"Spike Maneggi"

Part Three: Flashes

"Here."

Spike looked up from the crimson hole in his shoulder. Angel was holding a damp cloth out to him.

They were sitting in the living room of Giles' deserted house. Willow had had a spare key that Giles had left her in case of emergencies. A Slayer acting out of character seemed to be quite some emergency. Especially when she had it in for him even more than she usually did.

"Keep some pressure on it," Angel instructed, concern clear in his tone. Spike found himself pleased to hear it there. "I'll just go and find some tweezers. For the splinters."

"Thanks."

He dabbed warily at the wound, trying not wince. Xander and Willow were in the bathroom, chaining Buffy to the bath tub, but Willow appeared at the doorway just as he let a small expression of frustrated anguish slip.

"Here, let me do that," she said instantly, dashing across the room and dropping down next him where he perched on the coffee table. He let her take hold of the fold of cloth and take care of the wound, just glad not to have to deal with it.

The wait for someone else to come back into the room was glorious and agonising at the same time. Willow's curious lavendery scent and her soft, tentative fingers were close, itchingly close to him, as she tended the stab wound with an expression of incredible distress and concentration.

"Pet," he murmured, meaning to say something reassuring. Her eyes lifted instantly.

There was barely a pause before he felt the shocking warm, wet pressure of her tiny, curved mouth on his. He would have jumped from surprise if he hadn't been stunned frozen. Almost as soon as he began to register what was going on, she let go.

"Here. Tweezers," Angel said, coming back suddenly. Spike hated him for it.

"Can I?" Willow asked Angel, with a look of hopeful expectancy. He regarded her for a moment, before passing her the tweezers and fetching her a thin, yellowed book from under a crystal ball on Giles' mantle piece.

"There should be a numbing spell in there somewhere," he said kindly. "I've left Xander guarding the Slayer."

Spike narrowed his eyes.

"Why d'you keep doing that?" he asked Angel. "Callin' Summers 'the Slayer'?"

One side of Angel's mouth quirked up. "I was under the impression that that was what she was, Spike."

Spike didn't push it. Instead, he regarded the embroidery in Willow's shirt sleeve, plucking absently at it as her hand lay across his leg. He felt Angel's eyes on him, and withdrew his hand, looking up.

"Why are you 'ere?" he snapped suddenly. "Thought you were all sun-set heading. Figured it was a no-look-back deal…"

Angel sighed. "It was. It was meant to be. The truth is, I came back here for you, Spike."

He felt Willow tense beside him, and he glanced up, to see her watching Angel, even as she continued to dab lightly at the puncture hole. The pain had subsided considerably.

"Little ol' me?" he repeated sceptically. "No offence, Peaches, but you've never really seemed that into—"

"Not like that, you idiot," Angel retorted testily, wrinkling his nose. "No. I've come back for something else. To warn you."

Willow had stopped any pretence of cleansing the injury, and having wrapped his shoulder tightly in a clean white bandage, turned on the table to stare, as he was, at Angel. Her fingers caught in cuff of Spike's sleeve and nipped the leather, and when he noticed, it didn't take him very long to decide to take Willow's hand firmly in his. She beamed at him, and he felt a bizarre surge of warmth in his throat.

"You're in danger, Spike," Angel said stiffly, carefully avoiding looking at their entwined fingers. "I've heard some things, in L.A. Underground. There's a rumour in the demon world that someone called Red Andrews is looking for you."

Spike looked blankly at him.

"Who?"

"Red Andrews."

Spike closed his eyes. "Yes, thank you, you great over-grown bat. I know her name. But who the hell is she? What does she want with yours-truly?"

Angle looked at his feet.

"I'm not… exactly clear on the finer points. I just thought I better get here."

Spike shook his head. "And a lot of help that's going to be," he sighed.

"Look, how I handled this isn't the point, Spike," Angel said brusquely. "There's something about Andrews you need to hear… She's… well, from what I've heard she's pretty much… completely insane."

Willow's eyebrows rose.

"Insane?"

Angel glanced towards the door and windows, as though expecting this woman to come crashing through one of them and start slaughtering them all any second, before he leant in conspiratorially. "From what I've heard, she's what you might call a… homicidal lunatic. And this is coming from people who aren't exactly your model citizens. Stay out of her way, Spike."

"You think I'm goin' to go seekin' this bint out?" Spike hissed. "I know I like a good bit o' violence from time to time, but I'm not completely stark-raving. Gimme a little credit, Old Man."

