Red Right Hand
by
Witling
Part Seven
In movies, ventilation ducts were clean and reasonably well-lit and big enough for people to stand upright, and they led right where you wanted them to go, like to the hell out. In reality, Xander was finding, ventilation ducts were a different deal. The one he was in was silted full of crud and dust, and the only way he was getting anywhere was flat on his belly. He had a layer of fuzz on his face like he was trying out for Quest for Fire, and his whole front itched with grit. He kept having to push dead mice out of the way with his leading edge.
"This." He turned his head, paused, and sneezed violently into his shoulder. "Sucks." His nose was running, because apparently there were allergies even beyond the grave. "Spike, you bastard." Another couple of sneezes, the second one so hard he cracked his forehead involuntarily against the floor of the shaft. "Motherfucker." Bruce Willis never brained himself against the scenery. It was deeply depressing to realize that he was a shittier action hero than Bruce Willis, who had no hair. "I'm going to find you, and I'm going to rescue you, and then I'm going to kill you." Which was something else Bruce Willis never seemed to do.
The shaft led a hundred or two hundred or maybe a thousand feet straight ahead, and there were no convenient "Rescue efforts this way" signs, so he just kept crawling. His right side burned, his broken finger whimpered. He had splinters. It occurred to him to stop crawling, roll over, and nap. A quick dip into coma would do him all kinds of good, pep him right up and work that weird cold Walrussian ache out of his system, and when he woke up he could get right back on the bellycrawling through the darkness to unforeseeable peril. What was it Spike always told him? Don't be an idiot?
"This Kyd's place is great," he muttered. "I'm so glad we showed. Great idea, sire. Asshole."
He kept crawling.
The shaft went on and on in blackness, and after a while he started to lose track of where he was exactly--in a ventilation shaft in the basement of a private vampire club? That seemed unlikely. More likely was the idea that he was actually still plain old Zeppo Harris, pitched headfirst into a columbarium and currently sleeping off the brain damage. Pretty soon he was going to wake up and find Willow and Giles and Buffy staring down at him, looking apprehensive and more than a little impressed. Willow was going to bend down and apply a pint of lemon sorbet to his temple, and he was going to laugh and reach up and yank her down and punch into her throat like a Capri Sun--
Okay, maybe he wasn't still the Zeppo.
God, he was hungry.
He crawled on. The shaft started to angle up, which was a novelty. Just slightly at first, and then, after a couple of levelling-out stretches, steeply enough that he had to brace his hands and feet and start to chimney. There wasn't as much dust now, and he caught the faint sensation of air movement. It was a bit like he'd been crawling up out of the forgotten bowels of the earth, and if he got through the rest of the night without thinking about bowels again, he'd be very happy, thank you.
After a million years, a square of light appeared above him. He started moving faster. Pretty soon he realized he could hear voices. And other stuff. And he was getting a faint smell of cod again. To the best of his ability, he made himself a quiet little dust-covered chimneying vampire.
"--care how many we've bagged tonight, the rate's the same. Six kilos of market-grade herring apiece. That's the deal."
Gurgling. Somehow, it sounded pissed off.
"Well that's too bad, but I don't give a damn how many limbs you lost--"
Gargling. Definitely pissed off.
"Look, you're a mercenary, you don't get worker's comp. You don't get dental, you don't get a 401k, you get six kilos of herring and full use of the basement floodrooms. Head on down there, try the hot and cold alternating. Knock yourself out. I've got stuff to do."
Sounds like a toilet being flushed, repeatedly and emphatically. Xander was almost at the top of the shaft now--he could see through the slats of the metal grating. Half of a ceiling, a light bulb. Not much else. He wedged himself in place and kept still.
"Yeah, a purse seiner on your ass too. Tell your people to get their herring out of my loading bay before I have it trucked to the Shedd, okay? You people stink."
A door slammed, and then there was nothing but a low, constant burble. Xander gave it a few seconds, then inched up to the grate.
The room was empty except for a big grey lump sitting on a small plastic chair at a Formica table. The floor was covered in a sheen of water, and the aroma of fish jammed two clammy fingers straight up Xander's nostrils. He wiped his face and took a careful breath through his mouth.
"Six kilos doesn't seem like a lot for a...person your size."
