Up for a trip to Sunnydale, anyone? (or New Fic, Part the First)
Title: Joe and Spike’s Excellent Adventure
Author: missbaxter
Character/Pairings: Joe Pitt, Spike
Rating: R, for language
Summary: Spike calls in a favour from an old friend....a Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Joe Pitt Casebooks cross-over
Author’s Note: New York City, 1970s, the punk scene: Spike and Joe had to have met up at some point in there. The Sunnydale segments are set at an indeterminately early point of BtVS Season 2.
Disclaimers also fall under the category of Things that Should Be Noted: the characters of BtVS and the Joe Pitt books are owned respectively by Joss Whedon and Charlie Huston
Prologue
Figure that there’s no way in hell that this is a regular Van Helsing. Figure I know that cause she’s got me pinned down with a face full of someone’s front lawn and she’s fixing to ram a piece of their garden fence through my heart. Figure that, if I live through the next three seconds, I’m gonna be taking Spike for a nice little walk in the California sun. But first I’ve gotta get up.
The stake comes down.
1.
He spells it ‘vampire’. I spell it ‘Vampyre.’ He thinks I’m pretentious. I think he’s a moron. With just cause. How can someone so smart not notice that his plan has a hole that’s the size of the Grand Canyon? Go after a Van Helsing, fine. That’s why I’m here, in sunny old Sunnydale. Hauled out from my usual turf on the Island by a phone call, calling in an old debt. Suits me. Could do with a holiday. But this? This plan? Seriously. Just call the whole thing off. Debts or no debts, going after a Van Helsing who knows what they’re doing is bad news, full stop. Going after a Van Helsing who knows what they’re doing in broad daylight? That takes a special kind of stupidity. But then, I wouldn’t expect anything else from this guy.
“No, you idiot.” Spike sticks his hands in his pockets, looks for a light, talking round his cigarette. “You won’t actually be outside.”
“Except for the part where I have to get from here to the house. And the part where the house has windows.” I pull out a Lucky of my own and go to light it. Spike reaches over and grabs the lighter. I make a mental note to set fire to that coat of his when he’s not looking.
He huffs out smoke in exasperation. “Look, I told you, it’s foolproof. You sneak in during the day, you hide in the basement, which has no windows, wait til she comes in after dark, jump her, drag her outside and then we kill her. Simple.”
“Uh huh.” I take a drag and shift my weight. Tombstones aren’t the world’s greatest seats. I eye Spike. There’s something he’s not telling me. He’s twitchy. He’s not normally twitchy. Not from what I remember. “Just like that, huh?”
“Do it,” he says. “Do it, and we’re back in the black. All evened up. Scout’s honour.”
October, 1977
“Scout’s honour,” he says, kicking me cheerfully in the spleen. “Over a hundred years old, mate. One hundred years of chaos, blood and mayhem.” He favours me with a sneer, peroxide hair haloed in florescent light. “Right now, I’m feeling generous. Piss me off again and you won’t make it to midnight.”
I haul myself up the bathroom wall, spitting out bits of teeth, and wondering why this one, this one who’s so definitively my kind, can’t be seen in the bathroom mirror. I could smell him four rows away, that sharp ammonia tang that blared out ‘Vyrus’ like a strip joint sign in the wrong end of town. He didn’t look like Coalition, none of that be-suited fat cat jazz. Didn’t look much like Terry’s usual brand of Society hippies neither. Definitely wasn’t gangster Hood or freaky-ass Enclave. Had him figured for a Rogue. Waited until there was a break on-stage, followed him following a tall chick with orange hair into the bathroom. She’s still here, a broken puddle on the floor under the dryer. Her hair’s red now, and I’m none the wiser as to where this asshole comes from. Okay, I know he’s British, but that’s beside the point, because the important thing in Manhattan isn’t where you came from, it’s what turf you walk now, and what you’ll do to keep it. Some Rogues can be trusted. This one can’t.
He breaks my left kneecap with a final kick before he turns to go, and I only manage to stay up by hanging onto the counter, gritting my teeth and praying that the Vyrus starts knitting things up quickly, because this really fucking hurts. Then I’m alone in the bathroom. Me and the dead girl. Someone else’s kill or not, I still feed before I go back out into the autumn night. I can’t afford not to.
“Yeah,” he says, “CBGB’s. That was a riot and a half, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Really fun. Almost as much fun as...sitting here on a crappy tombstone talking about the best way to get ourselves killed.”
“Hey.” he says. “You owe me, Pitt. Don’t you forget that.”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten.” I stub out my cigarette on a marble angel’s toe. “I still think it’s a shit plan, though.”
“But you’ll do it?” He looks suddenly, bizarrely, like a ten-year old, half malicious glee and half nervous anticipation that his plan maybe won’t work. I think back to that first conversation, and think that what I should have said , what I should have said, leaning up against the wall, was that it wasn’t the years that counted, it was the mileage. Because Christ knows I’ve got enough of that for both of us.
I stand up anyways. “You wanna show me where this house is, then?”
2
October, 1977, sometime later than the previous encounter.
