They were in the cathedral rectory. A fan sat in the corner, its blades spinning feebly. It barely unsettled the wafer thin pages of the open bible in the middle of a huge oak desk.

Vicious sat languorously in the seat behind it, his long legs perched on the corner crossed at the ankles.

A chorus of angelic voices filtered through the late afternoon air. The cathedral's choir-boys were practicing in the main atrium, their voices rising to the rafters as their hymn reached its peak.

Even after the choir-boys left, their carefree laughter and quickly thudding footsteps bouncing of the walls, their last heart-wrenching notes of hope, despair and resurrection resounded through the hollow cathedral like a distant bell.

If any of this affected Vicious at all, he did not show it. His dead gray eyes stared out at the setting sun, its dying orange rays shone through the window, catching in his silver hair like a blood red halo.

And Mao Yenrai's corpse perched precariously on a bench lining the wall, fixing her with its blank stare.

Cuffed to the chair opposite Vicious, Faye barely breathed. The elusive yet penetrating smell of Mao's blood was consuming and unbearable. She struggled for the words that would describe it, thinking that writers didn't know what they were talking about when they called it 'coppery'. Coppery had a warm, burnished, wholesome feeling one finds in the kitchen. A REAL kitchen.

The blood just made her gag. She sucked her lower lip in, pinching it with her teeth to distract herself.

Suddenly she found Vicious contemplating her intently. His eyes both mysterious and penetrating.

"You seemed to recognize me when we first met." he stated in a silent question, his eyes pinning her down like a bug.

"I've heard of you." Faye swallowed. "From others."

"What doyou know of him?"

"Nothing." she confessed. And then, out of agitation she added: "He's just some carefree, careless bum I have to work with." She had been glancing at the clock ticking patiently on the wall, thinking how like that lunkhead to come late.

"Do you always go around with your eyes closed?" he asked then, his tone condescending and his eyes far away. It seemed that he had said this to somebody else a long time ago.

"I'm a thief. Of course I don't."

He was looking steadily out the window as she said this, and her words made him smile slightly. She wouldn't realize till later what Vicious had known: that for all of Spike's misgivings about thieves, he was the biggest one among them.

Apparently filling up time until Spike arrived, Vicious leaned forward, his voice seemed rusty from disuse as he began to make her understand who Spike Spiegel Lunkhead was. .

"Don't make the same mistake I did of underestimating him." he confided in a sibilant whisper. He had taken a seat next to her now, his dead eyes glancing over her breasts with nothing more than to notice that they were there. "For all intents and purposes, he was a skilled fighter, a keen diplomat: the best man you could have watching your back."

The crocodile smile dropped from his face as he remembered the past. His eyes were a dull, wistful gray as he smiled ruefully.

"He was an angel, but more importantly: a demon hungering for blood and freedom. The only thing holding him down was an angel's unswerving loyalty. You know to whom that was, don't you?"

Laughing at her silent apprehension, he clued her in by pointing exaggeratedly at Mao Yenrai's corpse. It was propped against the wall, silently sitting in on their discussion. Faye smelt the rot, heard the flies buzzing around it with rising nausea.

"What has he got to do with anything?" she asked feebly, disliking how close Vicious was right now. The tickle of his long silver hair along her neck, but most of all, the evil grin on his face as he continued whispering in her ear like the Serpent in Paradise.

Faye listened with increasing incredulity as he disclosed to her a whole criminal underground world that Spike and Vicious had not only inhabited, but literally dominated in service of an adoptive father that sat quietly decomposing a few feet away.

It did not fit that lounge-happy idiot. She could see his lanky form now, stretched across the yellow couch like a cat in a sliver of sunshine. Blissful, ignorant and lazy.

She imagined in her head a Spike Spiegel that was somewhat dingy, alcoholic and manic all at once for what he had apparently done for the syndicate. Not that fuzzy-haired joker with whom she had made it a daily ritual to annoy and mooch off of.

"Nobody could touch Mao while Spike was there." Vicious continued inexorably. "He was Mao's fangs. But with no personal agenda, that loyalty means nothing.

"I wanted to take over the syndicate, but I couldn't afford to lose Spike's followers by killing him overtly: I had to divert his loyalty elsewhere. Give him his freedom, so to speak." He looked at her hungrily then, silently laughing at something funny.