The lump jumped six inches and swung around in the chair. There was a head, he saw now--he could make out a couple of dark, watery eyes and a surprised O of a mouth.
"I'd have gone for at least ten," Xander went on. "I mean, herring being what they are these days. And it's not like you're getting benefits--"
He never would have said a thing that looked like that--basically, like a big, dingy plastic bag full of dirty seawater--could have moved so fast. But before he could even finish what he was saying, it was up and over the table and up the wall, and the grate over the vent shaft was a thing of the past. Xander jerked back from the light and the cold, grasping arms, and skidded ten feet down the shaft into darkness.
"Hey, whoah--" He caught himself with a squeal of palmflesh on metal, and for a moment they regarded each other. The Walrussian extended a couple of arms into the shaft, patted around gently, then slowly pulled them back out. Xander adjusted his grip and swallowed.
"If you help me," he said, "I'll get you twenty kilos of herring. All of you. You can keep whatever Fawn's paying you, and I'll get you twenty on top of that."
Silence. A rivulet of cold water began to run down the side of the shaft, and Xander lifted his hand away from it. "That guy you were talking to didn't sound too great, is all I'm saying. You're working hard, all you want is an honest day's pay for an honest day's work--"
A squealing, popping sound, like the first mutterings of a kettle on the boil, and the Walrussian pushed an arm back into the shaft. Xander pulled back, but it didn't come close. It just waved in the entrance, and when he looked a little closer he noticed it looked sort of...truncated. Like something had whacked the end of it right off, and now there was just a ragged, seeping stump.
"Shit, that's gotta hurt. You got that fighting vamps?"
The stump trembled. The Walrussian looked at it, then looked at Xander. He licked his lips and said nothing.
Then suddenly the mouth of the vent was clear, nothing there but condensation. There was a watery glurble down below, in the room. Impatient-sounding. Xander squinched carefully back up to the lip of the vent and peered down. The Walrussian was down there watching him, not moving.
"Twenty kilos," Xander said again. "Deal?"
The Walrussian farted.
"Okay then," Xander said, and clambered painfully down out of the shaft.
It was amazing how far a C- in high school Spanish didn't get you when you were trying to talk to something that considered piddling on your shoe a complete sentence.
"Okay, let's try it this way," Xander said, moving his foot out of the puddle. "If Spike's still up and walking around, burble once. If he's dust, twice."
One burble. Definitely one burble. Thank God. Xander relaxed muscles he hadn't even known about.
"Great. Where is he?"
Burbling and leaking. An excited Walrussian was a real all-senses experience. Xander held up his hands in a time-out. "Slow down there, Nessie. Just...point me in the right direction."
An unhesitating tentacle to the left. Xander pointed that way too, just to confirm. One burble.
"Okay. Okay. So...we're going to head down there, and find Spike, and--"
A small geyser of fishy-smelling incomprehensibility.
"No hablo agua, sorry. But you've got my back, right?"
A pause, then one burble. Xander stood there a minute wondering what he was supposed to do. There didn't seem to be too many options.
"Okay, then." He turned and started down the hall to the left. By the sound and smell of it, the Walrussian was right behind. So far, so good.
Whoever Kyd was, he needed to hire a cleaning service. The hall was dim and quiet and dusty as hell. This couldn't be the public part of the club--it must be the back rooms, the office area. Did vampires do paperwork? Well, even if they didn't, they could still keep the place a little neater. It was like walking through the Mojave back here; there were actually drifts of dust by the baseboards. Crazy unhygienic. Or maybe, now that he thought about it, kind of...
"One thing," Xander said, slowing to a halt and staring at the floor. "Is this place always this...dusty?"
Noncommittal glurb. Xander turned and looked the Walrussian in the cavernous eyehole.
"This is vamp leftovers, isn't it?"
One burble, frank and unconcerned. Xander turned back around and started walking a little faster, with a new prickle right between his shoulder blades.
"You guys do a great job, you know? Standout."
Burble.
The hall joined with another hall, and the Walrussian pointed left again. Xander started walking. He was starting to get that tight, tense feeling in his belly again, the one that said in no uncertain terms, You know what you need to do? You need to find Spike. And make sure he's okay. How about you get on that? How about I just sit here and gnaw at your duodenum until you get on that?
