Roman Holiday
May. 25th, 2004 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Around the time of "The Girl in Question," I remember expressing my dissatisfaction with how the whole Angel/Buffy/Spike triangle had been resolved on the AtS series. I don't recall the exact context, but I remember writing to
azdak that I'd have to "phrase my answer [to what I might have liked to have seen instead of the whole ridiculous "Immortal" scenario] in the form of a fanfic." And so, here it is. Basically, Angel and Spike... talk.
An interlude set during "The Girl in Question." Angel and Spike have met with the W&H Signora, and are waiting to do the ransom exchange.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"What are you doing?"
Spike leaned backward as he called this out. He was near bored to tears with hanging around the piazza himself--waiting for the Roman mafia to show up certainly wasn't as glamorous as as those pistol-blazing mobster pictures made it look--but now Angel had gone and wandered off on his own, into a dark alley off the main square, from the looks of it. From his vantage point by the piazza's decorative fountain, Spike could see that Angel was bent over a pile of boxes, crouching down.
He emerged from the darkness a moment later with, of all things, a baby.
"It must have been abandoned," Angel said wonderingly as he approached, picking bits of rubbish from the child's dirty covering, a loosely wound blanket. He rewrapped the blanket gently, hoisted the child to his shoulder.
Spike gaped at him. Angel holding a baby. Well, there's a picture. It took him a moment to find something to say about this.
"And what do you think you are? Foundlings Society?"
"It's been abandoned," Angel repeated. "We can't just leave it here." He glowered back at Spike, one large hand cradling the infant's tiny head, holding in such a way that his chin and shoulders seemed to curve around the baby's body, sheltering it.
Portrait of Cro Magnon with Child, Spike thought to himself. You have got to be joking.
"Why not leave it here?" he insisted. "What's it gonna do, run off? We've already got a job on." He hefted the ransom bag he was carrying for emphasis. Demon don's head to pick up. Certainly not getting fresher. "Put the kid back, and we'll come fetch it later."
"Are you out of your mind?" Angel ground out. "I can't leave some helpess child lying in an alley. A dog could come along, or... or someone drunk riding a Vespa. What if--"
"Oh, whatever, brilliant, let's take on another mission of mercy," Spike muttered darkly, realizing that the cause was already lost. The old man wasn't going to budge, and he was already tired of arguing. Not as if his temper had been in such great shape to start with--the night had been shaping up badly since they'd arrived and had only gotten worse, intrigues and frustrations and runarounds and slammed apartment doors. He blew out an annoyed sigh, shifted the bag in his hand. "You know, we've still got that head to think of. Much as I'd love to help you maintain your hero credentials on a whole other continent, we can't spend the whole night tracking down the polizia so you can play your fantasy version of Two Vamps and a Ba--"
"Aha!" Angel pointed with his free hand, triumphant. "I knew you could speak Italian. You'd never spend time anywhere you didn't know how to order drinks."
Spike made a face. Changing the subject, nice going, wanker. "So I've picked up a word or two on the travels, so what."
"You know you're not fooling anyone with that undereducated act, William." Angel offered an unpleasant grin while bouncing the child lightly on his shoulder, an incongruous picture to say the least. "I could smell the university on you when Dru brought you home."
"And I could smell a farm boy trying to impress all over you, what's your point?" Spike fired back testily, then abruptly stepped off curb to begin crossing the piazza in long strides.
Angel blinked in surprise. The observation had caught him off guard--he'd honestly forgotten that such insight had always been young William's most startling ability. It was what had given him such hope at the beginning. Hope that this one, unlike the others he'd nurtured and trained, would turn out to be a truly rare monster. Like himself.
Angel tottered after him, stricken into brief silence, the baby clutched to his chest. Where the hell is he going? he wondered in confusion.
"My family was the most important one in our village," he blurted, regretting the slip the instant it was out of his mouth. Why are you giving him ammunition?
Spike shot him a venomous look. "Yeah, I'm sure it was a buzzing potato farm."
"This isn't the time for the Irish versus the English, Spike." His anger was coming back now. He pulls out one Anglo-Saxon insult about bogs or micks and I'm going to knock him on his ass.
"Not much of a contest anyway. Your footy teams are rancid. Look, can you pick up the pace? The sight of you with that baby is giving me turns."
"I happen to be very good with children," he retorted. The baby was fussing, its tiny arms waving, and he suddenly realized why he felt so off-kilter--carrying the baby was like floating on a sense memory of Connor. Such helplessness and utter trust...
"Right, very good at eating them, as I recall."
