...And Once More (with feeling)...(or New Fic, Part the Second)
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
3.
The back door of the house on Revello Drive opens easily. Which is a major bonus when you consider that the only thing standing between me and instantaneous death by cancerous, blistering five o’clock sunlight is a mangy blanket. I don’t even want to know where the stains on it come from. But the lock tumbles, the door swings open, and I am in. In and tip-toeing through the house, desperately seeking the sanctuary of the basement door, trying to find somewhere, anywhere that doesn’t have windows, because the blanket is smoking like a motherfucker, and it would be a shame to leave scorch marks all over the nice beige carpet. Not to mention charred bits of yours truly.
Only problem is, it’s hard to see the basement door through the blanket, and I’m still stumbling about the hall like a moron when the woman comes down the stairs.
Mostly, I can just see her feet. Fluffy blue slippers. I risk raising the blanket a bit, and squint out from under it. My back has begun to peel. I see a fuzzy towelling robe, curly blond hair, a face that you can read three miles off. I know what she’s going to say before she even opens her mouth.
“Why is there a man on fire in my hall?”
So I got the words right. Didn’t get the tone right, though. I figured she’d be scared. Figured she’d be squeaky with fright and running for the door. Instead, she just sounds pissed off. Pissed off and disbelieving and not about to take shit from anybody. Me, I like that in a woman, so I refrain from breaking her neck. Instead, I just smack her one upside the head and she goes down like a block of concrete off of Brooklyn Bridge. Then I haul her by the feet down into the basement with me. It’s easier once I’m out of direct sunlight, and can drop the blanket, but her head still clonks off the steps a couple of times. I feel bad about that, so when I tie her up, I make sure that the circulation’s o.k., and that her head’s propped up comfortably on a pile of old paint rags. If nothing else, the fumes’ll keep her out cold for a bit longer. Maybe give her pleasant dreams. I move some of the shit in the basement around to make a bit more space. Then I sit back and wait for the Van Helsing.
I wait. I smoke. I wait some more. I look at the lady to see if she’s gonna wake up any time soon, because, hey, a conversation is a conversation, even if I have to gag her when I hear the front door opening. It takes about fifteen minutes. Then I hear coughing and groaning, and I move my feet surreptitiously out of the way, because if she’s gonna puke, I don’t wanna have to smell it on my boots all the way back to Manhattan.
“Hey,” I say, when she seems to have woken up some.
She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me. She’s scared now. Her eyes are very big, and the pulse in her neck is thumping. Lucky for her I already ate. We got take-out just before dawn. A crappy burger joint that backs onto a crappy alley where the night shift go for their cigarette breaks.
When I’m pretty sure that she’s not going to puke, I stretch my legs back out.
“So,” I tell her, “here’s the deal. You sit here, nice and quiet with me. You don’t try to escape, you don’t try to scream, you don’t do anything but sit here. In return, I won’t rip your sternum out through your nostrils. Understand?”
She nods. Licks her lips. Finally manages to get words out. “What do you want?”
I finish my cigarette and stub it out on the unfinished floor. “Lady, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
That’s about it for the conversation. I think about the amount of time I’ve spent over the last twenty-four hours sitting in silence with someone else. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t play well with others. But really, what is there to say to a woman you’ve knocked out and tied up in her own house?
“I’m not a serial killer,” I tell her, after some time, just as a reassurance.
“And what a relief that is.”
“You know,”’ I say after a minute, “the sarcastic bit’s usually my line.”
“Along with assault and robbery?” She’s good.
“No,” I say after a minute. “I do...jobs. For other people, mostly.”
“Who are you doing this for?”
I shrug. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Who said I was joking?”
And again with the silence. But then she’s the one to break it.
“Look, I don’t know what you want, but my credit card and my wallet are upstairs in my purse. The table, the small one, just outside the living room? That’s original New England craftsmanship. You can-“
“Lady,” I tell her, “ Do I look like an antiques dealer? I got enough stuff of my own, I don’t need to haul around other people’s shit.”
“Joyce,” she says after a minute.
“Huh?”
“My name is Joyce.”
“Hi, Joyce.” I think for a minute, then figure it won’t do any harm. “I’m Joe.”
“Hello, Joe.”
We have a moment of uneasy truce. On her part, the cause of the unease is pretty obvious. On my part, it’s coming more from a growing suspicion that Spike really hasn’t told me everything about this deal. The house was supposed to be empty. I look at my watch. It’ll be dark soon. I think. I think some more. I think that pooling your information with your hostage is kind of a stupid thing to do. Think that maybe it’s my kind of stupid.
“Joyce?” I say.
