s the first genuinely amusing thing Angel’s said to him for a long time. If he didn’t know better, he’d say it was almost… flirtatious.  

He uses the same tone to reply—the manner of very old acquaintances that know far too much about each other to hide behind barriers.  ‘That’s fair.’

The flirty tone continues, Angel’s voice now slightly husky and low. ‘Why are you still here in L.A., Spike?’ 

The answer is so obvious he wonders if the potted plant will get it before Angel does. What other reason could there be? He’s so intent on picturing himself saying I stay for you, Angel; you’re my sodding life, and I love you that he doesn’t hear most of the rest of Angel’s speech. Reconstructing, therefore, he offers dismissively, ‘I don’t think a big world suits me. I think I’m too small for that.’

Insignificant. 

He suddenly feels insignificant, as if his great sacrifice was done on another show, with another audience, and it’s irrelevant to the part he’s got on this one: the humorous sidekick.  Perhaps that is all he’ll ever be to Angel. Perhaps Angel remembers the past differently. Perhaps he doesn’t remember him as a friend at all. Perhaps Angel has memories of minions that are more potent in his mind than memories of him.  

Has he merely constructed an elaborate fantasy past life in his head to make up for the never-ending disappointments of the present one? It’s entirely possible.  He always did have a vivid imagination. Maybe, there never were four of them in that bed, and the curtains never billowed in on their intimacy, making them scream and laugh with mock fear. Maybe, when seeking Darla’s mouth, Angelus had never kissed him, wickedly chuckling at the possibilities their lips had then suggested. Maybe, when taking Darla, Angelus’s hand had never strayed to his thigh, stroking it as he stroked inside her soft walls.

Maybe, he doesn’t have an embarrassing hard-on now.  

It’s an interesting theory: if this erection is real, then maybe all the rest is, too. It feels real, stretching painfully against the material of his jeans. 

It’s the sort of erection that makes you need to slide down on the couch to ease. It’s trying to find somewhere to go, and his jeans are too tight. Thank God they’re black, or he could anticipate a small damp spot appearing. He can feel the tickle of leaking pre-cum, something in any other circumstance to be enjoyed to the full, but not here, not now.

Desperately, he keeps his eyes closed, going with the totally logical belief that if he can’t see it, Angel can’t either.  

He tries to calculate how far it is to the door and how much tenting there will be if he stands up in profile.  

With a horrified start, he realises that Angel will be able to smell him soon so says quickly, ‘I should go.’

Is the music is still on? He thinks it is, and hopes it distracts Angel enough for him to make a subtle exit.

He opens his eyes cautiously, doing his sneaky-observation-of-Angel thing that Angel still doesn’t get after over a hundred years of being covertly watched by his childe. Unfortunately, Angel is looking directly at him, studying him, too. He smiles wanly and bends to place the glass on the floor.

Oh, bollocks!  

Squeezed blood compacts even more, and he says in a slightly high voice, ‘Thanks.’

For the first time in his unlife, he’s glad that Angel never notices him. He makes it out of the door and leans on the wall. All he can think of is release: clichés of tidal waves rushing through his mind… explosions… fountains.  

He falls into his own apartment, fumbling at the button on his jeans. It’s a relief just to yank the zipper down, sighing as he eases his cock out. The feeling of bursting departs, leaving him with a dull, aching hardness. 

He kicks his jeans off disgustedly, not sure whether he’s angrier with them for being too tight or at himself for being so stupid, so… cowardly. For that’s what he is—a coward. He should have captured Angel’s hand and introduced it to his bulge, holding it there, not burning with sin, but burning.  Maybe he should have just turned to the ponce and told him how he felt.

He flings himself face up on the bed, arms akimbo, punishing himself for being so reticent. It only increases the anticipation of relief, his cock now standing like a pole from his body. 

They mirrored each other there, too. 

It’s the wrong thought—Angelus’s cock. It makes his swell that final bit, unpeeling the head from its soft covering.  

Sitting up and eying the bathroom door, he sighs with frustration.  It seems so pathetic to feed his seed to the drains of L.A., when there are so many more pleasurable places to deposit it.

He turns the shower on, idly watching steam make patterns on glass.  Very carefully, lips pursed with effort, he writes Spike.  Angel then follows, entwining their names through the e. It’s more pathetic than the contemplation of drains, and he hastily rubs it off again. But he can’t help his gaze straying to the door… the hallway… on—all the way into Angel’s apartment, if it could….

What would Angel say if he walked in and just told him?

What’s the worse that could happen?

Tell Angel exactly what he’s thinking for once….

It’s as intoxicating as it is frightening.   He’s fairly sure Angel wouldn’t stake him. He’s fairly sure Angel wouldn’t go for it either, but he’s not… positive. There’s that tiny element of doubt given life by the belief that Angel remembers the past as well as he does.

Desires like that don’t change. 

Angelus said it: deviant. 

They both knew what he’d meant and had been willing to take that journey together.  Perhaps Angel does remember billowing sunlight, lips, and smooth thighs stroked to enhance pleasure. Perhaps he remembers it all and misses it, too.

It’s the fear of hell again—not some pissy Roman version of that, which he suspects Angel still respects, but the hell he can bring about on earth. If he goes in there now, the worst that can happen is just that: the worst—banishment from Angel. 

He’d rather live this half-life than live without Angel at all.

The water is so hot he winces as it splashes on him, and he leans to one side, staring at the door.

Suddenly, before he can change his mind, he turns the shower off and pulls his jeans back on, striding into Angel’s apartment. 

Thought is banished for once, he’s all action—physical need.

Angel’s not there.

Cursing with frustration, he hears a sound in the bathroom and stops to listen.

It’s unmistakable: the sound of flesh upon flesh.

His whole body dissolves with need.  

Closer… tipping his head to the sound… leaning on the other side of the partition… spreading his hand on the wall… wondering if Angel’s is spread there, too—his other hand….

Intense visual images of an erection tease his memory as he listens to Angel jerking off, beating his cock, and they’re so clear that he knows he’s not imagining them. He can actually picture it: same size, uncut.  

A hand slides inside his jeans, uncapping his dick once more. He hisses as the foreskin bunches behind the ridge, the wet tip too sensitive to touch.

Angel isn’t finding his too sensitive. It sounds as if he’s running on a wet pavement: slap, slap, slap—heavy beats, jerking pleasure around his body.  

He wonders what Angel is thinking—what he’s picturing. Even Angel must use fantasies to get off. Perhaps they’re of Buffy, too, although, somehow he doubts this. She was his virgin bride, and he’s fairly sure Angel isn’t using her innocence for relief. Is he rolling on a shared bed? Is he thinking about hands? Does he remember blood dripping from mouth to mouth, lips joined just a little too long, tongues inserted a little too far? Does he remember sly smiles exchanged with knowing looks on promises of so much more? 

Spike’s hand speeds up, matching Angel’s pace, but then there’s a gasp and a long drawn out moan.  

Almost immediately, the shower goes off, and Spike only has time to wonder that Angel doesn’t linger more over this pleasure, before he makes an attempt to stuff his cock back into his pants and retreat.

Too late. 

Angel emerges from the shower, an overwhelmingly masculine figure emerging from steam and becoming solid. His cock swings heavy and spent as he walks, head down, frowning as if he’s had no pleasure at all.

Confused by his planned declaration to Angel turning into some kind of freaky voyeurism, Spike stays still, trying not to stare at the swinging dick. 

He’s impressed and pleased by the effect his unexpected presence has on Angel though, enjoying the earthy cursing and watching Angel, thoroughly embarrassed, retreat back into the bathroom.

‘What the hell do you want?’

Huh?  He’s not thought this one through and comes out with the first thing he can think of.  ‘There’s no hot water my side.’  He wonders if Angel will notice that his hair is wet.

Angel doesn’t seem impressed with this inspired excuse, but not quite realising how, Spike ends up moving toward the shower in a kind of dream. He’s thinking about drains and wondering if Angel regrets wasting his seed, too.

‘Don’t touch the water either.’

He turns. It’s there again: that flirty, low tone that makes his balls prickle.

In his mind, he asks Angel to join him, but Angel replies in a puzzled voice that he’s already showered. With a stab of deep affection for all Angel’s quirks and inadequacies, Spike just says, amused, ‘Towel?’

The growl is better than words—Angel is flirting with him, and he’s doing it in their own unique language.

Standing naked in Angel’s shower, he trails one toe over the drain.

His erection is actually painful, but he leaves it alone. He’s thinking. He raises his eyes and fixes on the wall between them. Does Angel stand there listening—as he listened? Is he waiting to hear proof of his childe’s loneliness? Does he crane to hear a telltale beating of preternatural flesh? Flesh of his flesh….  

Shutting down, locking all the crazy thoughts inside, he acts on pure instinct once more. He steps out of the shower and confronts Angel with a wet, urgent erection solid against his belly, a cockhead out and raw, and balls pendulous, swinging painfully as he walks.  

There’s nowhere for him to go now. He offers everything he has, waiting.

It doesn’t go exactly to plan.

Angel’s acute embarrassment embarrasses him.  He falters, and the terrifying thought comes to him that it has all been a dream—none of it real. Angelus never gave him the time of day…. He was merely treated like a minion, banished to distant rooms in the house whilst his sire played with the women…. There was no illicit kissing done under the excuse of feeding….

Feeling totally exposed, disgusted with himself—a cheap whore—he asks for a towel, not minding that he’s thrown the wet, second-hand one of Angel’s.

He doesn’t mind at all… for in the action of stretching around to reach the towel, Angel’s shirt rides up. Soft cotton pants hide nothing…. 

Something thick and heavy points toward the ceiling…. 

Spike flits back over the events of the evening. Between Angel getting off in the shower, and Angel being erect now, there’s only been one event… his shower.

He mulls this over as they go through some desultory, routine jibing.  

There’s a startling, but very pleasant conclusion to his flit: Angel got hard listening to water falling on his skin.

He goes into his room and leans on the door, holding onto the handle.  

The world suddenly seems full of possibilities again. He’s not in this strange confusion alone: Angel’s there with him. Maybe his sire isn’t able to articulate this yet, but Angel’s body is doing the talking for him. You can’t fake an erection; it comes from being aroused, from wanting to fuck or suck or roll with someone, feeling their heat, feeling their passion, too. Angel had listened to him showering, and he had wanted his body. 

The only trouble is, Spike has the distinct impression that Angel is not ready to admit this yet—even to himself.  If he’d pushed it—possibly falling on Angel as he sat embarrassed and hunched on the bed—he would have lost everything. Angel’s denial needs something other than his usual stalk-‘em-until-they-give-in approach. This needs subtlety.  

If he’s aware of a certain inconsistency in his moods, he ignores it. He’s a vampire with a soul; who’s gonna say what’s consistent for that?

He needs a new plan, one that will draw Angel out slowly, get him to admit his need. 

It’s all about subtlety.

After he’s taken care of….

He eases the knot of the towel with a sense of palpable relief. He’s subsided somewhat from the peak of hardness listening to Angel had produced, but a few swift strokes brings that urgency back.

Dropping the wet towel on the floor, he goes to the bed, planning to lie back and think of his plans for Angel, but as he kneels on the edge, a startling memory floods his mind: Angelus, naked and sprawled on his belly on a bed, reading.

It doesn’t take much of a switch to shorten the hair and update the covers.  Now, it’s Angel’s prone body beneath him.  

He spreads his fingers over Angel’s solid ass, able to feel the imaginary skin as vividly as he can feel his own dick. He strokes both idly: Angel’s flawless cheek and his thick member.  

He can’t see Angel’s hole, but if he closes his eyes, he can feel it under his thumb, so he thumbs it for a while, his other skimming the tip of his cock. 

The hole is very tight; he forms a fist with his spare hand—as tight as he anticipates Angel would be.  

Gently, experimentally at first, he pushes his cockhead against the tight, fleshy enclosure.  It seems impenetrable, but he doesn’t release his grip to accommodate it; he just pushes harder.

The sensation of forcing into something so resistant makes him harden enough to make an inroad, and the sensitive cockhead slips through his fist. He can’t help a soft sound of pleasure and withdraws to do it again. This time, slippery with pre-cum, the push in is easy, and he’s half-embedded before he knows it.  

He’s lost track of Angel, so tries to focus on him again, but it’s too hard now. He can’t put Angel in this position—being penetrated—and keep his imaginary sire real. He has no idea how Angel would react to something like this, or even if he would allow it.  

He gives Angel a few long, hard strokes, just to help him make up his mind, feeling it’s appreciated. Leaning over further, climbing on top of the hole, he bangs in, using his hips for momentum and holding his fist rigidly still.

He doesn’t last long; he’s too hard. But it’s longer than he would last if he actually were fucking Angel.  

Flinging down onto the wet patch, it’s impossible to imagine this is Angel’s body—that he’s pitching down in post-orgasmic pleasure to that welcoming flesh. It’s all too impossible to imagine. Most days, Angel doesn’t even notice his presence; it’s a long way to go from that to…. But there’s the erection….  He recalls the shape of it under the soft cotton pants. For one sickening moment, he wonders if Angel shoved something down there—some kind of sick, vampire thing—then chuckles: what he saw was genuine arousal.

An even more unpleasant thought then creeps in. Maybe, Angel became aroused thinking about someone else…. Maybe, in Angel’s mind, the water was cascading over different flesh.  

He’s not entirely innocent of the crime of substitution himself: once fucking Dru and picturing Darla; always fucking Harmony and seeing Buffy; occasionally fucking Buffy and wishing it were Dru; fucking Anya the once and thinking of Harris—but only in an up-yours-Mate kind of way (of course); and doing all of this thinking, somewhere in the back of his mind, of Angel, or Angelus.

No wonder he’s screwed up.

But if Angel had done a little substitution, there’s a fairly short list of suspects: the wolf-girl. Bloody milksop with her annoying jaw.  But Angel has a thing about werewolves…. Blond ones….  

He rolls over onto his back and runs through the whole scene one more time.  

Despite all his self-doubt and confusion, he’s convinced that Angel was not picturing someone else as he hardened standing the other side of that thin divide.  He was picturing his smooth flesh. He was picturing…. He sits up, a tingle trickling unpleasantly down his spine. Was Angel fucking him? It’s a startling thought. His arse clenches in sympathy. 

Lying back carefully, he ponders this.

He knows the theory.  He’s a Victorian—sodomy hardly a mystery. But he’s never wanted it.  It’s not occurred to him before that if Angel were picturing them together, his sire would be kneeling and penetrating, and he would be lying down and… taking it.  All nine inches of it.  

Eight—no need to boost Angel’s ego any more than necessary. 

Nah… seven. 

The most unused place on a vampire…. 

Sheesh! Six, or it’s going nowhere near me!  

Hmm… with suitable lubrication though….

He folds his hands under his head and slowly draws his knees up, then spreads his legs experimentally.  

Bloody hell! Six….

But… maybe seven…. 

Huh, even eight… suitably… prepared.  Imaginary cock becomes imaginary finger, and it’s gently easing into him, twisting slickly through his tightness. 

He hisses, drawing his knees up to his chest, cock rising in response.  Angel’s fingers are made for this: long and powerful.  Angel’s well into it, the penetration suiting natural inclinations. Spike watches his eyes carefully, trying to read from the imaginary the needs of the real, and has to conclude that the flesh and blood one would get off on this, too.

He arches and begins to pull his prick. He actually misses something he’s never had: feeling of something inside him. He thumps on the bed, desperately wanting that something thumping inside him—eight inches of solid Angel ramming into him, and it’s a theory in his head no longer. 

Sodomy? 

Oh, yeah, bring it on….

He explodes, a rain of sperm that leaves him shaking, aching for the feel of something hard easing slowly out of him.  

Twitching up an eyebrow, he smiles shyly as the provenance of this occurs to him, but, hell, if he had another hole, he’d offer it. He doesn’t, and the one he has will have to do.

Exhaustion sweeps over him, but it’s good. It’s tiredness from being almost shagged by Angel; it’s tiredness with Angel lying only a few feet away from him instead of being alone; and it’s tiredness from having his mind calm and clear for once. 

