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Author's Chapter Notes:
this story is slowly coming along. i just recently picked up a beta, so that should help it out alittle...or alot.
i dont own anything except my truck, and just enjoy taking the characters out for a ride.
He was sitting in my chair with his feet propped up on the desk, his hands behind his head, and the sun setting across his face…again. I could kill him. If I had really wanted to, I could have answered his wishes. But the actual WANT to kill him had faded years ago, and now that he had what we … well, I, had been fighting for for so many years, I wasn’t going to take it from him. He deserved it, no matter what he thought, about not deserving it and not wanting it. I was jealous, envious, damn right pissed off, in the beginning, when the chips had fallen and Spike had come out as what the Powers thought of as deserving of the greatest gift a vampire could be granted, you know besides Buffy…but that’s a different kind of gift…and a different story. That first breath that he had taken in the alley that rainy night was so bitter sweet I can still taste it. The sound of the blood that had once been borrowed and not unlikely to be pig’s, rushing through his veins had made my skin quiver in want, to just launch at him and drain it all out of him, just to see if it still tasted of pig’s blood, or if it would taste human.

*****

I had slid down the dead dragon’s neck with grace, or what I’ll call grace because there wasn’t any one around to see me stumble when I hit the asphalt, that was oddly enough softer then the hide of the dragon. I was wondering what we were going to do with all the bodies, because there were so many, when I saw his body. Illyria was holding him, with the rain I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not, but if she had been I would never have held it against her. Losing her powers, losing Wesley, losing Gunn, because even though I hadn’t seen him go down, I knew he was gone, he had barely stood to march against the first wave, and that had been hours ago, was bound to take its toll eventually. She held him like a mother who had just picked up a dead child, or a favored pet, which considering their relationship the latter was most likely more accurate. I had blood dripping from me everywhere, one of the many times I was glad that blood loss was not a way to kill a vampire. The dragon had bitten into me and I was lucky to still be in one piece, so to walk, or stumble, whatever, away from that particular beast I was thanking the few things I still believed in.

“Is it just us?” I asked even though I already knew the answer.

She looked up at me with so much pain in her eyes; it was comforting to see her coming around to human emotions, right up until I remembered how many she had taken down with Wesley’s name on her lips. Homicidal rage had taken on a new meaning.

“I believe so, however, I am unsure how much longer the vampire will remain ‘one of us’,” the inflection in her voice clearly separating us from her but I guess she still had to maintain the semblance of the walls that separated the two.

That was ok though, if what she was saying was true and “us” consisted of her and I, with what we had just done, well I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Subsequently, I stood there thinking about the ramifications of my actions of earlier that night and the last few weeks when I heard it. It was like the strangled gasp of one of those people that is attacked by a shark and doesn’t die from the shark bite, but almost kicks it from the near drowning that is simultaneous. I think that if it hadn’t been raining, or if I had actually been paying attention instead of wondering if I was still going to have a job in the morning, I would have heard the six heart beats that came before the breath. However, as it was, I didn’t, and that gasp of a dead man that Spike’s unundead body emitted was a shot from left field, right to the center of my heart and soul. The second breath, sounding less ‘I just almost died from strangulation’ and more ‘I haven’t breathed for real in over a century how the heck does this work again’ hit my brain.

I fell to my knees at his side, which looked all the world like I was happy and rejoicing the great gift endowed upon my most beloved grandson(which, by the way, I despise when he refers to me as grand anything). However, the reality of the situation was that the Shanshu... was no longer a feasible reality for me. My thoughts from before the breath returned to me; the ramifications of my actions. When I signed away the Shanshu I hadn’t really thought about the possibility of never getting it, to actually being a possibility. I guess I had just thought that ‘hey, I’m doing this paramount deed to help rid the world of some of its most brutal evil even if it’s just for a little while, it’s not a big deal’. But in the moment of that breath, it became this gigantic deal, which I had lost. In the ultimate battle of Angel verses Spike, Spike had just chopped my legs off.

I was so freakin' mad, you don’t even know.

As his breaths evened out and his heart rate, that I could know hear because I had zeroed in on it as soon as I picked it out of the surrounding noise, slowed, my demon raged against my soul. Who would have thought that my demon would be the one angriest about not getting the Shanshu? Not me that’s for sure. So when it took all the power my soul possessed to rein it in, I knelt at Spike’s side.

“I believe this one can no longer carry the title I have bestowed upon him.”

If I didn’t know any better I would have thought she was cracking a joke, but I’m glad I did know better, because just the thought of Illyria making a joke out of the loss of all my hope had my demon eyeing her for the responsibility of its loss.

“I think you might be…” I was interrupted by Spike’s hand jumping up from its previous immobile position to clutch his chest.

“Bloody fuck,” the pain in his voice was startling, until I remembered the battle we had just fought.