"You don't immediately strike me as his type." he stated almost conversationally, lifting a long finger to pull back a shard of hair from her face. She was pale, shaking and looked slightly sickly. Dead bodies tended to do that to people. It made her look beautiful. He studied her like one does an enigma, neither of them moving or looking away. "But I like you. You're every bit as helpless as Julia was, but there's something wild and gamine there."

"Julia?" she echoed stupidly, grabbing onto that name like a cat treading water.

"Yes." he confirmed absently, tapping his finger thoughtfully on his katana. "She was my secret weapon. The one thing that would make Spike leave the syndicate, and ultimately Mao Yenrai."

"Who was she?" she asked, her mouth dry. The buzzing flies and the smell were all that she could sense right now. Vicious was a blurred reflection on the other side of the looking glass.

He smiled bleakly. "She was supposed to be my Delilah. The one to weaken and destroy him." and then his smile tightened, along with his fist around the hilt of his katana. "But she turned out to be Helen of Troy, the woman who weakened an empire. So like a woman to fall in love with her target."

Faye barely registered the names as she threw up all over his shoes. She felt the tension drain from her soon after, and it made her feel better to know Vicious would be facing Spike down smelling like puke.

888

"Feeling better?" he asked conversationally as she finished sipping the water and cleaning her face. To her chagrin, his shoes and pants were back to being spotless and he was back to being pristinely ominous again.

As she was cuffed again, she noticed Mao Yenrai's absence with a sigh of relief. The color had returned to her face, and she was feeling irritable. Her stomach growled.

"If you just want Spike, why do I have to be here?" she asked somewhat petulantly, dreading his continuation of a story that wasn't going to have a happy ending.

He looked at her then, a queer half-smile on his face that reminded her so much of Spike that moment.

"Yes." he stated after a long while, "I really do like you."

"Enough to let me go?" she asked with a sweet smile.

"That wasn't what I meant." he replied with uncharacteristic lightheartedness.

She remained silent, mulling over the sudden change over Vicious. His sudden friendliness was unsettling, and sad.

"You remind me of Spike." he confided then, his expression grave, sad and reminiscent.

"Is that why you're dragging him back here? For a syndicate reunion?" she demanded, staring him full in the face. "He's left the syndicate, isn't that what you wanted?"

"There are binds to the life we lead." he murmured grimly, his manner suddenly businesslike and alert. "It affects Spike more than you will ever know, and no matter how hard you try - he will always be half the man he ever was. You should thank me now for putting him out of his misery."

The door opened then, and one of his underlings strode in and bowed politely. "He's arrived, sir."

"I know." Vicious replied eagerly, the mirthless smile returning to his face. "Oh, and Miss Valentine..."

She turned to him reluctantly.

"When you bend over his dying body to kiss him goodbye, remember to look into his right eye. His left eye's mechanical and doesn't register colors." He grabbed her face then and forced her to look at him. "You do want him to see the face of his so-called life in its every vibrant shade and color before he dies, don't you?"

"He might not have to if you go to Hell first."

He smiled bleakly. "I'm already there."

888

Despite Vicious' painfully detailed narrative, it all seemed like a big misunderstanding. Especially when she remembered the half-affectionate warmth in his eyes when Spike had jokingly told her that he would come. She hadn't fully understood the extent of how Spike dealt with danger until that day.

Self-centred Faye was just jubilated that somebody would help her get out of this mess she stuffed herself into again. She didn't even bother to stifle the twitter in her heart when she saw Spike's cocky smirk on the screen.

That was until she finally met the syndicate Spike. Spike in a ratty grey trenchcoat with the look of stillness in his eyes. He didn't even bother negotiating or putting his gun up, or scratching that thick head of his with a sheepish grin and saying: "Well, looks like I came to the wrong party..."

He just pulled the trigger.

The case of mistaken identity theory she had conjured up crashed around her like the cathedral window.

Spike didn't come to negotiate, and Vicious sure as hell wasn't expecting him to. What followed was a frenzy of hate and bloodshed, the sound of gunfire and explosions followed her out into the cathedral parking lot as she looked for her Redtail.

It was no dream.

The words spun in her head as she feverishly undid her handcuffs and S.O.Sed Jet. They froze in her mind as she heard a crash and turned in time to watch Spike's body plummet to the ground.

Even as she bent over him to check for his vital signs, she couldn't help but close his left eye with one bloodied hand and pray to his open one to live through this.

She would never kiss him goodbye.