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Play It Again, Sam. Part 10
Not sure if this is the best time for posting fic, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lillianmorgan beta'd this very quickly, so I thought I'd post now, since I have some spare time. This is the last part (except for the epilogue), and you'll finally find out why the story has such a bizzare name and why Riley really has nothing to do with anything. I hope you like it and that I manage to surprise you a bit! :)
Previouslies here.
Oh, and this chapter is long! Just thought I'd warn you. ;)
Feedback is like oxygen!
Part 10
As the last few notes of ‘Wind beneath my wings” died out, Spike slowly turned around.
“Play it again, Sam”.
Nina looked up at him. “You know, that’s a misquote, what she actually says is ‘Play it Sam’, only for some reason...”
Spike looked at her. “Not quoting bleeding ‘Casablanca”, Wolfgirl. Want Sam to play the song again!”
Sam looked perplexed, but obliged.
Angel growled. “Spike, for the last time, don’t call my girlfriend ‘Wolfgirl’ - and why the hell do you want to hear this song? I thought you liked punk.”
Spike let his fingers wrap around his glass and his eyes unfocused. “This was the song that Buffy wanted for the first dance at our wedding,” he said softly.
Angel, who had just begun to drink another mouthful, choked. If Spike had seen it, he would have laughed, but his eyes were still on events long past.
“She wanted a daytime ceremony, would you believe it - in the park! Asked the Watcher to give her away - he was less than thrilled at the prospect of me as a pseudo-son-in-law, needless to say.”
There was a sadness and longing in Spike’s words that made Angel uncomfortable. He suddenly recalled the broken-down mess that Spike had been when Dru left him. His cocky grandchilde was usually so full of bravado and snark that Angel had nearly forgotten that there was a sensitive, Victorian poet underneath. But... marriage? What was it Buffy had said? She had denied that Spike was her boyfriend, and her next words had been ‘He is in my heart’.
Thinking about it didn’t make him wince, like it usually did - there was a definite upside to being drunk. He could even think about the kiss without too much difficulty. It had been so perfect, the way she had fallen into his arms, as though she had never left - only she’d been covered in Spike’s scent. He had done his best to ignore it then, but now...
“When...” Angel found himself stumbling over the words. “When did Buffy agree to marry you?”
Did this mean that Buffy loved him? But if they were engaged, why had Spike stayed in LA? They’d never really talked about it, but Spike had suggested that their relationship had been all about sex - and tonight he had skirted around the subject very skilfully indeed... .
Spike looked up from his glass and turned to Angel. “When? It must be... four, four and a half years ago now... funny, it seems like a century.... shoulda known Red would mess up sooner or later...”
Riley, whom they had thought asleep, suddenly sat up. “Four years... I remember something... Buffy... wedding dresses - you mean she was really going to marry you, but - she said it was just a joke...”
Angel looked at both of them in turn. “OK, someone explain this to me, because I’m getting a headache!”
Spike pulled himself together, realising that he had let the mask slip.
“Oh, just a spell of Willow’s that went wrong. Turned Harris into a demon-magnet, made Giles go blind and made me and Buffy think we were engaged!”
Riley looked relieved. “I thought she acted a bit funny that night...” his eyes glazed over and he stopped mid-sentence, having forgotten what else he was going to say.
Angel looked at Riley, who had started to snore, and then at Spike who was emptying his glass and beckoning the bartender to fill it up again. This seemed as good a time as any to find out what on earth had gone on between Spike and Buffy. Waiting ‘til the blond had drunk another glass, Angel tried to find an elegant way of broaching the subject, but found that he was too drunk to think clearly. Maybe straightforward was the way to go.
“Spike.”
His grandchilde turned slowly and looked at him passively.
“What happened between you and Buffy?”
Spike stared at him for a long time, unblinking blue eyes making him uncomfortable. Finally the eyes narrowed and Spike answered coldly.
“S’ private!”
Angel sighed.
“Spike, please...”
Spike looked at him incredulously. “Please? You think I’m gonna talk because you bother to ask nicely like a good boy? Well fuck you! Have I ever asked why she happens to walk around with a nice set of your teeth mark on her neck?”
At Angel’s shocked expression, he laughed joylessly. “Thought I’d never noticed? Given the number of times I buried my face in that neck I could hardly not. And having seen an identical set on Dru for 120 years tends to make them easy to recognise! So yeah, I’m telling you sod-all.”