As a rebuttals went, this one went right where it was supposed to, causing immediate, stabbing pain. Angel promptly stabbed back.
"I seem to remember a few orphanages on your menu too, Willy. Hunting for street urchins? Don't tell me you don't remember."
Spike shot Angel an annoyed look. "Of course I remember," he said patiently. "You know Dru had a thing for the young ones." He furrowed his brow, grimaced. "Right. Best if we don't throw stones at each other then. Not like either one of us is lily white." He picked up the pace, swung out into the middle of a busy roadway and began hailing cars, swinging the leather bag in his hand as an attention-getter.
A car slowed. Spike weaved through speeding cars to stand alongside the slowly inching vehicle and there was a brief exchange in Italian, accompanied by florid hand gestures. Spike nodded, shouted grazie! and the car sped up again. Angel watched as Spike sauntered his way back, lighting a cigarette as he walked.
"So?" Angel asked, unsure what the hell had just transpired.
"So the nearest polizia isn't that near. Plenty of churches thick on the ground around here, though." He waved a hand in the general direction of the square, lit cancer stick trailing smoke. "Might be the best option for now, drop the tyke off at a House of God, let the friars deal."
"You wanna go into a church?" Angel said this reflexively, only to be visited with a weird feeling of deja vu. The picture came back into his head of Spike holding a cross. Braining him with it. He clutched the baby a litle tighter.
The kid started to wail.
Spike snorted, set down the bag. He placed the cigarette firmly in the corner of his mouth and held out his arms. Angel stared at this spectacle for a moment, then handed the baby over.
"Be right back," Spike muttered around the cig, and marched off stiffly toward a darkened stone pile near the edge of the square. Angel watched from the distance as Spike approached the attached rectory house and banged on the door, hard. Lights came on, the door opened, and there was more talking and gesticulating, a flurry of white-robed women. Angel turned away, not really feeling like revisiting older memories of what he used to do with nuns.
Ten minutes later, Spike was walking back, arms empty this time.
All business, Angel picked up the bag, handed it back. "We should go back to the square and wait," he said.
Spike took the bag, nodded. They walked back to their designated meeting spot in silence. The subject of the baby definitely did not come up.
Only now, after the brief flurry of action, Angel felt restless. There were too many memories churning in his head, too many conflicting emotions, as if the night hadn't started out bad enough, with all the running around and being unable to accomplish something so simple as meeting and talking with Buffy. Since when had she become so unavailable? It always used to be that whenever he wanted to see her, he just went, and there she was.
Just standing around and waiting without talking was really making him tense.
"Does Buffy even know that you're back?" he found himself asking abruptly, even as he recognized that bringing up Buffy as a conversation topic was probably a bad idea.
Spike looked uncomfortable. "Don't really know," he answered after a long pause. "Not unless Andrew blabbed about it, I suppose." He sighed. "Which would then make her pissed as hell at me for not saying anything but at least that I'd know how to deal with."
"As opposed to what? Giving her a heart attack by just showing up on her doorstep?"
"It's what happened to me when she came back from the beyond." Spike gave him a withering look. "I got through it."
"You can't have a heart attack. Your heart doesn't beat."
A brief look of dismay crossed Spike's face. "Oh. Right."
Angel pondered. It really wouldn't be a good idea to give Buffy a major scare. Not when he had no idea how she was going to react to him either, given that weird message from Andrew some months ago. It can't be true that she doesn't trust me. He must have gotten it wrong. But the only way I'm gonna know for sure is if I talk to her first.
"Look," he told Spike, putting on his most reasonable voice. "When we find her, I should be the one to talk to her. You can stay out of sight until I can ease her into the news. It'll lessen the shock."
"Oh, right!" Spike turned on him, eyes blazing. "Leave me hanging in the hallway while you get her all starry-eyed and lure her into your meaty embrace to lock tongues. Forget that." He stabbed a free finger into Angel's chest. "Not here to be your sidekick. I'm not letting you out of my sight."
"You really don't have a say in this, Spike. Whatever I do or don't do with Buffy has nothing to do with y--"
"She told me she loved me," Spike blurted.
Angel's words abruptly dried up in his mouth.
Spike averted his eyes.
Silence.
Angel stared. Spike was now steadfastly avoiding his glare, working his shoulders in a motion somewhere between a shrug and a nervous tic.