He was on it. He was so totally on it, immersed in a shitty mental film loop of Spike strung up and skewered, Spike beaten bloody, Spike fighting and losing, fighting and losing--that he walked right into another vamp when they hit the next hallway.
"Hey!" That was all the other guy bothered with before lobbing a fist at Xander's head, and he was big, he was seven feet tall and four feet across, he had to swing down to go for the face, this was the kind of David-and-Goliath mismatch that made bookies toss up their hands in despair. Xander ducked, stumbled back, and yelped when his right side crunched into the far wall. The guy was coming at him, mad and punching. "You're that little shit we put in the basement, you're--"
Then a pair of watery grey tentacles, like wet bicycle inner tubes, wrapped around him from behind and separated his head from his shoulders. Poof. More dust in the hallway.
"You're that asshole who wouldn't negotiate," Xander gasped, staggering upright. The Walrussian was brushing its tentacles off fastidiously. "Contract terminated, huh?"
The Walrussian may have shrugged, or it may have been examining its stump. Xander rubbed his ribs and eyed the dust at his feet.
"Twenty kilos," he said again. The Walrussian regarded him without expression, then extended a tentacle down the hall in what must have been an after you gesture. "Uh, thanks."
He walked lively, and resisted the urge to look behind himself.
There wasn't much use in being a vampire, he thought, if you didn't even have any cool extrasensory powers like the ability to know where your sire was at all times, or flight. Magical Spike-sensing abilities would help out a lot when he got bored in night clubs, for instance, and wanted to tell Spike he was taking off. But he didn't get anything like that--all he got was the ability to take a bullet in the gut without croaking, and apparently a natural 18 in Sire Overprotectiveness. The winding-up feeling in his belly was tightening even more, he was starting to feel almost sick with worry. He rubbed his stomach with his unbroken hand and turned right at the next corridor.
"I don't know how you thought you were going to spend your evening," he said, breaking into a near-trot. "But bloodhounding out my dickhead sire in the aftermath of a vampire gangland hit was not high on my list of picks. Left here, huh?" It was definitely a left, and then there was going to be a small set of stairs, up the stairs, and God, if his belly didn't stop hurting he was going to have to stop and puke, but it was just down this hall and then up the stairs--
He stopped dead, one hand still on the ball of wire in his belly. Spike was close--just-down-the-hall-and-up-the-sta
"Well, will you look at that," he said. "I have a superpower after all." He took a step forward, and his belly jumped. "I always thought it was just that he made me sick to my stomach."
No response from the Walrussian, so Xander started forward again, letting his body steer and breaking within a few steps into a staggering run. Down the hall, up the stairs, a big wooden door and holy mother of God, that was a really big gun in his face.
"You're that little shit we put in the basement," the guy with the gun said, sounding more confused than annoyed. Xander got both hands up in a who, me? gesture.
"No, that's another guy, that's ponytail guy, I'm one of you--"
The safety clicked off and Xander closed his eyes involuntarily.
"Bring him in." Woman voice. Xander opened his eyes, one at a time. The guy with the gun reached out a massive arm, a tree-sized arm, an arm that he probably used on weekends to give carnival rides to small children and their ponies, and got hold of Xander's scruff. Fawn was standing in the doorway, smiling and shining her fang rock at him.
"Hi sweetheart," she said. Xander made a small sound that may have been eep.
He was dragged inside with his shoes barely skimming the floor. The room was big. Nice-looking, if you liked opulence, wealth, and taste. Stone floors with big dark rugs, windows looking out over the lake, a fireplace big enough for goat. Furnished like a high-priced hotel suite, with luxe leather sofas and a big-screen TV, a stereo playing soft jazz, art on the walls. Fawn was walking away, her back to them, to a bar by the windows.
"You look like you've been through hell," she said over her shoulder. "Let me get you a drink, okay?"
Screw your drink! Xander's inner reactionary shouted, Che cap slightly askew. What have you done with Spike? Fawn lifted a bottle of Macallan, and he whispered, "Okay," through the giant hand crushing his windpipe.
"You can put him down," she said. "It's all right. He's harmless."
"He's supposed to be in the basement," Hulk said. "What's he doing all the way up here?"