Not counting my dragon holes, I was pretty beat up and knowing Spike and his ‘guts before glory’ attitude, his body was more than likely barely still in one piece. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I laughed at him. ‘Ha ha, now you hurt like a human too. See, we can live without that.’ (I surmise to myself that I was just trying to make myself feel better about having lost, because who doesn’t try to see the bad in the other persons win and the good in our loss.)

“Spike,” I dared a few fingers on his shoulder, ”How do you feel?”

“Like I just got ‘it by a bloody truck, or per’aps a dragon.”

I saw him make the first attempts to sit up, and the waves of pain that rippled across his face. I was about to tell him not to sit up, when he fell back down the half a centimeter he had gotten up, and when Illyria spoke.

“I do not believe you should attempt to move as of yet, vam.., Spike,” the word sounded strange from her voice, I doubt she had used it more than a hand full of times, “Your injuries are extensive and your healing process has just downgraded many steps.”

She had made a joke, that sly little…well, anyways. It was a relief, maybe, that Illyria was the one to reveal to him his new status in life, because I don’t think I could have. My blood was still boiling and all I wanted to do was rip his now very human throat out, just for all the heartache and grief he had caused me all these years. That want to kill him, yeah it came back with the full force of a pissed off Angelus for about five minutes. But I couldn’t.

“What 're you talkin’ bout? Ugh,” he paused...to breath, I guess, maybe he had a few broken ribs (good!), “It ‘urts ta breathe.”

He wrapped his arms around his body in the cradle of Illyria’s arms.

“Why does it ‘urt ta breathe?”

Illyria looked up at me then, my internal battle ended, and I became Spike’s protector all in that moment.

******

“GET OUT OF MY CHAIR!!”

It was like a routine. I leave my desk…for whatever reason, do what I have to do, come back, and there he is, propped up in my chair gazing at the sky. Like he couldn’t be at some beach somewhere doing the same thing, and actually feel the sun kiss his skin. Lucky bastard. But no, always my chair, always when I return. Which was really odd, because it didn’t matter the time of day either. Only thing that stopped him was when he physically couldn’t move. Despite all that uncannyness, I still can’t afford to let him leave W & H by himself, not after last week.

He slowly turned his face to look at me, his left eye still swollen shut, his nose still swollen from this latest break, and both of his lips scabbed over in a few places.

The cut on his cheek is ready for the stitches to come out, I thought. The eye that could open, even if it was just enough to see through, gazed at me with contempt. Even when he could barely walk, he only allowed himself two days to heal before he was back to being in my chair.

Slowly, he removed his hands from behind his head. The right one sported a cast up to the elbow, while the left had gotten away with just an assortment of cuts and bruises. Just as slowly, he brought his feet from the desk and rose from the chair. Spike had looked much the same after that rainy night as he did right now.

As he moved away from my chair to carefully deposit his body in to one of the ones situated in front of my desk, I sat down...in a small puddle of blood. Damn it, Spike.

“You need to go to the infirmary and get your bandages checked, you bled on my chair.”

I had tried to be the nice gentle guy for about three months, but I’m not a saint and that’s the kind of patience this former vampire required, and that was while he WAS a vampire. As a human, I don’t even think a saint’s patience would have held for long.

“Don’t ya e’er get tired of savin’ me?”

The contempt in his voice was so strong, but I had learned to ignore it after the first few weeks.

“Don’t you ever get tired of getting into fights you know you’re not gonna win?”

I countered not even looking up from my paper work. I had ended up having a job in the morning after all, and while it was a little more docile then before, it still required a great deal of attention and hard work, that I was forced to complete without my team. The pain of that loss being a huge bump in the road as it was without the added distraction that Spike proved time and time again to be.

“If ya wou’n’t pull your hero act fer just one night, it wou’n’t be a problem fer either of us,” his head hung back on the chair, not even bothering to look at me with deep seeded hate any more.

It was as if we just went through the motions now. Sad that in just three months we had entered this particular dance routine.

He would go out, get into, pick, or stick his nose into some fight against now impossible odds, because even as a vampire, some of the scraps I pulled him out of would have been iffy. I would find out he had gotten out long after he was gone, which don’t think that I’m not trying to get better alarms to catch him before he gets out. I would jump in, save his beaten body from some stupid fight. He would recover and turn up in my office no less than two days later to bitch at me about saving him.

So far, this fight was the softest one we’ve had. I wonder what that means.

“Spike, I know you want to berate me and act all disgruntled and hurt that I had to save you…again,” I looked at his half broken body not quite lounging in the high armed, stuffed chair, “but you look like shit. Your face is a mess, you arm is broken, and your bleeding all over my office. I can smell it, if I hadn’t seen it. Go to the infirmary, get checked out, and go to your room and get some rest. It’s not gonna kill you to heal a little before you come in here all anger and petulant child.”

His snort of laughter was hallow and disturbing. However, it was the look he gave me with that one eye, and his words that chilled my blood just a little more than it already was.

“To bad, cause then I wou’n’t 'ave ta keep sneakin' out.”





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