Angel/Spike: Summerbreeze
Title: Summerbreeze
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Angel/Spike
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For challengetime for the Angel ficathon. Request was for dark smut or just slash, and a reference to the puppet thing. Ah, the smut didn't happen so much.
Afterward, the worst thing isn't hearing Spike's heart drum in his chest, naturally as if it never stopped, and it's not the question hanging over him of whether the prophecy was Spike's all along or if it just became his by default when Angel signed the paper - the worst thing is that they're still here. They didn't win, because word is trickling down the grapevine that the Black Thorn are back in business, and they didn't exactly lose because the city's going on just like it always has, sunshine and tourists pasted over the crime and degradation, and the vampires and demons underneath it all, slick layer of scum just below the surface.
The Partners don't come after them. They go back to the Hyperion, which as hiding places go is just one step above putting a neon sign on the roof that blinks "come and get us", and they don't get attacked by so much as a nasty lawsuit. New company policy has to be that they're just not important enough to deserve the attention.
After the dragon, it's kind of a let-down.
So life, what passes for it, goes on. The sun comes up every day, and it takes him too long to realize that Spike hardly ever goes out in it. Sits in the hotel's garden sometimes, face turned to the sky, but he doesn't stay long enough to get a tan. If he notices Angel watching him, he comes back inside.
Most of the time, Angel makes sure he doesn't notice.
**
Nina comes through the double doors looking pretty and tanned and like she hasn't slept in a week and her arms are around him before he's processed that she's here.
Her hair's a shade lighter than he remembers. He hugs her back. She smells like saltwater and tropical flowers.
Behind her, Spike is scowling his way across to the door. "Going out," he says, frozen and blinking at the mid-afternoon sunlight for less than an eyeblink before he hunches his shoulders and pushes out into it.
"Thank God you're okay," Nina says. "Your building was gone, and I remembered you'd had a detective agency so I checked the Yellow Pages and thank God."
All of this said directly into his shirt and Angel thinks, sadly, that maybe he could fall in love with her.
"Lassie went home?" Spike guesses when he finally gets back to find Angel in the garden, alone.
"Taking her family to stay with her parents in Vancouver."
"Just like that," Spike says, sceptically.
He looks past the garden wall at the streetlights. Inhales, and remembers why he hates this place at night as soon as he catches the scent of night-blooming jasmine.
Spike sits next to him on the low bench. He's dressed in t-shirt and jeans, the weather forcing him out of that damned coat. He has pale freckles on his arms. Angel waits for more insults about Nina, or his hair, clothes, brooding, anything, but Spike's clammed up.
"Do you ever wish you hadn't been brought back?" Angel asks, because the silence is almost swallowing them whole, and because he really doesn't know.
"No," Spike says, the hesitation long enough to make it at least a half-truth. "'Cause for one thing, that'd mean agreeing with you." Nudges his shoulder gently against Angel's: "And, seeing you as a puppet, wouldn't want to have missed that."
"Yeah."
If there was ever going to be a time to bring up Buffy, this would be it. Neither of them say a word.
**
"When are we making our move, then?"
Angel looks up in surprise, puts the mug of blood down. They don't take meals together. Unless he's lost track of time again, Spike should be upstairs, wandering between the empty rooms till he finds the one he's going to sleep in tonight.
"What move?"
"Against the Circle. C'mon, you must have something."
The only possible answers to that statement are all deeply ironic.
"We don't know who the new members of the Circle are," he says, not adding what has to be obvious, even to Spike: that it cost them Drogyn, Wes, Gunn, Lorne, Illyria - he doesn't even consider that he counts Lorne but not Lindsey - to reach their non-victory, and that was when they knew who they were fighting. One vampire and one human, no back-up, no resources. They wouldn't have a prayer.
"We have to do something," Spike complains, and Angel remembers that this is just how Spike gets in the summer. Always especially hated it when they were in Europe, when there was the heat as well as the long days.
