For rusty_halo.

Boglescatverse

by
Witling

Part One

And that would be what a dead Du Pont’s Variegated Cacodemon looked like. Smaller, somehow. Less imposing. And with a rake sticking out of its back.

Xander sighed, put a heel against the thing’s cranium, and pulled the rake out with a memorable popping sound. Thank God for metal tines. And Dumpsters. And damn, he was almost out of Hefty bags. Living on the Hellmouth, you could never have enough Hefty bags. The kind with the drawstring were the best.

He was back from the shed, shaking the bag open, when something moved behind him and he spun, Nijinsky for a panic-blind second, the rake raised. Spike was already stepping back, grinning, his hands raised in the universal sign for harmless, you idiot.

“Holy fuck.” Xander’s arms were hard, loaded, and for a minute he considered bringing the rake down anyway. Wouldn’t kill him. Might teach him not to go tiptoeing through other people’s tulips.

“For the love of God,” Spike said, taking another step back. “Don’t tidy me.”

Xander took a breath and lowered the rake. “Spike. And now, leave.”

Spike craned his neck to look past Xander’s shoulder. “Juvenile. You try sticking a fork in one of the adults, you’ll understand why Du Pont’s last words were ‘Get it off me’.”

“Uh huh. Right now, I just want it off my lawn. Before I have to explain it to city council.” Xander shook the Hefty bag out with a crack and crouched down at the head. Spike’s feet didn’t move. “Help or move on, Spike.”

After a second, Spike’s hands came down and took hold of the proboscis. “Count of three, yeah?”

The Dumpster was closer to full than he’d thought; they had to lug the thing two blocks down to the big blue bin behind the Cinerama and sink it in buttery topping. There was already an occupant; Xander couldn’t remember the name but he remembered the little lamprey mouth and the chunk it had taken out of his wrist. Doxol, or droxor, or something. Whatever. It sank. The Du Pont’s took some prodding, and they both ended up with rancid petroleum product on their sleeves.

“Filthy,” Spike said, flicking his arms irritably as they walked back up the street.

Xander shrugged. He was exhausted. Apparently the adrenaline he’d used to tidy the Du Pont’s had been his last. Shrugging alone made his shoulders ache. The thought of putting the rake away made him want to groan.

“That wasn’t quite disgusting enough,” Spike was saying. “Next time, could we bury the body in warm mayonnaise?”

“Spike.” Xander rubbed the back of his neck, then heeled his hands into his eyes. He yawned, popping his jaw. “What time is it?”

Pause. “Two thirty.”

“Jesus Christ.” He stumbled over the edge of the boulevard, opened his eyes, corrected course. “I have to be at work in five and a half hours.”

The thought of going to work, spending another day like this, fried and stoner-eyed and tracking very slowly on the real world, was unendurable. He took a deep breath and rubbed his neck again. Unendurable was overstating things. It was endurable. Caffeine pills made it so. Also, fritters.

Someday, when they were finished saving the world and they all got to walk up the aisle and Leia put the medals around their necks, he was going to take the podium, nod graciously, and then just…sleep.

“Right. About that.”

He looked sideways at Spike, who was looking sideways at him. Who looked away quickly when he saw Xander looking, and started fishing in his pockets. “You’re going to work in a bit, right?”

Xander said nothing. He had a bad, belated feeling he’d just rubbed rancid buttery topping all over his face. Spike pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket, tapped one against the pack, and lit it carefully. Probably afraid he was going to go up in a tarry bonfire of butter substitute.

“You work all day, yeah?” Spike was looking at him, the used car salesman look, and Xander sighed.

“What’s wrong with your crypt?” he asked.

Spike muttered something, stuffing his cigarettes back in his pocket.

“What?”

Spike dragged hard on his cigarette, briefly contemplated something in the middle distance, then said, “Exterminator.”

“You’re fumigating your crypt?”

Spike frowned. “Gets buggy. Helps to clean it out once in a while.”

Xander opened his mouth, then closed it. Then raised his hand, index finger raised. “Okay. First. That’s stupid.”

Spike shrugged.

“Second. You’re a vampire. You don’t want to breathe fumes? Don’t breathe.”

Spike wrinkled his nose. “Gets in my clothes.”

“Third. You have nowhere else to stay?”

“Not just at the moment, no.”

“Fourth. Spike. This is the third time.”

Spike flicked a glance at him, then went back to examining the treetops. “You’ve got cable.”

