Land of the Lost

by
Witling

Part Three

He'd been afraid the desert would have nothing more in it than tigers and monkey-faced assholes with clubs, but he'd been wrong. It had soft little prey animals that came out under cover of night, creeping out to drink from the rivulets coming off the cliff face. He didn't bother with game face for them—or maybe he didn't want to switch for other reasons. You seem a little intense, Harris had said. Maybe he was right. Even in human face, Spike felt like he could smell things more sharply, see things more clearly. He moved faster, with less effort. He was more perfect here than he was in the real world, he realized. More perfect, or more like the demon. And maybe he didn't want to know too much more about what that really meant.

He caught a couple of little bucktoothed critters, snapped their necks, and carried them back to the oasis. Harris was asleep beside the fire, the club in his outstretched hand. Good thing—gutting without a knife was messy. Spike tossed the extra bits in the fire and speared the meat for roasting. Then he squatted down, his arms hanging between his knees, and sank into a kind of daze. The flames rose and fell.

He was running over the wide red plain, his feet striking up puffs of dust from the ground. His legs were long, pure muscle eating the ground. His belly was a cup. He could see for miles, he could smell every movement of water under the ground, of herds of deer in the distance. He was going somewhere, following something. Faint disturbances in the red dust, faint eddies of scent in the wind. Something big, something bloodied. There was blood in his mouth and on his hands. Soon he started to find drops of blood in the dust as well. He was getting close.

He was at the base of a cliff, and the tiger was above him, scrambling up the rocks with its tail lashing. Trying to get away. Its blood slicked the rocks, its paws scrabbled for purchase. He leapt up after it and grabbed it around the waist, bringing them both down together. They hit the ground with the tiger on top, two tons of fighting muscle. It lashed like a whip and he braced his heels in the dirt, arched, and snapped its back. While its heart still beat, he punched into its neck and drank.

He was in darkness, naked, moving with another body. His mouth on another mouth. Hands on his back, pulling him in, warm breath. He was inside, and clutching for more. He could smell familiar skin, familiar blood. He was stronger, he was stronger than anything and anyone, and he had to be careful, to hold some of his strength in reserve so he wouldn't cause damage, but that only made it better. The gasping breath got faster, uneven, and he knew he was giving pleasure. It made him feel like trapped light, like a coal in the darkness. He made safety and pleasure and life. He felt warm skin under his hands, against his belly, a trickle of sweat between them. With his eyes closed, his hands latched tight around the body beneath him, he gave up what he had.

He was floating in darkness. Interlaced with another set of arms and legs, another warm exhausted body. Sleeping breath touched his face. He'd never felt it, this deep quiet peace. This knowledge that everything was all right. No need to worry, or even to think. He never wanted to stop feeling it. Never wanted to leave.

"Spike."

Someone was shaking him by the shoulder. He stood up abruptly, staring around. Harris was on the ground by his feet, bowled over and blinking. The bruise on his face had swollen. It was starting to get light, and the fire was almost dead.

"Jesus Christ." Harris got to his feet and took a step away. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. What's wrong?"

Harris wiped his palms together slowly, eyeing Spike as if he'd been taken over by aliens. "You were just sitting there. Squatting there." He paused. "Staring."

"I was asleep." Spike leaned over and grabbed a couple of branches from the pile to chuck into the fire. "I'm not allowed to sleep, now?"

"Sleeping we do with our eyes closed, Spike. You were staring."

Spike dropped the wood onto the fire, and it crackled up immediately. The meat was roasted on its little sticks, probably dry now but still edible. "I was asleep, that's all."

"Well…" Harris looked doubtful, as if he wanted to pursue the issue but didn't quite dare. "Also, you're kind of—"

Spike stared at him.

"Bumpy," Harris said, gesturing at his own face.

Startled, Spike felt his forehead. The ridges were there, hard and prominent. He hadn't even noticed. With an effort, he suppressed them. Harris looked relieved.

"You should eat some of that," Spike said brusquely, tapping the roasted meat with the end of a branch. "Haven't eaten in a while, have you?"

Harris looked at the meat as if he hadn't even noticed it yet. "Oh my God," he said. "You got food?"

"Went shopping." Spike turned away, but the tone in Harris's voice—awed, grateful, amazed—was doing something strange to his chest. It felt warm and tight, too big. He walked to the water and pulled his shirt off, washed off a little better than he'd done before. There was dried monkey blood under his fingernails, and under his arms. And strangely, he was hungry again.