He knows what he wants. He knows what Angel…. Should he say wants or needs? He hopes they’re the same.  Wants. He knows what Angel wants, too. He just has to persuade him that it’s what he wants.

He wakes to another new day. He’s had many new days, but often they aren’t… new. He grins softly. His small Chernobyl of the soul is over. He feels it. Hell’s fires no longer lick; they’re there, but he’s burnt up before… no biggie.

Hell hasn’t got him yet; he’s sneaky like that.

He stretches then folds his arms under his head, thinking.  Angel.  

Has there ever been a time when he’s not been thinking about Angel? Even when he fell through a floor with the Slayer, even when those years of stalking had finally come to fruition, he’d been thinking of Angel and what he was taking from him… where they’d both been… what else they would now share.

Stalking…. It had worked with her: a persistent wearing down of her defences until she’d relinquished them as easily as her panties.

Distracted suddenly, a few moments do pass when he’s not thinking about Angel, but then he veers back on track.  

Stalking….

It’s not going to work—not with Angel. He’s not going to wear his sire down with sexual persistence.  Angel needs something else. He needs something else with Angel. 

He turns his head on the anonymous, guest-apartment pillow and studies the other one—the empty one.  

Once more, thoughts of Buffy intrude.  But they’re not thoughts of falling into something neither of them could control. He remembers the other time they shared a bed. When she really needed him, he’d given her nothing but his strength.  With startling clarity, he sees that what he was for her at the end, he has to be for Angel at the….

He frowns, wondering where that depressing thought came from. Is this going to be the end? 

With a small flick of his eyebrow, he admits he doesn’t care all that much—as long as he goes down fighting alongside Angel. 

Angel needs him to be exactly what he turned him to be: his companion in the fight. That they’ve changed sides in the conflict doesn’t alter that.  

He has a slightly vague idea of what this companionship will entail, long-forgotten Latin lessons coming back to him: Thebans, Spartans…. He always knew there was more to those intimate brotherhoods than his tutor had allowed. 

He’s not forgotten that he’s here under a cloud—a slight lapse in a tunnel blotting his otherwise fairly spotless copybook. 

The first thing is to get Angel to trust him again.  

He narrows his eyes and admits reluctantly that this might be trust him for the first time, but this is a mere detail, and he doesn’t let it ruin his enthusiasm for the project.  

Project Angel. 

It’s not a very inspired name, but it’ll have to do for now.  Get Angel to trust him…. Tame Angel? Angel… a wild horse: nervous, trembling, beautiful. The huge stallion rears, challenging him. Break Angel! That’s a much more interesting thought…. He strokes a hand over his belly, heading lower, as the ways he could do that breaking occur: Angel chained—one touch, an electric twitch—Angel manacled—soft stroking—Angel bleeding—urgent jerking—Angel torn—arching off the bed—Angel begging—break me Spike; break me in. He comes in a glorious mess on his belly, shot after shot of thick cum arcing out and raining down on waiting flesh.  

He doesn’t come down from this pleasure for a long time, his whole body quivering with contentment.

Rubbing his hand around in the stickiness, he mentally rebukes himself for falling at the first hurdle. This kind of behaviour isn’t going to get him anywhere—isn’t going to get Angel to trust him.

It’s bloody fun though….

Full of enthusiasm for the day ahead, he swings his legs off the bed and enjoys a long, leisurely (hot) shower, then retrieves his clothes from the heap he left them in on the floor.

He sniffs them suspiciously and tries to imagine what they’d smell like to non-preternatural senses. As they’re the only ones he’s got, there’s not much choice but to dress in them again.  

He stands for some time, watching Angel sleep. It only confirms the need for his project. No one should sleep alone in a double bed. The occupant tries to fill it, stretching limbs to the four corners, but it never really works. Where there should be another warm body, there’s only space.  He tips his head to one side and mentally measures the spare capacity in Angel’s bed and reckons he’d fill it quite nicely. 

Getting bored, wanting some company, he claps his hands and shouts a rude reveille.  

Angel jerks awake and rolls onto his back.

Spike nearly laughs out loud, but lowers his gaze and pretends to be searching in his pockets for a cigarette. For a moment, as he’d turned, Angel’s erection had tented the sheet like a fifth limb seeking space. 

Totally distracted by his thoughts the previous night, trying not to think inches, he blurts out, ‘Come on. We get to torture the little fat git today!’

He’d forgotten what a terrible morning person Angel is—his brain slower to get going than damp kindling.  ‘You think Lindsey is fat?’  Spike mentally rolls his eyes at the mention of that bloody name, but then grins when he’s ordered out.  

He claps again, chivvying Angel a little and turns to see what might be for breakfast. All this planning has given him a real appetite.

He chatters nonsensically until Angel finally goes to shower, then helps himself to some food and wanders over to the window to pull the drapes.  

In the hermetically sealed apartment, they don’t billow. 

Leaning on the glass, remembering a time when there was no morning wake-up call, when they lay curled together, happily filling the available space, there’s an overwhelming sense that this is all wrong. 

It’s wrong, but Angel doesn’t seem able to see it. They live in sunlight, sleep the hunting hours away, feed on degrading blood from plastic bags and deny the constant need for the pleasure of flesh.  He has the hopeless desire to return to what they had once been: soulless and simple. He wants to curl in a lair, deep in the safely of the earth—not discover that the earth is hollow and not to be trusted.

He senses clean, soap-smelling skin return to the room—does Angel prefer the smell of non-soaped, natural skin, too?—and murmurs, ‘It’s too high up here.’  

At the reply, he flicks his eyes over, studying Angel with his habitual, stealthy regard. He hears a deep vein of cynicism and defeat in the seemingly casual reply.  There’s something in Angel’s tone that worries him… intrigues him. This is more than just the weariness of being CEO of Wolfram and Hart. It’s as if the fight is just too much for him. The impression of Angel’s vulnerability is not helped by the fact he’s peeled off his bandage, revealing an ugly wound beneath.  Sensing that this raises thoughts of him (and not in a good way), he turns his gaze back to the view.  Defences down, guilt swelling, he’s caught with a broadside by Angel’s criticism of his clothes.  He can’t think of a suitable reply, but is surprised when Angel flicks an envelope over.

He replays the moment as he opens it… implication he smells… envelope. Pout! He files this interesting thought away to pick at later: Angel was deflected and affected by a simple pout. He’s got lots of variations of these, so this could be an extremely useful discovery.

Money! He wasn’t expecting the envelope to contain dollars, and he’s rather pleased. The pleasure quickly subsides when, once again, Angel manages to ease that damn lawyer’s name between them.  As long as that’s the only part of the man easing between them, he’ll let it go. No, he bloody won’t! ‘Angel, do you have a problem with something? Every bloody time—oh, sodding hell—we talk about him—Angel is actually jealous—you accuse me of—of me with him!—fucking him! Bloody hell!

It’s unbelievable but very, very satisfying. Angel is jealous! He picks up Angel’s cue like a terrier. ‘What? What don’t you like thinking about, Angel?’

When Angel says you, a great sense of calmness descends over him. For one moment, all the striving—to survive, to understand the world, to understand Angel—ceases, and all he knows is that Angel wants him.  The truth of this is in Angel’s shy flirting with that contradiction.  The certainty of it is in Angel’s confident stride to the elevator. Whatever dark thoughts he woke with, whatever led to his strange, uncharacteristically nihilistic comment earlier, he’s now riding high on the same connection he feels, the same promise that was sealed with their burning flesh.

He strides after Angel, joining him in the elevator, feeling more like a companion than he has for a very long time.

Feeling brave, he tests Angel’s patience, winding him up subtly as he used to be permitted to do—in another time and another place when Angel played the role of father, and he played the child (albeit with a very enjoyable incestuous sub-plot to that pseudo relationship).

It seems that Angel can still play the game, that he still remembers the rules. Spike fancies he can hear an Irish lilt in the way Angel murmurs, ‘You try my patience.’ 

It’s the voice that has haunted his dreams for over a hundred years.

He doesn’t want the other Angel—the cynical, hopeless one—to return. It seems to be his new mission—blown in on the heat of imagined flames—to keep Angel buoyant, energised, and ready for the fight. He tries to recall some Homer to set the right mood then takes Angel’s arm in a manly, warrior-like way.

‘Let me do the torture thing, Pet. You do the talky-talk thing and then leave, yeah?’ Sheesh… how much more noble can you get than that?

He ignores Angel’s predicable reaction and adds in a slightly seductive voice, ‘I don’t want you to do it.’  Ignore the poof’s rant. God—he’s so lovable! ‘Precious. You’re too precious.’ Bugger. Gone too far. Heart on fricking sleeve. Claw back some dignity. ‘To the mission, that is.’

Not hitting the delicate balance needed to pull off this manly companion thing, he lights a cigarette and floats away for a while, thinking about going shopping and wondering if he’s got enough money to buy a telly.

He’d forgotten just how much the small human annoys him. He annoys him even more now because he can watch him with Angel, and there’s no doubt, there’s… reaction. He can’t describe it any other way than that: reaction. 

He watches for a while then works it out. The man wants Angel. 

He’s not sure it’s entirely sexual. 

It’s close enough though. 

He turns his gaze upon Angel. 

No reciprocation. 

It’s extremely interesting viewing Angel from someone else’s point of view for once.  

For the first time, Spike tries to look at the outside. He always looks inside Angel to the things they share: blood, demon, memories.  He rarely looks at the exterior, but he does now. 

Angel has changed.  He looks tired.  Spike sighs, wishing he could discover the provenance for this extreme weariness. It’s a manifestation of the nihilism he’d heard earlier, a sense that nothing matters—that they don’t matter. It depresses him to see Angel defeated. Nothing broke Angelus: not the Inquisition, not that stalking plank Holtz, not Buffy.

Okay, he admits it’s a tad unfair to compare Buffy to the Inquisition, but the pain they caused was bloody similar…. She did that thing with a stake….

This pug-nosed little git doesn’t seem to find Angel tired. He seems very happy—very happy—to be mauled and shouted at, dragged and touched and handled by Angel.  It’s beginning to piss Spike off, so he suggests they swap, taking over the questioning—a little interrogation that won’t give bloody toerag a standing ovation. 

It’s not hard to deflate the ponce’s nads: a few well-timed murmurs about hell, and things subside nicely.

 

It goes on all day. He’s so bored. If it weren’t for watching Angel getting angry, which is always an incredible turn on, he’d go do his shopping. He’s alternating between a telly, which he’s not sure will work in the apartment, and some books, which he figures will.

He desperately wants to buy one of those doobries… with the little silver sticks that you can tap with at meetings and look as if you’re taking notes, but you’re really surfing porn… silver with a little blue screen.  

Oh! And an MP3! He could attach them and do illegal things with music. This little pillow-biter looks like he’d know how to attach them—looks like he’d know how to attach a lot of interesting things. Spike tips his head on one side, thoughtfully studying the earrings. Why has he never had something pierced? He lets his mind wander, musing on likely places. Would a hole try to close over? Crushing the stud…. Popping it out…. Course, he wouldn’t get something poofy (like bloody earrings)—nah, something hard…. Great fucking bolt up his piss-hole! 

The image of a bolt flying from his cock, squeezed out as his preternatural flesh heals, cracks him up, and he turns away to hide a grin. 

At bloody last—Angel’s finished!

Angel sweeps out, tapping him on the back; Spike’s only too happy to follow.  If he gets a shifty on, the shops’ll still be open.

As he strides behind Angel to the elevator, Spike thinks (not for the first time) that Angel needs to lighten up a smidge. Always yammering… torture… redemption (he’s bound to bring redemption in somewhere)….

Where would Angel look good pierced…?

That’s an interesting thought. He studies Angel’s body as he walks behind the imposing figure.  

Picturing decorative studs (and, if he’s really honest—which he usually is, of course—picturing the putting in and taking out of decorative studs, and the nooks and crannies of Angel’s body that would need to be held, probed and separated whilst he worked) takes his concentration off Angel’s conversation, and before he knows it, they’re side by side on the couch, and Angel’s being broody again.

Nothing changes.

He’s just beginning to think up a whole new points’ system for Angel—based on a complex arrangement of different broody facial expressions—when Angel’s conversation becomes considerably more interesting.

‘Spike…?’

Could he have put a more flirtatious undertone to his voice if he’d tried?

What would it be like to be called to bed by that voice…? Angel lying naked and aroused, arm outstretched…. 

He stretches his fingers, studying them as if Angel has taken one and is pulling him forward….

‘Hmm?’

‘Are we talking about the lawyer?’

Huh? Photographic memory replays the conversation.

Their whole history implodes to this one moment, and then explodes, a kaleidoscope of fragments. Has he been talking about the human while he’s hardened to thoughts of Angel, naked and glorious on a bed, or has he obliquely told Angel all the things he’s been trying to tell him since he got his soul?

How his soul aches to confess: to admit love and need, to acknowledge his great desire to do good. 

He starts to reply—the word love actually on his lips.

‘Why did you leave me there?’

Love, and all the other words are swallowed, just as surely as all his good intentions were when he turned from Angel.

He has no answer. Not one that he can explain to Angel, anyway, for his explanation teeters on the brink of insanity between his extremes of love and hate.  He doesn’t know which side of this great chasm he will eventually fall, but sure as hell doesn’t want to be pushed early by Angel.

He’ll fall in his own good time.

‘I have something I need to do.’ He sinks his tone, adding an air of mystery and import to his declaration, striding out.

Project Angel isn’t going too well.

Retail therapy. 

He has absolutely no idea where to go or what to buy but has a vague idea that Project Angel might stand more chance of success if he was… cleaner.

He might not know where to go, but he knows someone who will. The trouble is it has to be approached carefully, subtly. Never let the enemy know your ultimate objective.

‘So, Hamilton. How’s it going?’

‘Spike. How charming. It’s going very well. And with you?’

‘Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, so… nice suit, by the way.’

‘Thank you! I’m flattered you noticed. Slightly worried, but intrigued enough to continue this conversation.’

‘Huh?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What? Look, I mean…. Are you just gonna stand there with your bloody hands folded?’

‘No, I could unfold them. There. Isn’t this pleasant.’

‘You, Mate, need to chill a bit.’

‘I’m not familiar with that term… chill…. Is that the opposite of burning in hell?’

‘What?’

‘What do you want, Spike? Unlike you, I have a role in the coming apocalypse, and I’d rather like to get on with it.’

‘Right. So much for sodding subtle. Where’d you buy the fucking suit?’

‘Turnball and Asser.’

‘And?’

‘It’s hardly your sort of place, Spike.’

‘Never mind, Ponce; I’ll find it me bleeding self.’  He tries to make a sweeping, grand exit, but it’s not easy in grubby black.

He cheers himself up by stealing Angel’s favourite car and relaxes as soon as he pulls out from the evil empire. Fucking over-dressed, poncy git. He’s top of Spike’s new list: People Who Are Gonna Get Bumped Off Come The Apocalypse.

Eve’s next. 

That’ll teach her to get a room with his sire.

He’s forced to call Harmony on and off for over an hour getting directions, but eventually, he scoots into the turn-ass place under his coat, shaking the smoke to disperse it slightly. 

He’s the only person in the shop, except for three Marcus-clones. Smaller, but creepily similar.

‘May we help you?’

He looks around theatrically then down at his own clothes, raising one eyebrow.

‘Ah. Quite. I’m afraid, Sir, that you won’t find anything in here to suit you. So to speak.’

Spike stares at him for a while until the man reddens and turns away.  

He marches to a rack of shirts and pulls a number off hangers, but they’re all… shudder. He drops them to the floor, walking over them. ‘So, where’s the cool gear?’

‘I’m sorry, Sir, but I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

‘Ask away. I’m feeling just pissy enough to forget all my good intentions and fucking EAT you!’

‘Sir! Seriously, I’m trying to…. Don’t!  Sir!  There’s a…. Please! Better… shop… for you…. It’s really… cool! Don’t!  We cater for a much… older…. Please!’