He slammed his glass on the counter and strode away, coat billowing behind him like an angry cloud.
He suddenly stopped and slowly walked back, until he was inches from Angel’s face.
“I will tell you this though! I. Never. Bit. Her. Not before the soul, when I had her naked in my arms night after night! Not after the soul, when The First set up base camp in my head and tried to pull my strings! Do. You. Under. Stand.”
Angel looked like he had been punched. “She... she slept with you before the soul?” he stammered and tried to look around for his drink. He was definitely not drunk enough. Having found his glass, he looked up and realised that Spike had disappeared. Calling out to Sam and Nina that he would be back in a minute, he followed the other vampire outside.
Spike was sitting on an upturned crate in the dark alley behind the bar, smoke from the cigarette he held between his fingers weaving it’s way up in the air and dissolving. Angel noticed that he held it with his left hand, while he was holding up the right one and studying it, as though it was suddenly new to him. Stretched it out from his body and flexed the fingers, but still he seemed unsatisfied.
Angel slowly walked over and stood beside him. Without looking up, the blond vampire started talking.
“Thought it’d leave a mark you know? Well, didn’t think I’d be here at all, of course, but having wondered about it later. You’re supposed to get a scar when you burn, right?”
Angel didn’t know what to say, and it seemed Spike wasn’t expecting an answer anyway, because he kept talking.
“But then maybe it wasn’t fire really - she just finally let herself feel it...”
Something that sounded like a sob escaped him, but the dark eyes he turned to Angel were dry.
“I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for what you did to her.”
Angel frowned. “What I did?”
The voice became mocking. “Yes, what you did - when you walked out on her! Leaving - for her own good. Didn’t do any good as far as I could see, except extinguish any hope she had of ever loving again. Eighteen years old, and her ‘soulmate’ runs away.”
A glance towards the bar.
“Captain America in there left because she didn’t love him - poor guy never stood a chance! But me - I stuck around until I had lit that flame again. I made bloody well sure before we went into that last battle that she understood that it was ok to let herself be loved, and that if she loved back it wouldn’t end in tragedy! That they don’t always leave, the men she loves!”
Angel was reeling. “But - but you left her too, Spike. Dying is a pretty final way of leaving!”
Blue eyes, so dark they were nearly black, seemed to glow. “Bloody hell! Don’t tell me you still don’t understand! You, Riley, her dad, Giles - you all up and left without her getting a say in the matter. She likes to make her own decisions, and I let her choose! She took that pretty bauble from you and chose me as her Champion - knowing that it might do me in, but it was her decision!”
He tilted his head, eyes turning to blue slits. “And that’s what kills you, isn’t it! That’s why you’re asking questions. Why me and not you, right!”
He seemed completely sober now, speaking intensely and deliberately.
“Well let me tell you! Because you’re the guy that always left and I’m the guy that always came back! You wanna know what we had? Fine!”
At the back of Spike’s mind was the thought that he was going to regret this once he was sober again, but right now he didn’t care. He was angry, and at the moment most of the anger was directed at Angel. Angel who had been given Buffy’s love without reservations, the love that Spike had fought so hard for, in the nearly-broken girl he had known. Who had pieced herself together so, so slowly. Where had her precious ‘soulmate’ been then?
“I’ll tell you! I loved her before the soul! That’s why Dru left me. Saw it before I did.”
He stopped and stared into the distance. His eyes became soft, and he spoke quietly, seemingly forgetting where he was.
“Watching her fight was like poetry, how could I resist? Her eyes - the way the world fell away when she looked at me... loving her...”
Spike abruptly lifted his head and looked Angel straight in the eyes, the softness replaced by steel:
“Loving Buffy made me feel like a human being. It made me willing to die for her!”
The words were like a swordblade, cold and precise. Angel felt them cut through him and it was as though he had fallen off a ledge. Like time had been pulled out from under his feet. Long suppressed memories from Sunnydale came rushing back, sharp and unavoidable.
Angelus, disdainful: “The girl made me feel like a human being. That’s not the sort of thing you just forgive.”
And the look in those blue eyes - Spike standing above him, radiating anger. “Take a long look, hero - I’m nothing like you!”
Slowly returning to the now, Angel looked at Spike, his brain desperately trying to catch up. “You were ready to die...”
The cold fire gone, the blond sent him a sad, tired look. “Yeah, all noble and self-sacrificing. Only - I failed, and she had to jump!”
