Compatible Faults 14
Warning: Actual Non-Con this chapter. No subtlety about it. Angel fans steer clear: he's a bad bad vampire.
Previous Parts Here
Chapter 14: Lawyers
Angel was sitting on his sofa, staring at the grey-black screen of his turned-off television like it owed him an apology.
The doors slid quietly shut behind Spike. He stepped into the room. Angel didn’t move to acknowledge him.
“Angel, I…”
With a hard jerk, Angel undid his zipper - the sound was loud in the silence. He continued to stare straight ahead as he unbuttoned his slacks and pushed them down and open, freeing his erection.
Spike swallowed a dry mouth. “Right,” he said, and walked forward on unsteady legs. He sank to his knees between Angel’s splayed thighs, looking up briefly at the stony visage over him. Angel was hurting so bad he couldn’t speak. Spike ran his hand up Angel’s thigh.
Angel smacked it away.
Right.
Spike leaned toward Angel’s cock and kissed it, gently, just at the tip. Angel wouldn’t listen to words right now, it was clear, but action could show him he was loved. Spike licked his way up the underside of Angel’s cock, laved the head and took it immediately into his mouth, working up moisture by running his tongue back and forth.
And then, suddenly, he couldn’t do it anymore. His throat constricted hard and he gagged on nothing. He pulled back. “S-sorry. Sorry, Angel. I can’t…” He sat back on his heels. “I’ll just go, then.”
Angel’s hand caught his shoulder as he started to rise. “Where are you going?”
“You don’t want me, Angelus. Not like this. I’ll just make myself scarce.”
Angel hauled him up by his shirt-front. “You’re right. I don’t want you right now. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you walk out of here.”
“You are damned,” Spike said, with an inappropriate smile.
Angel stood, pulling Spike with him, he walked him backward toward the bedroom. Spike let him. He was too tired, too beaten. Angel threw him onto the bed. “Strip. Or this won’t go well for you.”
Spike coughed a laugh and fought against his duster and his over-all exhaustion to turn and take the coat off while lying on the bed. “Don’t see how that could be, Peaches. Looks like I’m going to get fucked either way. A little violence between us is just foreplay, right?”
Angel didn’t return his smile. He stepped forward and ripped Spike’s t-shirt down the front. Spike reached for his fly, hoping to save his jeans similar treatment, but Angel was having none of that, he ripped down the front of the jeans, sending at least one rivet flying.
“Fuck, Angel! Not my jeans!”
Angel’s forearm hit him hard in the chin. He blinked away stars while the ruined denim was forcefully stripped from him.
He hit him. Spike blinked at the ceiling, not paying attention to the rough treatment his lower body was getting. That one blow resounded with meaning. Angel wasn’t half-playing this dismissal. He hated him, right now.
“No, Angel. No. Let’s stop.” Spike started to get up, only to be knocked back this time with a closed fist.
He clenched his teeth against a pained cry as Angel flipped him, palm pressing hard and salt stinging on the bullet wounds still littering his back.
Too late, he fought back, scrambling to his knees and trying to crawl off the bed, out from under the weight on him. Angel reacted coolly, efficiently, pinning him and grunting.
The sick bastard was probably glad for the struggle.
“No. Please. Just don’t.” Spike didn’t speak too loudly; he didn’t expect to be listened to. He was alone, now. “I’m sorry,” he said, and wasn’t talking to Angel anymore.
The thrust came hard, the second Angel had gotten a steady advantage, there was no pause, no adjustment, only hard, insistent thrusting punctuating a steady stream of curses. “Whore. Fucking cock-starved slut. Do you like that? Huh? That’s what you want. What you are. What you need. Is that what you want from me? Is it? Take it. This is what you are. Whore.”
Spike laid still, feeling his body moved against the bed, feeling the air draw in and out of his lungs as they compressed and released under the assault. The pain was already fading and he wished it wouldn’t. It was harder to feel the shame when you had pain to distract you.
***
Spike awoke with a flinch, his mind jump-starting right back to the last moment it remembered. The wounds and pain of the night before had dulled like the taste of cotton in his mouth. He wasn’t surprised to be alone - not even the sound of the shower to alert him to Angel’s presence.
