Which he did.

Have work.

In Parts and Service.

Problem was, Vinnie was waiting for Spike in Parts and Service once he'd dealt with the latest Fred, presumably a bear.

And Vinnie wouldn't shut up.

If Spike thought sharing space with the Three Stooges minus One was irritating, sharing space with Vinnie was like sharing a stuck elevator with Dawn after two bags of Skittles washed down with Mountain Dew.

Only instead of voluntary sugar poisoning, Vinnie brought to the table endless enthusiasm and a voice that cracked six different directions all at once – he was, after all, fourteen.

Even for ghosts, it seemed, hormones happen.

He followed Spike everywhere.

Enthusing.

Beans, in the form of a package of extra hot wasabi edamame from the employee lounge vending machine spat or tossed, didn't send the kid packing.

Nor did salt, sea or table.

Thumb waggling? Forget it!

Some day in the future, Spike would track down the assholes who'd created these little snippets of folklore and hire something to beat them up while he watched laughing. Were they already dead, he'd take the time to make it personal by pissing on their graves.

It got so bad that at one point Spike, while trying to figure out how to re-connect the Mangle's torso with the rest of the Mangle, seriously considered breaking silence with Buffy and calling her house from work. With any luck, Dawn would answer and he'd convince her to come down because he knew what the sight of a girl did to the male psyche at the age of fourteen because he'd once witnessed in person what happened when a pretty young miss with big blue eyes and dark curls once sat down beside a lad of fourteen… who was writing things down in his commonplace book… at a garden party… to enjoy a bit of tea and seedcake… and smiled at him… causing this extremely gallant but socially inept young man in his first pair of real long trousers and whom had shaved for the very first time that morning to go glasses down, spots and all, onto the lawn in a dead faint... In other words: when fanny approaches, silence ensues.

Problem was, as soon as Vinnie went silent, Dawn would feel obligated to fill the gap, landing Spike right back in the hole he was trying to climb out of.

Anyway, bad idea: Dawn had no business roaming the streets of Sunnydale alone because he didn't have time to go fetch her… besides, what if Buffy picked up?

(Not that Spike would mind. He was nothing like that stupid, spotty four-eyed little git of fourteen he'd heard of… He'd be all manly business-like… oh yeah! Give her a lead or… something… or other… maybe not even say a word, just hang up… leave her wondering what the hell was going on… did she miss him? At all?)

(Shut up, William.)

"Like, did you know that Mags designed these two?"

"Huh?" Spike looked up blankly from sorting bits and bobs of his wedding gift to the Mr. and Mrs. Riley Finns of Ass-end Nowhere, South America. Vincent was now sitting next to the Mangle's remains on the workbench, drumming his sneakered heels on the storage drawers beneath. "Two? Wotcha mean, two?"

"You didn't know this is two different units all mixed up?" The boy was bouncing up and down in excitement. "The Mangle was a girl fox, so that Foxy the Pirate would have a sister…. ummmmmmmm, no, a girlfriend… mumble mumble mumble." Yellow eyes paused, blushing red as his hair, "They were gonna be pirates together – but she designed Foxy first."

"You don't say." There was a thud from out in the passageway. Spike glanced towards the source of the noise. Freddy had tipped over again and was busy righting itself with slightly more success than a flipped turtle. Whatever it was that made all of them go weird at midnight was easily distracted – all he'd had to do to keep the big fuzzy dead mouse smelling lumps out from underfoot was toss a handful of random change and small candies he'd scrounged from between the cushions of the beat up couch in the employee lounge in the in their paths. The stupid things had spent the last hour fruitlessly trying to pick candy and coins up with their big spongy fingers. Chica was more of a challenge until Spike locked the kitchen door before it could get at the expensive pots and pans (and jars of pickled peppers) before handing it the old saucepan and lid he'd fished from a nearby dumpster – the experience of spending a better part of two centuries keeping an insomniacal Dru safely occupied during daylight hours so that he could sleep undisturbed had not been wasted in this kiddie madhouse!

Vincent continued, "We, I mean, people used to be real mean to her – she never talked at school, and wore the same dress in Kindergarten. She'd get off our school bus at the housing projects mumblemumblemumble sometimes she'd have a black eye or mumblemumblemumble."

"What the… Speak up, kid!" NOT that Spike was actually listening to all this blather – he had better things to concentrate on.