Spike drops him and rips a couple of sweaters off a stand. They’re black and fucking clean.

He slams them on the counter.

The man sidles around to the other side, hastily ringing them up. Then he stands expectantly. Narrowing his eyes, Spike digs in his pocket to retrieve the envelope, glancing casually at the till.

‘Whuhuh?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How much?’

The man smiles as if he’s won a pissing contest. ‘One thousand and thirty five dollars. Sir.’

A dignified exit isn’t possible.

Hell, he’s had worse things dented than his pride.  ‘So, this other shop…?’

Winning the dick-measuring contest as well, the man nods understandingly. ‘Energie.’ It’s tagged on, but it’s not meant. ‘Sir….’

This one isn’t empty, and a number of young men turn to watch as he shakes out his smoking coat.

He looks around for a moment, puzzled then picks something off a table.

‘Still my beating heart; the I has just been put in desire.’

He turns to find a young, apparently homeless man watching him admiringly. ‘Huh?’

‘Anything I can get you? And I’m including myself in that….’

‘Huh?’

A slight frown. ‘Oh, jeez, do—you—speak—English?’

‘Bloody sodding hell! Of course I speak bloody English. I am sodding English, you git!’

‘Okay! Do you want to buy some… sodding… clothes. Jeez, I love that… sodding…. That’s so cool!’

Spike holds up the pair of jeans. ‘Where’s the new stuff?’

‘New… stuff?’

‘The—new—clothes. I don’t want this homeless shit!’ He pokes his finger through a rip in one knee. ‘I’ve already got a pair like this. I need something new.’

‘You are so funny! Go on—tell me you’re an English comedian, and this is some kinda candid show, and you’re gonna….’ 

‘Fucking hell! I want to buy some sod…. Some freaking clothes! Is that too much to ask?’

‘Sheesh! Unripped jeans! You’re breaking my heart. Over here….’

He sees a price tag.  It’s a nightmare, spooling like a bad movie. ‘How bloody much!!! I don’t wanna buy the sodding factory!’

The walls are closing in on him. He doesn’t understand any of this. He just wants a pair of jeans. Last time he’d bought some, they’d been ten bob.  Throwing his hands up (metaphorically as well as literally), he sees a rear exit and storms out. 

He’s in a large mall.  

There are people everywhere; he’s jostled.  The roof is smoky glass; the sun begins to burn. 

Totally disorientated, he dives into a shop.

A sublime sense of calm descends.

Shiny metallic things everywhere…. Some have flickering blue lights…. And every single one of them is playing The Ramones.  

There is a heaven after all.

Too Tough to Kill on full blast, a bottle of whisky to christen the new sound system, and he makes heaven here on earth.

He can actually feel hell being pushed back, flames dampened by the smoky taste of the fiery liquid.  

He strips off his T-shirt, the smell beginning to get to him now, too. The boots join them in a pile on the floor, and he begins to slide away on the alcohol, his body taken over by the music. It’s better than heaven, and the memory of the unsettling shopping trip fades. 

Utterly caught by surprise by the sudden cessation of the music, he falters and stops singing.  He can’t look Angel in the eye. He’s standing on his T-shirt and feels intensely guilty that he was such a failure. He just wanted to buy some new clothes and look… nice.  But he’ll be damned if he’ll admit anything of this to Angel’s censorious look. ‘Buying clothes is so boring.’

It’s an argument before he knows it, but it’s not what he wants with Angel. 

Then it’s a blur of angry words that he doesn’t stop to consider until they’re standing toe to toe, and he’s poking Angel and telling him that he loves him, only he doesn’t use exactly those words. 

Angel doesn’t hear what he doesn’t say and takes the finger, bending it painfully.  Cresting high now on pain-induced memories of vampire foreplay, Spike invites Angel to remember, too.  The word fuck seems startling out loud despite the number of times he’s said it in his head.

But Angel doesn’t remember. He wipes a small trace of him from his cheek. Did they once lick traces of blood from the corners of inviting lips? Did they stare too long? Lick too knowingly?  

Perhaps it’s all delusion—as deluded as his memories of a slayer actually loving him.

‘I’m sorry.’  I’m sorry you wiped me off.  ‘I don’t want this.’

‘What do you want?’

I want you.

It’s so crazy. He no longer knows what any of those words mean. He doesn’t know who he is; he has no idea what the want entails; and he’s damn sure he doesn’t know Angel anymore. Angel… Angelus… his sire… his companion… his teacher… his friend. His.

It’s a lot to invest in one slightly poofy vampire. He feels guilty for needing so much from Angel when Angel so patently can’t give him any of it.

Project Angel is shit.

Everything’s shit.

‘I’m kinda tired, Angel; I’m going to bed.’  

The tension between them is unbearable, more potent than whisky or music, but it doesn’t subdue emotion—it heightens it.  

His back to Angel, he can feel hairs on the back of his neck pricking with stress at the aching need in his heart.

‘If you want to tell me, Spike, you know where I am. I’m not going anywhere. Go use the shower first if you want.’ The voice is so close—when did Angel get so close? ‘I’m gonna read for a while.’

He stares at Angel hard enough to drill down into his soul. Are you offering me something more? The promise of your domesticity? The family I lost when I lost you? 

‘I won’t runt and play in shit with you, Spike. Not now. We’re more than that now. Both of us. Equal and the same—souled and precious.’

OH! The absent fuck screams in his mind. 

Tired, drunk and strung out, he pushes past, heading blindly to the promised shower, his mind churning all the possibilities implicit in Angel’s declaration.

He said they were equals. 

He called him precious.

He didn’t deny that he wanted to fuck.

He showers mechanically, feeling no heat, no water. Angel isn’t a project; this isn’t a game. This is their history being tested, and without their history, what are they? The world tumbles down around them, and without their history—the ties that bind—they’ll be destroyed. Angel needs him, and he’s got to stop pissing around. He can hardly stand for drink when Angel needs him. He feels abashed when he accepts some offered blood.

‘You used to talk to me.’

Unprepared, his defences dulled by unaccustomed guilt, Spike can’t summon the clever deflections that have protected him all his life.  He hears defeat in his voice.  ‘You used to listen.’

‘Are the souls barriers?’

Of course they bloody are. ‘I don’t know.’ I’m half-mad most of the time, kinda makes it hard to talk! ‘Yes, maybe.’ You’re always so angry it makes it hard for you to listen. ‘You’ve not heard me since you had yours.’

Once more, an argument erupts. This never changes: the volatility of their relationship.  But suddenly, he’s watching Angel fetch him a sweater, and different words tumble out. 

One of them’s been listening.

The words crack Angel open; he can see fractures in the carefully presented façade.  Angel’s vulnerability draws him closer.
 
Angry words build, spat out but still meant.  Then Angel turns, his eyes dark and accusatory. ‘You never talk to me; you never tell me what you’re thinking. I never know what you’re thinking, Spike! I’m sorry! I can’t be the intuitive person you seem to want me to be! You have to….’

It seems to Spike he’s been screaming at Angel for so long that his inner voice is hoarse, so now he speaks in the old language, the one they used to use.

Touching Angel’s body is like falling into a familiar bed after years sleeping in anonymous ones. Memories mass on his lips, their shared saliva releasing them, but the kiss is a paradox: the longest and the shortest—an equinox between what was and what could be.  

Then he stands straight and keeps Angel’s gaze challengingly.  You hear me well enough now, don’t you?

He sees that Angel does, and the thought frightens him a little.  Angel’s crossed a line in the sand that was a marker between them. Angel has crossed over into his scary realm where thoughts can become desires and memories become more tangible than blood.  

Possibilities have gone—all the promise that something could happen… gone. 

Something has happened, and certainty is so much harder to kick against than possibility.

The kiss was a test, a dip in the water of memory. It doesn’t matter whether Angel kissed him back, or not—which is just as well for Angel’s lips stayed still and cold—the critical question is did Angel want to kiss?  Did the memories swell in his mouth, too, or did he swallow without tasting?

The cold reality, when he returns to his room, is that the kiss did not give Angel the key to his memories. Spike begins to believe that there’s nothing locked in there to discover anyway.

It rather puts paid to his romantic version of their past. 

Where was the erotic charge that was sparked to life by burning flesh?

He puts some music on and picks up the bottle a little unsteadily.

On a swallow, music eases out….

Knew the signs
Wasn't right
I was stupid for a while
Swept away by you
And now I feel like a fool
So confused,
My heart's bruised
Was I ever loved by you?

He turns, incredulous, to the sound. Did he conjure this from his feelings for Angel? Is this the kiss made manifest?

He puts the bottle down and stands by the window.

Out of reach, so far
I never had your heart
Out of reach,
Couldn't see
We were never
Meant to be

He beings to laugh, but is surprised when he’s mute, and the humour emerges as tears.

Catch myself
From despair
I could drown
If I stay here
Keeping busy everyday
I know I will be OK

He does need to go—to leave L.A. He’s known that for a long time but fooled himself that he was helping, doing some good, when all he was doing was hanging around like Angel’s puppy, waiting for a bone.

That makes him laugh again, finding schoolboy humour in the word bone, but once more, the laughter is twisted inside his heart and emerges as a sob.

But I was
So confused,
My heart's bruised
Was I ever loved by you?

He hears footfalls and wants to ask was I? but instead, says wearily, ‘Go away, Angel. It’s late.’  It’s too late for us now; there’s too much history, and it tangles around my heart like thorns.

Out of reach, so far
‘You’re right, Spike. I do use you.’
I never had your heart
Out of reach,
‘I’m sorry.’
Couldn't see
We were never
Meant to be
‘I kinda thought we were using each other. You’re here willingly, though. I don’t force you to stay.’

No, but you don’t really want me here. I embarrass you— remind you of things you don’t want to remember.

So much hurt,
So much pain
Takes a while
To regain
What is lost inside
And I hope that in time,
You'll be out of my mind
And I'll be over you

I can leave you, Angel, but you’ll never be out of my mind.

‘You’re wrong. I do want you here. I need you here.’

Whoa.

Where did that come from?

But now I'm
So confused,
My heart's bruised
Was I ever loved by you?

Shut up, Bint, I’m listening to my sire here.

‘I think you’ve always liked the fact that I can’t read you.’

Well, yeah! So stop bloody doing it now! Get out of my head, Angel!  He heads nonchalantly to the shower, hoping Angel will go before anything more incriminating is read.

‘Haven’t you forgotten there’s no hot water this side?’

Trying to summon some dignity from an undignified position, he turns to the bed, but Angel’s parting words hold him fixed in time.  ‘I do like you, by the way. I still think you’re an idiot, but I’m almost kinda fond of you.’  

Angel looks at him. The look is memory made tangible, but it stabs into his gut in a way memories never can, and the look has nothing of the past; it’s all of the future.

He’s ensnared in a net, fished from darkness where his thoughts were his own, and Angel stares down at him, captured.

As he lies in the bed, his stomach heaving from tension and whisky, Spike realises that he’s lying quite still in Angel’s net. 

Not one thrash for freedom.  

He doesn’t sleep, so wakes to Angel’s presence, disoriented.

He’s never been less sure whether this is Angel or Angelus, never more snared in the confusing uncertainty of his memories.  Angel stands over him as he’s done so many times in the past when they shared sleep as willingly as blood.

His body yearns to return to those days.  

Too soon, the figure departs, but Spike closes his eyes and settles into a light dreamless sleep, for once untroubled by something he can’t reach.

He wakes to another day, but this one isn’t new at all.

It could be any of his mornings, waking with the world lurching around him, his body poisoned and sick.  He retches weakly and wishes he were under the ground, in the dark. Squinting at the blinding, painful light, he senses movement in the doorway. Before he can turn his head—which has to be done very slowly—Angel throws something at him, and he fumbles to catch it.  

The events of the previous day now join all his other confusing memories. Clearly, kissing Angel is a false memory, or another dream, better than life, which is never difficult given the crud life usually throws at him.

‘Good morning.’

Oh shit. I did kiss Angel!

He dresses, colourfully cursing everything he can think of. When he steps out, Angel does too, looking fresh and immaculate, clothes pressed and expensive, hair just so.

They stand side by side, waiting for the elevator.

It’s more embarrassing than being caught shagging a robot.

No way he’ll mention it; he’ll be too embarrassed.

The git! He’s humming!

‘Must you?’

Right. Just say it…. ‘I was drunk last night, k?’

‘Okay.’

Dying slowly is too good for him.

It’s too much. He can’t be this exposed. He wants to obliterate the memory of being so desperate that he… kissed Angel….

Despite his blinding headache and churning gut, he makes a dignified departure, heading for the stairs.

It actually takes a moment of standing in the dark with brooms falling to work out what he’s done.

He turns and makes an equally dignified return to wait for the elevator, but as he approaches, he stops, mouth dry. 

The face is full of mirth, gleeful and teasing… and it’s Angelus… after all these years…. 

His heart kicks over, as if his sire’s presence returns the beat he stole.  Tears beckon—grief that this beloved ghost should still haunt him so. 

It’s not Angelus; he knows this really; it’s Angel—but Angel’s laughing just as fully and as happily as Angelus ever did.

He rides down with Angelus bearing the face of this newer, handsome man, and for the first time, Spike suspects that he’s the one being covertly watched. A stab of excitement stirs his loins from pain-induced flaccidness.  He tries not to smile but murmurs, ‘Ponce,’ teasingly.

Angel’s reply is equally soft and flirtatious, willingly speaking of the kiss. Spike is effectively silenced for the first time in his life, and he’s debating using his lips for something instead of speech when Wesley comes in.  Angel shoots an expectant glance at the door, humour sliding from his face like a sloughing off of unwanted skin. Spike wants to make Angel smile again; he wants to hear his soft, private voice, not this harsh one that he uses to stay in control.

When they enter the elevator Spike stands slightly forward, waiting for the doors the opposite side to open.  He wonders sometimes about Wesley. He’s not easy to read, and Spike’s got where he has by being able to read humans. Well, okay, he admits just now isn’t a good time to judge just how far he’s got—not literally in this bloody elevator a semi-prisoner in the evil empire… more got in general… the bigger picture… still standing after all this time kind of big…. Bloody good song that. He saw the poofter in concert once—Wembley. Good days.

That’s it! He can’t picture what kind of music Wesley listens too… can’t see him away from this place… can’t form a picture of his life, and it’s disturbing. He’s not sure if it’s because the man is so boring he doesn’t actually have a life, or that he’s got it so carefully masked it’s behind an invisibility shield of some kind. Sheesh, what an anorak! He obliterates this analogy and searches for a cooler one… and is it fucking hot in here, or what?

Something’s twitching his neck.  Exposed skin heats; short hairs prickle; sweat’s running down his back. He’s uncomfortable in his clothes and has the absurd desire to strip.  

Suddenly, without glancing sideward to confirm it, he knows that Angel is studying him.  

Angel’s eyes are on him as sensuously as hands, and he waits, aching for the first touch of flesh. Opportunities are passing them by! Eternity isn’t all that long if you can’t learn to take a risk, commit to something unknown…!

The doors slide open, and suddenly, the day stretches before them, like so many others in the past—all their better chances wasted. It makes him want to weep for the stupidity of it all.  He doesn’t want to end up like the dark human, studying his demon through a glass window, too afraid, too closed off to get up close and personal and just taste her. He wants to eat his demon, taste him to the bone and back again. ‘You know what, Angel? Sometimes you think too damn much.’

They question the lawyer mechanically, but Spike’s still thinking about Wesley.  This human he can read so easily, and he’s comparing them, trying to see where the Englishman’s weakness might lie.  He seems to be the key to understanding Angel better.  He’s been to Angel what he was to Buffy….

Okay! Whoa!  

Seven years flash before his eyes, but a few weeks of thumping and bumping kinda stand out… rather like other things that stood… out….

Shit. 

Buffy plummeted him into a depression of spirits bad enough to go and get his fucking soul! If Wesley and Angel had thumped and bumped and then…. Jeez! Has Angel been dumped by Wesley?