Harris ate the meat with happy, ravenous sounds, and Spike washed without looking at him, watching the sun come up over the far flat plain. He'd been dreaming strange things. Strange, but good. He felt strong, inexhaustible, like he could start running in any direction and kill anything he found. At the same time, the little domestic noises from behind him made him feel tender. Like he hadn't felt since Dru left.

He watched the last of the monkey blood disappear into the clear stream, and felt the sun start to dry the back of his neck.

Midday, they lay side by side in the shade of the cliff and watched the heat waver over the plain.

"You're sure we shouldn't go back?" Harris sounded hesitant, preoccupied. He was in pain, the bruises swollen all over his neck and shoulders, but he wanted to try for the spot where they'd come through. "I thought the idea was, when you get lost, you stay put."

"We're not lost."

"We're lost, Spike. We're uber-lost. We're in the Land of the Lost." Harris gave a quick glance around and rubbed his cheek gently. "I'm expecting Sleestacks any minute."

"You're breathing better." He sounded almost normal, although he still seemed exhausted.

"Yeah." He took a deep breath in, then let it out. "I guess it's like altitude. You get used to it."

"That's good."

There was a pause, then Harris said, "Yeah."

Way out in the middle of nowhere, something moved across the plain in a large herd. There were thousands of them, whatever they were. Spike could smell the faintest hint of cud and dung. It smelled familiar.

"It's okay," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on the movements of the deer, or whatever they were. "We're safe here."

Harris didn't say anything to that, and Spike didn't elaborate. He didn't see any point in trying to explain the deep sense of comfort he felt in his belly. It wasn't something he could find the words for, and he had a vague intuition that it wasn't something Harris could understand anyway.

Harris fell asleep eventually, stretched out flat on his back with his arms behind his head, his mouth open because he still had to pull at the air a little. Spike made sure the club was lying close to his hand, where he could grab it if he needed to. Then he pulled his shirt off and toed out of his boots, studying the horizon. He considered getting rid of the jeans, too, but something in him drew a line at that. He set out at an easy dogtrot, feeling the hot dust puff up beneath his feet.

It was half an hour before he smelled a trace, and then he veered for it immediately, picking up his pace. The prints were broad and circular, moving at a lope. He followed them down a long, gradual slope toward the smell of deer and grass.

The deer were in a valley with a shallow muddy river at the bottom, thousands of them trampling their pointy hooves into the silt. The tiger was crouched on a shelf of rock above them, flat against the dusty stone, its tail twitching softly at the tip. It was bigger than the last one, twelve or fourteen feet. Something in the base of Spike's brain lit up, sending an electric charge down his spine and out to his fingers and toes, to every part of him. He grinned, feeling his face split. The tiger's head turned suddenly, and they looked at each other. The tiger kept silent, its ears flat against its skull. Spike growled.

It slid off the rock before he could reach it, and was halfway down the slope to the river before he caught up. It ran at a full-out sprint, its lanky back legs overtaking its ears. The deer ran squalling, thunderous in the water. Spike caught the cat's back foot and they both skidded downhill in a plume of dust, entangled and snarling.

They hit the water and then it started in earnest. The cat was heavy, heavier than Spike had anticipated. It bore him down and he was blinded by the water, mud in his eyes. He could feel its fur against his mouth, and he bit instinctively. Nothing—all he had was slack skin. He kicked and flipped, feeling his spine give more than he'd known it could, and suddenly he was in the air, on top, the cat hissing putrid breath in his face, its tongue bright pink and curled like an oyster.

He punched it in the head, and when it flinched back he held its front legs open and buried his face in its throat. They went under again, both of them. This time he was deep in its artery, swallowing blood and mud, feeling its legs clutch at him. He was swept with the beautiful knowledge that he was killing it, that he could kill something this enormous and powerful. Its blood passed into him, and he swallowed it greedily, gratefully, like Harris eating the little scraps of meat off the sticks by the fire.

He made it back to the cliff face a couple of hours later, caked with dried mud and blood. Harris was awake, sitting against the rock with his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. He watched Spike walk up without comment. Watched him rinse off in the stream, then pull his boots and shirt back on. When Spike walked over to sit next to him, though, his hand closed around the club and he pulled it a little closer.

Spike hesitated, frowning. "What?"

Harris dropped his eyes. "Nothing."

As an afterthought, Spike felt his own face. No ridges. He'd made a special effort to be sure about that. Didn't want Harris thinking he was getting out of control.