Buffy told him she loved him. Angel struggled to match this idea to the person in front of him, couldn't. He'd wrapped his head around the idea that they'd had a relationship, although that had been a shock he'd been some time getting over--but at least he could understand that. Spike had always had a certain... physical appeal. And Buffy was only human, with needs. But--
First he gets a soul to impress her and then she falls for it because that's Buffy, always too big with the compassion, and he took avantage of her, had sex enough times that he calls it a relationship, but if she--
"She didn't really mean it," Spike amended softly. His free hand, loose at his side, worked for a moment, clenching and unclenching, a strangely helpless gesture.
Angel goggled at him. His worldview tipped on its axis for the second time in as many mintues.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Angel rasped.
"Well, she did say it just as I was on the verge of dying, you know." Spike shot him an annoyed look, fiercely defensive, even as his hunched posture told another story. "Have to admit there's some questions about the timing," he muttered.
She sent me packing from Sunnydale in favor of him with some cock-and-bull story about cookies and he's complaining that she--
For some reason, all Angel could get out of this was the implied insult to Buffy.
"You thought she was lying to you?" he choked out.
For an instant, he considered twisting Spike's head off, feeling it roll for that brief moment before everything turned to dust.
Surreally, Spike just sighed. "No," he breathed. He looked sad. Despondent, even. "She... probably meant it at the time. But it's a fair bet she never expected me to show up and start asking her questions about it."
Spike let the bag fall to the ground. He began to pace. "So, by the way, pet," he announced in a loud voice, gesturing as if talking to an invisible audience. "What you said, down there in the Hellmouth, just as I was about to fry. You really mean that, or not?"
Angel watched him pace, searched for words. He wasn't sure why he felt the need to defend Buffy in this matter.
"Want I should move in? Now that we're, you know, such soul mates and all? Should I set up the joint account?" Spike continued his fantasy conversation.
"Buffy wouldn't do that," Angel said haltingly. It killed him somewhere inside to say this, but he had to. "I know her."
Spike didn't even look at him. He just shook his head, sat down on the edge of the fountain, defeated. "You know her. Wonder what that feels like," he said. "Used to think I knew her, but I didn't. Don't. Don't know anything anymore. Don't know if I can trust anything she ever said. Wish she'd never said it." He laid his head in his hands and just sat there, a slight, not very impressive man swamped in the folds of a too-large coat.
"Want to talk to her worse than anything." Spike's voice was muffled by his hands. He pressed his fingertips into his eyes. "But it's like... we've already said everything that needed to be said. Could never find the right words."
Angel sat down next to him. Was silent for a long time.
"I know exactly what you mean," he finally said.
And they waited some more.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
An interlude set during "The Girl in Question." Angel and Spike have met with the W&H Signora, and are waiting to do the ransom exchange.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"What are you doing?"
Spike leaned backward as he called this out. He was near bored to tears with hanging around the piazza himself--waiting for the Roman mafia to show up certainly wasn't as glamorous as as those pistol-blazing mobster pictures made it look--but now Angel had gone and wandered off on his own, into a dark alley off the main square, from the looks of it. From his vantage point by the piazza's decorative fountain, Spike could see that Angel was bent over a pile of boxes, crouching down.
He emerged from the darkness a moment later with, of all things, a baby.
"It must have been abandoned," Angel said wonderingly as he approached, picking bits of rubbish from the child's dirty covering, a loosely wound blanket. He rewrapped the blanket gently, hoisted the child to his shoulder.
Spike gaped at him. Angel holding a baby. Well, there's a picture. It took him a moment to find something to say about this.
"And what do you think you are? Foundlings Society?"
"It's been abandoned," Angel repeated. "We can't just leave it here." He glowered back at Spike, one large hand cradling the infant's tiny head, holding in such a way that his chin and shoulders seemed to curve around the baby's body, sheltering it.
Portrait of Cro Magnon with Child, Spike thought to himself. You have got to be joking.
"Why not leave it here?" he insisted. "What's it gonna do, run off? We've already got a job on." He hefted the ransom bag he was carrying for emphasis. Demon don's head to pick up. Certainly not getting fresher. "Put the kid back, and we'll come fetch it later."
"Are you out of your mind?" Angel ground out. "I can't leave some helpess child lying in an alley. A dog could come along, or... or someone drunk riding a Vespa. What if--"
"Oh, whatever, brilliant, let's take on another mission of mercy," Spike muttered darkly, realizing that the cause was already lost. The old man wasn't going to budge, and he was already tired of arguing. Not as if his temper had been in such great shape to start with--the night had been shaping up badly since they'd arrived and had only gotten worse, intrigues and frustrations and runarounds and slammed apartment doors. He blew out an annoyed sigh, shifted the bag in his hand. "You know, we've still got that head to think of. Much as I'd love to help you maintain your hero credentials on a whole other continent, we can't spend the whole night tracking down the polizia so you can play your fantasy version of Two Vamps and a Ba--"
"Aha!" Angel pointed with his free hand, triumphant. "I knew you could speak Italian. You'd never spend time anywhere you didn't know how to order drinks."
