It was winter’s piercing chill without summer’s soothing warmth. It was the day without the night. The dark without the light. It was the hope without the fear. The laugh without the tear. It was the ship without the storm, the eyes without the face, the river without the sea. It was the bad without the good.
It was the dark side of the moon.
But, most important of all, it was the hair. Most definitely the hair. The hair was instantly recognizable to Spike, a copyrightable trademark, only copyrighting spikey hair would be a ludicrous endeavor and inevitably miscarriage because most, if not every, preteen listening to N’Sync dipped their little fingers in the gel jar. They had spikey hair, that is.
But anyway, the trademark cohort of spikes shot straight up, like a dandelion in full blossom, with that slightly forward slant and completely over-gelled to hell allure. The spikiness committed the brown bristle hair to an appeal that was more douchebag than anything. Spike very much adored all the different emotions that the hair stirred within him, though, because it allowed him to actually feel some emotion, which was great, and it also made him not think about Buffy and the elusive glaze of suicidal tendencies that washed over him when he thought about such a subject, which was good, too. Instead, he thought about Angel’s hair.
Angel’s expression was as blank and stoic as the dead president on the ten dollar bill. The creases and wrinkles on his forehead were still noticeable – they were always noticeable – but they were not as fervently furrowed as they were at the party last week where Angel had adroitly played the part of an angry bull that only saw red.
Seeing red... every path leads me to nowhere.
Angel sat down right beside Spike on the ground, both of them with their backs supported by the wall and openly sprawled out legs. They both looked as slouched and oppressed as scribbled question marks. Spike just sat there in the silence for a few minutes, seemingly ignoring Angel, only he wasn’t. He was really basking in the soothing presence of Angel; already the rambling self-deprecating monologue in his head about how sick and awful and not well he was had ceased rambling. Instead, he thought about Angel’s hair.
Angel shattered the shards of silence. “So what’s the problem?”
Spike didn’t turn his head to Angel, didn’t blink out of tune, didn’t even breathe. He didn’t want to have the habitual pep talk with Angel that always happened between best friends after such a catastrophic event, especially when Angel chose psychoanalyzing Freudian words like “problem.” Talking about the issue would be like drenching both hands in water and touching the metal part of a plug as it was halfway into a wall outlet. “I dun’ wanna talk about it.”
“Well that’s the answer,” Angel replied sarcastically, “the problem will probably just fix itself.”
Another long awkward pause occurred. Spike thought about telling Angel everything but knew that Angel probably already knew everything or else he wouldn’t even be here right now and even thinking about Angel in the loose context of Buffy made him nevertheless think about Buffy which therefore made him seriously consider starting appointments for that inane shock therapy thing that they did in the 1960s when some people took the presidential campaign heartbeat commercials seriously and were therefore inherently stupid and dumb.
He could be stupid and dumb; that would be perfectly fine with him. So long as he didn’t have to get all introspective and psychological and think about Buffy. He didn’t want to do that, especially the last one, because he was afraid he might do something he wouldn’t even be able to regret later because he would be dead, drowning in his own vomit.
Spike cocked his head sideways a few inches, still looking forward into the white wall abyss. “Remember that book? The Stranger?”
“Yeah.” Angel paused for a bit, waiting for Spike to continue and inevitably ramble on about how the book frighteningly related to his life, especially the lack of emotion and remorse and humanity in the protagonist in the novel and the pessimistic existential revelation that the protagonist undertook at the end of the book and how Spike was sure to undertake that exact same revelation in the next few days, maybe even few hours if he was really serendipitous and hit the lucky 7s.
Spike didn’t say anything, though, just left the title of the book up in the air, like those balloons the environmentally challenged release copiously after beach cleanups. “Did that have a point, or did you just wanna know if I’d read it?”
