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Author's Chapter Notes:
Ehy, folks! Here we are with the last chapter! If you liked this story, don't miss the sequel, Princes to the noir! And vote us, if you please, at fhe Fool for Love awards as Best Dark Fic.
Kisses and thanks for the attention. A special thanks to our beta Pat: you rock.
Roberta and Franca
20. Destiny.

Spike returned to the Crawford Street mansion, still bewildered after all that had happened in the last few hours, the soul burning inside of him, but somewhat calmer. Meeting Buffy again had given him a sort of…peace, a singular sedative effect on his senses.
Angelus’ choice could not have astonished him less. He was the only one, in the whole damn world, who understood what it was like to wake with senses tuned to human pain after centuries of natural evilness. He was the only one who could know that this was not the time for final decisions, like devoting himself to a bedazzled teenager with the maturity of a cherry tart.
Spike smiled to himself: she was immature, but lethal. He would never forget her, and he bet that nor would Angelus.
For William the Bloody it was hard enough at the moment not to run into the sun, to cease that torment: it was not the time to ask himself complicated questions such as what destiny awaited him.
He really had believed it was Dru. To love her, to be loved by her…a hundred and twenty years, and it hadn’t been forever. Lasting, yes, faithful, usually, but not forever. He didn’t know in which category his relationship with Buffy belonged… and he wasn’t delusional about it anymore. That had been love, although he could have killed her with his hands and fangs for the deep, bloody revolution she had brought to his and his family’s existence. But that love couldn’t last forever, either.
Buffy probably still had ahead of her a life span of five, six years at best. In the past, he might have considered other options, such as siring her, for example…to make her his childe, or Angelus’ …or both. Spike played with that thought: the night she had welcomed both of them into her bed, and she had offered them her blood, it would have been so easy to slide from the erotic play to a mutual destiny, something to bind them insolubly, all three of them, forever.
Even then, they hadn’t felt like extinguishing her. Now even more so. Just the thought of siring a human being, and especially Buffy, made his stomach churn.
And now…now that this new, burning, bright soul flooded all that had been his essence until then, what could be his destiny? And Angelus’?
It wasn’t going to be easy. It wouldn’t be banal. He was empty inside, when the pain subsided a little, and he had as yet nothing to fill him. Blood wasn’t enough anymore. Old certainties, old convictions, were gone…and new ones still had to form themselves. A spark of self preservation kept the two vampires up and…barely functioning, like automata, directionless. And this was, at least for Spike, even more devastating than the guilt.
He was born to will¸ and yet he had no desire to be anything.
Get out of here, for starters. Yeah, maybe that was enough will for the moment.
He entered the mansion from the rear. He didn’t ask himself about Angelus: he knew at a very basic level he wasn’t hunting anymore.
Nevertheless, he hadn’t expected to see him there either, standing in the hall. He wasn’t alone. A small, slim guy with a weird hat stood beside him, looking like a “Starsky & Hutch” vintage extra.
“Angelus and Spike, Los Angeles Police Department, at your service, Madame” Spike laughed, silently. Damn it!
“Since when aren’t you feeding, uh?” the bloke asked Angelus, who stared at him with a strange emotion…looking dangerously like reverence. Spike noticed, not for the first time, how the soul had changed his cruel grandsire. His face, so handsome and full of character, had now a deep sweetness…something he had never seen before. Fuck, something that had never been there. He felt he loved him…more than ever…and his loneliness and nostalgia for past times lessened slightly.
“And you?” the guy asked, turning around to face Spike. “Gaunt as a …well, a spike. But they told me you’ve never been fleshy. Are you feeding, uh? I bet you aren’t. Since when have you both stopped sinking your fangs into something plump?”
Spike lifted an eyebrow. The soul hadn’t taken away from him the itch to fight, and that stroppy bloke…but then his stare met Angelus’. He hadn’t fed, either. Oh, balls…were they going to starve to death?
“You’re idiots” the guy commented. “Butchers throw away blood by the bucketful. It’s just a matter of organization”
“Mate, shove that hat of yours up your …”
”William” Angelus stopped him. “This is Whistler.”
“Manager wannabe for two demons recently provided with souls?”
“Uh – uh, very funny, pal” the guy didn’t laugh. “Big, heavy things are happening on this side of the universe. All wrong. You fucked the Slayer…and your brain. And their plans went down the pan”
“Their?” Spike investigated.
”The Powers That Be”
”The powers that be…what?” Angelus asked. “This part of your resumé, frankly, isn’t clear to me, either”
Whistler sighed and walked over to the room that had originally been a kitchen. He opened a bottle of whiskey and swallowed down a big gulp.
”I really can’t get what they saw in you both…but, alas, they changed their minds, and they wanted you. And they took you. The Powers That Be are…the big guys, indeed. Of all the universe. Known and unknown dimensions included”
”Wanted us for…what?”
”But that’s obvious! For fighting the good fight!”
“Ah, obviously” Spike laughed. “And who told you I want to fight the good fight? Mate, I’m nobody’s servant. If I want to be evil, I will be. Even with a soul: a soul didn’t prevent Hitler from doing what he did”
“I just knew he would be the stubborn one” the guy muttered. “Now, if you’ll only open those big ears of yours, you’ll understand I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m here just to point you in the right direction…and to add up the score in the fight between evil and good”
Whistler stared at them.
“Come what may, want it or not, you have both changed lane. This time, evil loses, good wins”
Whistler didn’t vanish. Not with a woosh, at least.
Simply, he wasn’t there anymore.
Angelus and Spike exchanged glances.
This problem was a bit too complicated and disturbing to be digested all at once. And the sun had long since set. It was time to put some distance between them and Sunnyhell.