"Looking for his sire," she said, as if it were no real achievement. Xander's inner reactionary said, Hey! And then felt very confused.
"Put him down," Fawn said, "and go back outside. I'll let you know if I need you."
Hulk hesitated, growled a little, gave Xander's neck a final parting squeeze, and set him down.
"I'm right outside," he said, and left.
"Ice?" Fawn asked.
What have you done with Spike? Xander thought fiercely. What evil, foul, painful tortures have you subjected him to? Visions of Spike impaled on some piece of genteel modern art, or singed with burning strips of 500 thread-count Egyptian sheets, started up on the mental film reel. The wired-up feeling in his gut was so strong he had to put a hand over it to make sure it wasn't vibrating. The other hand was on his throat, which was still dented.
"I'll give you some," Fawn said. "Just one cube; you can always add another." She came back with a squat amber tumbler in her hand, and held it out to him. "It's the eighteen year-old. This is the high-roller suite. They stock the good stuff."
Xander stared at the glass, then at her. She regarded him steadily until he reached out a hand and took the whiskey from her.
"I guess you want to see Spike," she said.
"Where's Spike?" he demanded, and then stopped short. "I mean, yeah. What did you do to him, you bit--"
"Oy," Spike said from the couch. "Mind the language, Harris."
Xander spun around and stood gaping, while the zing went out of his belly and up through his spine and heart and head and left his whole body tingling. He could see the tip of a Doc Marten poking over the arm of the long leather couch.
"Spike--" In a second he'd dropped the glass and was across the room, it felt like two big steps and it made his right side gasp with pain, but fuck it, that was Spike's boot, that was Spike stretched out on the couch with his own glass balanced on his bare belly, no shirt on, looking up at Xander with heavy-lidded eyes. They'd stripped him, they must have whipped him or something, maybe he was drugged, his eyes looked all wrong, kind of dopey and placid--
"I'm going to get you out of here," Xander said, leaning forward to grab at Spike's hand. "Don't worry, we're getting out, it's gonna be okay--"
Bizarrely, Spike was slapping at his hand and looking annoyed. "What the hell are you--"
He must be disoriented from the drugs. Xander grabbed Spike's wrist and hauled, ignoring the pain in his own ribs. "It's okay, come on--"
Then there was a debilitating pain in his right shoulder, the right side of his neck, and he crumpled to his knees. Fawn must have snuck up on him, Jesus Christ, it felt like a cattle prod, why hadn't he heard her?
"Don't grab," Spike said, a little pissily, and let go. The pain let off and he stepped back, and Xander just stayed down. Hands and knees was a good place to be right now, while the world turned upside down and took him with it.
"Spike," Fawn said, from where she was still standing. "Come on, he made it all the way here just to find you."
"He should ask before he touches." Then Spike was crouching next to Xander, a hand on Xander's shoulder. "Look, just take a few deep breaths, okay? Just a nerve, you're all right."
"You've been drugged," Xander gasped, massaging his collarbone.
"Just a little pot," Spike said. "Nothing serious. Frankly, you seem like you could use some yourself. Fawn love, want to see if there's any left to that last one?"
"You've been tortured," Xander muttered, staring at the floor while the pain in his shoulder faded away. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Trust me," Spike said, "I'm fine. You look a little rough around the edges, though. Where've you been?"
"Basement cell," Fawn supplied, sitting down on the arm of the couch and holding a lit joint down in front of Xander's face. "I wasn't sure what I was going to do with him at first, so I just put him there for holding. Drag and hold."
"Your yobs beat him up?" Spike sounded intrigued, which seemed at the very least ungrateful. Xander stared at the ember of the lit joint and shook his head.
"Never got a chance," Fawn said, taking the joint away and dragging on it herself. "He got out."
"Got out," Spike said tonelessly, like he didn't quite understand what those words meant in that combination. "What'd you do, tag along with someone?"
"Fuck you," Xander said, staring at the floor.
"On your own, then." Spike's hand ran up Xander's shoulder and ruffled his hair. "Good for you. Really put yourself through the shredder, didn't you?"
"I sent a couple guards down to release him over two hours ago," Fawn said, her voice squinchy with pot smoke. "He was already gone. Dane Duke was pissed off, something about his hair."