Angel sighed. "I do. More than you know, Spike."

Bizarrely, Angel lifted his hand and ruffled Spike's platinum hair. Even more bizarrely, Spike didn't mind. He felt the corners of his mouth in the shadow of a smile, before he suddenly got an extremely vivid mental image of the two of them and Willow, and he leapt to his feet, sweeping his hand back to flatten his hair.

"Look," Angel said gently, fixing his eyes on Spike even as he tried to avoid his gaze. "It's all right, Spike. I know we haven't always seen eye-to-eye… I mean I blame myself for the way our relationship's turned out—"

"'The way our relationship's turned out'" Spike repeated incredulously, watching as Angel's eyebrows shot up in surprise at his outburst. "Somethin' is not right here, Angel. Why can't you bunch of—"

Willow coughed gently, and Spike's eyes flew to her. Some of his confusion dwindled, and a soft sort of understanding ghosted across the edge of his mind.

"Spike," she muttered. "Maybe you should give Angel a chance. He did come all the way down here to try and help."

That made sense. Willow's words had always convinced him better than anyone else's. And Angel had come all the way from wherever he was…

However much Spike wanted to punch Angel square in his self-righteous face, and then kick him very soundly in the balls, he couldn't. He just couldn't. A cloud of disgruntled affection swept down on him, and before he knew it he'd pulled Angel into a sharp, infinitely masculine hug and released him as quickly as possible, coughing.

The hard, metallic scraping of a key in the lock of Giles' door sounded, and Spike, throwing a strangled, confused short of look at Angel, crossed the room, vaulting the back of the couch and hauling open the door. Giles blinked at Spike, his bag falling somewhat numbly to the ground, then, to everyone's immense amazement, threw his arms around Spike's waist and hugged him tightly.

Spike could not believe that this day could get any weirder.

"Willow," Spike hissed, partly out of urgency but partly because Giles' grip on him was crushing his stomach to much that he'd have been well and truly buggered had he needed to breathe. "I think I need to talk to you. Now."

&

"What in the name of all tha's evil and unholy is goin' on around here?" Spike cried, as soon as he and Willow had set foot in Giles' bedroom and Willow had closed the door quietly behind them.

Willow smiled gently. "I think you're over reacting," she said sweetly, and his stomach bubbled. "They've just missed you."

Spike knew that something about that statement wasn't right. Something about it felt incredibly wrong.

"But Giles isn't usually tha'… cuddly…" Spike said slowly, searching his mind desperately. That wasn't the route of his anxiety. He'd felt uneasy around Angel a minute ago, and now… with Giles… He couldn't concentrate properly when Willow was rubbing his back like that, and murmuring something soothing and incoherent into his ear warmly. The kind of warmly that made everything else warm too.

Abruptly he turned around, his worry over Giles and Angel evaporating. Instead there was a different sense of unease: Willow was closer than she ordinarily was. But she also wasn't. How was it that she could also be deliciously out of reach and be perfectly accessible at the same time?

"Spike…" she muttered, and it shifted to the Willow being too close and hovered there. It was wrong, wasn't it? But… wrong? It felt right. Easy, simple, like they'd been standing this close to each other for years. No, wait… it was wrong.

Well… wrong was what he did, wasn't it? Hello, evil.

Slowly, Spike hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and hovered his mouth above hers, every millimetre of hot air between his lips and hers feeling palpable and solid. He didn't want to kiss her. He wanted her to do it, wanted to know that it was she who had bridged that tiny, insurmountable gap.

"Spike, I think—" Willow muttered, and he felt her breath ghost across his bottom lip.

"And therein," he interrupted, "lies your problem." He stepped closer. "You. Think. Too. Much," he breathed, his face so close to hers that his view of her mouth was blurred.

There was a small, tentative knock on the bathroom door, and Willow jerked violently away from him. Caught between a smirk and annoyance, Spike just touched Willow's shoulder to calm her and smiled gently.

"Come in."

Giles poked his head around the door, glasses in hand.

"Er… sorry… but… Spike, can I talk to you, please?"

"Yeah, Rupe, hold on. I'm comin'," he said tiredly.

Giles disappeared from view, and the vampire made to follow him, but before he left her, Spike gave Willow a reassuring smile and kissed her softly on the cheek.

"Wills, love. Go see to the Slayer. If she looks like she might come around, see if you can trap her or… knock her out of something. Put all tha' juicy magic goodness to use, all right?"