Dark eyes, so haunted that Angel could nearly touch the pain, looked straight through him.
“She was so beautiful and still - like she was sleeping... but I couldn’t hear her heartbeat...”
He took a deep shaky breath, and forced himself to continue. “When they pulled her out of heaven - she had to claw her way out of her grave. Did she tell you that?”
From the look on Angel’s face, she hadn’t. Spike sighed and wondered again why he was doing this.
“She was hurtin’ and lost. So she started to come to me. First it was just talking, and I think for a while we were actually friends. Until she kissed me! I guess that’s where things began to go wrong - and believe me, the irony is not lost on me! Then I found out the chip didn’t work on her. Thought she’d come back wrong. She was convinced anyway.”
Another sigh. “So, we started the most fucked up non-relationship this planet has ever seen. She just wanted to feel something - anything, and I was more than willing to be the Big Bad if she needed! But the sex - oh, god, the sex...”
There was an odd catch in Spike’s voice that disturbed Angel more than he wanted to admit.
“You have NO idea... it was... out of this world. Broke a house the first time.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. There was no easy way around the next part. “She used me. I... hurt her. That’s why the soul. So I could never hurt her again.”
He cast a glance at his grandsire to see if a staking was imminent, but Angel looked so shellshocked, that Spike decided that it would probably be best to keep going, while he could.
“It took a long time to earn her trust. Never thought she’d let me be close...”
A pause, as Spike examined his hand again. “She loved me, and we didn’t have the time to find out what it meant because the world was ending. We had to be heroes instead.”
A resigned smile. “Worst timing ever!”
He closed his eyes.
‘Were you there with me?’ ‘I was.’
And then - then she had trusted him with the world, and he wasn’t going to fail her again...
Opening his eyes, he looked at Angel. “So, yeah, she chose me. Because just this once, she got to choose how to save the world, and the rest of us chose to stand right alongside her. Personally, I had an old promise to keep, and she knew that!”
Angel stared at him, unable to speak. Here were things that he had never even guessed at, related calmly and with no frills. Could this be the same Spike who could never shut up about his achievements? He tried to formulate an answer, but Spike wasn’t finished.
“See, the problem with you Peaches, is that you loved the girl, but you never understood her. You fell in love with this pretty little girl with a big destiny that she didn’t want. The big lug in there fell in love with a college girl and when he found out who she really was, he couldn't cope. But I fell in love with the Slayer. And that little girl you once knew was buried so deep, that it took me years to find her and get her to come out again. So, no she doesn’t need me anymore. We had our moment, and I made sure that she didn’t leave her heart at the bottom of the hellmouth with me, but took it with her out in the world! And when she’s ready, she’s going to use it.”
Spike got up and flicked the long dead cigarette into the darkness. Not looking back, he started to walk away. Angel, suddenly finding it difficult to keep standing, clumsily sat down on the vacated crate. Staring out into the distance, he started talking to himself.
“Cookie dough... that’s what she said. Cookie dough.”
Spike stopped, and turned his head questioningly. “Cookie dough?”
Angel looked up, an odd bewildered expression on his face that Spike could not recall ever seeing before.
“That night. When I brought the amulet. We talked. She said - she said, she was cookie dough. That she wasn’t done baking and that’s why she couldn’t make it work with guys. And that someday when she was done, she’d be cookies and...”
He frowned slightly and Spike suddenly smiled. “- and someone could come and eat her!”
He started to laugh. The alcohol which had pulled him down into the deep, dark, painful undercurrents of his mind, now made him acutely aware of the ridiculous, and he was overcome with the easy mirth of the very drunk. Angel felt his mouth twitch. Moments later they were lost to laughter.
When Spike finally was able to speak again, he looked at Angel and asked, still chuckling.
“Just tell me that you didn’t let her get away with it?”
Angel looked confused. “Get away with what?”
Spike cast his eyes heavenward, as though petitioning the starless sky for patience. “You said something, right? About the whole ‘eating her’ thing?”
Angel silently shook his head. Spike grinned and lit another cigarette. “Gotta hand it to you mate, you’re a bigger man than me. A double entendre like that? I mean, it’s so pointed she could have used it as a stake! I could have had fun with that for weeks! Months even! Damn that girl!”
He chuckled happily and held out his hand.
“Come on Champion, I think it’s time we picked up our dear friend Mr. Whitebread himself and escorted him home. Tonight’s been all kinds of weird!”