He sat down next to Harris, a little further away than he'd been going to. The club lay between them, Harris's hand flexing around it nervously. Spike looked down at it, then at Harris's face.

"You going to hit me with that?"

Harris cleared his throat, swallowed, and shook his head. Spike looked away across the plain. The herd of whatever had moved away. Nothing out there now but red dust and heat.

"Spike?"

"Yeah?"

There was a long pause. Spike watched a few pinkish clouds move past, way up high. Finally, he looked at Harris, who was watching him with a strange expression. Like fear.

"What?"

Harris shook his head, dropped the club, and gave a shaky little laugh. "Nothing." When he wiped his palm on his trouser leg, it left a wet mark behind.

He must have fallen asleep again, but this time it was just nothing, a black hole he didn't even remember dropping into. He woke up lying in the dirt, his face turned up to the sky. Alone. Harris was nowhere to be seen.

If he'd had a working heart, it would have kicked up. As it was, he sat up with a snap, like a jack-in-the-box released. The stream trickled by, sublime and indifferent. The club was gone, Harris was gone. It was almost dark. For a few seconds Spike cast about in a kind of frenzied confusion. Something had attacked them while he'd been asleep. Harris had been killed, taken—

Then he saw the tracks leading out into the desert, one clear and the other dragging a little, because Harris was still limping from the club landing on his legs. They were short, hurried steps. He was using the club as a cane, by the look of it. Heading out alone into the darkness, into the middle of nowhere.

With a snarl of fear and anger, Spike started to run. How long had he been asleep? How far had Harris gone?

It was cold again, and there was no moon. Maybe there was never any moon in this reality. It didn't matter, he could see the tracks plainly enough, and he could even smell Harris himself, out there in the darkness. Smell his blood and his fear, the finely dispersed molecules of his breath in the air. He wasn't far, he couldn't have got far. Still, Spike ran faster.

He caught up after an eternity, maybe a little less than an hour. Harris was near exhaustion, breathing so hard and raggedly that Spike could hear him five hundred yards away. He smelled like injured prey, dragging itself across the bare face of the desert at night. Spike wanted to grab him, cover him, make him invisible to everything out here that would eat him if it got half a chance.

He was running softly and he didn't call out, so by the time Harris noticed him they were almost close enough to touch. Harris spun around and swung the club, desperate and awkward. He couldn't see, Spike remembered. Couldn't see, couldn't smell, was half-frozen and practically suffocating. The club went wide, and he grabbed the end so Harris couldn't try again.

"Fuck—" Harris yanked at his end, then let go abruptly and staggered back.

"It's okay," Spike said gently. "It's me."

That didn't seem to reassure Harris at all. Maybe he had sunstroke, Spike thought, stepping closer and getting a hand under Harris's arm. Harris gave an involuntary gasp and tried to pull away.

"It's okay," Spike said again. "Harris, it's me. Spike."

"Let go." Harris tried to get his arm free again, but Spike held on. "Fuck off, Spike. Let me go." His voice was raw and high.

"Let you—?" Spike tightened his grip. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing." Harris laughed, a little hysterically. "I'm fine, Spike. Just let me go, okay?"

Spike said nothing, and didn't let go.

"Please?" Harris voice cracked, and he tugged experimentally at his arm. Spike let go and Harris stumbled back, massaging his bicep. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Harris was shivering, he noticed. "You're freezing. What the hell are you playing at, running away like that?"

"I don't know." Harris coughed, dry and painful-sounding. "I just…I thought maybe the portal—"

"I told you," Spike said patiently. "It won't be there."

"I know. I know you said that."

"So what are you—"

"Spike." Harris wiped his mouth and took a deep breath. "Jesus, I'm going to die here, aren't I?"

"What?" Spike took a step closer, involuntarily. Harris stepped back. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm saying…" Harris trailed off. "I don't know what I'm saying. I'm cold."

"That's why I made a fire."

Harris said nothing. He was studying the ground, as if he were trying to see something. Looking for the club, Spike realized after a moment. He held it out, so it brushed Harris's hand. "Here."

Harris jumped, but took the club. It seemed to make him feel a little better to clutch it in both hands. "Thanks."

"You're welcome."

They stood there for another few seconds of silence, Harris holding the club tightly, Spike wondering what to say next. Finally Harris opened his mouth, his eyes on the ground.

"Spike."

"Yeah?"

"Can I ask you something?"