Angelus watched the night flowing past the deSoto’s window. Desert, desert, houses, gas station, desert, a road house, desert. Spike drove at full speed, tight lipped. Neither of them itched for conversation.
“Butcher’s blood, uh?” Angelus said, suddenly. His companion nodded.
The ancient demon with an angel face…Angelus looked at his hands. He really saw blood on them, centuries of massacres…a new, male lady Macbeth. Unforgettable. And notwithstanding this…
Hope.
How could you have hope when you had been the cause of more evil than you could even imagine?
But in the farthest, tiniest, most shadowed part of himself Angelus felt hope. A small flickering light. A light Whistler’s words had given new strength.
If the Powers That Be really had other plans for them, maybe, all of this hadn’t really been useless.
Maybe, there still was the slight possibility to…
“Atone” he murmured, aloud.
”Sorry, mate, that’s not my style” Spike whispered, speeding up. Outside, the night sky was turning livid, dawn was approaching. In a few minutes, daylight would come.
That hadn’t changed. They were both still vampires…totally so. And they needed blood (human? Animal?) and a shelter from the sun. They had the broad means of un–living, thanks to Angelus’ cunning business initiative. Angelus had several accounts in foreign, fancy-named and welcoming banks, and other accounts in the names of his childes. Spike would have died of sheer starvation before entering a bank and filling in a form to get some cash, but Angelus felt at ease. In case of absolute necessity, Spike would not want for anything.
“I bet you regret not hiring the usual limo” Spike commented.
“Not at all” Angelus muttered. “There’s a motel. Let’s get a room”
Spike parked the deSoto in the dusty lot and the two vampires walked quietly towards Reception.
A woman came to take their documents: she was tired-looking, forty-ish, slightly obese. A good meal for two.
With shaking hands, Angelus fished out of his wallet his Platinum Visa card. Spike rolled his eyes: he abhorred those signs of human wealth Angelus had always been so fond of. But if they helped to keep his eyes from wandering to the landlady’s neck….all the better.
“Man, with that you can buy yourself the whole place” she said, amused.
“We just need a room. On the north side of the building”
She nodded, her heels ticking across the concrete floor, and handed him a key. The usual couple of queers, probably. Those black leather trousers, the inconsiderate attitude of the blonde one, they were most probably on the sado–maso circuit. What a load of shit…
The two vampires went quickly up the stairs. To sleep, to dream…maybe to die…the Bard already knew all about people like them. They just wanted to close their eyes and to forget. The spark, which never stopped burning.
On their staircase there was a room with a “Private” sign on it. The door opened, and a seeming teenage girl came out, heavily made up. She had a client.
“Come in, Brad” she said, her voice dripping with her last shot. Or maybe it was tequila that ran heavily through her veins.
The guy, a dirty blonde with a faux good attitude about him, smiled with his rotten, predator’s teeth...and entered the small private apartment.
She lived there, she was the landlady’s adopted daughter.
Spike and Angelus stared at each other.
The man went into game face, closing the door behind him with a bang.


“Oh, fuck!” Angelus muttered. To share her with the other vampire? To warn her? To save her? And how, since she hadn’t invited him into what was effectively a private home inside the motel?
While he was still musing, Spike was gone.
He was already in the apartment, and he had thrown the Brad-wannabe against a wall. Angelus followed him, broke the leg off a chair and threw it to Spike.
William the Bloody ended the task. His first rescue. Dust in his face. He rolled his eyes and then looked at his hands: they were shaking.
The girl passed her hands over her tired face, already wrinkled.
“Who the hell are you? What did you do to my client?”
Angelus, still shocked, took some cash and threw it on the table.
He went out with Spike, and their eyes met.
“I…I don’t know what got into me” Spike murmured, as bedazzled as his companion was. “I had to do it. I knew I couldn’t let him kill her”
”Indeed, the most disquieting detail is still escaping you” Angelus replied, when they were out of earshot. “She didn’t invite us in”
Spike leaned over to his grandsire.
“We are not alone in this…Spike”
“I know” he replied. “But I swear I’ll do it my way”
“I get that” Angelus nodded. And he knew also this was what separated them…and linked them just as deeply. Their diversity, their affection…all in all.
After a long day of perfect sleep, lying together like two worlds apart and yet close, separated in the same bed by a universe of untold tales about themselves, at the fall of darkness Spike and Angelus took the car and left.
Each of them towards his own destiny.


The princess woke up in her white girly bed. In her dreams, darkness had never been so vivid, seductive…dangerous. But, on waking, all was black inside her. The light had gone. And what she had learned would painfully last not for one, but for thousands of lifetimes. Oh, the loneliness…
All in all, despite her broken heart, the princess still lived.
And so did her two Princes to the noir.
Here endeth the lesson.

THE END.





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