Epilogue
lillianmorgan beta'd this very quickly, so I thought I'd post now, since I have some spare time. This is the last part (except for the epilogue), and you'll finally find out why the story has such a bizzare name and why Riley really has nothing to do with anything. I hope you like it and that I manage to surprise you a bit! :)Previouslies here.
Oh, and this chapter is long! Just thought I'd warn you. ;)
Feedback is like oxygen!
Part 10
As the last few notes of ‘Wind beneath my wings” died out, Spike slowly turned around.
“Play it again, Sam”.
Nina looked up at him. “You know, that’s a misquote, what she actually says is ‘Play it Sam’, only for some reason...”
Spike looked at her. “Not quoting bleeding ‘Casablanca”, Wolfgirl. Want Sam to play the song again!”
Sam looked perplexed, but obliged.
Angel growled. “Spike, for the last time, don’t call my girlfriend ‘Wolfgirl’ - and why the hell do you want to hear this song? I thought you liked punk.”
Spike let his fingers wrap around his glass and his eyes unfocused. “This was the song that Buffy wanted for the first dance at our wedding,” he said softly.
Angel, who had just begun to drink another mouthful, choked. If Spike had seen it, he would have laughed, but his eyes were still on events long past.
“She wanted a daytime ceremony, would you believe it - in the park! Asked the Watcher to give her away - he was less than thrilled at the prospect of me as a pseudo-son-in-law, needless to say.”
There was a sadness and longing in Spike’s words that made Angel uncomfortable. He suddenly recalled the broken-down mess that Spike had been when Dru left him. His cocky grandchilde was usually so full of bravado and snark that Angel had nearly forgotten that there was a sensitive, Victorian poet underneath. But... marriage? What was it Buffy had said? She had denied that Spike was her boyfriend, and her next words had been ‘He is in my heart’.
Thinking about it didn’t make him wince, like it usually did - there was a definite upside to being drunk. He could even think about the kiss without too much difficulty. It had been so perfect, the way she had fallen into his arms, as though she had never left - only she’d been covered in Spike’s scent. He had done his best to ignore it then, but now...
“When...” Angel found himself stumbling over the words. “When did Buffy agree to marry you?”
Did this mean that Buffy loved him? But if they were engaged, why had Spike stayed in LA? They’d never really talked about it, but Spike had suggested that their relationship had been all about sex - and tonight he had skirted around the subject very skilfully indeed... .
Spike looked up from his glass and turned to Angel. “When? It must be... four, four and a half years ago now... funny, it seems like a century.... shoulda known Red would mess up sooner or later...”
Riley, whom they had thought asleep, suddenly sat up. “Four years... I remember something... Buffy... wedding dresses - you mean she was really going to marry you, but - she said it was just a joke...”
Angel looked at both of them in turn. “OK, someone explain this to me, because I’m getting a headache!”
Spike pulled himself together, realising that he had let the mask slip.
“Oh, just a spell of Willow’s that went wrong. Turned Harris into a demon-magnet, made Giles go blind and made me and Buffy think we were engaged!”
Riley looked relieved. “I thought she acted a bit funny that night...” his eyes glazed over and he stopped mid-sentence, having forgotten what else he was going to say.
Angel looked at Riley, who had started to snore, and then at Spike who was emptying his glass and beckoning the bartender to fill it up again. This seemed as good a time as any to find out what on earth had gone on between Spike and Buffy. Waiting ‘til the blond had drunk another glass, Angel tried to find an elegant way of broaching the subject, but found that he was too drunk to think clearly. Maybe straightforward was the way to go.
“Spike.”
His grandchilde turned slowly and looked at him passively.
“What happened between you and Buffy?”
Spike stared at him for a long time, unblinking blue eyes making him uncomfortable. Finally the eyes narrowed and Spike answered coldly.
“S’ private!”
Angel sighed.
“Spike, please...”
Spike looked at him incredulously. “Please? You think I’m gonna talk because you bother to ask nicely like a good boy? Well fuck you! Have I ever asked why she happens to walk around with a nice set of your teeth mark on her neck?”
At Angel’s shocked expression, he laughed joylessly. “Thought I’d never noticed? Given the number of times I buried my face in that neck I could hardly not. And having seen an identical set on Dru for 120 years tends to make them easy to recognise! So yeah, I’m telling you sod-all.”