Her beautiful little mouth curved softly and her eyes went all dark and hungry-looking. Sometimes he thought he had to be the most patient vampire in any number of worlds on top of any number of Hellmouths as he thumbed her bottom lip and wondered why he couldn't just have her now, here, please.

Angel was stood next the couch with his hand resting on Giles' shoulder when Spike entered. For the briefest glimpse of a second, Spike's fingers twitched towards the Watcher's hair, as though about to ruffle it, but then the impulse was gone, and Spike shook his head to clear it.

"Problem?" Angel asked quietly, who'd been watching him. Spike glanced at Giles, who was tapping his glasses against the coffee table as he drummed his fingers impatiently across the open pages of a book on his lap, engrossed. Spike lowered his voice.

"Somethin's not righ', Angel," he whispered. "I keep gettin'… I don' know. Flashes."

"Flashes o' wha'?" Giles piped up. Spike frowned.

"There's a 't' in 'what'."

"There's a 't' in 'shut up', an' all, William," Giles retorted stubbornly, looking up.

"Don't you speak to Spike like that," Angel said quickly. "Go upstairs. Now, please."

Giles glared at them both, but snapped the book shut and marched across the room, bounding up the stairs as noisily as possible.

"He's really startin' to get on my wick," Spike groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "What were we sayin'?"

"You keep getting… flashes?"

"Flashes of what?" Angel and Spike looked up as Xander came in from the other room. "Willow's working some kind of sleepier-than-thou spell on Buff, so she'll be a minute." He fixed Spike with a piecing stare. "She seemed pretty happy. Apparently you've been a 'perfect gentleman' with her. She's all… swoony. Giles up stairs?"

Spike couldn't help but smirk appreciatively, but apparently Angel didn't miss the significance of Xander's demeanour.

"You should be careful there," he said quietly, as soon as Xander had disappeared after the Watcher. "I think Xand's getting a little too… attached to you."

Spike snorted. "Xander? I don' think so. Not when I've got my li'l Willow tree."

He felt Angel's gaze burning into the side of his face, and looked up, trying not to blush.

"You want to be careful there as well," Angel said, but with a lop-sided grin. "She's way too perfect."

Spike nodded. "She is, i'n't she?" he replied dreamily, grinning.

"Wonder what she'd doing with a schmuck like you," Angel joked, sitting down on the couch. Spike sat, slowly.

"No clue," he said dimly. "I'm not lookin' any gift horses anywhere, though. I'm too lucky. Don' wan' to ruin it."

Angel smiled knowingly. "So. These flashes?"

Spike shook his head, pulling his packet of cigarettes out and lighting up. A plume of blue smoke furled upwards towards the upper level. "I don' know. It's like… I'm fine one minute, everythin' seems fine. Be'er than fine, if Wills there," he chuckled. "Then suddenly everythin' feels like it doesn't fit. Square peg, round hole type deal. Like a secon' ago, went to bat Giles 'round the 'ead, and couldn't. Didn' feel righ'."

Angel considered it for a moment. "Well… he is getting a little old for that, now."

Spike shook his head again. "Tha's not it. Never normally stops me. Somethin' else is going on, and I need to find out wha' it is. It's like I'm not where I'm mean' to be, y'know?" He took a long drag from the cigarette, and caught Angel looking disapproving. "Wha'?" he asked, through the smoke.

"You should really quit," Angel said.

"Oh, not this again! It's not like it's doin' me any harm!"

"You've got other people to consider. Willow, Giles—"

"Oh, please. I never do it around them."

"Not the point, Spike, you're setting a bad example."

"Hmmm."

There were a few short, sharp raps on the door. Spike, still glaring half-heartedly – he knew he was right, really – at Angel, got up, cigarette stubbornly between his teeth, and prowled around the couch to get to the door.

Standing on the other side in a navy-blue pleated skirt, a white sweater and a pair of cowboy boots with silver buckles which glinted in the moonlight, was a short, red-haired woman with a leather satchel, a wide smile, and a British accent.

"Hullo. I'm looking for Rupert Giles – I'm from the Watcher's Council. Name's Red Andrews. He about?"

Slowly, Spike lifted his hand, frowning, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. His eyes still on Andrew's face, he called back over his shoulder.

"Hey, Ange. Is this that psychopath you were on abou'?"

Red Andrews frowned, and opened her mouth, but before any more could be said, there was a massive screaming crash from the direction of the bathroom, and Spike wheeled around, coat spinning out behind him.

"Willow!"

&