"Spikey? Oh, Spikey?" Angel's tone of voice was mocking as he called out to Spike. Muttering curses under his breath, Spike crawled out of his makeshift bed and began the walk to the tunnel entrance, stopping only to pull on his black leather pants. How the hell had Angel found him here so fast? Spike had been hoping for more time before Angel came a-calling to take Spike to task for bedding his woman. He had wanted enough time to try to figure out how to make it happen again.
Lighting a cigarette, Spike threw open the tunnel door to see Angel framed in the doorway. Angel looked... good. Pissed, but good. Black jeans, loose burgundy velvet shirt, hair mussed like he had also just crawled out of bed with Buffy himself.
"Yeah, you bloody poofter? You here for a reason?"
Fake cool, that was the plan. Angelus would have had some interesting punishments in mind if that had been Dru Spike had been with all alone, Dru who had come home looking like Buffy had. Of course, Angelus was long gone. This was Angel and anything he might do to Spike wouldn't hold a candle to anything the soul-man's old self might have done. Bleeding travesty, it was, the mess that a soul had made of a once perfect monster. Taking a deep breath, Spike blew out cigarette smoke at Angel and smirked as Angel drew back briefly.
Angel stepped in to the basement, as it were, of Spike's crypt and looked around. "Cozy," he said, as if Spike hadn't spoken. "How do you keep this place up, seeing how often you leave?"
Bit of a bite there, Spike reflected, but still controlled enough to be ignored. "Got myself a crypt-sitter as it were. Demon by the name of Clem."
"Yeah? You know, for all your big words about how much you love my woman, I think you've left her even more than I have." His voice was idle, almost disinterested. He was examining knickknacks like he didn't have a care in the world. He might have been talking about the weather, except for the occasionally shiver of fury that ran through Angel's words.
"Nah, mate," retorted Spike. "You and I are tied. Two for the both of us."
Angel continued on like Spike hadn't answered. "You know what excuse Buffy gave me for coming here, Spike? You know what excuse she gave for coming back smelling like you?" Angel was pacing casually threw the area, at time stopping to study some things in greater detail. He lingered at the pale blue sweater that Spike had kept through everything, fingering it as if he knew who it had belonged to.
"Haven't a clue. That she needed a good f-"
"Don't!" gritted out Angel through clenched teeth, interrupting him. "Don't use that word with her. Don't. Because I didn't come here to kill you, but if you push me, I will."
It had been a long time since anyone had accused Spike of being stupid. "Fair enough," he agreed carefully, making sure he said and did nothing that would inspire Angel to rip his head off. But then Spike looked at Angel, all stiff muscles and tight clenched wrath, and had a sudden, panicky thought. "You didn't hurt her, did you?"
Angel smiled then, not Angel's smile, and said, "Hurt her? No, I threw her against the wall and-"
"You didn't," Spike broke in flatly. "I would know."
"No, you're right. I didn't lay a finger on her," Angel said in that strangely calmly fierce voice. "I just asked her why she came. And what she told me was that she came here because you and she never had a chance to say good-bye."
Spike stiffened. Had she really said that? Was that just a good-bye tumble, some act from the past that she needed to get out of her system? It pissed him off to know that Angel could read every line of his body and knew that Spike had been rattled by his words. Angel was stalking like some hulking jungle cat through the crypt, almost behind Spike now, but Spike refused to turn around and give Angel the satisfaction of knowing he was making Spike even the smallest bit uneasy. Angelus he had known, and Angel, but this strange combination of both was something else entirely. What exactly was Angel these days?
"So why are you here? You already said it wasn't to kill me, so what's left, Angel? What else is there to say?" Spike knew that his voice fairly screamed of faked casualness, but it was the best he could do.