Good. He didn’t want to see that prick any time soon. After he’d - after he hadn’t even let Spike leave the bed the night before, waking from his own slumber to growl like a bear and drag him back down, hold him down until Spike had no choice to just sleep there, covered in the bastard’s sweat and smell.
There was a note on the pillow. Thick cardstock, embossed letter “A”. He wasn’t going to read it, but it was there.
He chastised his hand for picking it up. Obviously it hadn’t gotten the memo from the rest of him, nor had his eyes, which eagerly scanned the text, scrawled in Angel’s loopy handwriting.
“Sorry,” it said, “I wanted to kill last night. It was better that you stayed. But sorry.” It was signed “Angel.”
Spike crumbled the paper and threw it across the room. The bastard was not going to get away with that excuse. “I only hurt you to stop myself from hurting others” - what bollocks.
Spike's clothes from the night before were ruined. He kicked them aside and winced, feeling every moment of pain and degradation in his body as he moved. Fecker had ripped him apart. Again. He limped to his room.
His room. Spike bit back bile. He threw the door open, ripped the blankets off the bed, then threw the books off the shelves, opened the drawers and pulled out all the clothes.
Angel had bought him clothes. How fuckin’ generous. Spike kicked and smashed the room apart until his anger gave out.
Deflated, sore, he sat on the corner of the stripped mattress, looking at the pile of junk that was the room and not feeling in the least satisfied. He sighed, rolled his eyes, called himself a “sad, pathetic git,” and fished a pair of jeans from the mess.
***
Spike was sneaking through the corridors, feeling foolish, and trying to look like he wasn’t sneaking, but still it was the fact that he was peering anxiously around the corner that made him not see he was walking right into Gunn.
“Hey, Spike,” Gunn said, distractedly, eyes on the papers he’d been carrying, making sure none had fallen.
“Charlie,” Spike said. “Seen Angel about?”
“Nah, man,” Gunn said, frowning at his papers.
“Um. Good. Listen, Charlie, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Kind of busy.” Gunn held up his papers.
“Well, just some advice, lawyer-like. I went back to my apartment to try and get my stuff. It isn’t much; hell, it’s junk. But they changed the locks and the landlady won’t let me in. Isn’t there something I could do? Something injunction-brief-deposition-something?”
“Sure. To get a temporary… a…” Gunn looked up at him, and a seriously concerned, anxious expression crinkled his handsome features. “I’m… not sure.”
“Normally I’d just break in, but she had a cop right there. Swear she knew I was coming.” Spike shifted his feet, tucking his hands in his pockets. “Stupid, anyway, it’s just a pack of cigarettes. But… it’s all I got left of Sunnydale. God - can you believe I’m saying that like I liked the place?”
Gunn was still squinting, frowning. “I - I have to go,” he said, and turned abruptly around to stride back to his own office.
Spike wrapped his arms around himself. “Maybe we could talk about something else?” he asked the empty air. “I just… Christ, I need someone to talk to.”
Up and down the corridor, lawyers moved about their business, hardly noticing him standing there.
***
Angel panicked when the sunlight fell on him through the car window, jolting awake and hitting his knee on the hand brake.
The Viper was not a comfortable place to spend the night, even with the seat pulled all the way back. He ached and groaned and set about pulling the seat back up. The ocean spread before him, falsely calm. He’d driven to the overlook in the wee hours of morning, after waking up next to Spike and realizing what he’d done.
He was a coward, running like that. Worse. This was where he’d once agreed to meet Cordelia, that fateful day when she first vanished.
Angel rubbed his face with his hands. He still felt tired. He hoped Spike had found his note. That he understood the note.
The sun was now quite high, coming in the westward-facing windshield. He reattached his seatbelt and pushed the key back all the way into the ignition. He didn’t want to go back and face the music, yet, but there was no reason to stay here and brood in discomfort. He’d go to a demon bar nearby and get some much-needed breakfast to clear his head.
Angel scanned the parked cars and the few sunbathers on the beach as he turned back to the main road. He felt so alone. He hoped he hadn’t fixed it so he’d stay that way.
***
Cell 15: Lindsey McDonald.
Spike shook his head at the little paper directory. There were 30 holding cells, apparently, in Woflram and Hart. And why did no one suspect the place was evil? How many law firms had holding cells?
None of the cells were currently in use, save number 15 - chosen because it was at the near end of the hall.