Spike made a face. Changing the subject, nice going, wanker. "So I've picked up a word or two on the travels, so what."
"You know you're not fooling anyone with that undereducated act, William." Angel offered an unpleasant grin while bouncing the child lightly on his shoulder, an incongruous picture to say the least. "I could smell the university on you when Dru brought you home."
"And I could smell a farm boy trying to impress all over you, what's your point?" Spike fired back testily, then abruptly stepped off curb to begin crossing the piazza in long strides.
Angel blinked in surprise. The observation had caught him off guard--he'd honestly forgotten that such insight had always been young William's most startling ability. It was what had given him such hope at the beginning. Hope that this one, unlike the others he'd nurtured and trained, would turn out to be a truly rare monster. Like himself.
Angel tottered after him, stricken into brief silence, the baby clutched to his chest. Where the hell is he going? he wondered in confusion.
"My family was the most important one in our village," he blurted, regretting the slip the instant it was out of his mouth. Why are you giving him ammunition?
Spike shot him a venomous look. "Yeah, I'm sure it was a buzzing potato farm."
"This isn't the time for the Irish versus the English, Spike." His anger was coming back now. He pulls out one Anglo-Saxon insult about bogs or micks and I'm going to knock him on his ass.
"Not much of a contest anyway. Your footy teams are rancid. Look, can you pick up the pace? The sight of you with that baby is giving me turns."
"I happen to be very good with children," he retorted. The baby was fussing, its tiny arms waving, and he suddenly realized why he felt so off-kilter--carrying the baby was like floating on a sense memory of Connor. Such helplessness and utter trust...
"Right, very good at eating them, as I recall."
As a rebuttals went, this one went right where it was supposed to, causing immediate, stabbing pain. Angel promptly stabbed back.
"I seem to remember a few orphanages on your menu too, Willy. Hunting for street urchins? Don't tell me you don't remember."
Spike shot Angel an annoyed look. "Of course I remember," he said patiently. "You know Dru had a thing for the young ones." He furrowed his brow, grimaced. "Right. Best if we don't throw stones at each other then. Not like either one of us is lily white." He picked up the pace, swung out into the middle of a busy roadway and began hailing cars, swinging the leather bag in his hand as an attention-getter.
A car slowed. Spike weaved through speeding cars to stand alongside the slowly inching vehicle and there was a brief exchange in Italian, accompanied by florid hand gestures. Spike nodded, shouted grazie! and the car sped up again. Angel watched as Spike sauntered his way back, lighting a cigarette as he walked.
"So?" Angel asked, unsure what the hell had just transpired.
"So the nearest polizia isn't that near. Plenty of churches thick on the ground around here, though." He waved a hand in the general direction of the square, lit cancer stick trailing smoke. "Might be the best option for now, drop the tyke off at a House of God, let the friars deal."
"You wanna go into a church?" Angel said this reflexively, only to be visited with a weird feeling of deja vu. The picture came back into his head of Spike holding a cross. Braining him with it. He clutched the baby a litle tighter.
The kid started to wail.
Spike snorted, set down the bag. He placed the cigarette firmly in the corner of his mouth and held out his arms. Angel stared at this spectacle for a moment, then handed the baby over.
"Be right back," Spike muttered around the cig, and marched off stiffly toward a darkened stone pile near the edge of the square. Angel watched from the distance as Spike approached the attached rectory house and banged on the door, hard. Lights came on, the door opened, and there was more talking and gesticulating, a flurry of white-robed women. Angel turned away, not really feeling like revisiting older memories of what he used to do with nuns.
Ten minutes later, Spike was walking back, arms empty this time.
All business, Angel picked up the bag, handed it back. "We should go back to the square and wait," he said.
Spike took the bag, nodded. They walked back to their designated meeting spot in silence. The subject of the baby definitely did not come up.
Only now, after the brief flurry of action, Angel felt restless. There were too many memories churning in his head, too many conflicting emotions, as if the night hadn't started out bad enough, with all the running around and being unable to accomplish something so simple as meeting and talking with Buffy. Since when had she become so unavailable? It always used to be that whenever he wanted to see her, he just went, and there she was.