"Dane Duke's an asshole," Spike said shortly. "Hope you stake him. Come on, you smell like a cannery." That was to Xander; he was pulling on Xander's arm, trying to get him to stand up.
"Fawn's taking over the city," Xander gasped. "She's been killing all the vamps in town, she hired the Walrussians to do it and she's taking over the territory. Chicago's going to be, like, Fawnago." He winced. Spike was regarding him stonily. "Okay, that was bad, but it wasn't mine originally."
"News for you," Spike said, still pulling Xander's arm and getting him halfway up at least. "I know all that."
Xander let himself be pulled all the way up, forgetting his right side and then flinching back down into a half-crouch when it flared up. He was having problems computing. It sounded like Spike had said he already--
"You've been busy crawling through sewers, smells like," Spike said, starting to walk him over toward the bar. "Me, I've been up here talking to the brains of the operation."
"Without your shirt," Xander said irrelevantly. Or maybe not irrelevantly. For a second, Spike's hand locked tight on his bicep. He still smiled, though.
"What you need," he said, "is a drink, a bath, and a smack in the head." Xander reacted just a second too late, and caught the smack right in the middle of the skull, hard enough to make his teeth clack. "Now, Fawn was lady enough to make you a drink, and you dropped it on the floor. You can clean it up later, when you're feeling better. You can apologize now."
There was something new in his voice, something that hadn't ever been there before. He didn't quite sound like Spike. He sounded like-- Xander didn't know, but it was weirdly, scarily familiar.
He sounded, for one thing, like he was dead serious.
Xander paused a moment longer, his eyes sprinting over Spike's whole body. No whip marks, no bruises. No signs of frontal lobotomy. Nothing in his face except hard, focused attention, like he was on pause while he waited for Xander to do what he'd been told. Like he was brainwashed. Or like there was something going on that Xander didn't understand.
"I'm sorry," Xander said, turning back and looking over his shoulder at Fawn, who was butting the joint on the floor beside the couch. "I'll clean it up."
She shrugged and picked a piece of pot off her tongue. "No problem, Xander. I'm fine with it."
"He's a bit of a berk," Spike said apologetically, taking a towel off the bar and dunking it in the ice bucket. "Take that, get yourself cleaned up."
"Let him take a bath," Fawn said. "He earned one, making it all the way up here on his own."
"Take two," Spike said, pulling a glass out and measuring ice into it. "Bathroom's that way."
Xander stood stock-still, holding the clean bar towel in one hand.
"He's so cute," Fawn said. "It's like that dog on the records, you know? The one with its head all--"
"His master's voice," Spike said, sounding bored. Xander narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to say, Listen, you wax cylinder asshole, you're either walking out of here with me right now, or-- But Spike's eyes were already on his face, watching him with a kind of hard, eager attention, like he was just waiting for a comment like that so he could--what? Xander swallowed and closed his mouth.
"Take a bath," Spike said again, uncapping a bottle.
"A long one," Fawn purred, rolling backward onto the couch and cradling the half-empty glass Spike had left on the coffee table. "Your sire and I need a little time to ourselves."
Part Eight
He'd never actually seen a marble bathtub before. Marble bathtubs were for rich people, people with tony penthouse suites, possibly Mafia. So it was appropriate, he reflected, staring at the golden fixtures, that he was seeing one now. Because apparently Spike had been co-opted by the vampire Mafia. So far, Chicago was really sucking.
There was an array of fruity-looking bath potions on the ledge by the tub, some brand that didn't sell to the middle classes, one Buffy used to aspire to. He scowled, sat down on the toilet seat, and started the hot water. Fine. He was in Bizarroland anyway, he'd take a bath. What the hell. But he wasn't using the fruity stuff.
"Use the stuff!" Spike yelled from the other room.
Xander went briefly, uncontrollably, to game face.
"I heard that!" Spike yelled.
In petty rebellion, Xander emptied an entire bottle of eau d'emasculation into the water and kicked the bathroom door closed.