"Depends." That got him another pause, so he said, "Yeah, okay. What?"

Harris rubbed his lips again, took hold of the club in both hands, and said, "Are you going to kill me?"

Spike just stood there, his mouth open.

"I'm just asking," Harris said. "I mean, I understand it's kind of a stupid thing to ask, because if you were going to kill me, why would you tell me first? You'd just kill me. Except maybe you would tell me, because when you think about it, what the hell am I going to do to stop you?"

Spike held up his hand, palm-out. Then he remembered that Harris couldn't see. "I'm not going to kill you," he said.

"Yet," Harris supplied. "Not yet, right? You're waiting for the right moment."

"I'm not going to kill you," Spike repeated. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about you being really fucking scary the last couple of days, Spike."

"What—I'm not scary." He was, and he knew it, but his mind felt at war with itself. Something about what Harris was saying felt true, but a greater part of him felt drastically misunderstood, even wronged. "I'm not going to hurt you. I've been saving your life."

Harris swallowed, but didn't release his hold on the club. "I know. You get my firstborn, remember? I'm very grateful for all that you've done, but I'm also a little worried that you're going kind of Son of Sam on me, and right now I'm not really sure that you know what you're doing."

"I know what I'm doing."

"You go running around half-naked in the desert and come back covered in blood. Is this some drum circle thing I'm not invited to?"

"I have to eat, Harris. We can't all get by on roast chipmunk, all right?"

Harris blinked, then closed his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He rested the end of the club on the ground, and leaned his weight on it.

"You all right?" Spike asked, wanting to reach out but afraid to make it worse. Harris opened his eyes.

"Yeah. I'm just…maybe it's me. Maybe I'm going nuts."

"You're not nuts, you're just…" Spike watched Harris shiver for a few seconds, then thought fuck it. "Come here." He didn't wait for compliance, just reached out and chafed Harris's shoulders with his palms. "You're just cold."

Harris flinched slightly at his touch, but didn't try to move away. His eyes searched the darkness earnestly. "You still have the soul, right?"

"It doesn't come and go, Harris."

"Right. And yes, I know, another stupid question."

"Don't be scared," Spike said, and then wanted to say more, but couldn't think what, exactly, to add. Harris's arms were cold and trembling under his hands. Without thinking about it, he yielded to the impulse he'd been fighting for hours. Days, maybe. He pulled Harris in and held him close, feeling the shaky warmth of his body, smelling his skin. They stood like that for a few seconds in silence.

"Spike?" Harris said at last, over Spike's shoulder.

"Mm?"

"You're…hugging me."

A small part of Spike's brain thought, You're right, I am. What the fuck is that about? The rest of him didn't think at all. He raised his palm to Harris's cheek, turned his head, and kissed him on the mouth. Harris tasted like woodsmoke and meat, like dust, like himself. His lips were dry and split. Spike licked them gently.

"Spike?"

His hands in Harris's hair, his hips riding forward on their own business, Spike hummed a reply. Harris swallowed. His throat clicked.

"I think…I think you're maybe not okay right now."

Spike pulled back. In the faint light of the foreign stars, Harris's eyes were wide and black, wet at the edges. His hands were still on the club, flexing tightly. Spike frowned. "What's wrong?"

For a moment Harris searched blindly for his face, his lips opening and then closing again. He seemed to think of several replies, and then discard them one by one. Finally he cleared his throat and said, "Do you promise not to kill me?"

Spike smiled, rubbing his thumb over the bone behind Harris's ear. "God, you're a wanker. I don't kill people I love."

That seemed to hit Harris somewhere just around the solar plexus. He let out a soft breath and swayed slightly on his feet.

"You taste good," Spike said, and kissed him again. This time Harris's mouth felt less amazed. He opened his lips slightly, and after a little while he even kissed back. His hands stayed put, though. His heart was beating fast, and he smelled like fear. Spike tried to kiss it out of him, and after a while it seemed to drain away. Finally Spike realized that Harris was hardly moving, hardly responding. Exhausted.

"Let's go back," Spike said, slipping a hand under Harris's arm. He felt delighted, exuberant, ready to run all the way back to the cliffs. Ready to go wherever he had to, do whatever he had to. It was going to be okay. Everything was going to be okay.

Part Four

This time he found them a small cave not far from the oasis, dry and warm from the sun-heated rock. There were little animals—mice, or something like mice—but that didn't matter. He lit a fire at the mouth and Harris lay slumped against the wall of rock, staring around with a kind of dull amazement.