Purely for the sake of giving them the benefit of the doubt, he pictures them together.  He has the very interesting thought that in bed with Angel, the human would be very easy to read….

He chuckles at the interesting contrast of dark and pale flesh he can see in his mind. He knows that if there were any truth to any of this, he wouldn’t find it so amusing, so he’s just goes with the fun for a while. Angel and Wesley…. “Thank you, Angel, I’m very grateful.” “You are welcome, Wesley, it’s my mission to give orgasms where I can.” “No, Angel! Your mission is to save the world! Never forget your mission!” “The guilt, Wesley, the guilt! Gunn and Fred! I’m….”  

‘I’m getting them back, Spike. Gunn and Fred. Both of them.’

Huh! Shit! I do him better than he does himself!

But Fred’s name… hurts! It actually hurts! He’s not used to this yet—his soul too new.  She was the only one willing to help him, but when she needed him, he was the other side of the world, staring uselessly into an endless hole. He burnt up to save the entire world, but for one stick-thin girl with a pretty smile he could do nothing.

‘Fred.’ It doesn’t bring her back saying her name, but it feels good.

For a brief flash of complete altruism (which he’ll punish himself for later—perhaps a nice little pain session with Illyria….) he almost wishes that Angel had fucked Wesley.  His sire needs all the moments of pleasure he can get.  Angel’s setting himself up for a fall; he’s going to fail with this as he’s failed so many times before. One vampire taking on the world…. It doesn’t work that way.

The elevator finally arrives, and mulling over his punishment (it’s good being your own judge and jury, and he’s always very strict with himself), running over some of his favourite moves with Illyria, he steps inside.  He’s adapting, but not fast enough, and he doesn’t like having his arse kicked quite so easily by someone even thinner than he is.  She reminds him of a stick of rhubarb, but he obviously hasn’t pointed this out to her.  

Suddenly, he’s pinned into a corner, and Angel’s dark look fixes on him. ‘What?’

If only he could tell Angel about the rhubarb—not the actual thought itself, of course, but the theory of all his thoughts. It’s how you escape from the big picture, how you don’t set yourself up for a fall. It’s what he does, but he can’t explain it to Angel. Angel just thinks he’s an idiot, and maybe he is, but he’s still standing, stupid or not.

He’s not sure he can explain any of what he feels—this sense that they won’t make a difference to the people that need them… that they’re too focused on the big picture and not on the individual need (one person’s in particular), but he tries.

Angel so doesn’t get it that he actually laughs, Buffy’s name now between them.  As if she is something they can talk about in a bloody elevator.  He doesn’t need Angel to remind him that Buffy only carries him in her heart—never in her guts and blood where he wants to be… where she carries Angel.

For the first time, when Angel asks him if he still loves Buffy, he sees that she’s only in his heart, too: pure and beloved.  How can he explain this to Angel—explain what they shared at the end? How can he speak of the ethereal to this—this overwhelmingly physical presence? 

He’s about to tell Angel about the last few weeks with Buffy when he falters, his belly suddenly clenching in fear. For one moment, he’s not Spike trapped in an elevator by Angel, but William, trapped against smog-darkened bricks by Angelus.

When Angel’s lips posses him, his reaction is much the same as it had been to fangs; total surrender.

He’d forgotten that Angel knows how to kiss this well.  

The next time he has a coherent thought, he’s standing behind a secretary from the accounts’ department, but he has no memory of how this happened.  

His arm is touching Angel’s, leather sleeves brushing, and it’s every bit as erotic as the kiss.  

It would have been a passionate kiss from an established lover, but from Angel…. 

Angel…!  Angel who must have been thinking about kissing him for some time…. Angel thinking this when he was looking at him…. He groans inwardly. Angel suddenly gives a small, amused snort, and Spike’s face flares, convinced the humans will be able to smell the intense scent of vampire arousal hanging heavily in the air.

Angel wants him, and that changes everything.

It seems to him now that a monumental decision is coming. 

He’ll have to decide to give up memories, dreams and longings for reality.  If he commits to this thing with Angel, there’ll be no going back to a time when it was just possibility.  It’s as if he’s in a show, the end uncertain until the script comes through.  He’s not sure he wants to read that final script and see where all this ends—it’s safer to stay where his memories and his desires shape reality.

Too soon they’re alone, and Angel turns, demanding to know the ending, too, asking him what’s to happen.

It’s so unfair. Angel holds all the cards—he always has.

Then Angel throws him a huge curve and bends reality to match fantasy. 

Angel asks him up to his apartment. 

It’s the most difficult thing he’s ever had to do, just walking through a brightly lit lobby toward Angel’s private elevator. 

The tension in his belly is unbearable. Everything he’s pictured or wanted is going to play out in some form or other, and now that it’s here, he doesn’t feel ready for it—too small, to stupid, too grubby, too old, too young, too confused, too exactly what Angel has always thought of him.

He wishes Angel had just pounced and taken him—as he’d taken him to death. Why not with this as well? He could have taken him between floors… the elevator slamming against the walls… no escape possible….

This slow anticipation unmans him, makes him want to turn away, run away, stay away—anything not to go upstairs to fuck with Angel. 

Maybe he can limit it to fighting with lots of blood involved….

He’s surprised he’s actually able to step over the threshold of Angel’s office.  It seems way too reminiscent of something else he’s gonna breech soon. Okay…. What exactly does Angel think is going to happen upstairs...? 

Suddenly, he realises he’s not alone and stares wildly at Wesley and Lorne, for one bizarre moment thinking they’ve come to watch.  Then he remembers that not everything revolves around him and Angel, and that somewhere, out there, the world is coming to an end…cus if he thinks I’m gonna be the one being breeched, he’s got another think….

He nods at them, distracted by the mechanics of exactly what’s going to go where, and Wesley murmurs, ‘Where are you going?’

Spike’s jaw drops slightly until he realises that the human probably wasn’t referring to his cock, and goes to the window, suspecting he doesn’t have to worry about the nervous clenching of his arse now anyway: they’ll have Angel now, dragging him back to the fight.

He registers Angel’s presence, hears words, but isn’t sure whether it’s their meaning or the tone of urgent need that makes him turn. Both are kinda startling.

‘Later guys. I have something urgent I need to do with Spike.’

He catches Angel’s eye for the first time since they obliquely discussed having sex.  SHIT! Maybe Angel actually does want to talk! Oh, no, about redemption and fucking souls…!

With a frisson of shock, he sees that Angel is as nervous as he is. You don’t get that nervous thinking about the prospect of… talking. 

He softens his look and gives him a tiny nod.  Angel smiles at him.  Whatever happens upstairs, Spike suspects nothing will give him more pleasure than that intimate smile.

They both turn at Wesley’s mention of Gunn.  He watches Angel’s face change as he shoulders his burden once more.
 
Determined to be there for him, he stands close behind, listening…. If I really was a Lieutenant, I’d have a cool uniform…. Oh! Yessss! Black…. I bloody loved that Nazi uniform. Bloody Krauts and their….

Sometimes it would be better if he didn’t listen at all, instead of this half-listening that enables him to survive but never engages his heart.

It’s so much better if your heart isn’t engaged.

A sense of inevitability settles over him.

He knew they would come to this point at sometime.

It’s all so painfully logical. Hell can only hurt you as much as you can stand it. 

He wants to scream at the human to stop. 

Angel can withstand everything hell has to offer, and Angel will volunteer to go to hell again to take Gunn’s place.

But that’s not the way this final script goes…. 

He’s Angel’s Lieutenant.

He’s Angel’s right hand man. 

He’s the champion.  

He’ll go instead of Angel, willingly making that exchange—he’s done it before.  

Life is process of endless chances and coincidences that bring you back to exactly where you started. 

He slides out silently and goes up to the apartment. He has to do this thing before Angel tries to stop him, before they stand and argue, and then Angel lets him do it. They both know who the real champion is, who’s the star of the apocalypse, who needs to stay and fight the bigger fight.  Letting him go will hurt Angel now. He’d save Angel from that pain just as surely as he wants to save him from the pain of hell.

Spike’s eyes water slightly as he brushes his fingers over his new sound system. He shouldn’t have bought anything that ties him to this life.  Making things… cosy… only leads to getting your heart trampled on. He knows this and should have remembered it.  

As if he could live here with Angel in cosy domesticity.  That’s the other version of his story—the one his zany writer was gonna write for him. This is the real one, and he’s the comic sidekick wearing the red shirt.

He needs to move swiftly, needs to speak with Hamilton, find out how to offer himself for the exchange.  

He takes nothing with him and waits for the elevator.

Angel steps out, and Spike gives him credit for being disappointed before he’s angry. Then he’s too busy awarding him a huge twenty points before they launch into the latest argument. But it’s fitting—they’ve spent so much time arguing it’s actually comforting. 

He’s rarely heard Angel this angry, though. 

He steps out, keeping his dignity by the simple expedient of making it look as if he was going to leave anyway, and strides back to his apartment. He doesn’t need to smell Angel’s arousal—it distracts him too much from his aim.  And he only has one aim—to prevent Angel from guessing what he’s going to do—so quite how he ends up blurting his whole plan out to Angel like a three year old caught with his fingers in the biscuit tin he’s not at all sure.

Perhaps it’s the fact that he melted under Angel’s kiss and didn’t reform quite right afterwards. Perhaps it was Angel’s cock grinding into him that ground the confession out.  

Angel hurt him, fingers digging into his skin, evoking echoes of their history. 

He surrendered his willpower to Angel’s kiss as surely as he once did his life.  

He was pinned against the window, sunlight pricking his skin, exposing him with its clarity. 

Still he would not speak…. 

But Angel ran a finger lovingly down his cheek.

It laid bare his heart more effectively than any torturer’s blade and he confessed,  ‘I’m going to exchange myself for Gunn—so you don’t have to. I don’t want you to go to hell.’

Chapter 3 – Angel’s Night

Angel hears Spike’s words, puzzled. Why the frigg is the idiot worried about me going to hell? 

 He has the suspicion that there’s been more going on behind the intense blue eyes than he’s realised.

He gives Spike another small shake, just because he can, and because he doesn’t have time for this. ‘I’m not going to hell. What the hell are you talking about? You’re not going to hell either!’

Spike tries to push him off, but Angel just leans harder. 

‘Wesley said!  He said that hell could only hurt as much as you could stand it!’

‘And… duh! I was there! That’s why we’re sending Illyria….’

‘Huhuh?’

‘She’s going to take Gunn’s place. Hell won’t even chip her blue nails, I’m thinking.’

‘She’d never agree to that!’

‘Wesley says she will.’

‘Angel!’

‘What!

‘I don’t know!

Angel kisses him again, just to see if that helps his confusion. It seems to. It doesn’t help his much though, and he pulls off.  He opens his mouth and frees words that lie shallow in his throat, not releasing those that are buried deeper—where they’re safe.

‘Let’s do this thing, Spike. You want it; I want it. Let’s do it, get it over with and get on with saving the frigging world. I’m too distracted like this!’

‘Get it over with.’

Once he’s committed to only using words that won’t hurt him to expose, he can’t go back and use the other ones he has in his heart.  

He turns away, embarrassed that he’s implied this much—that he’s implied he’s been thinking about having sex with Spike. He’s fairly sure his childe’s been thinking the same thing… but you never know with Spike exactly what he is thinking. 

He turns back and puts a hand on Spike’s T-shirt. ‘Now or never, Spike. Make your mind up.’

‘Now or never.’

‘Stop repeating what I say! Do you want this thing or not?’

‘I—.’

‘You kissed me first, Spike! What was that?’

Spike nods thoughtfully, and Angel relaxes fractionally. Although people never seen to notice, he’s actually not good at talking about feelings. 

He narrows his eyes and begins to unbutton his shirt. ‘I’m going for a shower. If you’re there when I come out, so be it.’

‘If I’m not?’

Angel laughs. ‘Don’t forget, I can read you now, Spike. I know exactly what you are thinking! You want this as much as I do.’

Spike nods and smiles. ‘Yeah. I forgot you can read me.’

Angel turns and strides across to his apartment.  He’s handled it well—this situation. It has been awkward between them, and this will clear the air. He sometimes wonders if Spike ever thinks about the past, wonders if he ever thinks about the things Angelus promised him…obliquely…. Wonders if he feels bitter that those promises were not fulfilled.

He showers and steps out, rubbing his hair. Spike is sitting on the edge of the bed, biting a nail.  Angel steps past him and walks over to the window to pull the drapes. No need to have too much illumination on this.

‘Get undressed.’

Spike obeys silently.  Angel watches as the T-shirt falls to the ground, watches as the slim jeans tumble off to join them.

Spike stands naked, watching him.

Angel comes forward and throws the towel over the bed.  He takes Spike’s arm and pulls him closer.

Spike is unresisting, but there’s no reciprocation there either.  Angel pushes Spike back onto the bed, and slides over him, familiarity with the act of fucking taking over. It’s been a while, but he’s not forgotten.  Only…. 

He jerks his eyes down, utterly thrown when he discovers it’s all totally different. The old routine—stroke until wet then enter—doesn’t work. But it’s not all bad—this difference. He examines Spike for a while, pleased when stroking seems to have an interesting effect on him, too.

But he’s not in this for foreplay. He wants it over with. He wants to stop being obsessed with Spike, having this irritating person on his mind when he should be concentrating on Gunn or Illyria or Lindsey or Hamilton or even the apocalypse that’s about to overtake them. 

He turns Spike over and pushes up one of his legs.  He’s never done this, but he’s thought about it once or twice over the centuries.  It always seemed a good way to cock a snoot at God, and Angelus was always looking for opportunities to do that. He kinda became a nun man instead. 

It’s not that different. 

Pushing in is pushing in. 

He has to push hard, but eventually he’s through. 

He’s surprised how good it feels. Maybe it’s because he’s only had Eve in the last two years. That depressing thought fills him with enough repressed need to swell some more, and with that swelling comes the irresistible need to move. He begins to pump into the tight receptacle, and it’s very, very good—the perfect position to get a really good angle and thrust.

He knows it won’t take long—it’s been too long—and slides his hand under the slim body to give Spike some relief as well.

Spike is soft, which kinda throws him—he didn’t think you could do this and be soft.  Not all that concerned, he just increases the speed of his thrusts, and pulls a few times on the soft penis.

Before he can control it, a huge orgasm surges from his balls. This is nothing like the swift, surgical hand jobs he’s made do with for two years. It’s intense, makes his toes twitch, makes him cry out as he fills Spike.

Only then does he look down, and for the first time a wave of total confusion hits him. He’s pumping his sperm into Spike! It’s more bizarre than sucking his blood out.

With a grunt of complete satisfaction, he rolls off to one side, panting.

Spike straightens his legs then curls onto his side facing the window.  Angel stretches and nods. ‘I should have done that a long time ago.  It would have made things simpler between us.’

He turns his head when Spike doesn’t reply. He wonders if he should offer to do something… more.  This isn’t unfamiliar either, often lying beside Darla for hours while she finished off.

He feels sleep overtaking him—a pleasant post-orgasmic weariness that he can’t resist.  Something nags his memory, and before he can bring it to the surface and dismiss it as irrelevant, he turns onto his side, wraps his arm over Spike, and tucks him tightly into his concave shape.

Memory stops nagging at him, and feeling more content than he has since the body tucked and held was a great deal smaller and softer, he falls into a deep, restful sleep.

Angel wakes with the innate awareness that only a few hours have passed.  He’s incredibly comfortable, and it takes a moment to realise that Spike is still tucked against him.  

For a while, he just lies there, enjoying this more than he enjoyed the orgasm. 

What would it be like to do this every day? Waking with Spike in bed with him…. He thinks he could get very used to it. 

The bed stinks of them—an intense masculine smell of cum and sweat. Smiling, he buries his nose into the hollow of the sleep warm neck, and the movement wakes Spike. 

Angel turns him over onto his back and studies him. 