After the close dance with the Walrussians, the basement cell brawl, the swim in the floodrooms, the crawl through the shaft, the dusty hallways, and the final headlong sprint up the stairs, he needed a bath. He hadn't been planning to take one under quite these circumstances, but he could admit that he needed one. He could even admit that hot water and soap sounded okay. He was freezing and pretty much all his parts hurt. Plus, he had dust in every gasket. Struggling to get his shirt off, he heard his shoulders creak in protest. His right side was a triple-salami pizza of contusions from hip to shoulder. And his little finger still stuck out due east, like it was trying to hitch a ride away from the rest of his body. He couldn't really blame it.
Naked, he stood next to the tub and pondered his fate. Right about now he'd expected to be red in tooth and claw, hand-to-handing it with Fawn's crew of bruisers, or possibly dragging Spike's inert body feet-first through some hidden access tunnel. Doing rescue-guy things. He put his hands in the small of his back and looked around, grimacing. There were individual hand towels folded up beside the sink. With little goats on them.
The bath water was somewhere between hot and scalding, and as soon as he sank down into it he was half-buried in a drift of foam. It smelled like flowers. He was going to be a flowery little fledgling. Wonderful. Maybe later they'd all sit down and have hot cocoa and play Apples to Apples. And then, the electroshock therapy.
He slid down the marble until his ears were underwater, toed the faucet half-off, and closed his eyes. He was done trying to figure any of it out. Good night, and somebody could wake him when the clock ticked over to sane again.
He drifted for a while, then came back to realize that he could hear something under the running water. Something in the other room--it sounded like fighting, like yelling and thumping and holy shit, Spike was in trouble--
He jerked upright and was halfway out of tub when his ears cleared and he realized that it wasn't a fight. Fighting didn't entail that particular rhythm, or those kinds of groans and affirmatives, or the phrase "Give it to me." People who were getting beat up didn't ask to be beat up harder.
He stood with one leg still in the tub, dripping all over the plush, curly bathmat, transfixed. Inside his brain, Leftover Zeppo Xander peered out of his sofa-cushion fort and gave a long, low, commiserating whistle. Sucks to be you today, doesn't it?
"She has a fucking rhinestone in her tooth," Xander whispered miserably. "That is so fucking tacky." Leftover Zeppo nodded.
Xander stood listening a couple seconds longer, then shrank back into the tub and dunked himself completely under. Sound was muted under there, and if he closed his eyes and plugged his ears he could pretend he was somewhere else completely. Like wherever the rest of the world went when they died.
By the time Spike appeared, Xander was back to the surface, pruned up and sulky. He'd refilled the bath twice, and used another bottle of stank. He was lying on his back under a mountain of froth, his arms crossed over his chest, watching his toes play with the hot water tap. He didn't look up when Spike came in.
"You about done?" Spike smelled like sex and booze and cigarettes, all of which were supposed to be good smells, and all of which made Xander feel like puking into his own lap. He shrugged, then jerked his legs away when Spike reached down into the tub between his feet and pulled the plug. "You smell like Vera Lynn."
Xander sank down into his protective wall of foam and gave Spike a death glare. He was still shirtless, the bastard, and he hadn't even bothered to button his jeans all the way. There was a hickey on his throat. Xander's eyes caught on it and he felt a fresh stab of anger.
"Come on," Spike said, dropping the plug and shaking bubbles off his fingers. "Out you get."
"Why?" He sounded like a teenager, he could hear it in his voice, and he hated it because it wasn't cool, it wasn't casual, it wasn't Hey, sure, why don't I take the next suite over, you guys seem like you've got this thing going on. It was more along the lines of Diediediediediediedie. Somehow he'd thought that being a vampire would make him suave and impervious. But no.
"Because I told you to," Spike said. "And because you're being rude."
"Rude?" Xander pulled the plunger all the way back and shot every cc of venom he had into the word. "I'm being rude?"
"Or deaf," Spike said amiably. "Your call."
Xander let his face ripple a little, just enough to make a point, although he wasn't really sure what the point was. "You just banged Christina Aguilera halfway through the supporting wall, and I'm being--"
That was as far as he got before he had to come to terms with the more pressing problem of Spike's hand crushing his windpipe. Bruised!his brain cried out silently, while his fingers plucked feebly at Spike's. Already bruised! Leggo!
"You need to keep a civil tongue in your head," Spike said quietly. Xander rolled his eyes up and caught a glimpse of Spike's expression. Fixed, alert, very blue. Not a standard, run-of-the-mill, you-stupid-twat Spike look. More of a look-at-me-looking-at-you-you-stupid-twat look. With bite.