He slammed his glass on the counter and strode away, coat billowing behind him like an angry cloud.
He suddenly stopped and slowly walked back, until he was inches from Angel’s face.
“I will tell you this though! I. Never. Bit. Her. Not before the soul, when I had her naked in my arms night after night! Not after the soul, when The First set up base camp in my head and tried to pull my strings! Do. You. Under. Stand.”
Angel looked like he had been punched. “She... she slept with you before the soul?” he stammered and tried to look around for his drink. He was definitely not drunk enough. Having found his glass, he looked up and realised that Spike had disappeared. Calling out to Sam and Nina that he would be back in a minute, he followed the other vampire outside.
Spike was sitting on an upturned crate in the dark alley behind the bar, smoke from the cigarette he held between his fingers weaving it’s way up in the air and dissolving. Angel noticed that he held it with his left hand, while he was holding up the right one and studying it, as though it was suddenly new to him. Stretched it out from his body and flexed the fingers, but still he seemed unsatisfied.
Angel slowly walked over and stood beside him. Without looking up, the blond vampire started talking.
“Thought it’d leave a mark you know? Well, didn’t think I’d be here at all, of course, but having wondered about it later. You’re supposed to get a scar when you burn, right?”
Angel didn’t know what to say, and it seemed Spike wasn’t expecting an answer anyway, because he kept talking.
“But then maybe it wasn’t fire really - she just finally let herself feel it...”
Something that sounded like a sob escaped him, but the dark eyes he turned to Angel were dry.
“I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for what you did to her.”
Angel frowned. “What I did?”
The voice became mocking. “Yes, what you did - when you walked out on her! Leaving - for her own good. Didn’t do any good as far as I could see, except extinguish any hope she had of ever loving again. Eighteen years old, and her ‘soulmate’ runs away.”
A glance towards the bar.
“Captain America in there left because she didn’t love him - poor guy never stood a chance! But me - I stuck around until I had lit that flame again. I made bloody well sure before we went into that last battle that she understood that it was ok to let herself be loved, and that if she loved back it wouldn’t end in tragedy! That they don’t always leave, the men she loves!”
Angel was reeling. “But - but you left her too, Spike. Dying is a pretty final way of leaving!”
Blue eyes, so dark they were nearly black, seemed to glow. “Bloody hell! Don’t tell me you still don’t understand! You, Riley, her dad, Giles - you all up and left without her getting a say in the matter. She likes to make her own decisions, and I let her choose! She took that pretty bauble from you and chose me as her Champion - knowing that it might do me in, but it was her decision!”
He tilted his head, eyes turning to blue slits. “And that’s what kills you, isn’t it! That’s why you’re asking questions. Why me and not you, right!”
He seemed completely sober now, speaking intensely and deliberately.
“Well let me tell you! Because you’re the guy that always left and I’m the guy that always came back! You wanna know what we had? Fine!”
At the back of Spike’s mind was the thought that he was going to regret this once he was sober again, but right now he didn’t care. He was angry, and at the moment most of the anger was directed at Angel. Angel who had been given Buffy’s love without reservations, the love that Spike had fought so hard for, in the nearly-broken girl he had known. Who had pieced herself together so, so slowly. Where had her precious ‘soulmate’ been then?
“I’ll tell you! I loved her before the soul! That’s why Dru left me. Saw it before I did.”
He stopped and stared into the distance. His eyes became soft, and he spoke quietly, seemingly forgetting where he was.
“Watching her fight was like poetry, how could I resist? Her eyes - the way the world fell away when she looked at me... loving her...”
Spike abruptly lifted his head and looked Angel straight in the eyes, the softness replaced by steel:
“Loving Buffy made me feel like a human being. It made me willing to die for her!”
The words were like a swordblade, cold and precise. Angel felt them cut through him and it was as though he had fallen off a ledge. Like time had been pulled out from under his feet. Long suppressed memories from Sunnydale came rushing back, sharp and unavoidable.
Angelus, disdainful: “The girl made me feel like a human being. That’s not the sort of thing you just forgive.”
And the look in those blue eyes - Spike standing above him, radiating anger. “Take a long look, hero - I’m nothing like you!”
Slowly returning to the now, Angel looked at Spike, his brain desperately trying to catch up. “You were ready to die...”
The cold fire gone, the blond sent him a sad, tired look. “Yeah, all noble and self-sacrificing. Only - I failed, and she had to jump!”