She looks at me.
“You believe in vampires?”
“What?”
I show her my teeth.
4.
I have to give her credit; she doesn’t scream. I’m liking Joyce more and more. She shuts her eyes tight and takes a couple of deep breaths.
“This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. I did not just see.. fangs. You have fangs.”
“Uh huh.”
“Oh my God. Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmy-“
I knock her out again. There’s only so much of that a guy can take.
5.
I hear the front door slam upstairs, then a kid’s voice shouts hello and more voices and footsteps clomp on by. They’ve either gone into the kitchen or gone upstairs. I give it a minute and listen to the sounds of the house. Check my watch. Seven o’clock means it’s definitely dark out. Joyce is still out cold. One of her slippers has fallen off, so I put it back on her foot before I ease up the basement stairs and slide the door open. Van Helsing or no Van Helsing, I’m leaving. Fuck this. There’s random women and children all over the place. Ten to one, Spike is just trying to get me picked up by the cops for some bizarre petty reason known only to his twisted brain. Fuck, he’s probably phoning them himself from round the corner. The sooner I get out of suburbia, the better.
I decide to try for the back door. I make it as far as the kitchen. There’s three of them, riffling through the cupboards and leaving milk out all over the island. They can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen and they look about twelve to me, in fuzzy sweaters and flannel shirts and running shoes. The red-haired girl and the boy see me first and freeze open-mouthed. The blonde keeps talking from somewhere behind the refrigerator door.
“-because it’s not like I don’t already have enough to worry about between failing chem and stupid Spike and stupid Snyder and Giles panicking over five hundred different signs that the end is nigh. Although if the end really is nigh, then that would kind of-“
“Buffy?” The other girl interrupts her, her voice gone high with fear.
“-mean that Snyder-“ The blonde girl slams the refrigerator door shut and stops in mid-sentence.
I’m about to explain politely that I’m just leaving and then my brain catches up with my ears and I do my own version of a statue. She said ‘Spike’. The blonde girl mentioned Spike. That can only mean one thing.
“Aw fuck,” I say, and then she comes across the room and hits me harder than Hurley on a good day, and any thoughts I had pertaining to the fact that I don’t kill children are knocked out all over the hall carpet along with a back molar, and I kick back and knock her into the clothes tree, which is a stupid, stupid thing to do, because she reaches up and fucking breaks off a piece of it and comes at me again with her insta-stake, and I only manage to dodge it at the last second by back-handing her into the boy and they go down with a crash. I make it to my feet and hold the red-head off by just planting my hand on her forehead and keeping her at arm’s length. You’d think that someone that short would have figured out that I’ve got the reach on her, but, hey, she’s a teenager. They do stupid things as part of their job description. I let go of her head without warning and she face-plants at my feet. I feel an absurd urge to apologise. It passes when the blonde roundhouses me into the newel post. I’m busy getting familiar with the floor again, when something grabs me by the scruff of the neck and hauls me up. For a minute, I can’t believe it’s the blonde girl. She’s only about the same height and weight as her friend, who’s scrambling up with the help of the boy. Then she hits me again, and I believe it. I think I even say ‘ow.’ There are definitely stars. I lash out anyways, and when the stars clear, I’m busy propping up the wall and the girl’s picking herself up out of the wreckage of what used to be Joyce’s New England table.
\We stand there for a minute, facing each other, eyeing each other. She still looks like she’s about twelve. I wonder if she’s waiting for me to make the first move. I think that a curveball might be the right approach.
“So you’re the Van Helsing,” I say.
“What?” She looks bewildered and more than pissed off.
“Most Van Helsings are men.” I pick a splinter of newel post out from my wrist with my teeth and spit it out. “The last one I met was older than you though. In his fifties. English guy. Not much of a runner. You, you look like you could out-run me if you tried, and believe you me, I don’t say that often.”
“What are you talking about?”
“So you’re not the Van Helsing? The phrase ‘vampire hunter’ isn’t ringing any bells?” I start out deliberately goading, but then I have a thought. “Don’t tell me it’s your mom, cause I just spent a good hour and a half hanging out with her and that would really be embarrassing.”
She looks like she’s counting to ten and making it to three. “What have you done to my mother?” She starts towards me.
“Nothing.” I jerk my thumb at the basement door. “She’s fine.”
And when the girl gets close enough, I twist sideways from the punch that she throws at my face and get her in the same head lock that I’ve seen Hurley use almost every day of my non-life, and I hang on as we go staggering and reeling through the hall and out the front door to where Spike is waiting.
.
And Pauline is tied to the railway track, folks, it's a cliffhanger - the final reel should go up next week...