Xander stopped struggling, let the bath water swish softly back to level, and just lay there. Spike kept a hand around his throat, but didn't look away. For a few long seconds, they stared at each other.
Xander's brain clicked off the remote, folded the newspaper, sighed, trudged up the stairs, swung the cellar door open, and propped its elbows on the kitchen floor. There's something going on here, it said, helpful and also a little bored. Something we don't understand. Maybe we should play along.
Infinitessimally, Xander nodded.
Spike held him down a second longer, his eyes still locked on Xander's face. Then he let go and stood up, shaking more bubbles off his hand.
"Right then. Get yourself dried off and we'll see if there's anything you can put on."
He dropped a bath towel onto the toilet seat and was gone before Xander had a chance to say, Sir yes sir. Or to hope that whatever he was going to put on wasn't going to come with a frilly little cap and a feather duster. His day had really already sucked enough.
No ruffles, no calico prints. But not much else, either.
"I'll see if the guys have any spare stuff around," Fawn said, stretching her silken arms up to grab hold of the headboard. "You're okay in a towel though, right?"
Okay?, Xander's brain replied. I'm more than okay, I'm fucking great. I fucking love towels. Terry is all I'm going to wear from now on. Let me just go back in and get a washcloth to wear on my head. He opened his mouth, caught Spike's look, and said, "Sure."
"Cool." Fawn gave a long, feline groan and rolled from side to side, making the headboard creak. "Oh my God, I needed that." Xander stared blankly at the rumpled sheets, at the clothes scattered over the floor, at the panties and bra that Anya used to have too. "Your sire's an amazing lay, you know that?"
"I, uh--" Speech had deserted him. Speech was such a freaking coward. Xander wrenched his gaze up from the tangle of lace and silk and saw that she was smirking at him. "Okay." Somehow, My ex used to have those panties didn't seem like the best option at the moment.
"Better than okay," she said, rolling away and sharing a smooth pale ass cheek with the world. "Way better than okay."
"Make yourself useful, why don't you?" Spike said from the other side of the room, and Fawn smiled invitingly back over her shoulder, and Xander's brain reeled at the sudden implication that he was going to have to, oh God, no, hang on a second, he really wasn't in the mood, he was never going to be in the mood again--
Something damp and clammy hit him in the back of the head and he flinched, thinking, Walruss-- It hit the ground by his foot and he jerked his toes away. Just a wet bar towel.
"Clean up that mess," Spike said, walking past with a glass of whiskey in each hand and settling onto the foot of the bed. "That drink you dropped."
Xander stood for a minute, gears grinding, trying not to see the way Spike was leaning over, passing one of the whiskeys to Fawn, slouching back against the footboard. The way his right foot was searching out hers and tickling it. The look on his face--negligent, satisfied, comfortable. The look of a guy who was pretty happy with his lot in life, because his lot in life was pretty much just banging horny women and drinking their liquor.
And when you looked at it that way, you could kind of see why he looked comfortable.
"He doesn't always do what you tell him to do," Fawn observed, still facing away, sounding amused.
"He's new, love. Still learning."
"Did you see his finger?"
Spike squinted at Xander as if seeing him for the first time. "What'd you do to your finger?"
Xander looked down; his pinky was a blueish sausage. On a scale of one to ten, it hurt at about a four. And dropping. "Nothing." He folded the bar towel over it and geisha-d over to the glass he'd broken. "So, uh, can I have a drink too?"
"Sure," Fawn said, rolling onto her back and piling pillows behind her head. "There's some dope on the mantel if you want some."
Take it, Xander's brain advised him.
"Um, thanks."
"He's so cute," she said, turning back to Spike. "I love it when they're new like this. All big eyes and constant hard-ons."
Xander almost dropped his glass again. He didn't have a hard-on, he was relieved to confirm. She must be talking about some other new vamps, maybe some fledge she had, maybe--
"Where's Willard?" he asked, scanning the mantel. Ah, yes. Fat plastic baggie, great, whatever, sign him up.
"Willard..." Fawn laughed and sipped her drink, and didn't say anything else. Spike just sat there like a romance novel hero, all shirtless and bedheady, tickling her toes. Unbelieveable. Also, gross.
