He's still in love with you. Can you believe it? After all these years he's still in love with you. He doesn't talk about you as much but that's because I cracked after the fifth month and told him that after you died he could look into getting you canonized but until then if he could just cool it on the Buffy rhetoric I'd really appreciate it. He wasn't so thrilled with me that week.
He's still in love with you, and you probably can't believe it because word on the street is you couldn't believe it when you two still hung out. If, you know, hung out is the appropriate verb to describe your relationship. Personally I think something along the lines of 'holocaust' would be more accurate but Clem was around here yesterday and he gave me his version, told me to go easy on you because Spike was a different guy back then and you had the whole moral saving-the-world high ground going for you. I listened to him, not for your sake and not for Spike's, but because generally speaking Clem knows what he's talking about. I'd just like to make that clear before I get underway here. It's not that I dislike you exactly, it's just that I don't like you either and I'm scared and when I'm scared I get hostile and susceptible to run-on sentences. Spike seems to think that's a trait of yours too, so try to see where I'm coming from.
He's still in love with you. Please don't laugh. It's not his fault and it's not funny anymore, if it ever was. Reason says he should have given up on you by now but that's Spike, right? If anything can be said about him it's that he's relentless.
I'm not sure you know who I am. My names Laurie—Lorraine Delaney if you're looking for formality. There's a small chance that Willow may have mentioned me but it's unlikely and I hope I'm not getting her in trouble by calling you like this but I don't really have a choice at this point.
Okay, look. When the Hellmouth closed and you headed off to sunny old Athens or Rome or wherever you went Spike headed up the coast to San Francisco. Dawn kept in touch with him, and Willow to a lesser degree, and when Willow came to San Francisco there was that power-out and we ended up getting stuck in an otherwise empty subway car together. I'd left home earlier that year and I'd been traveling around the country ever since and so when I met Willow I was essentially carrying everything I owned on my back and had roughly two bucks in my pocket. Anyway, we started talking and she's got that weird truth-dar thing and by the time the subway was running again I was being handed an address and told that this guy would give me a place to stay.
Yeah, I know it probably wasn't my best move. In my defense I think Willow had some subliminal spell thing going on because if I was in my right mind there's no way I would have agreed to living with some stranger named Spike, for christsake. Particularly a stranger dressed entirely in black whose body temperature adapts to his surroundings. Nifty.
Come to think of it Willow must have had some sort of spell going on because Spike seemed genuinely surprised when he heard himself telling me I could have the back room.
He told me later that he called Willow to ask her about it and she said she thought we'd be good for each other. What with me living in hostels since I left Detroit and sleeping in used car lots and Spike not leaving his apartment except to kill shit and get drunk she may have be right. Or, you know, horribly, desperately wrong depending on how you look at the current circumstances.
To be perfectly honest, when I first met him I thought he was gay. Yeah, okay, you don't have to laugh that hard. What was I supposed to think? It's San Francisco and a lesbian witch had just sent me to live with him. Plus he's got that hair and the coat and I mean, come on, you've seen him, he's totally pretty enough to be gay.
Calm down, it's way to early in the story for you to get all huffy. I'm not sleeping with him.
We get along. That's essentially what it comes down to. I've lived with him for two years and yeah it was awkward at first but the fact that Willow's spell made it impossible for either of us to try to get me to leave kind of eased the tension. Generally speaking we're both sarcastic enough so that neither of our feelings get hurt, our music taste overlaps, we both like Hunter S. Thompson, and we have the same taste in hangover food. It's not much, but in the first month that's what we went on.
This isn't coming out right. I'm trying to explain something to you but any eloquence I may have once possessed seems to have fled.
He rented When Harry Met Sally when I got sick and made me soup and held my hair back while I threw up in his toilet. He makes me breakfast and drops hints about getting my GED and applying to University of San Francisco or something in the area and comes looking for me to yell at me when I'm out to late. We've settled into a surprisingly domestic routine for a vampire and a runaway. But then there are the nights when I come home and find him passed out on the couch or in front of the door. When I have to pour a bucket of ice water over his head to rouse him and when those goddamn eyes of his get that look that would break the hardest hearts and when I know without question that he is thinking of you.
He taught me how to cheat at cards. I don't have a birth certificate, or a driver's license, or any other form of identification and I don't have the faintest idea what my social security number is and anyone who could attest to my identity is back in Detroit so I can't get a job. No job means no cash and while he has adamantly refused to let me pay the rent I try to appease my conscience by leaving the odd twenty dollar bill in his pocket. Anyway. We got bored one day and started playing cards, starting with Spit, which was a disaster because he won every time and just grinned and went,
"Vampire speed, pet. Dig it."
Eventually he showed me out to cheat at Blackjack to raise my morale and I could have sworn he looked proud when I beat him.
Trouble started last month when I mentioned the price in bus tickets going up. He was watching TV but he flicked it off and demanded to know what exactly that was supposed to mean and when I clarified that I'd be leaving soon he got that look that's usually reserved for you before he got pissed and started ranting about my fixation with perpetual motion.
I guess this is where I start to resent you because no matter how many times I try to tell him that it's not like this is permanent he's utterly and completely convinced that when people leave they don't come back. Ever. Anyway we started fighting and your name came up a couple times, well, many times, and he ended up storming out to some bar where he found some vamp trying to turn her boyfriend and I guess he did more beating than staking because she was unconscious and needless to say, without pulse, and he ended up being arrested for murder. Obviously the chip stopped him from escaping.
So that's why I'm calling you. Because he's in trouble and he needs you. When he called me from the station he told me to call Angel, something about a favor over some sort of fishing expedition, and I'm going to right after I hang up with you but I figured that now was the time to fuck Spike's pride and call you. Because it's been seven years and he still talks about you. Because I hear him sometimes, talking to you in his sleep. Because of his reaction when he overheard a bunch of vampires talking about killing the 'real' slayer, anger and amusement.
"She'd kick your asses, you bloody wankers," he said, before doing it himselfSo I'm asking you, although begging would be more precise, to help him. To fuck moral absolutes, call in the cavalry, and break him out. And, yes, okay, I love Spike but it's platonic and so for my sake and for his I'm asking for your help. Because he's not alright and because I think you may have loved him once. Because it's been seven years and he's never stopped loving you.
Because his trial is next Thursday at nine a.m. and the San Francisco court house is full of windows.