He had to fill out a request form to visit the prisoner. Next to “Reason for Visit:” Spike wrote “peace of mind.”
Spike didn’t think he could have gone through with it if the form had to be sent up and signed by so-and-so and “please come back at three”… no, he would have chickened out. As it was, they just took the form, stamped it, and waved him toward a guard who walked him to the locked corridor and presented him with this door. Cell 15.
The guard raised an eyebrow. Spike nodded, and she opened the door. “You have one hour,” she said, and stepped aside to let him in.
Lindsey didn’t get up from where he sat on the edge of an army-style cot. He glanced briefly up, said, “Oh,” and looked back at his game of solitaire spread over the grey wool blanket.
The guard closed and locked the door behind Spike.
Emotions exploded in his brain, contradictory and all at once - hate, forgiveness, anger, sorrow.
Lindsey didn’t react at all. He was as calm as if they were just - what? Old friends?
Spike swallowed them back with effort, found a patch of wall to lean against, stuck his hands in his pockets and said, “So this is a Wolfram and Hart holding cell. Not bad. Step up from Sing Sing.”
Lindsey placed a card. Without looking up, he asked, “You were in Sing Sing?”
“First trip into the States, yeah. Bloody learned a thing or two about passports then. 1928 I think it was. That place was shit. Couldn’t hardly stand up in a single cell without hitting the wall with your elbow.” Spike looked up at the acoustic tile ceiling. “This is nice, though. Cozy, even.”
“Been in worse, that’s for sure,” Lindsey nodded. “The Juvie prison back home was designed to make you hate looking at it - all that institutional green and bars on the windows. How’d you get out?”
“What?”
Lindsey finally looked up. The right side of his face was mottled with orange and purple that had been hidden from Spike’s sight by the gentle fall of long hair. Yet his expression was calm, even cheerful. “Out of Sing Sing. How’d you get out?”
Spike shrugged. “Killed a couple guards, ripped a grate off a window. The usual.”
“That’s the usual, huh?” Lindsey scanned the plain white walls, as though he hadn’t really looked at them, the past 48 hours trapped within them. He cracked a slight smile. “Too bad I don’t have any windows.”
“Right.” Spike nodded. He pushed himself off the wall. “Well, I can stand here and pretend I’m just an old mate popped in for a chat until our hour is up, but I think you know why I’m here.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Spike. That was never part of the plan.”
“No. No. Wasn’t about me at all. I get that. I was just a tool to get to Angel. Suppose you’d have rather fucked him, too. Don’t feel bad; you can say it. Everyone does.”
Lindesy threw down his cards. “Don’t be a dick about this.”
“Oh? Sorry. Wasn’t aware I was, Doyle.”
Lindsey stood, arms spread. “You want to take a piece out of me? Be my guest. Angel already had his turn, guess it’s time for yours. I did what I had to do to fuck with the senior partner’s plans.”
Spike winced, just a little, imperceptibly. Somehow, the dark bruises brought out the sharp brightness of Lindsey’s blue eyes. Spike hurriedly looked elsewhere, trying not to think of where those bruises came from, of what else Angel could have done. “Don’t pretend this was for the greater good. It was about Angel, just Angel, and you know it.”
Lindsey shrugged and let his arms drop. “Partially Angel. Hell, okay: mostly. He’s a dick. Everyone goes around acting like he’s the god of all boy scouts and can do no wrong.” Lindsey took a step forward, chest out. “That son-of-a-bitch locked me and twenty other people, most of whom hadn’t done a damn evil thing in their lives, in a room with Darla and Drusilla, hoping that they’d make snacks out of us. I was one of only two people to survive. How fuckin’ noble is that?”
Lindsey looked shocked as Spike sighed and fell back against the wall. “Sounds like my sire,” he said.
“Well, like I said,” Lindsey stepped backward, to the cot. “He’s a dick.” He sat down.
“I’m one hundred and twenty-four years old,” Spike said, “And I’ve never had a girlfriend didn’t date that bastard first. You understand?”
Lindsey smiled. “Angel and Harmony where an item? I find that hard to believe.”