"Okay," Xander muttered, sloshing whiskey into his glass. "Willard, I hardly knew you."
"Willard didn't listen," Spike said flatly. "Willard didn't do what he was told."
"And now Willard's history."
"Smart boy," Fawn purred.
"You should see me scale a ventilation shaft."
"The thing is," Spike said, leaning over and oh God, nuzzling Fawn's disgusting perfect toes, "I've been letting things slide with you since the beginning. No discipline, no training."
"You shot me in the gut," Xander said helpfully.
"Things are going to be a little different, starting now."
"Okay, but if you want to do this in Spanish, I'm going to need a vocabulary list."
"I want you," Spike said, and paused. For a few seconds he lay slumped against the footboard, studying Xander with a look of faint frustration. Then he heaved himself up to sitting and held his drink out toward Fawn. "Hell with it. Hold this a minute, will you love?"
She gave him a look of interest over her shoulder, but didn't take the drink. After a second he smiled--maybe a little tightly--and set it down on the floor. Then he got up and started walking across the room toward Xander. Who was getting a bad feeling, which worsened the closer Spike got.
"Hang on a second, I don't think I really got what you were saying, there--"
"I was saying," Spike said, cracking his knuckles against his palms, "that we need to get a few things straight around here."
"Straight, yeah. Sure, no problem." Xander was backing up, holding his whiskey against his chest like a shield, thinking bizarre, stupid thoughts like You can make it to the door if you go now-- Leftover thoughts from eighteen years of living under his father's roof, which if nothing else had given him a keen ability to judge trajectories. "Listen, sorry, I'm a little tired, I'm still getting myself together here--"
And again, he didn't get to finish his thought, unless the rest of his thought had been urk. Spike was suddenly right there, right in his face, and there was a Spike hand around his throat and another one taking the glass out of his hands.
"Since you just cleaned up," Spike said, in a considerate tone, putting the glass down on the mantel. Then he punched Xander in the face.
It hurt. Getting punched always hurt, but lately his pain threshold had risen, and while getting whaled on by Hell's Angels wasn't exactly fun, it didn't make him feel like his head was coming off at the neck anymore, either. Getting hit by ponytail vamp had sucked, but that had at least been kind of a scrimmage. Getting shot had hurt…okay, more. Getting punched, even by Spike, didn't hurt as much as getting shot.
That wasn't saying much.
Xander got one hand up to try to block, but he couldn't see properly, his head was ringing and his nose felt broken, and before he knew it, another brick wall had crashed into his face. He was bleeding. Profusely, enthusiastically. He tried to swing with his right, caught a lot of space, and then Spike was shoving him back, right off his feet, and the back of his head cracked the wall.
"Goddammit--" He kicked, swung out like an idiot, and Spike punched him in the gut. Hard. That was it, that was the end. It didn't matter that he didn't breathe or eat or pee much anymore--it was still like a lead ball dropping on him from a height, and all he could do was curl in on himself and gasp and try not to die. His whole body was trying to crawl out of this. Spike dropped him. He landed on his hands and knees, on the floor, blood tapping the wood in a steady rhythm under his face. He was going to throw up. He heaved twice, experimentally. Nothing but spit.
He felt something touch his ribs, and flinched automatically. Fuck, Spike-- His diaphragm was locked in place, his airway was sealed, there was no way he was talking. What the fuck are you doing?
It was Spike's toe, prodding him. Then Spike's hand, running over the back of his head and gripping his hair. Pulling, so he had no choice but to lift his head. Spike's face was very white and very still.
"That's the only warning you're going to get," he said.
Xander tried to get his breath to say something, tried to snort some of the blood off his lip, tried to do anything that would make him less of a pathetic footstool of a man. He couldn't. He still couldn't quite get his head around the fact that Spike had just hit him.
"Understand?" Spike said. For just a second, his eyes flicked to the far side of the room. To the bed, where Fawn was sitting up in the sheets, watching closely.
Xander swallowed. His throat was still locked, so speaking was out. He nodded instead.
"Good," Spike said. He dropped Xander's head, stood up, and wiped his hand on his jeans as if he didn't like what he'd been touching. "Right, princess--what's on the menu for this evening's entertainment?"
t b c
Index
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