Dark eyes, so haunted that Angel could nearly touch the pain, looked straight through him.
“She was so beautiful and still - like she was sleeping... but I couldn’t hear her heartbeat...”
He took a deep shaky breath, and forced himself to continue. “When they pulled her out of heaven - she had to claw her way out of her grave. Did she tell you that?”
From the look on Angel’s face, she hadn’t. Spike sighed and wondered again why he was doing this.
“She was hurtin’ and lost. So she started to come to me. First it was just talking, and I think for a while we were actually friends. Until she kissed me! I guess that’s where things began to go wrong - and believe me, the irony is not lost on me! Then I found out the chip didn’t work on her. Thought she’d come back wrong. She was convinced anyway.”
Another sigh. “So, we started the most fucked up non-relationship this planet has ever seen. She just wanted to feel something - anything, and I was more than willing to be the Big Bad if she needed! But the sex - oh, god, the sex...”
There was an odd catch in Spike’s voice that disturbed Angel more than he wanted to admit.
“You have NO idea... it was... out of this world. Broke a house the first time.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. There was no easy way around the next part. “She used me. I... hurt her. That’s why the soul. So I could never hurt her again.”
He cast a glance at his grandsire to see if a staking was imminent, but Angel looked so shellshocked, that Spike decided that it would probably be best to keep going, while he could.
“It took a long time to earn her trust. Never thought she’d let me be close...”
A pause, as Spike examined his hand again. “She loved me, and we didn’t have the time to find out what it meant because the world was ending. We had to be heroes instead.”
A resigned smile. “Worst timing ever!”
He closed his eyes.
‘Were you there with me?’ ‘I was.’
And then - then she had trusted him with the world, and he wasn’t going to fail her again...
Opening his eyes, he looked at Angel. “So, yeah, she chose me. Because just this once, she got to choose how to save the world, and the rest of us chose to stand right alongside her. Personally, I had an old promise to keep, and she knew that!”
Angel stared at him, unable to speak. Here were things that he had never even guessed at, related calmly and with no frills. Could this be the same Spike who could never shut up about his achievements? He tried to formulate an answer, but Spike wasn’t finished.
“See, the problem with you Peaches, is that you loved the girl, but you never understood her. You fell in love with this pretty little girl with a big destiny that she didn’t want. The big lug in there fell in love with a college girl and when he found out who she really was, he couldn't cope. But I fell in love with the Slayer. And that little girl you once knew was buried so deep, that it took me years to find her and get her to come out again. So, no she doesn’t need me anymore. We had our moment, and I made sure that she didn’t leave her heart at the bottom of the hellmouth with me, but took it with her out in the world! And when she’s ready, she’s going to use it.”
Spike got up and flicked the long dead cigarette into the darkness. Not looking back, he started to walk away. Angel, suddenly finding it difficult to keep standing, clumsily sat down on the vacated crate. Staring out into the distance, he started talking to himself.
“Cookie dough... that’s what she said. Cookie dough.”
Spike stopped, and turned his head questioningly. “Cookie dough?”
Angel looked up, an odd bewildered expression on his face that Spike could not recall ever seeing before.
“That night. When I brought the amulet. We talked. She said - she said, she was cookie dough. That she wasn’t done baking and that’s why she couldn’t make it work with guys. And that someday when she was done, she’d be cookies and...”
He frowned slightly and Spike suddenly smiled. “- and someone could come and eat her!”
He started to laugh. The alcohol which had pulled him down into the deep, dark, painful undercurrents of his mind, now made him acutely aware of the ridiculous, and he was overcome with the easy mirth of the very drunk. Angel felt his mouth twitch. Moments later they were lost to laughter.
When Spike finally was able to speak again, he looked at Angel and asked, still chuckling.
“Just tell me that you didn’t let her get away with it?”
Angel looked confused. “Get away with what?”
Spike cast his eyes heavenward, as though petitioning the starless sky for patience. “You said something, right? About the whole ‘eating her’ thing?”
Angel silently shook his head. Spike grinned and lit another cigarette. “Gotta hand it to you mate, you’re a bigger man than me. A double entendre like that? I mean, it’s so pointed she could have used it as a stake! I could have had fun with that for weeks! Months even! Damn that girl!”
He chuckled happily and held out his hand.
“Come on Champion, I think it’s time we picked up our dear friend Mr. Whitebread himself and escorted him home. Tonight’s been all kinds of weird!”
Epilogue