Spike pulls back a chair as if he's going to sit, and then he's pacing. The restless motion would make Angel's head hurt if he watched it, so he doesn't. He looks down at the blood, inwardly pissed at his own hesitation. Not like it's nothing Spike hasn't seen. Or done. Only he's remembering the only other summer he ever spent in LA, or the only one that matters: Wes so damn pleased with translating the prophecy and Cordy telling him to go ahead and drink in front of them, they're family. Which Spike both is (didn't turn the boy himself, Dru doesn't even ask 'can I keep him, daddy?' but Angelus was no less his sire for it) and isn't (because Spike's human now and the shanshu means a clean slate and why is he even here, still?)
"You want something to do?" he says. "Demon attacked me last night. Grey, about eight feet tall, six claws on each arm. Ran off into the sewers. Tell me what it was and how I can kill it." This last is shouted over the slamming door, because Spike hates to be reminded that he's of more use now as a watcher than a fighter. Angel pretends he doesn't notice how the contents of the weapons cabinet mysteriously rearrange themselves during the day, or the cuts and gunpowder smell on Spike's hands. Wherever he goes to practise, he does it during daylight, and somewhere out of the hotel. Every time, Angel's a little surprised that he comes back.
He drains the mug in one swallow. The blood is thick and cold.
**
June crawls into the hottest July since records began. The office has air conditioning, one of Cordelia's legacies, but the bedrooms swelter. Spike takes to sleeping in the lobby, the basement, on the roof. Angel, unbothered by the temperature or the humidity, stays where he is. The long hours of daylight make him miss his old office's tinted glass. He thinks about going up to San Francisco to see Connor - hell, he could take Spike along, let them try to figure out which one of them's the other's uncle - but he remembers that the colleges are closed and Connor's at home, or on a family vacation somewhere.
He spends his nights patrolling. Clearing out vampire nests in a row of derelict buildings on the pier. Helping the helpless, and thinking about the dead.
Cordy and Gunn left orders that they be cremated. He doubts he'll ever be back to Ireland to see the place where Doyle was buried. Dead, Illyria looked like Fred again, and when he picked her up from the alley floor she was light as empty air. The Burkles took her home to Texas. Trish was kind enough to lie, say that they knew it wasn't Angel's fault. Roger didn't speak, or meet his eyes.
Wesley has a grave in a small cemetery not far from the Hyperion, the stone stating nothing but his name and the dates of birth and death, because Angel couldn't think of anything he wanted to say. He still can't, and when he visits he stands over the plot in silence. All Watchers, Wes told him once, are burned, or buried with a stake through their heart. He couldn't bring himself to do either, and while he (very briefly) considered finding some way to contact Lilah Morgan, he didn't call Wesley's parents until their son was already in the ground. In his head this is very simple: he loved Wesley. They didn't. They don't get to take him back to England, and Angel doesn't think about his own guilt over Connor, or the fact that he's not sure he ever truly forgave Wes.
**
He's avoided this part of town, but the demon leads him on a twisting trail through the sewers and when they burst out into the air Angel realizes where they are.
The new Wolfram & Hart building looks just like the old one. No lights in the windows but no sign of a construction crew's machines, either.
"They're back in business," is the first thing he says, back at the hotel.
"Should wash that off." Spike nods at the demon blood oozing from his fingers to the tiles.
"Spike," he says, just in case some freak of lobby acoustics means he wasn't heard, "The Wolf, Ram and Hart. They're back."
"Never went away. And Brachnar blood's toxic to humans."
For some reason, this slides beneath his skin like a thorn. "I'm not human."
"Yeah, well, I am," Spike snaps, and for someone worried about getting the blood on him he keeps getting awfully close to Angel.
"And you just keep reminding me of that, don't you?" Which is mostly untrue: Spike has never said the word shanshu, never said anything about his new humanity. It's just there, the breathing that's always uneven because Spike seems to concentrate on doing it, as if he doesn't trust his lungs to work on their own. The way he smells different now, not the cool blankness of Fred-turned-Illyria but something human and new.
And some days Angel wishes he would say something to rub his nose in it because then he could just shake him, fragile human bones and all. Smack him across the room and watch him break. They're very close together and he lifts his hand, unsure if he's going to punch Spike or kiss him. Physical contact, either way, something to hold onto, and just before he touches him he remembers the blood on his hands, and that if he touches Spike now, he'll burn him.