“There you go again,” Spike said with a sigh. He was still looking ahead, almost eerily, borderline crazily now, as people didn’t normally talk to walls while speaking to their best friend, probably only friend, and certainly the only person that wanted to talk to Spike right now. “You’re always looking for a point, always seeking that elusive happiness... well, lemme tell you something, Angel, it’s all in the pursuit... Constitution deceptively states it and everything; you can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not ever the happiness itself.”
Angel turned to face Spike directly. The bleached man didn’t flinch in reaction, his jaw didn’t tick into a clench, his nostrils didn’t flare or hand out any suggestions of such; he looked insanely normal. Pale, even.
“I dunno, Angel,” Spike muttered somewhat awkwardly, probably because he was trying his damnest to be all introspective and it just wasn’t working out at all. “I just... I just feel like my life’s been one massive loop of Jeremy without the good ending.”
“Good ending? What good ending? The Pearl Jam song? I thought—”
“The student kills himself in the end of the song after being tormented in school all his life, yeah,” Spike dutifully finished. “That’s good, though... that’s peaceful, that’s rest... and I’m tired.”
“You want to sleep?” Angel asked lamely, trying to pry open Spike’s tightly closed lid with the little dumb kid appeal.
“Y’know, sometimes... sometimes I really do. Just hibernate ‘til I’m twenty-one and sleep passed all this shit, this fucking hell, this stupid crap... I wanted The Inferno but she was just buying a stairway to heaven... I shoulda soddin’ curbed the pride and the prejudice and the malice but the sun never rises... we’re too ignorant and naive when we’re young and too stupid and senile when we’re old...”
Angel gazed intently at the crumbling Spike.
“I just wanna paint—just wanna paint everything black... the doors, the windows, the furniture, the house, the fucking Mona Lisa and everything in the Louvre... paint it all black...”
Spike repeated his favorite word again. “...black...”
“You’re making no sense—”
“...black...”
“...at all,” Angel finished.
“Yeah... ‘guess I’m not...” Spike trailed off as he thought about the destructive meaning of his previous words. “I just wanna be like that girl in the Fantastic Four. The one that can turn invisible. If I can’t do that... I dunno, bang, bullet in the head, problem solved.”
“Don’t joke about that,” Angel said.
“Who says I’m joking?”
Spike’s rhetorical question stung the putrid air for a handful of heartbeats before Angel began speaking again.
“You wanna know what your problem is, Spike?”
Spike openly gestured with his hands. “Enlighten me, John Locke.”
“Keep in mind I’m only saying this because I’m your best fr—”
“Have at it already.”
“I think, well... I think that your problem is yourself. I’ve seen the ways you act, in school and around Buffy and around me... you’re what the people around here would call emo...” he trailed off as he questioned himself with a scratch of the head, “or maybe it’s goth?”
Spike gave Angel a cold dead stare.
“Minus the fashion, of course,” Angel added hastily so as not to get beaten. “Hmm... or maybe you’re Byronic?”
Another cold dead stare from Spike.
“Minus the homosexuality, of course,” Angel interjected hastily again because it looked like Spike was going to bite a left pinky dead off.
Spike thought about what Angel said for a second as he resumed his regularly scheduled wall watching. He guessed he was fine with that. Maybe he was that. Byronic or emo or goth or stupid or whatever. He didn’t care that much anymore. So long as he didn’t have to think about Bu—
Spike started tapping his head against the wall now, making hollow clicking sounds with each thud.
“Y’know what I mean...” Angel tried to clarify, “you think you’re misunderstood and better than everyone else... you’re egotistical, you’re belligerent, you’re self-centered, you’re destructive to everyone around you and yourself, you only know the world in black and you think you’ve suffered life’s greatest tragedy by being picked on for a handful of school years...”
Angel took a much needed chug of air. “That, uh, that’s what I meant. When I said emo.”
“Is this suppose to make me feel better?” Spike asked. “Because it’s not working. At all.”
Angel let out a deep breath as he prepped himself for the main course. “Spike... you’ve really just gotta ask yourself one thing... has anything you’ve done since becoming Spike made your life better?”