Spike glared. “Except Harmony. Fine. And thanks for letting me know how much stalking you did on my life, not creepy at all that you know every little thing. Anyway, the exception proves the pathetic rule: I exist in that man’s shadow.” Spike pointed emphatically, as though he could pin Angel’s shadow to the wall. "And the worst part is, you made me think, for a fragile few months, that I had a destiny of my own. What an idiot I am,” he laughed, humorously, “After all these years it should have been bleedin’ obvious.”
“If I could go back…”
“Don’t lie to me, Doyle.” Spike winced, shook his head. “Lindsey. Don’t fucking lie.”
Lindsey tilted his head back. “All right. I played you. I did it to get to Angel. I’d probably do it again, if I could keep from fuckin’ the whole plan up like I did. But the sex wasn’t part of the plan. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t part of the plan to like you, to fall for you. But I’d do that over again, too.”
Spike’s face was angled down, his jaw tight. To the floor, he said, “Havin’ a real hard time believing anything that comes out of your mouth.”
“Then why are you here, Spike? To torture me? Because this?” He waved his hand between them, “Seeing you? Hurts worse than Angel’s fists.”
Spike looked up. His nostrils flared. “Don’t patronize me. I’m not some mooning romantic. You wanted to fuck. We fucked.”
“Oh! Like it was all one-sided.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
Lindsey stood again, head titled to show, alarmingly, his bruised side. “If it meant nothing it wouldn’t hurt.” He lifted his chin just a little more, challenging. “And you’d have jack-shit to do with me.”
“Right. Which is why I’m leaving.” Spike strode to the door and knocked on it to summon the guard. “Don’t know why I bothered.”
Lindsey put his hand on Spike’s shoulder. Spike spun around, fist connecting without thought to the un-bruised side of Lindsey’s jaw.
Spike froze, staring at the bruised and battered face. Lindsey licked his lower lip. “Told ya you cared,” he said, and took a lazy step backward, hands at his sides, “The defense rests.”
“Fuck you, Lindsey. You’ll not be seeing me again.”
“Hey, I’m just here to help defeat the bad guys,” Lindsey said, looking smug through it all.
The door opened, catching Spike by surprise. He muttered an apology to the waiting guard and stepped past her into the corridor.
As the door shut, Lindsey smiled. “He’ll be back.” He sighed and gathered up his cards to start the game over.
Continued -->
Previous Parts Here
Chapter 14: Lawyers
Angel was sitting on his sofa, staring at the grey-black screen of his turned-off television like it owed him an apology.
The doors slid quietly shut behind Spike. He stepped into the room. Angel didn’t move to acknowledge him.
“Angel, I…”
With a hard jerk, Angel undid his zipper - the sound was loud in the silence. He continued to stare straight ahead as he unbuttoned his slacks and pushed them down and open, freeing his erection.
Spike swallowed a dry mouth. “Right,” he said, and walked forward on unsteady legs. He sank to his knees between Angel’s splayed thighs, looking up briefly at the stony visage over him. Angel was hurting so bad he couldn’t speak. Spike ran his hand up Angel’s thigh.
Angel smacked it away.
Right.
Spike leaned toward Angel’s cock and kissed it, gently, just at the tip. Angel wouldn’t listen to words right now, it was clear, but action could show him he was loved. Spike licked his way up the underside of Angel’s cock, laved the head and took it immediately into his mouth, working up moisture by running his tongue back and forth.
And then, suddenly, he couldn’t do it anymore. His throat constricted hard and he gagged on nothing. He pulled back. “S-sorry. Sorry, Angel. I can’t…” He sat back on his heels. “I’ll just go, then.”
Angel’s hand caught his shoulder as he started to rise. “Where are you going?”
“You don’t want me, Angelus. Not like this. I’ll just make myself scarce.”
Angel hauled him up by his shirt-front. “You’re right. I don’t want you right now. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you walk out of here.”
“You are damned,” Spike said, with an inappropriate smile.
Angel stood, pulling Spike with him, he walked him backward toward the bedroom. Spike let him. He was too tired, too beaten. Angel threw him onto the bed. “Strip. Or this won’t go well for you.”
Spike coughed a laugh and fought against his duster and his over-all exhaustion to turn and take the coat off while lying on the bed. “Don’t see how that could be, Peaches. Looks like I’m going to get fucked either way. A little violence between us is just foreplay, right?”