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Angel/Spike
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For challengetime for the Angel ficathon. Request was for dark smut or just slash, and a reference to the puppet thing. Ah, the smut didn't happen so much.
Afterward, the worst thing isn't hearing Spike's heart drum in his chest, naturally as if it never stopped, and it's not the question hanging over him of whether the prophecy was Spike's all along or if it just became his by default when Angel signed the paper - the worst thing is that they're still here. They didn't win, because word is trickling down the grapevine that the Black Thorn are back in business, and they didn't exactly lose because the city's going on just like it always has, sunshine and tourists pasted over the crime and degradation, and the vampires and demons underneath it all, slick layer of scum just below the surface.
The Partners don't come after them. They go back to the Hyperion, which as hiding places go is just one step above putting a neon sign on the roof that blinks "come and get us", and they don't get attacked by so much as a nasty lawsuit. New company policy has to be that they're just not important enough to deserve the attention.
After the dragon, it's kind of a let-down.
So life, what passes for it, goes on. The sun comes up every day, and it takes him too long to realize that Spike hardly ever goes out in it. Sits in the hotel's garden sometimes, face turned to the sky, but he doesn't stay long enough to get a tan. If he notices Angel watching him, he comes back inside.
Most of the time, Angel makes sure he doesn't notice.
**
Nina comes through the double doors looking pretty and tanned and like she hasn't slept in a week and her arms are around him before he's processed that she's here.
Her hair's a shade lighter than he remembers. He hugs her back. She smells like saltwater and tropical flowers.
Behind her, Spike is scowling his way across to the door. "Going out," he says, frozen and blinking at the mid-afternoon sunlight for less than an eyeblink before he hunches his shoulders and pushes out into it.
"Thank God you're okay," Nina says. "Your building was gone, and I remembered you'd had a detective agency so I checked the Yellow Pages and thank God."
All of this said directly into his shirt and Angel thinks, sadly, that maybe he could fall in love with her.
"Lassie went home?" Spike guesses when he finally gets back to find Angel in the garden, alone.
"Taking her family to stay with her parents in Vancouver."
"Just like that," Spike says, sceptically.
He looks past the garden wall at the streetlights. Inhales, and remembers why he hates this place at night as soon as he catches the scent of night-blooming jasmine.
Spike sits next to him on the low bench. He's dressed in t-shirt and jeans, the weather forcing him out of that damned coat. He has pale freckles on his arms. Angel waits for more insults about Nina, or his hair, clothes, brooding, anything, but Spike's clammed up.
"Do you ever wish you hadn't been brought back?" Angel asks, because the silence is almost swallowing them whole, and because he really doesn't know.
"No," Spike says, the hesitation long enough to make it at least a half-truth. "'Cause for one thing, that'd mean agreeing with you." Nudges his shoulder gently against Angel's: "And, seeing you as a puppet, wouldn't want to have missed that."
"Yeah."
If there was ever going to be a time to bring up Buffy, this would be it. Neither of them say a word.
**
"When are we making our move, then?"
Angel looks up in surprise, puts the mug of blood down. They don't take meals together. Unless he's lost track of time again, Spike should be upstairs, wandering between the empty rooms till he finds the one he's going to sleep in tonight.
"What move?"
"Against the Circle. C'mon, you must have something."
The only possible answers to that statement are all deeply ironic.
"We don't know who the new members of the Circle are," he says, not adding what has to be obvious, even to Spike: that it cost them Drogyn, Wes, Gunn, Lorne, Illyria - he doesn't even consider that he counts Lorne but not Lindsey - to reach their non-victory, and that was when they knew who they were fighting. One vampire and one human, no back-up, no resources. They wouldn't have a prayer.
"We have to do something," Spike complains, and Angel remembers that this is just how Spike gets in the summer. Always especially hated it when they were in Europe, when there was the heat as well as the long days.