"Home sweet home," he said faintly, and laughed.

He seemed to expect something from Spike—his eyes were black and weary, following Spike everywhere he went. Spike smiled back a couple of times, trying to put him at ease. It didn't work. Finally, unnerved himself, Spike built up the fire and went out shopping for Harris's dinner. A few more of the toothy, fine-boned little animals, which he strung on a stick through their hind legs. This time Harris watched him do the gutting, without commenting or offering to help. When the meat was cooked through Spike brought it to him, hoping that would help smooth things over between them. Food was elemental, wasn't it? You couldn't hold a grudge against a man who fed you when you were hungry.

And Harris was hungry. His stomach made low snarling sounds, and he ate the meat fast, so fast that Spike held the second stick back.

"Slow down a bit. You'll get sick."

Licking grease from his fingers, Harris sat back against the cave wall. Again, he looked around and chuckled without much humor.

"I have to admit," he said. "You know how to treat a guy right."

"It's not much," Spike said, playing along, glad just to be talking again. "But the cleaner's on holiday."

Harris gave him a sharp look, a hopeful look, and Spike tried a bit of the meat. It was good. And he was hungry again, somehow.

Harris reached for the meat, and Spike automatically handed over the bit he was holding. Harris hesitated, then took the scrap from his fingers. He put it in his mouth and chewed, his eyes closed. "What is this, anyway?"

Spike shrugged, separating another bit from the stick. "Looked like a rabbit, sort of."

"Mmm, sort-of rabbit."

Spike smiled and held out another piece. Harris took it. They went on like that for a while, Spike rationing the meat so Harris wouldn't eat too fast. That was what he told himself, at least. He was just making sure Harris didn't get sick. It didn't have anything to do with the feeling of their fingers meeting. It had nothing to do with how it felt to feed Harris, literally feed him, one piece at a time.

The meat was practically gone, and Harris's eyelids were dropping. Spike tore the last shreds off and held them, without thinking, to Harris's mouth. That seemed to startle him, and he sat up a little straighter, his eyes alert again. Spike brushed the meat against his lower lip and he opened his mouth automatically. Like a baby bird, taking what was offered.

"Go to sleep." Spike wiped his hand off on his jeans, briskly and without comment. Harris's eyes, glassy and dark, stayed on him. "I'll take care of the dishes."

Harris closed his eyes without smiling at that one, and Spike got up, walked to the fire, and dropped the stick and skeletons into it. Then he went out into the night, walked a good hundred feet from the mouth of the cave, opened his jeans, and jerked off. The orgasm was waiting right there for him. It pulled him forward a step and knocked breath into his lungs. When he stopped seeing stars he zipped up, scuffed sand over the mess on the ground, and stared for a minute or two out into the darkness of the plain. Then he went back into the cave, stoked the fire, and sat down beside it to keep watch.

Harris slept long, maybe because the cave was dark, maybe because he was exhausted. Maybe because he was trying to avoid waking up. Spike wasn't tired at all, but he was hungry. A few hours after the sun appeared, he laid the club down beside Harris's sleeping body and went out running. Back to the valley with the river in the bottom, where he'd seen the deer the day before. They were there again, skirting the stiff, waterlogged corpse of the tiger he'd killed. No more tigers, but he ran down a couple of deer and drank them instead. They weren't anywhere near as satisfying.

It wasn't such a bad world, he mused, his heels striking dust from the ground on the way back. There was enough food for now, and if they ranged a little farther they'd probably find more. One of those deer would last Harris a while, and there had to be some kind of fruit or grass or something he could eat as well. Humans needed that kind of thing, didn't they? Maybe they could find more of those monkey things, and see what they ate. There was food, there was water, the air was getting better for Harris and the sun didn't burn Spike to a crisp. It was a world where he was top of the food chain, too. That didn't hurt matters any.

Maybe the portal hadn't been such a bad thing after all. Maybe it had just been a kind of…opportunity.

He got back to find Harris naked in the stream, washing up. It clobbered him harder than anything this red world had thrown at him so far. Blindsided him, in fact. His feet stuttered to a stop, and he just stood where he was, twenty feet off and staring.