Surprised by his arousal from this totally sober, daytime revision, he runs his hand lightly over Spike’s chest.  The flatness intrigues him. He’s always been a breast man, but now he finds this flat muscle as attractive as he finds his own chest—pleasing that it’s broad and smooth and strong.  He chuckles and bends to Spike’s nipple, amused that it’s so small and insignificant.  He nibbles it then withdraws sharply when there’s a small hiss.

It’s the first sound Spike’s made since coming into the room, the contrast with the silence making him notice this for the first time. With a stab of excitement, he nibbles again, harder. The hiss is repeated, and this time hands clasp his head, pulling him down hard.  

Angel groans and slides lower in the bed, too aroused now to be satisfied with nipples.  

Spike’s hard.

Holding the hardness, Angel suddenly feels cheated that he didn’t enjoy this the first time.  It’s utterly intriguing, rising to his touch. For the first time in a lifetime of fucking, he can actually see arousal manifest. 

He laughs like he did the first time he saw a mechanical toy and plays just as inquisitively with this new wonder.

He glances up at Spike with lowered lids then flicks his tongue out suggestively.  The promise implicit in the pink wetness elicits a soft, ‘Oh, yeah.’

With a surge of arousal so intense that he has to concentrate not to release, he lowers his mouth to the head of Spike’s cock and repeats the small flick of his tongue.  ‘Fuck, Angel, yeah….’ Spike arches and holds himself quivering with pleasure like a bow under pressure.

The use of his name fires Angel’s belly, and he envelopes the cock with his mouth. It’s so different—not something you can know until you try.  So many women, so many eager mouths on him, but not one, not one really got it right. Not like this. He feels its delight in being mouthed as if Spike’s cock is independent from the rest of the body and talking to him in its own unique language—a language of weeping, twitching and pulsing.

The sounds of pleasure from up top have stopped, and Angel wants them back. Now he’s heard them, he doesn’t ever want to fuck Spike without them.

He lets the cock drop from his mouth and sucks in the balls instead.  

Spike’s hands shoot out to grip something—anything—and he begins to swear.  Angel tongues the balls apart in their sac, massaging each one in turn, bathing the soft skin with saliva.  He lets them drop slowly from his mouth so they fall pendulous and heavy.

He’s not ready to return to the cock yet and moves lower, flattening himself on the bed.  Before he can push Spike’s legs up, they’re lifted voluntarily.  

The smell of sex is intoxicating, and it’s… his…. Part of his body is still inside Spike! 

Darting his tongue out to explore gets the most satisfied sound yet.  There’s a faint trace of blood, and he frowns at this, remembering Spike’s silence. 

Spike’s cheeks part with no resistance, and Angel tongue bathes him, slopping wetly over the tight hole.  It’s fun listening to the obscene accompaniment.  

When he pulls his mouth away, everything is glistening, a hint of the pink inside walls moist and enticing.  Like a red rag to a bull, the trace of fleshy pink triggers masculine need. Rising up onto his knees, he pushes his cock against the enticement.  

He feels a shudder go through Spike and takes it as pleasure, but just before he pushes in, he looks up to see eyes tightly closed and teeth gritted.

He frowns. He wants eager Spike back.  

Hesitantly, he pushes Spike’s knees wider apart and leans over him. He bends down and takes one nipple in his mouth.  As he does, he glances up.  When he sees surprise and pleasure on Spike’s face, he eases his little finger into the wet hole.

‘OH! Fuck!’ Spike arches and drags Angel’s head over to his other nipple. 

Things go a little crazy after that. Angel can’t work out the sequence of events. They roll and bite and find places that feel untouched for centuries. Then he’s on top again; Spike lies looking up at him, and very slowly, Angel pushes against Spike’s body for entry.  As soon as he feels it opening though, he eases off and bites a nipple again. This time, Spike laughs and opens his legs wider. ‘You bugger.’

Incredulous, Angel feels Spike’s strong legs wrap around his back, so he pushes again, the head slipping into place.  This time he waits.  He wants to bend and kiss Spike, but it’s too intimate.  As soon as Spike looks comfortable, he pulls out again.

Spike’s eyes widen in outrage, and there’s a lot of rolling and biting and some considerable amount of blood before they’re back: Spike supine and waiting beneath him.

This time, he’s not so gentle, and he pushes the head right in.  Spike groans, and it’s a sound of pure pleasure.  He rises up and bites Angel’s nipple hard, then licks some blood off his chest. 

Angel groans too, and as he leans down to give Spike more access to his nipples, he embeds fully.

Spike gasps, and they’re both still for some time, Angel staring down in surprise.  He tries to work out where the tip of his cock is; it feels as if it’s under Spike’s belly button.  He pulls right out and sits back on his heels. 

Spike moans and twists around, fingering Angel’s pulsing red flesh.  Angel cries out and leans back on his hands. Spike’s touch is incredibly erotic.

He thinks he can’t hold out any longer and wants to let his orgasm rip, but very pointedly, Spike straddles him.  Before Angel can prevent it, Spike lowers.

Spike tips his head back, his neck stretched, as if making room for the vast object easing into his body.  Angel puts a hand up and brings his face back to horizontal; he wants to watch the expression.

Spike stares deeply into the dark eyes and does not drop his gaze as he begins to raise and lower on Angel’s stiffness, pleasuring himself on it. 

There’s something so wanton in this look that Angel cries out and fastens onto Spike’s neck, lightly drawing blood with his human teeth.  He holds Spike tightly around the waist and goes with the rhythm of the lifting and lowering.  

‘Fuck, that’s good, Spike.’

The words shock the silence.  Spike hesitates then replies, ‘You feel good—inside.’

Angel feels pleasure from the words almost more intense than that from the tight channel.  

He lowers his gaze from Spike’s eyes to his lips, but then drags them back as if caught in some guilty act. 

Spike stops moving, hesitates, then leans forward and places his lips to Angel’s.  

Suddenly, it’s a blur of hard flesh, writhing. In the frantic intensity of the kiss, Angel slips out. They claw their way across the bed, each trying to climb further inside the other’s mouth.  

With no more thought, Angel stabs forward; Spike is there to meet him thrust for thrust, and suddenly, there’s cum everywhere, shooting from Spike’s cock and leaking out as Angel overloads the tight ass.

Angel makes a sound.  Spike copies it, and they collapse, wet and sated.

The centre of the bed is a mess of spilt fluid, the blood as enticing as the sperm.  Curling together in the rumpled mess, Angel hitches the sheet over them both.

Before he falls asleep, he sides his hand down to Spike’s belly, combs his fingers tightly into Spike’s soft, wet hair, and then they sleep again.

Angel is woken by hunger, but he’s so warm he doesn’t want to move. He takes a deep breath and shifts his fingers slightly in Spike’s now sticky hair.  He moves his other arm and slides it under the still sleeping figure, clasping his fingers together tightly over the hard belly.  It feels like imprisonment, and he’s glad.

Extreme hunger wakes him a few hours later, and reluctantly, he eases from the bed and pads naked to the kitchen.  As the blood heats, he stares back at Spike.

He didn’t have this with Buffy—this time just to stand and enjoy. It was quick then taken from him.  He’s surprised though that looking at Spike, naked and rumpled, should make him think of Buffy.  He can’t see a similarity.  He doesn’t know why he’s smiling either. He’s not really one for gratuitous humour.

He carries the bloodbag back to the bed and wakes Spike with a shake.  Spike sighs and turns over, about to speak, but suddenly, Angel presses his lips to the sleepy ones and opens his mouth. Blood pours out, running down their faces and onto the covers, the spillage not helped by Angel’s laugh and Spike surprised cry of pleasure.

Angel takes another swallow, holding the bag out of Spike’s reach. He swills the blood around in his mouth, looks at Spike then… swallows.  Spike’s eyes fly open, outraged, and Angel chuckles, bending down to kiss the pout.  

The blood is forgotten, the bag squashed beneath them as they roll, kissing.  On one roll, Angel’s belly covered with blood, Spike takes his mouth from the kiss and lowers slowly, licking the red, sticky fluid off the smooth skin.  

As he reaches Angel’s belly button, he pauses, tongue just playing in tiny circles seductively. Angel looks down expectantly.  Spike laughs and wobbles Angel’s belly with both hands.

Genuinely outraged (and not a little embarrassed), Angel rears up and flips Spike onto his back.  Spike lies helpless, laughing, making no attempt to defend himself. The surrender is confirmed when he whispers, ‘Take me again….’

Angel doesn’t reply; he just slides his hands onto the backs of Spike’s thighs, lifting and parting them.  Spike shakes his head and wriggles out from under, turning onto his hands and knees. With a look, eyes lowered and enticing, he fires Angel’s lust until it spills out, pre-cum dripping copiously to the rumpled sheets.

Spike dips at the waist.  Angel pushes in, and they cry out in unison.  

Angel kneels to Spike’s backside, and he has to admit that it’s the perfect position for a man to fuck: straight in, hard and fast.  He thumps forward then stills, remembering something from the previous day.  Cautiously, he eases his hand around Spike, seeking him out.  Spike’s cock is solid and swollen, and with a grunt of relief, Angel begins to ride him properly.

He wants to speak but doesn’t know what to say, can’t remember ever saying much with other lovers. But the absence of talking seems odd with Spike; it’s the one thing they’ve always done too much—talk.

‘Like this?’

He’s pleased with this inspired beginning.

Spike nods then adds, ‘Yeah….’

He rakes his nails down Spike’s back. ‘And that?’

Spike arches like a cat, welts appearing on his pale flesh. ‘Call me Will.’

It’s the least likely thing Angel expected Spike to say, but he replies easily, ‘Do you like that, Will?’

‘Yeah, I do. You used to do that….’

Angel hesitates.  ‘Yeah. I remember. When I was fucking Darla and you were lying alongside us.’  He thumps in, something he’d wanted to do then and makes up for now.

‘Why didn’t you take me then, Angel?’

Angel shifts his angle. ‘Because I’d have lost—yeah—power over you.’  He slows down, not wanting to come too soon.  ‘You can’t dominate someone you’ve—jeez, you’re so tight—mewed with pleasure over. You can’t—mmm—control someone you’ve shared your body with.’

‘Sure you can…. It’s just a different kind of—oh, fuck—dominance.’

‘You were always too human, Will. Clench in… yeah, like that…. Demons shouldn’t think of other kinds of dominance. God, this is good…. There is only one: fear.’

‘I never—ugh—feared you.’

‘Sure you did.’ His balls are beginning to swell, so he eases down even more. It’s the best fuck he’s ever had, and he never wants it to end.  ‘You feared me enough to obey me. Don’t clench! Too….’

‘I obeyed you because I—harder!—respected you.’

‘You’ve a damn funny way of showing—yeah, that’s right, play with yourself—showing respect, Spike—Will. Not seen a lot of respect since you came to L.A.’

‘Yeah, well.  Mmm, that’s good—slow like that….’

‘Like it slow?’ He eases right down, pulling out very slowly, pushing even more gently back in, making sure to grind right in each time until wiry curls brush Spike’s smooth skin.

‘Bloody hell….’

Angel rakes his fingers over the arched back to renew the fading streaks and is rewarded with a long drawn out hiss of pleasure.

Rewarding Spike in turn, he gives a few really hard thrusts, but then eases back again.  ‘You didn’t really want this then.’  

Spike cranes his head around, and they look at each other for a moment before Angel adds defensively, ‘You’ve changed, Will. You used to be too shy to undress in front of me.’

‘You used to strip me.’

‘Aye, that I remember. See? It was all about control.’

‘You’re the one who’s changed, Angel. I’m exactly what I was then.’

‘You were plump then.’

‘What!’ Spike clenches his backside, but Angel suspects he wasn’t aiming for the effect it actually produces. He groans and lies, utterly undone, over Spike’s back for a moment. ‘Do that again.’

Spike does, and Angel thrusts in against the new tightness. 

He puts his hands to Spike’s cheeks and eases them further apart so he can watch his slick cock easing in and out of the stretched hole. 

‘I wish we bloody showed up in mirrors.’

Angel murmurs,  ‘We could take some photographs.’

Neither of them laughs, and Angel suspects this interesting suggestion might be raised again.

He’s beginning to feel the desperate need to cum now. ‘You ready?’

There’s a pause then Spike dips lower. ‘Why don’t you make me….’

‘Yesss.’  Angel digs his fingers into the hollows of Spike’s hips and humps him, closing his eyes, enhancing the pleasure by picturing the scene.

He hears a moan from Spike, and the channel spasms around him.  With a huge shout of pleasure, he unloads again, unable to stop crying out, marking with the sharp sounds each individual release.

Spike snakes an arm around him then collapses slowly, keeping him in.

Angel lays on top of his childe, his cock still twitching and jumping inside the prone body.

‘Am I heavy?’

‘What the fuck do you think?’ Angel doesn’t take offence; he’s noticed that Spike’s tightened his arm, imprisoning him entirely.

Angel pretty sure he’ll never move again and begins to welcome sleep.  Just before he succumbs, he pouts and presses his face into the back of Spike’s hair. ‘Spike?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Why did you leave me in the tunnel?’

‘Because I blamed you for turning me.’

‘That suddenly occurred to you? You couldn’t have thought of that, say, a hundred years ago?’

‘Oh, I did, but I didn’t care then—didn’t fear hell, see?’

‘And now you do?’

There’s no reply but a tightening of the arm that’s holding them together. It’s all the reply he needs.’

‘I’ve been to hell, Spike.’

‘I know you have.’

‘And I came back.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing is forever. We live many lives, all of them different and new. If you hadn’t burnt up in that pathetic attempt to impress Buffy, you wouldn’t be here now.  You lose this? Something else will come along.’

‘But I don’t want anything else.’

‘You don’t know that until you see what the something else could be.  We could both be human, for example, and not fighting the fight….’

‘You’re gonna talk about butterflies soon, aren’t you?’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing. Human men…?’

‘Could be.’

‘Can’t see it somehow. You’d be wanting to go off and sow your bloody seed with some all-American bint.’

Angel hesitates. It seems wrong somehow to finally speak of Connor while he’s pleasantly hardening inside Spike, but also amazing appropriate as well.  ‘I’ve kinda already done that—although I guess Darla wouldn’t appreciate being called all-American anything….’

‘Shagging Darla don’t count. You weren’t….’

‘No. We had a child together.’

Spike twists his head around, seems to find this inadequate, and rolls them, ignoring Angel’s groan of protest.

He sits up and stares fixedly. ‘A child. When? Or rather, what? Jeez, hell’s spawn, or what?’

‘He was human. A perfect, human baby.’

‘Was?’

‘Well, he’s grown….’

‘Angel! You tell me this, but it makes no sense! I mean… when?’

Angel sighs and sits up. ‘Let me make some food. I have a feeling once I begin speaking of Connor, I won’t be able to stop.’

‘Connor. You called him Connor?’  Angel nods, and it must have been a sadder gesture than he’d meant, for suddenly he’s pulled into Spike’s arms. It’s more intimate than the kissing, but he lets it happen. 

It’s the best thing he’s felt for longer than he cares to remember.  

Spike sighs and strokes slowly up and down Angel’s back. ‘Maybe hell is the pain we give to each other here on earth after all.’

Angel nods, unable to contradict this at first, but then he adds softly, ‘It wasn’t hell when I first had him, Will. When he was all mine….’ He means something beyond the obvious in the choice of that word, but he’s not sure what that something is. 

He’s pretty sure Spike won’t either, but Spike holds him away for a moment and says softly, ‘Maybe love can overcome.’ He pulls Angel in close before the effects of these words are visible on either of their faces.

When the blood is heated, Angel returns, climbing into the damp muskiness of their nest.

Spike is propped up on one elbow, watching him.  

He’s about to hand him one of the bags, but his eyes stray down to Spike’s lips.  He frowns, wrinkling his forehead. He wants to move his mouth closer, does, but draws back, uncertain.  A hand snakes out and captures the back of his neck, and he’s drawn down.

This kiss is revelatory. It’s long and slow, wet and engrossing; noisy moans and murmurs carried on air they’ve begun to breathe once more.  Angel stretches on top of Spike’s body as they kiss, not deliberately rubbing them together, but finding that happening anyway.  He rubs harder, jerking on the strong body beneath him.  The kiss gets louder, cursing intruding on the soft murmurs of need.  