Spike pulls back a chair as if he's going to sit, and then he's pacing. The restless motion would make Angel's head hurt if he watched it, so he doesn't. He looks down at the blood, inwardly pissed at his own hesitation. Not like it's nothing Spike hasn't seen. Or done. Only he's remembering the only other summer he ever spent in LA, or the only one that matters: Wes so damn pleased with translating the prophecy and Cordy telling him to go ahead and drink in front of them, they're family. Which Spike both is (didn't turn the boy himself, Dru doesn't even ask 'can I keep him, daddy?' but Angelus was no less his sire for it) and isn't (because Spike's human now and the shanshu means a clean slate and why is he even here, still?)
"You want something to do?" he says. "Demon attacked me last night. Grey, about eight feet tall, six claws on each arm. Ran off into the sewers. Tell me what it was and how I can kill it." This last is shouted over the slamming door, because Spike hates to be reminded that he's of more use now as a watcher than a fighter. Angel pretends he doesn't notice how the contents of the weapons cabinet mysteriously rearrange themselves during the day, or the cuts and gunpowder smell on Spike's hands. Wherever he goes to practise, he does it during daylight, and somewhere out of the hotel. Every time, Angel's a little surprised that he comes back.
He drains the mug in one swallow. The blood is thick and cold.
**
June crawls into the hottest July since records began. The office has air conditioning, one of Cordelia's legacies, but the bedrooms swelter. Spike takes to sleeping in the lobby, the basement, on the roof. Angel, unbothered by the temperature or the humidity, stays where he is. The long hours of daylight make him miss his old office's tinted glass. He thinks about going up to San Francisco to see Connor - hell, he could take Spike along, let them try to figure out which one of them's the other's uncle - but he remembers that the colleges are closed and Connor's at home, or on a family vacation somewhere.
He spends his nights patrolling. Clearing out vampire nests in a row of derelict buildings on the pier. Helping the helpless, and thinking about the dead.
Cordy and Gunn left orders that they be cremated. He doubts he'll ever be back to Ireland to see the place where Doyle was buried. Dead, Illyria looked like Fred again, and when he picked her up from the alley floor she was light as empty air. The Burkles took her home to Texas. Trish was kind enough to lie, say that they knew it wasn't Angel's fault. Roger didn't speak, or meet his eyes.
Wesley has a grave in a small cemetery not far from the Hyperion, the stone stating nothing but his name and the dates of birth and death, because Angel couldn't think of anything he wanted to say. He still can't, and when he visits he stands over the plot in silence. All Watchers, Wes told him once, are burned, or buried with a stake through their heart. He couldn't bring himself to do either, and while he (very briefly) considered finding some way to contact Lilah Morgan, he didn't call Wesley's parents until their son was already in the ground. In his head this is very simple: he loved Wesley. They didn't. They don't get to take him back to England, and Angel doesn't think about his own guilt over Connor, or the fact that he's not sure he ever truly forgave Wes.
**
He's avoided this part of town, but the demon leads him on a twisting trail through the sewers and when they burst out into the air Angel realizes where they are.
The new Wolfram & Hart building looks just like the old one. No lights in the windows but no sign of a construction crew's machines, either.
"They're back in business," is the first thing he says, back at the hotel.
"Should wash that off." Spike nods at the demon blood oozing from his fingers to the tiles.
"Spike," he says, just in case some freak of lobby acoustics means he wasn't heard, "The Wolf, Ram and Hart. They're back."
"Never went away. And Brachnar blood's toxic to humans."
For some reason, this slides beneath his skin like a thorn. "I'm not human."
"Yeah, well, I am," Spike snaps, and for someone worried about getting the blood on him he keeps getting awfully close to Angel.
"And you just keep reminding me of that, don't you?" Which is mostly untrue: Spike has never said the word shanshu, never said anything about his new humanity. It's just there, the breathing that's always uneven because Spike seems to concentrate on doing it, as if he doesn't trust his lungs to work on their own. The way he smells different now, not the cool blankness of Fred-turned-Illyria but something human and new.
And some days Angel wishes he would say something to rub his nose in it because then he could just shake him, fragile human bones and all. Smack him across the room and watch him break. They're very close together and he lifts his hand, unsure if he's going to punch Spike or kiss him. Physical contact, either way, something to hold onto, and just before he touches him he remembers the blood on his hands, and that if he touches Spike now, he'll burn him.