"I SAID, sometimes…. Sometimes… she'd smell… like, really bad." Vinnie looked down at his hands as they turned a large pirate-style hook over and over, feet pounding harder, adding, "We were like really-really mean to her until one day when we were all in the fourth grade one of the guys, Sean, took her little notebook away from her and threw it down the storm drain on the way home from school and she started crying and ran away and I felt really-really-really bad because I didn't think the other guys were gonna be THAT mean so I climbed down and got it out of there for her and it was open and she was like, really-really-really good at drawing so I showed dad and he showed them to Mr. Henry the guy who made these and he really-really-REALLY liked them but since they were Maggie's drawings we had to ask permission so me and dad took the little notebook to the housing project and we found where Maggie lived and it was really-really dirty and smelled bad, like beer and ashtrays and diapers and old feet and there were babies everywhere and they were dirty, too, and there was trash all over the place, and her mom was this big fat woman who wouldn't get off the couch and her mom's skinny boyfriend yelled for Maggie to come the Hell (sorry, mom says that's a bad word but that's what he said) out and get her goddamned (oops, sorry!) stupid book or he'd beat her ass (sorry that's another bad word but he said it!) so dad said that we'd come later at a better time…

"You can breathe if you want to, kid." Spike stared at Vinnie who was now rocking back and forth on the workbench. Somewhere behind the chip William dithered, not quite sure what to make of any of this. "Anyway, what's this got to do with this?" He gestured at what lay on the workbench.

Though a ghost, Vinnie took a deep breath anyway, mumbling, "We never went back. Dad had me invite Maggie to "Foxy's Pirate Pizzaria – only it wasn't Foxy's then - we needed a new lead character. He liked her fox drawing – but when he offered to pay her for it, Mags said "No." She was afraid her mom's boyfriend Cliff would take the money away and buy drugs with it." He suddenly looked up into the exposed rafters overhead and waved. Spike looked up, Maggie was perched catlike along one of the beams among the shadows. Solomnly she waved back, leather jacket draped across another beam. "So Mr. Henry gave her a job at the workshop in his garage and she helped take care of his kids – once a week we'd all go to some store and buy her new clothes and art stuff, but we'd have to leave it all at Mr. Henry's house because her mom would get mad because she didn't believe in charity."

A drift of dust fell between them. Spike looked up. Maggie was carefully stepping from beam to beam, arms out like the wings of a bird. "And she designed both of these? Sorry mate, but all I see is one thing with two heads."

"Three."

"Sorry, two."

"No, see that ball there?" Vinnie pointed, "Pick it up."

Spike picked up the lumpy looking metal ball patchily covered in stained black and pink fun fur and shook it, "Still don't see it."

"Throw it. At the wall. Hard."

Spike gave the thing a slight heft like a cricket ball before hurling it at one of the few walls in the place that wasn't covered in steel shelving or posters.

There was a noise like a bottle rocket when the thing, cracking the plaster and suddenly expanding into a much larger cartoon bull's head, complete with debonair little horns and a pencil-thin 'stache.

"Bloody hell, that's amazin' – she… she… That lit'l girl designed it to do that?"

"Nope, the Mangle, Margarita, and this guy were prototypes!" Vinnie slipped off of the workbench and joined Spike where he stood staring down at the head – "Mr. Henry came up with the expand-0-skeleton stuff, but Mags created the character – Guillermo the Bull – dad wanted to go portable with an authentic Mexican food truck complete with cool Mariachi music that we could take to festivals! Same thing with the bodies –when assembled, you can store it in a suitcase, arms, legs, hands, maracas, whatever – it all fits! Add a power unit, smack it on something hard and wow, you got an animatronic ready to party wherever you want!" The boy gestured to Maggie, as she picked her way down from the rafters along the tops of the shelves, before peering suspiciously at Spike from behind Vinnie's shoulder. "We're like, so glad you like, decided to come put all of us back together – I thought we were all headed for the dumpster – even the little ones. Did Mr. Henry send you?"

Spike paused, thinking fast.

It wasn't like the kid could actually DO something, or much of something about it if he found out what Spike had in mind for the things on the workbench. Soddin' hell, he was a GHOST – at best all he could expect was another newspaper assault or whatever!

Anyway, the kid knew things about the contraptions that weren't in the manual – might as well let him think what he wanted until Spike could at least get one if not both devices into a packing crate headed to South America. "Yeah, right." He said, not noticing the large yellow bunny as it paused in the doorway and stared at him before padding softly away, a little too fluidly for an animatronic.