Suddenly, Spike locks his hands behind Angel’s neck, arches with his eyes wide, and a flood of liquid is released between them. The scent of Spike’s cum sends Angel over the edge, and he closes his eyes, releasing too.  

They come to rest, mouths together, not kissing, paused, shivering from the intensity of their individual orgasms.

When Angel opens his eyes, Spike’s are almost too close to focus on.  They’re so blue, dilated until they appear like holes in the earth.  Angel is afraid he’ll fall into them. He slides off and discovers that he’s still clutching a blood bag in each hand.

‘Damn. They’re cold again.’

‘Give it here.’  Spike snatches his and rips in with expert precision.  Angel does the same and drinks quickly, trying not to taste the nearly congealed fluid.

When he’s finished, he glances over at Spike and starts to speak.  Words seem to dry in his mouth, and very slowly, he leans forward as if coming in for another kiss, but at the last minute, his tongue flicks out and catches a drop of blood on Spike’s lip.  

Spike lies back and says, ‘Jesus,’ very quietly. Angel can’t think of anything more appropriate.

A hand comes to rest lightly on his thigh. ‘Tell me about this Connor then, Mate.’

Mate: n. one of a pair; colloq. Partner.  With a smile, Angel lets it go this time.  That seems appropriate, too.

Very precisely and logically, as if he were giving evidence, he outlines the story of Connor and Darla, Cordelia and Wesley. He has to tell Spike about the Beast, about Faith and Angelus. He has to name Jasmine. But most of all, he has to talk about a contract signed and people sacrificed to that agreement: he has to tell him about the mind wipe. 

Throughout the long tale, Spike’s thumb strokes over his thigh.

When he’s finished, he looks up for the first time.  Spike twitches up an eyebrow and rolls more comfortably onto his back.

‘Well?’

‘Maybe none of it happened.’

‘Huhuh? I mean… huh?’

‘Well… maybe they didn’t get a mind wipe; maybe you got a mind implant. Maybe they’re remembering just fine, but you’re remembering skewy.’

‘Skewy?’

‘Well, yeah. Maybe they wanted you to take this job, so they implanted all that in your memory. You can’t ask anyone, can you? Being as it’s all supposed to be something you’ve done to them. Catch-22.’

Angel is silent for a long time and then says decidedly, ‘You think too much.’

Spike laughs and turns back onto his side, propped on one elbow.  

Angel turns his head. ‘What now?’

Spike flicks up his eyebrow, a glint in his eyes.  Angel begins to fall into their limpid centres then jerks back. ‘What?’

Spike puts a possessive hand on his arm and pulls him sharply forward.

For the next half hour, Spike demonstrates his possessiveness.  

It’s only the ringing phone that brings Angel back to an awareness of what they are doing—of what he is doing. 

Of what Spike is doing.

Chapter 4 – Spike’s Night

He hadn’t meant to tell Angel anything, especially not about hell and fear, and most definitely not about the flames that creep over his flesh when he loses his concentration. 

But now’s he’s made his heartfelt confession, the least he could have is a little… sympathy… a little… being taken seriously. Spike has the annoying thought that Angel isn’t taking any of this seriously enough.  

Because being kissed again is all very well, but it isn’t going to alter the price of fish, or any other dumb commodity, and why is he thinking about fish when Angel is kissing him… when Angel’s tongue is in his mouth, exploring… when Angel is leaning on him hard and heavy, and other things are hard and heavy… down there… heavy and hard…. 

Oh… fuck hell….  

Spike kisses back, and things get even heavier and harder; it’s all flesh and saliva and hot tearing at clothes until….

‘Let’s do this thing, Spike. You want it; I want it. Let’s do it and get it over with and get on with saving the frigging world. I’m too distracted like this!’

Huh!

The huh is about to get a verbal airing (with something stronger), but Spike suddenly hears what Angel actually said… underneath… where the real communication between them has always been.

With a stab of wonder – a prick in his bubble of anger - Spike realises that Angel is scared. 

Surfing in on this release of anger, comes the awareness that this man is not who Spike thought he was. This is not Angelus, or Angel as he was in Sunnydale. This is another man—a man who’s had experiences that have made him afraid. 

They’re teetering on a precarious edge: Angel’s fragile ego. 

Spike nods. It’s such a delicate balancing act—being on this edge—that if he upsets it at all, they’ll both fall off.  He doesn’t fancy the drop all that much.

He wants to reach out and reassure Angel that at least he is still what he ever was, but Angel is moving too fast, keeping control, setting the pace of this thing so he doesn’t have to stop and think. 

So he doesn’t have to admit that he has needs. 

Having needs makes you weak.

Angel doesn’t want to admit he’s weak.

When Angel comes out of the shower, the fragile balance gives a sickening lurch to the left as one false memory bites the dust—he’s never seen Angel’s erection before. That, he would have remembered!  He watches the defying of gravity with a sick fascination.

‘Get undressed.’

Should he be doing some kind of length comparison? Or thinking about rosebuds? Where’s the need to sniff man-scent? He knows he reads the wrong books, but it’s all coming badly undone, and he can’t keep his mind on track.  Getting naked is just about the worst thing he’s ever done. He’s too thin, too pale, too fucking…. 

Jesus! That’s different. 

There’s something extremely odd about being turned over. It’s not something that’s ever happened to him before. Not much a girlfriend could do with his other side (even Dru, who had some interesting habits). 

This is just going to be one of those things that you can’t describe; you have to…. 

Pain explodes in his body.

He’s the bloody king of pain, but this is different. This is a part of his body that has a hidden agenda for its pain. It’s telling him that something is fundamentally wrong and that, as a man, he should fight. 

His backside spasms with pain, and it’s only just started. His preternatural body resists the intrusion as bitterly as it’s resisted every other threat over the last hundred years.  Inch by inch, he’s invaded, a minor country capitulating to a conqueror that will subjugate for a lifetime of misery. 

The worst is still to come.  Pushing in was bad; thrusting almost makes him cry.  

Every single one of his victims is lying in the bed with them, watching him experience their pain. They’re not bitter, just curious, as if the truly dead can’t be bothered with anger. Maybe death’s too short to store up such pain.

Another trusted memory kicks a very large bucket—he’s never heard Angel having an orgasm before, either.  This, he would have remembered.

It’s almost worse when it’s over because then there’s nothing to distract him from the pain. Except maybe the dribbling…. Oh, bollocks, that’s just nasty. Clenching isn’t much use at all…. 

He curls onto his side and sends up a small prayer to the God who’s on duty for sodomite vampires that Angel won’t ask if it was good for him.  

Only he knows how fragile Angel really is.

He wanted to take Angel’s place in hell? Trust him to forget that some things are worse than hell.

‘I should have done that a long time ago.  It would have made things simpler between us.’

He’s not going to regret any of it. He’s not. 

Oh…. 

Not now, anyway…. Not now Angel’s arm is tucked tightly around him, and he’s pulled into such a perfectly aligned spoon that even their feet fit.

This memory is real. This, he does remember.  

If sleep takes him now, he’ll curse the heavens and everything good. He’ll renounce redemption and every sodding thing he’s ever wanted, for all he wants now is to stay awake in Angel’s sex-sated arms. To miss one minute of this would break him. It’s what he’s wanted for over a century, and it’s his now. 

He tries to fix every inch of Angel’s touch in his memory: hair on legs scraping his calves; bony knees prodding him; cock, semi-hard, prodding too; belly soft and warm to lie against; chin on his shoulder, as if Angel fell asleep wanting to tell him something; and breath, sweet and even in his ear, human frailty from this invulnerable body.

If he could, he’d turn and eat Angel to preserve this moment. He can’t, so fixing it in his memory has to suffice.

Angel’s fear taints the bed as palpable as the smell of cum, and Spike would take that away, too, if he could.  His sire seems to hang uneasily between his two personas: Angelus and Angel—Angelus fearing nothing, irreverent, no excess too repugnant for his devious imagination; Angel, cautious, fearful, reverent, seeped in the mysticism of the soul. Spike doesn’t have any answers, other than that this feels good, and he never wants to sleep alone again. Is it wrong? And if it is, wrong in whose narrow definition of what is right? They’re wrong to begin with. It seems kinda dumb to feel guilty about fucking flesh that shouldn’t even be there. He’s not sure why it’s a sin.  Is this worse than murder? Does it sit uneasily on some heavenly scale where they will be judged, not for the great good they’ve done, or the undeniable evil, but this: this sharing of their bodies?

Is pleasure the sin? Or is it the sharing? Is God so jealous of his children that he can’t bear to have them love each other more than him? For that’s what this is. Spike knows he would sacrifice all of God’s mercies for one fuck from Angel, and that seems wrong—fundamentally, where his new soul leaks its poison into his resilient body.

If they were men, this would be… unlikely. Demons, they don’t have a chance to sort it all out. 

Although he believes in God—hell, he believes in Brittany Spears despite that concept being almost too disturbing to contemplate—he doesn’t feel bound by God’s strictures. Why should he? Where was God when his life was being sacrificed against a brick wall by something that shouldn’t exist? He’s really had only one deity, and lying in the arms of God takes on a whole new meaning when you’re stuck together with dried cum.

The ache in his butt has subsided to a dull throb, which isn’t unpleasant at all. It reminds him of something, but he thinks it’s probably best not to probe this memory too much. 

For all that he lay down and let Angel fuck him, he doesn’t feel less than he was. He doesn’t feel demeaned.   

It was the ultimate giving, the ultimate sacrifice. It wasn’t womanly, which surprised him.  (Okay, if he was put over a rack and stretched unpleasantly for a while, he’d admit that the turning over was kinda demeaning, but not the rest. Not the rest at all. The rest was… sublime.) It was the noble ideal—the feeling that you must get in war when you lay down your life.  He doesn’t often feel noble, but he did once, when he’d lain on a bed and not loved someone the way he wanted to love, but the way she needed to be loved. 

It was bloody holy, and that’s pretty incredible for a demon. 

He wonders what Angel is dreaming—if he dreams—and tries to enter his sleeping state. He has a sense that the dreams would be chaotic and painful. Like balm, he wants to soothe. Angel’s body is soothing him now; it seems the least he can do.

For all he wanted not to sleep, he wonders why sleeps eludes him now. If he could sleep, he might have some power to go into his sire’s sleeping realm as fully as he intrudes on his waking hours. But it does—elude him. Like a phantom just out of reach, he cannot tip over into its welcome embrace, so when Angel stirs and lies awake alongside him, Spike feels his thoughts soft-stroking over his body.

Once more, he’s turned over, but this turning isn’t demeaning in any way at all. It’s revelatory—for them both. He knows what he wants, and he has the distinct impression that Angel is now sure about it, too. They’re both erect—Angel’s sleeping body leaving nothing to the imagination, pressing forcibly into him all night, demanding his compliance, even in sleep.

When the real taking begins, what happened against that brick wall becomes nothing but a prelude.  Angel plays with his slim, sleep-warm body.  Like a cat, his sire teases him until his survival instincts, which fought so hard against intrusion yesterday, ache for surrender. He wants to surrender entirely. In his imagination, he’s fulfilling a promise made by all men to a companion they only dare to want in dreams. 

This is what flesh demands. It goes on for a lifetime: teasing touch, flesh on flesh, and then the entering, which now is all pleasure. 

Is Angel smaller? The glistening shaft doesn’t look smaller. Spike can only conclude that he’s adapted. He does it for Illyria, so doing it for Angel’s prick doesn’t seem so unlikely.  Like a piston in a well-oiled shaft, Angel takes him again.  

They’re all limbs and noise and hot scent. He can’t separate individual pleasures or remember sequence and event. There’s just him, his body and Angel—all of his sire: lips, cock, vast presence, and blood.

It’s just tumble and touch, bite and blood, and the world coalesces to whether Angel is in or out.  All he wants is for Angel to fill him. He hadn’t realised just how empty he’d been.

Then Angel is out, and the emptiness hurts as much as the filling had before.  He lies waiting, his heart pumping wildly in his memory, just as real as if it were pumping now. Like a consecration, Angel’s offering comes close again, a hard tip brushing his hole, seeking entry. He opens his mind and his heart just as fully as he opens his body. 

But the benediction is withdrawn. 

Angel stares down at him, a glint of humour in his eyes. For the first time since he obeyed Angel’s command and undressed, it’s just them in the bed: no history, no memory, no substitute Gods, no ghosts. Angel is just Angel, and he’s just Spi…. He’s just pissed off, that’s what he is! Spike laughs. ‘You bugger.’  

Angel grins and tries to withdraw some more, but Spike wraps his legs around the broad back with a cheeky raise of one eyebrow.  

With a moan, he feels Angel inside him once more, his sphincter muscle quivering from sudden intrusion. It’s the kind of quiver that’ll build to orgasm if he’s lucky, so he lifts his hips, trying to force Angel further in.  

Angel chortles and pulls right out. 

Once more, they roll and tumble and bite, but there’s no sense of the ethereal. They’re sparring just as they always have—only now they’re not using words.

Somehow, like falling cats, they end up the right way: Angel prone on his supine willingness.  

With a stab, Angel embeds deeply, and this time, the quivering shoots all the way through Spike’s rectum, setting him on fire.  

They’re just getting into it again when Angel pulls out. Spike’s not sure whether to laugh or cry out. He twists around… and there it is: Angel’s prick. 

Face to face, nowhere to duck and dive or evade scrutiny that will expose his heart to anyone, it seems to Spike, as he straddles Angel, that they take each other, blurring distinctions that have kept them separate for too long.

As if Angel feels a dilution of something he ought to be, he bends and bites Spike’s neck, but it’s with human teeth, and just a gesture, so it only reinforces Spike’s strange feeling that this fucking has levelled them somehow. 

Muffled, Spike hears a ragged, ‘Fuck, that’s good, Spike.’

Something hitches in his throat. Something clenches inside his arse—one more rung up the ladder of pure pleasure that is Angel’s cock.  ‘You feel good inside.’ It’s so inadequate. Angel makes him feel good inside his heart, but he has no words for that.

Angel doesn’t seem to find anything lacking the reply. Before Spike knows it, they’re kissing again, and he’s climbing so far down Angel’s throat that their bodies separate, a wet slurping as slick cock leaves clinging tightness.

He’d forgotten he knew how to kiss this well. There’s nothing but saliva, tongues, and teeth clashing, until they’re joined once more. The shuddering orgasm that began inside his sphincter muscle an hour ago crests to a huge surge of release as Angel’s cock strokes him hard from the inside. With the taste of Angel still in his mouth, his whole body goes rigid, spasms of come arcing out, rivers of come spilling out as Angel fills him. Overloaded with sperm, like a leaky vessel, he sinks beneath the waters of Angel’s overwhelming presence.

Spikes wakes groggily to the simultaneous delights of Angel’s lips and warm blood oozing over his tongue and down his throat, coppery, mouth-watering, cock stiffening.  It’s the best wake-up call he’s ever had.

He hungers for the next mouthful, salivating and aroused.  Angel lifts one eyebrow, comes tantalisingly forward then… swallows. All the mysticism surrounding Angel vanishes: no God, no deity of any kind, he’s just a very sneaky, very annoying demon that… deserves to be punished.  

Laughing, he pulls Angel down but he knows it’s not particularly punishing. It’s exactly what’s he’s always wanted from Angel—his fantasy: rolling around naked with lots of blood.

Except… in his fantasies, he was the one—and he remembers this distinctly, having worked on this fantasy for many years, creatively building it and adding interesting things to it when needed—doing the fucking. He was the one doing the fucking, and Angel was the one getting fucked.  Kinda hard to get that mixed up. But that’s what he must be doing, getting things badly mixed up, because he murmurs, ‘Take me again,’ and he’s never wanted anything more. 

He’s mixed up because Angel inside him, Angel kneeling to his backside, is just about the best thing he’s ever felt. He never wants this to stop; it brings his insides alive with pleasure.