Xander looked up at the treetops too. Nothing up there, as far as he could tell, but then he hadn’t seen the Du Pont’s behind the shed, either. Not until it was practically siphoning him.

They were up to his apartment now, and he started across the lawn, fishing in his pocket for his keys. Five and a half hours. Jesus Christ.

Spike grabbed his arm suddenly, and he jumped, almost lost his balance, and found just enough adrenaline to remember what slight panic tasted like. “What?”

Spike pointed at the lawn in front of him. The rake was still there, tines up, waiting for his foot. It looked funny when the Three Stooges did it, but right now it looked more like a broken nose. He bent down carefully and snagged the handle.

“Yeah, okay. But this is seriously the last time, Spike.”

He left the rake behind the hydrangeas, and they went up.

Part Two

He stumbled twice on his way up the stairs--the second time with a muttered whoah, a moment of weightless teetering, and a brief vision of sledding straight back down to the landing on the back of his head. When you couldn't climb stairs without courting chiropractics, it was time to sleep.

His apartment smelled like home. The Sunday sports section was still papering the floor by the coffee table, and his whites were still languishing unsorted in the armchair. Six-thirty pm sun was slanting through the kitchen venetians. He shed his coat and shoes en route to the sink, drank half a glass of water with his eyes closed, and made for bed. Six thirty meant he had two and a half hours to examine the inside of his eyelids before he had to take a rake to any more cacodemons.

The bedroom was dark and stuffy and hot. He yanked his shirt off, thumbed open his fly, and started shuffling forward with his trousers heading slowly south. Just before dropping onto the mattress, he actually looked at it. And stopped.

"Spike."

Nothing.

"Spike."

Somewhere under the blankets--and he didn't sleep with all those, he hadn't even known he owned all those--something shifted. He waited. Nothing. He leaned down, yanked his trousers back up, and buttoned them firmly. Then he lifted the bottom of the blanket and grabbed a skinny white ankle.

"Spike. You have negative three seconds to be out of my bed." He jerked the ankle, and got bare calf. "Also, you are to be wearing clothes."

Spike muttered something he didn't catch, and he tightened his grip. "One of us worked all day, Spike. Better still, one of us pays rent." He dropped the ankle and stepped to the side of the bed, where Spike's jeans and shirt were lying in a pile. "God. Do you have to be naked?"

Another mutter, and he bent over, hooked Spike's T-shirt with one awkward, swinging hand like a shopping mall prize grab, then stood holding it, staring hopelessly at the sprawled lump under his blankets. "I'm too tired for this."

No argument from the lump, so he thought briefly about the couch, a hundred miles away and requiring the shifting of cushions, the closing of venetians, the plugging-in of the Scooby alarm. There was no justice in his life. No justice, and no dignity.

He dropped the T-shirt and poked the lump somewhere that seemed safe and dorsal. "Move over."

After a pause, the lump shifted. He dropped into the indentation it left behind, fumbled with the alarm clock, and let his eyes roll back in his head. Sleep peeled him smoothly up the middle.

Daphne wanted to say thank you to all her sorority sisters for all their support and understanding, and it was a sweet seventy-three degrees at eighty fifty-eight in the pm, end of another sunny day in Sunnydale, and here came the Stones with "Satisfaction," and play safe, kids. Cat-in-heat guitar chords. Please God. Five minutes. Five more minutes with the collective unconscious.

The world gaffed him, hauled him to the surface, and stood over him with its club raised. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. Stucco. Navajo White. The light was shuttered, lemony, horizontal. He was hot, lying on top of the sheets. Still wearing his jeans. The waistband was cutting into his side.

He groaned and rolled over to kill the Stones, then lay for a minute with his eyes closed, his forehead pressed to the cool wood of the bedside table. He'd spend Saturday fixing the air conditioning. Or sleeping. Or working overtime, because Innovative had sent the wrong insulation again, and someday, God willing, he'd have a job where he wasn't the guy who worked Saturdays to make up for other people's screwups.

He was pleasantly afloat in that world when there was a small movement on the other side of the bed, and he remembered: Spike.

He lifted his head and looked over his shoulder. Spike was there somewhere, half off the far side of the mattress under a moraine of blankets. He looked kind of...flat. Like he was mostly blanket. He hadn't moved.

Xander heaved his legs off the bed and pushed himself to his feet. "Rise and shine, dead guy."