Angel didn’t return his smile. He stepped forward and ripped Spike’s t-shirt down the front. Spike reached for his fly, hoping to save his jeans similar treatment, but Angel was having none of that, he ripped down the front of the jeans, sending at least one rivet flying.
“Fuck, Angel! Not my jeans!”
Angel’s forearm hit him hard in the chin. He blinked away stars while the ruined denim was forcefully stripped from him.
He hit him. Spike blinked at the ceiling, not paying attention to the rough treatment his lower body was getting. That one blow resounded with meaning. Angel wasn’t half-playing this dismissal. He hated him, right now.
“No, Angel. No. Let’s stop.” Spike started to get up, only to be knocked back this time with a closed fist.
He clenched his teeth against a pained cry as Angel flipped him, palm pressing hard and salt stinging on the bullet wounds still littering his back.
Too late, he fought back, scrambling to his knees and trying to crawl off the bed, out from under the weight on him. Angel reacted coolly, efficiently, pinning him and grunting.
The sick bastard was probably glad for the struggle.
“No. Please. Just don’t.” Spike didn’t speak too loudly; he didn’t expect to be listened to. He was alone, now. “I’m sorry,” he said, and wasn’t talking to Angel anymore.
The thrust came hard, the second Angel had gotten a steady advantage, there was no pause, no adjustment, only hard, insistent thrusting punctuating a steady stream of curses. “Whore. Fucking cock-starved slut. Do you like that? Huh? That’s what you want. What you are. What you need. Is that what you want from me? Is it? Take it. This is what you are. Whore.”
Spike laid still, feeling his body moved against the bed, feeling the air draw in and out of his lungs as they compressed and released under the assault. The pain was already fading and he wished it wouldn’t. It was harder to feel the shame when you had pain to distract you.
***
Spike awoke with a flinch, his mind jump-starting right back to the last moment it remembered. The wounds and pain of the night before had dulled like the taste of cotton in his mouth. He wasn’t surprised to be alone - not even the sound of the shower to alert him to Angel’s presence.
Good. He didn’t want to see that prick any time soon. After he’d - after he hadn’t even let Spike leave the bed the night before, waking from his own slumber to growl like a bear and drag him back down, hold him down until Spike had no choice to just sleep there, covered in the bastard’s sweat and smell.
There was a note on the pillow. Thick cardstock, embossed letter “A”. He wasn’t going to read it, but it was there.
He chastised his hand for picking it up. Obviously it hadn’t gotten the memo from the rest of him, nor had his eyes, which eagerly scanned the text, scrawled in Angel’s loopy handwriting.
“Sorry,” it said, “I wanted to kill last night. It was better that you stayed. But sorry.” It was signed “Angel.”
Spike crumbled the paper and threw it across the room. The bastard was not going to get away with that excuse. “I only hurt you to stop myself from hurting others” - what bollocks.
Spike's clothes from the night before were ruined. He kicked them aside and winced, feeling every moment of pain and degradation in his body as he moved. Fecker had ripped him apart. Again. He limped to his room.
His room. Spike bit back bile. He threw the door open, ripped the blankets off the bed, then threw the books off the shelves, opened the drawers and pulled out all the clothes.
Angel had bought him clothes. How fuckin’ generous. Spike kicked and smashed the room apart until his anger gave out.
Deflated, sore, he sat on the corner of the stripped mattress, looking at the pile of junk that was the room and not feeling in the least satisfied. He sighed, rolled his eyes, called himself a “sad, pathetic git,” and fished a pair of jeans from the mess.
***
Spike was sneaking through the corridors, feeling foolish, and trying to look like he wasn’t sneaking, but still it was the fact that he was peering anxiously around the corner that made him not see he was walking right into Gunn.
“Hey, Spike,” Gunn said, distractedly, eyes on the papers he’d been carrying, making sure none had fallen.
“Charlie,” Spike said. “Seen Angel about?”
“Nah, man,” Gunn said, frowning at his papers.
“Um. Good. Listen, Charlie, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Kind of busy.” Gunn held up his papers.
“Well, just some advice, lawyer-like. I went back to my apartment to try and get my stuff. It isn’t much; hell, it’s junk. But they changed the locks and the landlady won’t let me in. Isn’t there something I could do? Something injunction-brief-deposition-something?”