"Maybe," said Angel from directly behind him, much closer than Spike would have liked, "I didn't come here to talk at all. Maybe I didn't get what I wanted from Buffy." His hand, larger really than Spike remembered, closed over Spike's shoulder and the younger vampire felt a shiver go through him. What the hell was Angel about, playing these games? He stayed as still as possible under Angel's hand, caught by the dual facts that not only did he refuse to beat on Buffy's boy, he was also halfway to liking the feel of Angel this near again, Angel with no intent to harm him. The grip tightened some and Spike mentally adjusted his thinking. No intent to kill him. They hadn't really covered the issue of harm.
"Maybe," Angel breathed in his ear, "I remembered that you and I never got a real good-bye either."
No longer able to stop himself, Spike turned to meet Angel's eyes. They had gone vampire yellow, a level of control over the change that Spike hadn't realized that Angel could do. For a long time, the two vampires only stared at each other, neither moving, all the little mimics of humanity they wore around humans totally banished. They could have been statues in a wax museum. An awfully strange wax museum, Spike reflected, given their poses, but statues nonetheless. At long last, Angel broke the tableau. With a glint of fang, he lowered his mouth towards Spike's neck. With a shudder of desire, fear, acceptance, who knew, Spike allowed the touch for a moment, relished the cool, hard, wetness of Angel's mouth on his skin, the pressure of it. It was only when he felt the sharp bite of Angel's fangs into his flesh that he pushed the other vampire away, shaken, confused, turned-on.
"No," Spike said hoarsely, "not that way." And he pulled Angel towards him, kissing him deeply for the first time in nearly a century.
For one dizzying minute, it was like traveling into the past. They had been here before, Spike and Angel had, and for the first touch of Spike's lips on his own, Angel forgot where and when he was and just kissed Spike back, letting himself get lost in the moment, in the feeling of everything he had denied himself for so long. Of course, back then, it had never been Spike who would have started the kiss, but this was a hundred years later and Angel realized he no longer cared who kissed and who was kissed. Spike had gotten better at kissing in the last hundred years, or maybe Angel had just forgotten what it was like to kiss him, but now he wanted to just sink into the kiss and never come out again. Spike tasted of smoke, old blood, stale beer, and Buffy. For one moment, the jealousy swamped him, and he deepened the kiss, trying to suck the taste of her out of Spike's mouth. He didn't know what he was more jealous of. Why had he come here again, starting something that had been dead and buried for decades. With a low snarl, he pulled back from Spike, breaking the kiss.
Spike had at first grabbed Angel back to keep the kiss going but then reality seemed to come back to him as well and he let Angel go without a protest. Spike was trying to play things cool, but Angel's sharp eyes had seen his hand shake as he brought his almost forgotten cigarette back to his lips. He drew in a smoke-filled breath, held it and then blew it back out carefully before speaking. "So was that in the nature of revenge, then, mate? Cause I think that part of our lives is very much over."
Angel floundered, at a brief loss for words. "I... don't know. What reason did Buffy give you?"
"I'm thinking that's between me and the lady." Cold voice there, interesting. Angel could actually start to believe that maybe Spike did care for Buffy, in the strange way that only he was capable of. Certainly shy reticence was not his normal mode of behavior.
Carefully, Angel studied Spike. The vampire was tense, his muscles looking as hard as stone, his eyes fixed carefully on Angel's hands, trying to judge the level of threat Angel presented. Spike was only half dressed, and Angel spent a moment studying the new tattoos with interest, noting with humor that the longer he stared, the more uncomfortable Spike looked. "You really love her, don't you?"
Spike looked up, some unreadable emotion in his eyes. "Yeah, I do. So what exactly is it that you're jealous about, Angel? That I had her when you can't, or that she had me when you won't?"
Angel ran his hand over the sweater. Buffy's, and no doubt about it. Spike had always been one for taking trophies. The feel of it under his hand was soft, almost unfamiliar. Spike must have had it for quite some time, Angel thought. She wasn't much of one for softness these days, life and death had made her harder. The years change everyone. They had even changed him.
"I can have her," he whispered, somehow not believing he was telling Spike of all people this, when he had never told anyone else. "Since I came back, I've been able to. I just haven't."