He tries to keep Angel talking—about anything—so the pleasure won’t stop. You can’t come to orgasm if you’re being talked at—he knows this. (He’s fucked Harmony, after all.) He needs his concentration and knows Angel will too.  But he’d no idea Angel was this skilful. Angel uses his cock like a weapon, attacking all his defences, finding places that make him with weep with the need to orgasm. So, he lets it come and tries to make it good for Angel, too, clenching and pushing back. 

By the intense shudder behind him, he knows they came together.

Being fucked is mixed up enough. Wanting to keep Angel inside him is too freaky to contemplate.  But he does—want that stretch, want that slight twitch—want Angel lying on him like a blanket of domesticity.

He’s very mixed up. No point denying it really.

A soft quietness descends on them, the kind of quietness where they can talk and be honest for once.

It feels good, talking with Angel’s prick buried in him. 

But then mixed up becomes freaky…. 

Spike could swear that Angel said he had a child. A human one.  He rolls them, dislodging the hardening prick inside him—some things you really do need to concentrate on.

He watches Angel’s face and the sorrow is tangible. It’s worse than sorrow. 

So he listens. He’s good at doing that now, having had some considerable practise with Buffy.  He sits on a bed, and he doesn’t fuck; he listens. It feels so familiar it makes his heart ache.

For someone so rooted in his memories, it’s frightening discovering that there is no ultimate truth and that memory can be as flawed as the world is: huge holes in both that you don’t know about.

But his fear is nothing compared to Angel’s pain, and now some of that pain is his. He feels Angel unloading it onto him, through the tiny touch of his thumb on Angel’s thigh, which his sorrowful sire doesn’t appear to notice, but must—somewhere in his grieving heart.

He’s not sure when the idea occurs to him.

It doesn’t come to him like a cold, clear plan. It seeps in on pity that bruises his soul, making better feelings—a burn of need. Then it floods out, drowning his rational brain under an ocean pure lust. But when the idea does come, he hardens on its truth: if he makes Angel his, he’ll dictate what the truth is for them now. If Angel becomes his, then reality can’t be altered again; it will be just that: reality. If Angel becomes his, there’ll be no more sorrow, or loneliness, but a chance to make a new, good life—for them both.

Angel seems to be waiting for something, some reaction to his story.

There’s really only one Spike can make.  

Very slowly, he pulls Angel toward him, not for a kiss, but letting him tip face down on the mattress. He stills the inevitable protest by running his finger down the strong spine, making it appear less invincible—making it shiver with need.  

But he doesn’t stop his finger, like he knows Angel expects. He lets it continue, down through the shallow valley.  He knows now how good this feels, Angel’s finger feather-light in his memory.  

Still Angel resists, his body tensing as the touch becomes too intimate.  Spike only touches him some more—his tongue trailing over his shoulder and into the hollow of his neck, where he nuzzles, not feeding, but close enough to that intimacy to distract Angel from the other.

Angel is distracted; he turns onto his back, stretching his neck, pulling Spike closer.  Spike just rolls them again so Angel faces away from him and he curls into the perfect form.  

With agonising slowness, he licks down smooth, bed-warm skin to the base of Angel’s spine, where all the nerves sit, waiting, dormant. 

Angel puts his hand down to pull him up for a kiss, but Spike pushes it away and parts the hard cheeks.

Before Angel can stop him, he fires what is dormant, tonguing Angel’s hole, feeling Angel writhe beneath him. He knows the writhing is half in fear, half in denial, but both of these will go. They did for him.

His tongue fits into the indentation, his lips grazing the soft skin around.  He breathes lightly on the wetness, rewarded by a suppressed groan. It’s okay—this suppression. There are a lot of lines being crossed—new beginnings: for his tongue, for Angel’s ass. 

It takes him over like feeding. A first bite and the feel of hot blood squirting into his mouth… first lick and then the need to mouth wide and wet and push in through the tightness, taste Angel from the inside again. It’s been so long since he tasted Angel’s heat. It’s better than blood now. He’s done that, wants this. People change.

Angel’s so tense Spike can almost hear his heartbeat too, a subtle counterpoint to his, which still beats in his memory.

He matches his tongue to the beats, flick upon beat, swirl to drumming.

Then Angel opens his legs fractionally—two inches but a huge journey as well.    

With a moan of pleasure, Spike kneels in between them.

He runs his finger through the saliva-wet valley once more.  

The air is thick with expectancy.

The phone ringing makes them both jump—so uncharacteristic for both of them—and the tension dissipates, amused glances flicking between them.

Angel reaches over and picks up the handset, but before he speaks into it, he rears up and cups Spike’s neck, pulling him down so he can listen, too.

Spike narrows his eyes defiantly, but Angel cuffs him and the defiance turns swiftly into a kiss, which muffles Angel’s, ‘Yeah?’

‘Angel? Is that you?’

Angel disentangles their tongues, but keeps his eyes fastened on Spike as he replies, ‘Yeah, what’s up, Wes?’

‘I think you should come down.’

‘Have you settled things with Illyria? Has she agreed?’

‘She did more than agree, but I think you should come down and see for yourself.’

‘I’m kinda into something here.’

‘Ah.’

‘Wes?’

‘I rather thought Gunn and the coming apocalypse were things you were into… here.’

Spike cups his hand over the handset and murmurs, ‘Go.’

Angel looks relieved, He nods and pulls the phone, speaking decisively, ‘Five minutes.’

They stare at each other for a few moments longer, and Spike shrugs. ‘What you do is important.’

Chapter 5 – Angel’s Next Day

Angel isn’t sure whether he was glad when the phone rang or not. It stopped Spike’s… stopped the unthinkable….
 
He’s fairly sure he would have gone along with this unthinkable thing that Spike was so clearly thinking—fairly sure, but not… entirely…. He watches Spike, still lounging on the bed, as he dresses.  He knows his look is combatant and sees the same expression on the naked figure.

‘What are you going to do?’

Spike shrugs and rolls onto his back, folding his arms behind his head.  ‘Lie here and think about you.’

The lack of cynicism in this reply totally throws Angel.  But he feels the anxiety in Wesley’s voice calling to him, so with a small, confused nod, he leaves.  

He feels… rumpled, which is so unlike him that he focuses on this and not on the fact that he’s been fucking Spike’s brains out all night. That is clearly too freaky to think about at all, so he doesn’t.

The door slides open, and there’s Gunn—abashed, shocked, but Gunn.  Illyria folds her arms and looks interested in Angel’s reaction.  ‘This is the one you wanted.’

Angel folds his arms, too, not entirely happy about the knowing expression in her eyes. ‘Gunn.’

The man nods uncertainly. 

Wesley, who’s not let his gaze leave Illyria, says softly, ‘I think we may have to answer for this.  She… punched him free, so to speak.  The Senior Partners may take offence to being… punched.’

‘Let them.  Go get checked….’

Gunn shrugs off the offer and pushes past them to the door. ‘I’m okay, Man.’  

Illyria follows him, a curious look on her face as if a specimen spoke.

Angel runs his fingers through his hair, wincing as they get stuck. He tries to tell himself it’s dried sweat, but he knows it’s not.

‘Tell me this is good, Wes. This is good, right?’

Wesley is staring at the air that Illyria breathed.  ‘I’m not sure. Of course, having Gunn back is good, but punching, in my experience, gets you in trouble.’  He turns and eyes Angel slowly, head to toe.  ‘So, how is your demon-watching going?’

Angel sees himself turn away embarrassed, and is then surprised when he hasn’t done this, when he’s standing there facing Wesley down, not at all fazed by the knowing examination.  ‘It’s been revelatory.’

Wesley purses his lips and nods. ‘Good. You will need Spike, I think, when the senior partners… punch back.’

Angel smiles.  ‘Spike isn’t the demon I’ve been studying, Wes.’  He turns and puts his hand on the phone.  ‘I have some things I need to do.  I want Illyria watched. She’s stretching—testing her power.’

‘Actually, I think she’s testing ours, but I agree that she needs to be watched.  ‘What are you going to do?’

Angel perches on the edge of the desk and regards him carefully. ‘I’m not sure.  I’ve been offered something, but I’m not sure I’m ready to accept it.’

If this confuses Wesley, he doesn’t show it.  He nods. ‘Does the choice have consequences—for us?’

‘Us?’

For the first time, Angel sees a flicker of doubt in the man’s eyes. ‘Yes, Angel. Us. Your friends: Gunn, Lorne… me….’

Angel smiles inwardly. He heard a more intimate reply to this in the human’s mind.  ‘It might.’

‘And you’re tempted to accept this… offer?’

Even thinking about accepting Spike stiffens him, so he doesn’t dissemble. ‘Yes. I’m very tempted.’

Wesley turns his head back to the space Illyria left.  ‘Then, as it’s very possible we’re all going to die soon, I think you should give into temptation for once.  Desperate times blur reality, Angel. And, as I said, you will need Spike soon.’

Angel tips his head to one side, wondering if Wesley’s comment is as perceptive as it appears. Wesley blinks and turns back to him.  Their eyes lock for a moment.

‘I have no intention of any of us dying.’  For the first time since he made the deal to give Connor his new life, he actually believes this.  It’s hard to admit, but he thinks thumping into Spike all night has stiffened him in other ways, too. 

Wesley smiles sadly. ‘Perhaps that’s even more reason to take what you want. We all need motivation to keep fighting.’

‘What’s yours?’

Wesley laughs, a deflection of Angel’s too perceptive comment.  ‘I watch Illyria. At the moment, that seems to be my only motivation to do very much at all.’

Angel nods and picks up the phone he realises he’s been stroking softly.  As he watches Wesley’s retreating back, he dials and then speaks swiftly and sharply.

He’s not sure whether he’s using the wait for his orders to be carried out as an excuse not to go back up to the apartment, but he’s annoyed that even when they are, he still hesitates.

At last, he grabs the newly delivered bags and travels back up.

The apartment appears empty, but there’s singing coming from the shower.

This moment defines the purpose and the determination that have hijacked him since he began this thing with Spike—a moment of standing there with bags full of new clothes for his childe and the domestic sound of this childe sharing his living space.  

He wants this.

He wants this now, and he’ll want it tomorrow.

He’s very unwilling for that tomorrow to be short. 

He wants his eternity, and he wants it with Spike.

Without too much hesitation, he strips off and joins Spike in the shower, an initial embarrassment silencing them both until he turns Spike to the wall and runs his hands over water-slick skin.  He takes the soap out of Spike’s hands and drops it to the floor.  ‘I just want skin.’

Spike tips his head back, his neck stretched and vulnerable.  ‘Take it, Sire….’

Angel growls, and his whole body shudders when he transforms.  As he bites deeply into Spike’s neck, he shoots cum over the tight backside, his cock dancing and swaying independently under streaming water.  Disbelieving, he pulls away, grunting with annoyance.  

Spike spins around, blood tracing a delicate path around his collarbone—a necklace of possession.  His eyes wide, he stares at Angel’s bloodied mouth then falls to his knees and takes him in, moaning on the still twitching penis.

Angel’s knees weaken at the sensation of being sucked so soon after coming, but he hardens almost immediately, and then there’s only one thing he wants. He drags Spike to his feet.  Before he can turn and enter him though, he catches Spike’s expression, and what he wants suddenly changes.  He fastens onto Spike’s lips as if this kiss under the water is his eternity.  They push and stumble around the stall, grunting with the effort to touch and taste.  

Spike’s the tallest person he’s ever kissed—the strongest and the hardest—and it’s primitive, an edge of violence just beneath the need.  

They fall from the enclosed space to the bathroom floor, water spilling with them.

The back of Angel’s head connects with the coldness, but he drags Spike onto his belly and demands his mouth again, the kiss beginning to ease back into something that actually resembles soft touch of lips to lips.  

Angel blinks and suddenly they’re not kissing. They’re lying on the wet floor and waiting for the other to make the first move.

Angel purses his lips.  Spike lifts an eyebrow. ‘Well?’

Angel frowns, just a little, as if something still puzzles him, but he draws up his legs.

Spike looks down and swallows, and when he looks up his eyes flicker with panic. Angel smiles and cups a hand around the back of his neck, drawing him close.  Spike closes his eyes to the intimacy of a kiss then increases their intimacy considerably. 

Angel tenses.  Spike kisses harder.  Angel cries out softly. Spike holds the strong jaw and twists wide-open-mouth wet kisses on him.  

Suddenly, he snaps his eyes open.

Angel teeters on the edge of those deep, blue holes once more, but this time he opens his arms wide and surrenders.  The dive is slow—flying not falling—every inch of Spike’s entry as good as he’d always known it would be.

It’s the final thing he had to learn—from his demon study.  One hundred years of denial, yet here on the bathroom floor, he finally explores his deviance.
 
Spike isn’t moving, and Angel wants him to.  He lifts his hips, and Spike cries out, bracing his arms either side of Angel’s strong shoulders, spreading his fingers out on the wet tiles.  Still looking down to where they’re joined, he jerks his hips forward, jutting his cock deep into Angel’s rectum. They both cry out, and Angel clutches at Spike’s back, his body quivering.  Slowly, Spike puts a hand under one of Angel’s thighs and lifts it.  Then he jerks his hips forward again.  Their sharp sounds mingle to one gasp of pleasure, and it’s strong enough to break through the paralysis.  Spike makes an incoherent sound of pure lust and lifts the other thigh, leaning into the fucking, ramming in and out.  Angel claws at his back, as waves of pleasure are driven straight from Spike’s cock to his balls.  

He thought the pleasure was all for the one doing the fucking. He thought for the other it was all about surrender and finding something self-revelatory in capitulation.  He had no freaking idea that it felt like this.  

Totally pissed that he’s wasted over a hundred years of Spike’s cock, he wants to make up for it now and clenches hard, lifting up, angling Spike onto the place that pleasures him so.

Spike starts a loud, panting cursing.  

And then, for the first time, Angel sees his childe’s orgasm.  

With a huge intake of breath, Angel arches, digging into Spike’s back and ejaculating between them. It’s under such pressure that the arc of cum hits his chin and cheeks, rolling down like spittle from an enemy.

Spike is still moving inside him when he finishes.  With a grunt of disbelief, Angel arches to a second hardness.  Spike’s eyes flick wide, and he thumps hard and fast, bringing them both quickly back to a peak of need.  

This time as he ejaculates, Spike collapses onto Angel’s body, clinging desperately and they shudder against each other, moaning piteously from pleasure.

Angel separates them when the cold bugs him and the hard floor starts to make his back ache.  It’s been a number of hours, so he doesn’t feel too guilty.

Even then, Spike resists being extricated.  He pouts as Angel disentangles them and lies on the floor, watching him.

Angel shakes his head and holds out his hand.

Spike’s reaction to the clothes doesn’t surprise Angel. He listens to the derision and snarky remarks, hearing the genuine delight beneath.  He doesn’t let any of them be touched until Spike’s showered, and to ensure that this actually is a shower, he pushes him back to his own apartment.

His is suddenly too empty.

As he showers, he feels gently around his body. It’s not entirely his anymore. He knows this, and it’s incredibly strange to experience variation in his body after so long.

Spike’s sperm drained out some time ago and now pools slick on the floor with his—magical DNA mingling—but he’s still stretched and aching.  His butt is taking longer to heal than one or two near amputations he’s had, and this amuses him, not at all anxious over the delay.

He laughs out loud when he can’t decide which he enjoyed more: the fucking or the being fucked.  He hears a soft, ‘What’s so funny?’ and turns to find a stranger watching him.  

Spike seems embarrassed and looks down crossly at the new pants. ‘Bloody poofy things.’

They cling, low-slung and tight on his slim waist. The T-shirt seems designed to display defined biceps, a second skin over rippling abs.

Angel’s breath hitches with desire, and he steps out.  

‘Hey! You’re all wet… don’t….’ Angel hasn’t listened to Spike for a century; he sees no reason to start now.

The pants are no less attractive lowered around Spike’s thighs as he fucks him bent over the bed.  In some ways, they’re improved, and Angel studies the framing of the slim, hard butt as he pleasures them both.  

