A/N: This story may contain spoilers for Firefly through BDM, for Buffy through S7, and for Angel through S5 (though if you haven't seen Angel feel free to read anyway. The chapters can be read as stand-alones for the most part and I'll post a warning before the one Angel heavy one). I also have not read any of the Buffyverse comics so this story might not stay compliant with those.

Prologue or How Spike Fell in With Yet Another Scooby Gang

Spike was only interested in the job as a way of making a little dosh to get off planet rather than spending some. Well that, and he had always wanted to pilot a Firefly. So when he heard there was a crew with an opening, he headed down to the docks to check it out.

Oddly enough, it was the mechanic who was interviewing him for the position. Apparently the captain and second in command were off on a job and had left Little Miss Rainbows and Kittens to separate the real pilots from those who couldn't tell a 80-04 apart from a 80-10 (when he'd told her there was no difference under the shiny new plating she had been thrilled).

But it wasn't his ability to recognize a scam or charm red heads that got him the job. Mechanic was just trying to suss out how he felt about working with people who weren't all there when a man and a woman, presumably the captain and first mate, burst in. The captain, after confirming Spike was a pilot, told him he could have the job if he could get them out of atmo in five minutes or less. Now that was the kind of interview Spike could get behind.

Course they hadn't been out in the black for ten minutes before their bloody seer came in screaming her head off about him being a vampire and he had the luck of finding the one crew in the whole sodding 'verse smart enough to listen to the crazy bint. The lot of them had tied him to a chair and had a meeting about what to do with him. Between Rainbow's and, for some reason, Seer's support plus the doctor confirming the blood in his pack was not of the human variety, they decided to let him stay on as pilot until they reached their next stop.

They didn't fool him though. Spike hadn't been the walking dead for almost six and a half centuries, minus that brief period in the early 2000's, to not recognize a Scooby Gang when he saw one. Then again, it'd been a long time since he'd hung around one of these pseudo-family groups. Might be a nice change, for a little while at least.