“Sure. To get a temporary… a…” Gunn looked up at him, and a seriously concerned, anxious expression crinkled his handsome features. “I’m… not sure.”
“Normally I’d just break in, but she had a cop right there. Swear she knew I was coming.” Spike shifted his feet, tucking his hands in his pockets. “Stupid, anyway, it’s just a pack of cigarettes. But… it’s all I got left of Sunnydale. God - can you believe I’m saying that like I liked the place?”
Gunn was still squinting, frowning. “I - I have to go,” he said, and turned abruptly around to stride back to his own office.
Spike wrapped his arms around himself. “Maybe we could talk about something else?” he asked the empty air. “I just… Christ, I need someone to talk to.”
Up and down the corridor, lawyers moved about their business, hardly noticing him standing there.
***
Angel panicked when the sunlight fell on him through the car window, jolting awake and hitting his knee on the hand brake.
The Viper was not a comfortable place to spend the night, even with the seat pulled all the way back. He ached and groaned and set about pulling the seat back up. The ocean spread before him, falsely calm. He’d driven to the overlook in the wee hours of morning, after waking up next to Spike and realizing what he’d done.
He was a coward, running like that. Worse. This was where he’d once agreed to meet Cordelia, that fateful day when she first vanished.
Angel rubbed his face with his hands. He still felt tired. He hoped Spike had found his note. That he understood the note.
The sun was now quite high, coming in the westward-facing windshield. He reattached his seatbelt and pushed the key back all the way into the ignition. He didn’t want to go back and face the music, yet, but there was no reason to stay here and brood in discomfort. He’d go to a demon bar nearby and get some much-needed breakfast to clear his head.
Angel scanned the parked cars and the few sunbathers on the beach as he turned back to the main road. He felt so alone. He hoped he hadn’t fixed it so he’d stay that way.
***
Cell 15: Lindsey McDonald.
Spike shook his head at the little paper directory. There were 30 holding cells, apparently, in Woflram and Hart. And why did no one suspect the place was evil? How many law firms had holding cells?
None of the cells were currently in use, save number 15 - chosen because it was at the near end of the hall.
He had to fill out a request form to visit the prisoner. Next to “Reason for Visit:” Spike wrote “peace of mind.”
Spike didn’t think he could have gone through with it if the form had to be sent up and signed by so-and-so and “please come back at three”… no, he would have chickened out. As it was, they just took the form, stamped it, and waved him toward a guard who walked him to the locked corridor and presented him with this door. Cell 15.
The guard raised an eyebrow. Spike nodded, and she opened the door. “You have one hour,” she said, and stepped aside to let him in.
Lindsey didn’t get up from where he sat on the edge of an army-style cot. He glanced briefly up, said, “Oh,” and looked back at his game of solitaire spread over the grey wool blanket.
The guard closed and locked the door behind Spike.
Emotions exploded in his brain, contradictory and all at once - hate, forgiveness, anger, sorrow.
Lindsey didn’t react at all. He was as calm as if they were just - what? Old friends?
Spike swallowed them back with effort, found a patch of wall to lean against, stuck his hands in his pockets and said, “So this is a Wolfram and Hart holding cell. Not bad. Step up from Sing Sing.”
Lindsey placed a card. Without looking up, he asked, “You were in Sing Sing?”
“First trip into the States, yeah. Bloody learned a thing or two about passports then. 1928 I think it was. That place was shit. Couldn’t hardly stand up in a single cell without hitting the wall with your elbow.” Spike looked up at the acoustic tile ceiling. “This is nice, though. Cozy, even.”
“Been in worse, that’s for sure,” Lindsey nodded. “The Juvie prison back home was designed to make you hate looking at it - all that institutional green and bars on the windows. How’d you get out?”
“What?”
Lindsey finally looked up. The right side of his face was mottled with orange and purple that had been hidden from Spike’s sight by the gentle fall of long hair. Yet his expression was calm, even cheerful. “Out of Sing Sing. How’d you get out?”
Spike shrugged. “Killed a couple guards, ripped a grate off a window. The usual.”
“That’s the usual, huh?” Lindsey scanned the plain white walls, as though he hadn’t really looked at them, the past 48 hours trapped within them. He cracked a slight smile. “Too bad I don’t have any windows.”