He reckons he’s never going to solve the puzzle—which activity he likes the best—so he’s going to have to keep trying them both.

There’s not enough interaction, and he pulls Spike up by the waist, wrapping his arms around the tight T-shirt, nuzzling into his neck.  Spike twists his head around, and they kiss awkwardly, both smiling into the attempt.  Spike slides his hands back around Angel’s hips, and for a moment, they slow it down, rocking rather than thrusting, kissing slowly. 

‘Good?’

‘Fuck, yeah….’

‘I miss you inside me.’

‘Be back in there soon, Mate.’

‘I think, in some ways, you’ve… always been there.’ He feels Spike try to pull away and holds him on. ‘Is that why I’ve never heard you, Spike? Have you always been buried too deep inside me?’

‘Nah, you’re just daft wanker, that’s all, Angel.’

He pushes Spike away, but falls with him to the bed, crushing him and laughing, and it’s so much more like fighting than fucking that it’s over far too quickly.  They lie on their backs, spinning from pleasure.  A soft, amused voice brings him back to the cum-smelling bed.

‘So, what do you reckon… when we were fighting for that damn cup of perpetual piss-off… did you want to do this as well?’

‘What do you think?’

Spike chuckles.  

Suddenly, Angel turns to him, propping his head up on his elbow.  ‘Will you want this in the fight that’s coming, Spike? Will you want it enough to win that fight, too? Will you survive with me?’

Spike turns his head slowly, locks eyes with him, but doesn’t speak.  

Angel smiles.

Chapter 6 – Spike’s Next Day

Spike’s kinda glad the phone rang.

He’s fairly sure he’s got the balls to fuck Angel… fairly sure, but not… entirely.

Fucking Angel comes with so much baggage in his mind. It’s so much more than mere… fucking.

Topping Angel just isn’t natural (given all the other ways the whole enterprise seems unnatural, too).

Topping Angel is like fucking a parent, and he’s not got a very impressive record in that department.

He stretches his arms out on the bed, enjoying the rumpled sweaty, cum-damp feel of the sheets.

Angel is still strong in his mouth, a musky, salty, erotic taste that stiffens him as he runs his tongue over his lips.

If he closes his eyes, he has a vivid picture of Angel’s arsehole, his cheeks spread, his thighs open.  He groans and turns onto his belly, wanting to jerk off, but not wanting to lose the edge. He has the feeling that he’ll need this edge when Angel gets back.  

If Angel comes back….

He tries to project his thoughts down to Angel, sense where he is and what he’s doing.  With a huff of pleasure, he knows that Angel is thinking about him.  With a sense of wonder, it also occurs to him that Angel will always be thinking about him now.  

It will change things. Spike just isn’t sure whether it will change them for the better.  

Why have they done this thing now? They’ve had better opportunities.  Why now when things seem so… desperate.

And perhaps that’s exactly the reason why Angel has allowed it.  What does it matter what you do, if there’s no tomorrow? It’s like the game where you have to list all the things you’d do if you only had six months to live: nothing becomes too outrageous, nothing impossible—for nothing has any consequence.

Perhaps that’s how Angel feels. Why not fuck the idiot? Might as well go out with a bang.

With a grin, Spike realises he’s doing exactly what he did picturing Angel with Wesley—enjoying imagining something he knows is not true. Self-flagellation covered in Angel’s drying cum is extremely addictive though, so he turns onto his back and indulges in some more. 

If Angel is thinking about him, then perhaps it’s not good thoughts. He’s back with Wesley now, and the human has an unbreakable hold on Angel’s heart. Why else would Angel have let him live after what he did? Spike wouldn’t have. He’s not that sentimental where humans are concerned.  

(It’s his imagination; he’ll lie as much as he likes.)

So, Angel down in his office—probably leaning against his desk because it makes his legs look longer and thinner and gives him something to do with his hands—is thinking bitter thoughts about what they’ve done. Possibly disgusted, almost certainly angry and blaming him, seeing himself as a victim of seduction.

He likes that and trickles it through his mind again—him seducing Angel… Angel resisting… but not very convincingly….

He rolls over and rubs himself into the sheet, smelling deeply into the strong aromas.  It seems an age that Angel’s been gone. Glancing at the clock, he sees a book on the nightstand. Idly, he pulls it off and props it up against the pillow, squinting at the words.  It’s the most intimate thing he’s done in the apartment, the books Angel chooses to read somehow more personal even than his body.

It’s in French, so he doesn’t get far with it. He knows his French is better than Angel’s though, so lets it drop to the floor with a small, evil chuckle. He could have such fun, bugging the eternity out of Angel.

With a sigh, he peels himself off the sheet and heads into the bathroom, scratching his belly. He lines up all Angel’s poofy products and proceeds to scrub the angst out of his life.

Things always change. The knack is to change with them.  He’s always been flexible.

The image of himself being flexible for Angel doesn’t help his resistance to the temptation to beat off.  

He pours something girlie-smelling onto his prick and uses that excuse to wash… slowly.

It stops him thinking, which is good for once.   

Suddenly, Angel materialises in the steam and invades his private place. Spike resists the urge to laugh—his shower, for a moment, seeming more private than his arsehole.

Angel’s desire for him is palpable, thickening the steam.

Very slowly, Spike tips his neck back and offers him something that’s been private between them for over a hundred years.

Angel’s whole body is tense and aroused; his prick is stiff between them, and he bites.  Spike feels an intense shudder of pleasure course through him at this familiar taking, and then there’s a new potency in the air: the thick scent of cum.  He can feel it hitting his skin and being washed off in the hot stream from above.  But best of all, he can feel Angel’s orgasm through the teeth that invade him and the tongue that licks into the bite as he surrenders his blood.

Angel’s lack of control is intensely human. It levels them, takes away the significance of the bite, so that when they kiss, it feels more like kissing an equal than it has since the sex began between them. 

But Angel is still so strong, so invulnerable. Nothing Spike can do seems to hurt him: no wrongly placed elbow, no teeth too careless on his lips, no scratch of nails that he doesn’t seem to enjoy. 

They fall out of the stall, slipping on the wet floor, and Spike finds himself on top, their skin slick and hot from the water.  

Looking into Angel’s dark eyes, Spike has a moment of blinding clarity.  

This is when Angel will decide what the future will hold for all of them. If he’s lost his will to survive, then Angel won’t submit to him. If Angel won’t submit to him then this has all been what Angel said it was: just something to stop his distraction.

If he submits, if he’s willing to take this new path and explore it, then it’s something a great deal more than that.  It’s something that will change everything, a new beginning, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of Angel’s pain.

‘Well?’ Do you want to survive Angel? Do we have a future?

Angel opens his legs in willing surrender, drawing them up as if beckoning in that future. 

It seems to Spike that for the first time since his sire held their hands burning in the sunlight, Angel is taking a step he wants to and not one forced on him by guilt or by some seductive desire to save the world. This is just something Angel wants for himself. It’s the start of his recovery—conscious decisions about a future he can make and shape to his own desires.

Forcefully, knowing it will hurt however he does it, Spike pushes his prick against Angel’s tight hole.  There’s no give at all, so he pushes harder.

He doesn’t even want to take the pain away. It’s like a rite of passage—he went through it, and he wants Angel to experience it too… experience the pleasure beyond the pain. Neither of them is unfamiliar with that concept.

Angel beings to twist to escape the pain, so Spike opens his mouth wide and kisses feverishly: wet, slurping, desperate kisses.  
 
His foreskin bunches painfully against the ridge of his cockhead as he pushes, but then he’s through.  He looks down. The sight is more incredible than the sensation: Angel stretched around his width, pale skin contrasting with the purplish tint of his swollen prick.  

Suddenly, Angel lifts his hips, and with a jolt of shock, Spike realises that every tiny movement sends frissons of pleasure up his shaft into his balls.  It’s so tight. He’s not used to this incredible pressure.  Experimentally, he slides further in.  Equally hesitantly, he explores the pulling out.

A surge of near-release flares around his groin at the exquisite sensations, and bracing himself either side of Angel, he starts to pummel in and out.

He’s concentrating so hard on the pleasure in his cock that he’s forgotten the rest of his body—until Angel’s hands find his back and claw at him.  He wants more, deeper, further into Angel’s body… anything to increase the pleasure, and he lifts Angel’s thighs, flattening his ass, enabling him to plumb new depths of the tight channel encompassing him.

There’s a strange noise, and he realises he’s keening quietly.  When he stops, he begins to pant, sweat dripping off his forehead and into Angel’s eyes.  He wonders if it stings, but sees from Angel’s expression that he’s hardly there, that he’s lost in the pleasure.

That thought—that he’s bringing Angel pleasure with his body—brings him off.  His face contorts. His whole body spasms, and with a huge shudder, he releases a long, intensely pleasurable load of sperm deep into Angel’s body.  

For one bizarre moment, he wonders how his cum is also hitting Angel’s face—shot after shot in time with his pumping.  Two releases… he’d forgotten. It makes him harden again, makes everything swell and fill, and on the slippery sweetness of his ejaculate, he pumps in and out, wanting to see Angel come, watching avidly to see that evidence of this total surrender.

The second orgasm is even more intense as it surfs in on the shuddering pleasure of the first.  Crying out together, they release once more, and this time, Spike allows his body to crumple in a heap of spent energy.

He’s melting into Angel’s warmth, the strong body surprisingly comfortable.  His prick is still twitching inside Angel’s body, and if he concentrates on the images in his mind, he can make it swell and lift.  Angel seems to be asleep, or comatose. Either is flattering in its own way. Spike distinctly remembers Angel saying he wouldn’t let his guard down around him again…. He grins softly into Angel’s chest, the pleasure of being trusted hardening him in the sloppy channel.  

When Angel jerks to wakefulness, he groans and levers himself up on his elbows, disentangling them.  Spike’s torn between wanting to go again and wanting to hear the news from downstairs. Although he’d never admit it to Angel, he likes these humans he works with, and rescuing anyone from hell seems like a pretty good idea.

He’s still wondering how to find out without actually asking when he emerges into the bedroom and sees Angel glance toward the bed.

It’s covered with bags—the kind you really want to open, even if you’re a man. 

He tips one of them out, acutely aware that Angel is behind him and fairly sure that his sire isn’t admiring the clothes.  His backside twitches in an involuntary spasm, and he hears a faint moan.  He makes a snarky comment about the T-shirt that’s fallen out of the bag and goes to pull it on.  Angel catches him and wraps his arms around his waist.  ‘Go shower.’

‘I’ve just done that, Wanker.’

‘You’ve got all… dirty again….’

‘Hmm, have I…?’  It’s so ludicrous, this attempt to flirt after a century of knowing what the other is thinking—when it suits them—that they laugh, and Angel swats him painfully on the backside.  ‘Fuck off and make yourself decent.’

‘But I told you: there’s no hot….’

‘Yeah, well, we’ve both been lying recently.’

Spike blinks then with a rueful nod, walks naked across the room toward his own apartment.

He waits until Angel goes back into the bathroom then skits back in to open the rest of the bags. Too much washing is unchristian, and no one’s ever accused him of being that. And lived.

Things tumble from bags and every item is… perfect—exactly what he would have bought in the other version of his life where he really is cool. And rich.  Jeans with fashionable tearing and weathering that now don’t look wrong. T-shirts so tight that he can see his abs outlined beneath them. Pants so tight that he’s afraid to sit down. Either Angel thinks he’s thinner than he really is or….

The extremely arousing thought that Angel deliberately bought all his clothes to be this close fitting, doesn’t help the fit of the pants at all.  He debates adding a new tear, one to make things comfortable and chuckles at possibilities for fun that suggests.

Finally, he settles for a pair of combat pants that sit low on his hips and a T-shirt that hardly meets them, leaving a gap of skin when he moves.  They’re cut over his biceps, and he stretches, wishing he could see what he looks like in a mirror.  With a grin, he decides to see the effect on Angel’s expression. That’s mirror enough for him.

He doesn’t expect Angel to be laughing, but he is.  It’s possibly the best thing Spike has heard since I love you, which wasn’t true, but he burnt up enjoying, nevertheless.  Trying to stop his voice sounding too wussy, he says softly, ‘What’s so funny?’

The look Angel turns on him sends shivers down his spine. An icy trickle tickles his cockhead. Utterly embarrassed, he looks down, ‘Bloody poofy things.’

Angel is then like a force of nature: hot, urgent, and compelling.

He tugs at the waistband of the pants, cups the obvious bulge, runs his fingers under the thin T-shirt.

‘Hey! You’re all wet… don’t….’ Angel’s not listened to him for a century; Spike’s glad he’s not going to start now.  He’s hugged to the hard, wet body.  Angel reaches around, trying to slide a hand down inside the pants. The waistband’s too tight, and Angel curses, laughing, clearly amused by the joke on him.  He rips instead and then shoves his hands down to cup and separate the hard cheeks.  Groaning with pleasure, he explores the shallow crevice with strong fingers.

Spike is utterly lost to the desire to be filled again. His ass clenches in anticipation, so the entry, when it comes, is graced by pleasure enhancing pain.

They’ve not done it standing up before, and bending over, taking it up the ass, is so inherently wrong that enjoying it so much makes Spike laugh with glee.  Angel murmurs something, equally exalted and seizes his hair, pushing his fingers into the long locks and tugging on them like reins, riding him.

Spike’s lost to the pleasure of the rapid, hard fucking, waves of desire being driven into his body.  Then Angel seems to think that he’s too lost and pulls him up, nuzzling into his neck.

They kiss clumsily, wet, sloppy kisses that make them smile and pull away then come back on, tonguing and mouthing for more taste, more indulgence.

Suddenly, Angel slows everything down, and it’s even better than the rapid thrusting. Slowly, every inch of his channel is stoked, and an orgasm starts to build.

‘Good?’ 

Spike knows the question is rhetorical. His hands tightly clenched on Angel’s backside rocking them together, must tell Angel just how good this really is.  

‘I miss you inside me.’

‘Be back in there soon, Mate.’

‘I think, in some ways, you’ve… always been there.’  

Spike wants to see his face. It’s been a long time coming, but the confession is no less moving for that.  He feigns derision, trying to hide affection and replies, ‘Nah, you’re just daft wanker, that’s all, Angel.’

Perhaps for the first time ever, Angel seems to see effortlessly past the masquerade.  

Instead of taking offence, he laughs and topples them both to the bed, coming dislodged.  Spike curses and tries to straddle him—anything to have that hardness back inside his body.  He’s still wearing his pants half-mast, and he tips over, trying to free his legs.  Angel’s laughing too much to help, so Spike suddenly lunges forward and bites him. Like lightning, he strikes the highest point.

Angel howls and knees him, and then it’s war, and they’re both fighting to retain something they really don’t need between them anymore: dignity. They keep up appearances, for old times’ sake, and the battle is long and hard. If there’s more licking and sucking and tasting and moaning, than biting and punching and kicking, then there’s no one to point this out but them, and they’re too busy enjoying the prolonged, vicious foreplay to bother with words.

When he comes, Spike isn’t even sure who’s in and who’s out. His vision greys out with the all-consuming pleasure ravaging his body, and when he comes down from the shuddering intensity, he’s supine, spread-eagled and spent.

He’ll never be able to award Angel any prizes that would better this now. It seems to Spike that their entire lives have been a rehearsal for this.  He turns his head and regards the bloodied profile for a moment. 

‘So, what do you reckon… when we were fighting for that damn cup of perpetual piss-off… did you want to do this as well?’

‘What do you think?’

Spike chuckles.  

Suddenly, Angel turns to him, propping his head up on his elbow.  ‘Will you want this in the fight that’s coming, Spike? Will you want it enough to win that fight, too? Will you survive with me?’

It’s pretty unique as proposals go. But how else would you put eternity together into words?  

How do you put the reply into words? Spike watches the dark eyes carefully then, very precisely, in his mind, makes his answer.  With a burn of pleasure, he knows that for the first time, Angel really hears him. 

He smiles back.

The End

Feedback always welcome to Jenny (ladymoluk@hotmail.com)