Whoever’s in the cupboard is making a hell of a racket. I look up at Hurley, the Society muscle who’s leaning genially against the cupboard door, holding his assault rifle like it’s his baby. Except that Hurley probably wouldn’t hesitate to eat a baby. That’s the kind of guy he is. A big, cheerful, baby-eating Vampyre who has less brain cells than he has fingers. And he only has nine of those. He still manages to shoot straight. Some things in life just ain’t fair.
“Hey, Hurl,” I say. “Who’s in the cupboard?”
“Aw, ya know. The usual,” he says.
I know. I also know that the usual don’t sound like they come from Jolly Olde England. That narrows the field down a bit. My suspicions are confirmed when Terry Bird comes in.
“We caught him trespassing on Society property, man,” he says, pushing his glasses up. “Leaving bodies left, right and center up and down the block, and then we were the ones who had to clean it up. That shit is not cool. What are you doing here anyways, Joe?”
“Oh, you know,” I say. “The usual.” Actually, I’m down there to see if I can get him to lend me either twenty bucks or a pint of blood, but I figure it can wait. I’m more interested in seeing what goes down with the lying son of a bitch in the wardrobe.
The banging and muffled shouting gets louder.
Terry sighs and sits down at the table. I lounge by the door.
“Alright, Hurley,” he says. Hurley opens the cupboard, and a thrashing heap of black leather and peroxide spills out onto the floor and gets up spitting and lunging. Hurley absent-mindedly throws a hammer lock on him, and we wait until the visitor winds down. Hurl lets him go, and he shakes himself and begins to rant. It’s quality rant too. All British swearing and threats and ‘who do you think you are?’ and ‘do you know who I am?’ shit, like he’s some sort of royalty. Maybe he is. Like the inbred sort who wear funny hats.
“You!” He’s stopped ranting and is pointing at me.
I give him a little wave. I don’t bother to say hi.
Terry looks at me. “You know this guy, Joe?”
“We’ve met,” I say. I don’t really see any point in giving Terry the details.
He looks pained nonetheless. “You knew there was a Rogue on Society turf, and you didn’t tell me?”
I shrug. “Don’t work for you any more, Terry. Just ran into him, is all. Didn’t think he’d be around long.” Well, it’s true. He won’t be. Not once Terry and Hurley have finished with him. You don’t have to be a fortune-teller to work it out. Me, I’m seeing a stake-out in a New Jersey parking lot at sunrise, and then a shovel to clean up the mess afterwards. Just pass me a headscarf and call me Madame Fortuna.
But I guess I haven’t quite earned that stripey tent and crystal ball, because what I don’t foresee is the bit where Terry and Hurley decide that someone who withholds ‘vital information’, as Terry puts it, is as bad as an undisciplined Rogue. I only figure it out when we’re crossing the state line and something that feels like a sledgehammer (because it is a sledgehammer) puts me down, and I wake up on the tarmac staked back to back with the blond fucker.
“I got you out of that parking lot. I saved your sorry excuse for a non-life.”
“You got me into it in the first place,” I tell him, and wonder how many more times we’re going to have this conversation before I have to go leave for the house. So far, including variations, it’s been four times since I pitched up last night. There’s still two hours to go.
I sigh and slouch back down onto the floor of the culvert we’re lurking in. I try to think of something else to talk about. Nothing comes to mind. We didn’t have anything in common in 1977, apart from a liking for the Ramones, and we don’t have anything in common now. Besides a debt that’s about to be paid off.
And I still don’t like this. There’s something Spike hasn’t told me, something about this Van Helsing, other than that they have to be stopped. Okay, so I’m not a fan of Van Helsings, professional or amateur. All it takes is one in the right time at the right place to try for you in front of witnesses, or worse, cops, and that’s your cover blown. Doesn’t matter that the crosses don’t bother me, or the holy water. Doesn’t matter that I wouldn’t turn into dust, but just bleed out from being decapitated. They’d figure it out. When they looked at the teeth. When they looked at the DNA. When they saw what sunlight did to the body. When they realised that we were one step up on the food chain. And that would be that. The whole underworld of Vyrus-infected freaks, all rounded up and prodded and inspected and finally packed off into camps and sunlit chambers. Because that’s what humans do with things they don’t understand, with things they fear, with things that threaten their power. One on one, you’d have a hard time taking one of us. But a full-on war, with the military and the police and the daylight all conspiring? Done and dusted within four days. At the latest.
Spike’s saying something. I tune back in and try to look like I’ve been listening the whole time.
“...invite?”
I have to give myself away. “Huh?”
“I said, how does that work, anyways, that you can get in without an invite? Doesn’t seem fair.”
I would have expected him to sound petulant, but he’s watching me, speculative, a bit wary, even.
I shrug. “Search me. Why can’t you?”
He glares.
I try to look nonchalantly cooler than thou, though the backdrop of the culvert doesn’t help, and reach for another smoke. Wish for some coffee to go with it.
Interesting question though.
“Different mutations, maybe,” I finally offer, trying to break a silence that’s rapidly becoming uncomfortable. “Being more recently infected in a different environment. Maybe the Vyrus changed when it came over here.”
“Maybe.” He still sounds suspicious.
Must have done. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here now, participating in this hare-brained scheme. I lean back against the cement wall, and wonder, not for the first time, if Spike hasn’t just called me here to try and get me killed.
Part Two is thataway.