Spike felt very empty and very still, the way the navel of a maelstrom must feel, stolidly slurping in the center of the encompassing pandemonium. He could not answer the question.
“I mean, some people hate other people, yeah... but you take hate to the next level...”
Spike tilted his head to the side again, still looking dead ahead into nothingness. “Ever watched that movie? Donnie Darko?”
Angel understood perfectly now. Spike was trying to think about anything besides himself or Buffy, anything to get his mind roaming to digression. He was running away from his responsibilities, he was being escapist in every sense of the word, like that character Yossarian in his favorite book, Catch-22. “Yeah, I have. Good movie.”
“Real good movie,” Spike confirmed. “Donnie saves the girl in the end. He goes back in time and sacrifices himself for her... do you think I can do that? Become a self-sacrificing martyr?”
Angel stroked his chin. “Have you seen the six foot bunny through the looking glass?”
“No.”
“Then probably not.”
“Worth a shot though, right?”
“Yeah I guess.”
Angel slowly started to piece together everything in his mind. Despite holding similar reservations about last week’s crazy party, Angel had originally engaged in hesitant conversation with Spike because he had witnessed firsthand a devastated and hysterical Buffy race into Riley’s arms, hugging the oversized football player tightly while whimpering incoherent half-sentences into the man’s brightly colored jersey. Riley, of course, immediately pushed Buffy away and retorted that they weren’t going out anymore so it wasn’t his responsibility to hold her or to coddle her or to listen to her or anything like that, to which she quickly replied that she was more than willing to press the reset button on their relationship and try again. It all happened right in front of Angel in the cafeteria, in broad daylight.
And that’s when Angel smelled Spike, even over the aroma of the Axe body spray that the football players were heavily bathed in and the girly perfume that the cheerleaders tantalized all the boys with and the French Fries that made everybody corpulent... Angel smelled Spike over all that hubbub that stained the air of the cafeteria.
Angel didn’t literally smell Spike, of course, but rather very figuratively. He knew something had happened, that Spike must have been the person who seemingly smashed the already crumbling Buffy, and in turn Angel followed the scent – the figurative scent, that is – to the hallway where Spike sat. It was like he had transiently acquired some odd vampiric sixth sense. It was totally weird.
“Buffy’s going with Riley again,” Angel announced to Spike. Angel didn’t know how long he had been flowcharting current events in his head, but Spike was still incessantly tapping his noggin against the tall wall, oblivious as ever. “She looked pretty bad... she was crying when I saw her...”
Suddenly, something snapped in Spike, something visibly changed in him. His entire body twitched in one swift convulsive hemorrhage, like an upsurge of electricity had just galvanized the sensibility out of him. His ponderous breaths started to swallow in his lungs, crushing the vital organ like a soda can under a garage door. He caught his breathe and blinked a few times in rapid succession, looking to his right and then to his left and finally noticing Angel.
Spike fastidiously patted the temple of his forehead with his hand, trying to grasp at something that just wasn’t there. He rambled blindly, “Contacts contacts when did I get contacts where are my glasses?”
Angel sighed, clearly annoyed by Spike’s unintelligible rambling that was surely the result of actually addressing the problem. “C’mon, man, you’ve had contacts for four months... I don’t think switching back to frames is gonna solve anything, Spike.”
“Spike Spike who’s this Spike?” Spike shot his head leftward and rightward, upward and downward, and didn’t see anyone else in the halls. “I’m-I’m W-wi— not Spike who’s this Spike you speak of Angel?”
Angel’s eyes widened. “Who did you say you were again, Spike?”
“I’m William of course who’s this Spike?”
No, this isn’t the big fix or really a fix at all. I just wanted Spike to revert back to William for a chapter or two, more to force change and introspectiveness out of the stubborn protagonist than anything. I know this is like uber unrelenting angst with seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel, but the following story arcs should hopefully produce that nice glowy light. Feedback is worshipped and, like, oh my gosh, helps in the production of *gasps* future chapters.