He'd never been much for blokes, never really listened while Angelus rhapsodized over the white-skinned church-going boys he'd shagged and killed. Always thought it was sort of an affectation, just Angelus making a point of blowing through one more convention. And even Harris, even here—up till now, he hadn't felt lust for Harris's body. What he'd felt had been something different—an intense need to protect. A baffling urge for intimacy, for proximity. He'd liked the touch of Harris's skin on his own, but it hadn't had anything to do with his dick. Or maybe it had, but not in the usual way. Not in the way he thought of women, who made more sense where dicks were concerned.

So it was strange, almost frightening, to find himself pegged stock-still by lust like this. By the sight of Harris's body. Bruised and sunburnt and scoop-bellied, with broad shoulders and square hips and big-muscled thighs. With hair on his chest, and his forearms, and his legs. With a cock, like a plum hanging down between his legs. The sight of that, of Harris's complete, unselfconscious nakedness, made Spike's mouth go dry. He wanted that body, wanted to take it in his hands and open it like a fruit, tease out its sweetness and soft hollow places. He wanted to fuck Harris. Hard. A lot.

Harris crouched stiffly, the bones of his spine standing out under the skin, and cupped water to sluice over his head. His hair shone black in the sunshine. He snorted, blew water out his nose, and reached carefully for the rock to steady himself while he cupped more water to run over his neck and back. Spike hesitated a moment longer, then twisted his courage to the sticking point and walked through the bushes to the edge of the water. Harris froze, his free hand moving instinctively to his groin, then away when he realized it.

"Spike. You're…back."

"Yeah." He was covered in deer blood, and more mud from the river. He felt like an animal. "I'll wait till you're done."

Harris opened his mouth but didn't offer to share. After a second he said, "I'll be…I'm almost out."

"Better put your shirt on," Spike said, turning away and going to check on the fire. "You're getting burnt."

Spike washed later, alone, while Harris sat in the shade breaking big sticks into little ones. Naked, Spike wondered briefly whether Harris looked at him at all. Whether Harris felt anything like the same. The same as what? a part of his brain asked wearily. Every so often he felt these flickers, like his own voice talking in his ear. Asking him what the hell he thought he was doing. Asking him if he'd really kissed Harris last night, if he'd really gone looking for tigers to rip into little pieces, if he was really walking around in the sunshine. He didn't have answers to those kinds of questions. Or he did, but there was no point in giving them.

The water felt good, cold and sharp, and after he was clean he stayed in a while, just soaking with his head underwater. The world above looked blurry and purple, not even real. After a while Harris appeared at the edge of the stream, just as blurry but more real. Spike broke the surface in a hurry.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." Harris's face was disturbed. "You just…you've been underwater for ten minutes."

"I don't breathe."

"I know." The troubled frown didn't go away. "It's just…weird."

Spike considered, then shrugged and stood up. Harris dropped his eyes and turned away. So that was an answer, of sorts, to the question of whether Harris looked. Harris preferred not to, apparently.

Feeling strangely crestfallen, Spike collected his clothes from the dry bank and skinned them on. It was hell getting into the jeans before his legs were dry.

Harris had spent the time making neat piles of firewood from small bits to large ones. None of the piles was very big, Spike noticed. He needed to get more.

Harris was standing at the mouth of the cave, shading his eyes with his hand, staring out into the plain. Spike turned to look at whatever he was staring at. Just more herds of deer, covering the plain in the remotest distance like a colony of ants. He turned back.

"I'll get one of those for you, next time I'm out. Should have got one today, but—"

"They're doing something weird." Harris was frowning, squinting hard. "It's like they're…I don't know, stampeding or something."

Spike looked again. It took a minute to see it from this distance, but yeah, Harris was right. They were running from something, in huge movements of thousands at a go, first one direction and then another. Or maybe that was just what they did.

"Maybe," he said. "Doesn't matter anyway, they're a hundred miles off."

"Maybe they're scared." Harris lowered his head and pressed tears from his good eye, blinking hard. "Fuck. Ow. Maybe…a portal could spook them, right?"

Spike turned back and looked again. He didn't see anything different, just masses of dark movement, right, then left. Forward and back. Too far away to hear the hoofbeats, even. "It could. I don't see anything, though. Probably just one of those cats."

"Or something else." Harris chewed his lip and rubbed his hand over the beard starting on his jaw. It made a soft sound, an intimate bristling sound, that made Spike's palms prickle. "Could be something else out there besides kitties."

"Don't worry about it," Spike said shortly. "Whatever's out there isn't getting through me."

It seemed like Harris gave him a strange look at that, halfway between gratitude and fear. He ignored it, and went off to pick up more firewood.