He ran the shower cool-to-cold, then warmed it up slowly as he stood under it. His wrist stung: the lamprey bite. Droxol. Droxol? Now it was going to bug him. He toweled off, called his beard good, and wrapped himself in yards of good thick terry cloth before heading back to the bedroom.

It had got darker while he'd been showering, and the bedroom was murky and airless. He went straight to the dresser and rifled it for shorts, shirt, and staking trousers. An outfit that said I'm nobody's lunch. Over his shoulder, he noticed that the lump of Spike hadn't moved.

"Spike." He was almost out of socks; on Saturday, he'd do laundry. "Hey. Rip. Time to get the hell out of my bed." He gathered an armload of clothes, checked his towel tuckage, and started back out the door. "Feel free to get less naked while I build to a repressed panic in the next room."

He hadn't dried off very well, which made it hard to struggle quickly into his shirt and trousers. Part of him was sure Spike was going to round the doorway while he was pantsless, and mock him for his construction tan. Didn't happen. Dressed, he went back to the bedroom door and stuck his head around. The Spike lump hadn't moved.

"Spike." He cleared his throat and took a step forward. "Hey. Spike."

Nothing, and he started to feel a funny little tickle in the base of his spine. Maybe he's dead, his brain muttered, and he scowled and flicked it in the cerebellum. "Lestat. Come on. Places to go, demons to rake." He took another step forward, and squinted in the darkness. "Okay, you're starting to seem kind of...deaf."

He stood there a second, then took the last few steps all at once, and poked the lump without letting himself think about it. Part of him was waiting for it to--what, crumble to dust? And that would officially be the creepiest thing ever, and he could just go straight to Sunnydale General and get fitted for the Valium shunt. Some other time he'd examine the fact that he didn't find it especially creepy just to have napped next to a dead guy.

The lump was firm but yielding. It twitched slightly, and his heart started beating again.

"Spike, you moron." He pulled the sheets down and clicked the bedside lamp on. "Catlike reflexes, my a--"

Spike's eyes flickered open and then immediately squeezed shut again, his hand up to block the light. His mouth looked pained. The veins on his hand stood out blue. Xander regarded him for a minute, then carefully tipped the lamp to the wall.

"What'd you do, drink all day?"

Spike shook his head minutely, and mouthed something inaudible.

"You don't look so good."

The hand came down, and Spike squinted at him. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken.

"You sick?"

Spike shook his head, looked around the room as if surprised to find himself in it, and started to sit up. It seemed like it was going to take a while, so Xander walked around to the other side of the bed and picked up Spike's shirt and jeans. He turned the shirt right-side out and tossed it onto the blankets over Spike's lap.

"Time for me to go make the world safe for semi-viscous bipeds. And time for you to go home." He dumped Spike's jeans on the foot of the bed. "And by the way, next time you fumigate, book a motel."

Spike was staring at him blankly. He'd picked up the shirt, and was carefully, laboriously, reversing it again. Xander watched him do it, then watched him start to pull it slowly over his head, as if his arms weighed almost too much to lift.

"Spike." He was getting the cold creepy in his spine again. Spike pulled the shirt over his head, the tag turned up against his throat. He looked down at it in confusion. The crawl in Xander's back started up his neck. "Okay. Um. Spike? Are you feeling all right?"

Spike reached up and touched the tag, grimaced, and started to pull his arms slowly back through the sleeves. "'m fine," he muttered under his breath.

"You're wrestling your shirt. And you look...peaky." He looked, in the sideways table light, like a deathshead. He'd looked fine the night before. Did vampires get the flu?

Spike yanked his left arm free, and there was a snap of ripping stitches. Then he just sat there, his head dropped, as if the effort had exhausted him. Xander swallowed.

"Okay. Um." He was supposed to be at Giles's place in...ten minutes ago. Spike was probably hung over, or maybe he had a cold or something. Whatever. Giles would know. Thank God for Giles. "Okay. Change of plan, Spike. You hang here, hold down the fort. I'm going to go pass the buck."

Spike didn't move until he went over and plucked nervously at a corner of the T-shirt. Then he raised his head and gave Xander a bleary, confused look. His eyes looked pale and poached.

"You want a hand getting this off?"

He watched that go through the penny drop, watched the sneer start to work its way up, and just pulled the damn thing off over his head before it had a chance to surface. Pushed him back into the mattress with a finger on his shoulder. "Just stay here for now."

He clicked the light back off, and was halfway out the door before he realized he was still holding Spike's shirt, and that he should probably leave that behind.