Just standing around and waiting without talking was really making him tense.
"Does Buffy even know that you're back?" he found himself asking abruptly, even as he recognized that bringing up Buffy as a conversation topic was probably a bad idea.
Spike looked uncomfortable. "Don't really know," he answered after a long pause. "Not unless Andrew blabbed about it, I suppose." He sighed. "Which would then make her pissed as hell at me for not saying anything but at least that I'd know how to deal with."
"As opposed to what? Giving her a heart attack by just showing up on her doorstep?"
"It's what happened to me when she came back from the beyond." Spike gave him a withering look. "I got through it."
"You can't have a heart attack. Your heart doesn't beat."
A brief look of dismay crossed Spike's face. "Oh. Right."
Angel pondered. It really wouldn't be a good idea to give Buffy a major scare. Not when he had no idea how she was going to react to him either, given that weird message from Andrew some months ago. It can't be true that she doesn't trust me. He must have gotten it wrong. But the only way I'm gonna know for sure is if I talk to her first.
"Look," he told Spike, putting on his most reasonable voice. "When we find her, I should be the one to talk to her. You can stay out of sight until I can ease her into the news. It'll lessen the shock."
"Oh, right!" Spike turned on him, eyes blazing. "Leave me hanging in the hallway while you get her all starry-eyed and lure her into your meaty embrace to lock tongues. Forget that." He stabbed a free finger into Angel's chest. "Not here to be your sidekick. I'm not letting you out of my sight."
"You really don't have a say in this, Spike. Whatever I do or don't do with Buffy has nothing to do with y--"
"She told me she loved me," Spike blurted.
Angel's words abruptly dried up in his mouth.
Spike averted his eyes.
Silence.
Angel stared. Spike was now steadfastly avoiding his glare, working his shoulders in a motion somewhere between a shrug and a nervous tic.
Buffy told him she loved him. Angel struggled to match this idea to the person in front of him, couldn't. He'd wrapped his head around the idea that they'd had a relationship, although that had been a shock he'd been some time getting over--but at least he could understand that. Spike had always had a certain... physical appeal. And Buffy was only human, with needs. But--
First he gets a soul to impress her and then she falls for it because that's Buffy, always too big with the compassion, and he took avantage of her, had sex enough times that he calls it a relationship, but if she--
"She didn't really mean it," Spike amended softly. His free hand, loose at his side, worked for a moment, clenching and unclenching, a strangely helpless gesture.
Angel goggled at him. His worldview tipped on its axis for the second time in as many mintues.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Angel rasped.
"Well, she did say it just as I was on the verge of dying, you know." Spike shot him an annoyed look, fiercely defensive, even as his hunched posture told another story. "Have to admit there's some questions about the timing," he muttered.
She sent me packing from Sunnydale in favor of him with some cock-and-bull story about cookies and he's complaining that she--
For some reason, all Angel could get out of this was the implied insult to Buffy.
"You thought she was lying to you?" he choked out.
For an instant, he considered twisting Spike's head off, feeling it roll for that brief moment before everything turned to dust.
Surreally, Spike just sighed. "No," he breathed. He looked sad. Despondent, even. "She... probably meant it at the time. But it's a fair bet she never expected me to show up and start asking her questions about it."
Spike let the bag fall to the ground. He began to pace. "So, by the way, pet," he announced in a loud voice, gesturing as if talking to an invisible audience. "What you said, down there in the Hellmouth, just as I was about to fry. You really mean that, or not?"
Angel watched him pace, searched for words. He wasn't sure why he felt the need to defend Buffy in this matter.
"Want I should move in? Now that we're, you know, such soul mates and all? Should I set up the joint account?" Spike continued his fantasy conversation.
"Buffy wouldn't do that," Angel said haltingly. It killed him somewhere inside to say this, but he had to. "I know her."
Spike didn't even look at him. He just shook his head, sat down on the edge of the fountain, defeated. "You know her. Wonder what that feels like," he said. "Used to think I knew her, but I didn't. Don't. Don't know anything anymore. Don't know if I can trust anything she ever said. Wish she'd never said it." He laid his head in his hands and just sat there, a slight, not very impressive man swamped in the folds of a too-large coat.
"Want to talk to her worse than anything." Spike's voice was muffled by his hands. He pressed his fingertips into his eyes. "But it's like... we've already said everything that needed to be said. Could never find the right words."
Angel sat down next to him. Was silent for a long time.
"I know exactly what you mean," he finally said.
And they waited some more.