“Right.” Spike nodded. He pushed himself off the wall. “Well, I can stand here and pretend I’m just an old mate popped in for a chat until our hour is up, but I think you know why I’m here.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Spike. That was never part of the plan.”
“No. No. Wasn’t about me at all. I get that. I was just a tool to get to Angel. Suppose you’d have rather fucked him, too. Don’t feel bad; you can say it. Everyone does.”
Lindesy threw down his cards. “Don’t be a dick about this.”
“Oh? Sorry. Wasn’t aware I was, Doyle.”
Lindsey stood, arms spread. “You want to take a piece out of me? Be my guest. Angel already had his turn, guess it’s time for yours. I did what I had to do to fuck with the senior partner’s plans.”
Spike winced, just a little, imperceptibly. Somehow, the dark bruises brought out the sharp brightness of Lindsey’s blue eyes. Spike hurriedly looked elsewhere, trying not to think of where those bruises came from, of what else Angel could have done. “Don’t pretend this was for the greater good. It was about Angel, just Angel, and you know it.”
Lindsey shrugged and let his arms drop. “Partially Angel. Hell, okay: mostly. He’s a dick. Everyone goes around acting like he’s the god of all boy scouts and can do no wrong.” Lindsey took a step forward, chest out. “That son-of-a-bitch locked me and twenty other people, most of whom hadn’t done a damn evil thing in their lives, in a room with Darla and Drusilla, hoping that they’d make snacks out of us. I was one of only two people to survive. How fuckin’ noble is that?”
Lindsey looked shocked as Spike sighed and fell back against the wall. “Sounds like my sire,” he said.
“Well, like I said,” Lindsey stepped backward, to the cot. “He’s a dick.” He sat down.
“I’m one hundred and twenty-four years old,” Spike said, “And I’ve never had a girlfriend didn’t date that bastard first. You understand?”
Lindsey smiled. “Angel and Harmony where an item? I find that hard to believe.”
Spike glared. “Except Harmony. Fine. And thanks for letting me know how much stalking you did on my life, not creepy at all that you know every little thing. Anyway, the exception proves the pathetic rule: I exist in that man’s shadow.” Spike pointed emphatically, as though he could pin Angel’s shadow to the wall. "And the worst part is, you made me think, for a fragile few months, that I had a destiny of my own. What an idiot I am,” he laughed, humorously, “After all these years it should have been bleedin’ obvious.”
“If I could go back…”
“Don’t lie to me, Doyle.” Spike winced, shook his head. “Lindsey. Don’t fucking lie.”
Lindsey tilted his head back. “All right. I played you. I did it to get to Angel. I’d probably do it again, if I could keep from fuckin’ the whole plan up like I did. But the sex wasn’t part of the plan. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t part of the plan to like you, to fall for you. But I’d do that over again, too.”
Spike’s face was angled down, his jaw tight. To the floor, he said, “Havin’ a real hard time believing anything that comes out of your mouth.”
“Then why are you here, Spike? To torture me? Because this?” He waved his hand between them, “Seeing you? Hurts worse than Angel’s fists.”
Spike looked up. His nostrils flared. “Don’t patronize me. I’m not some mooning romantic. You wanted to fuck. We fucked.”
“Oh! Like it was all one-sided.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
Lindsey stood again, head titled to show, alarmingly, his bruised side. “If it meant nothing it wouldn’t hurt.” He lifted his chin just a little more, challenging. “And you’d have jack-shit to do with me.”
“Right. Which is why I’m leaving.” Spike strode to the door and knocked on it to summon the guard. “Don’t know why I bothered.”
Lindsey put his hand on Spike’s shoulder. Spike spun around, fist connecting without thought to the un-bruised side of Lindsey’s jaw.
Spike froze, staring at the bruised and battered face. Lindsey licked his lower lip. “Told ya you cared,” he said, and took a lazy step backward, hands at his sides, “The defense rests.”
“Fuck you, Lindsey. You’ll not be seeing me again.”
“Hey, I’m just here to help defeat the bad guys,” Lindsey said, looking smug through it all.
The door opened, catching Spike by surprise. He muttered an apology to the waiting guard and stepped past her into the corridor.
As the door shut, Lindsey smiled. “He’ll be back.” He sighed and gathered up his cards to start the game over.
Continued -->