shadowscast | How the Light Gets In (12/?)

Work was a bit lighter this week, so I've managed to get another chapter written. *happy* I'm not sure how many parts are left, but it's definitely nearing completion.

And now, the standard intro:

This is part of my Fragments series. It's a sequel to "Late Night Porn Store Blues," which is in turn a prequel to "Human Frailty."

Rating: R for the language at the moment. There might be some sexual content later, depending on how Spike and Xander behave. (What, you think I'd tell you ahead of time?)

Warnings: Spoilers for all of BtVS and AtS. The whole series was originally just an excuse to indulge my hurt/comfort kink. Somehow a plot crept in too (funny how that happens!) but expect lots of hurt/comfort still to come. My Spike's kinda broken, and my Xander's got problems of his own.

Previously in the Fragments 'verse: In "Late Night Porn Store Blues," Giles sent Xander from Rome to LA after hearing rumors of an undetected Slayer there. Xander found the girl, but it turned out to be Illyria, erstwhile god-king and currently roommate of Spike. Xander found Spike working in a porn store and suffering from a migraine, but it wasn't until Angel intervened that Xander realized Spike was now human. Spike was wounded superficially in a fight and also took an overdose of painkillers, so Xander took him to a hospital.

The next day in "How the Light Gets In," Giles asked Xander to recruit Spike for the new Council. Xander went and tried, and in the course of his interaction with Spike he found out that Cordelia was dead. Xander, in turn, informed Spike of Anya's death. The two of them got drunk and mourned together, and there may have been some drunken cuddles but they didn't talk about that in the morning. After sleeping the sleep of the drunk on Spike's couch, Xander had a morning cigarette in the kitchen and unfortunately triggered an apparent asthma attack in Spike. Note to Xander: don't smoke around Spike.

Meanwhile, Xander tried to recruit Illyria for the Council but it didn't seem to work. Then Xander decided to solve some of Spike's problems by getting him fake I.D. Something Giles said on the phone made Xander start to worry that Spike was suicidal, so he confronted him about it. They had dinner together, and Spike managed to convince Xander that he was too afraid of hell to kill himself.

The next day, they went to a gay bar together to buy a CD for Andrew (who is, by the way, gay). At first Spike danced with a stranger while Xander watched and Angel lurked outside and worried about Spike being up past his bedtime, but then Spike got laid in the bathroom and Angel and Xander had a nice conversation and finally Xander got to dance with Spike, and kiss him.

The next day Giles called up with a crisis: he needed Spike to translate an Ancient Greek text so they could stop someone from turning into stone. So Xander pulled Spike out of church, they got printouts of the text, and Spike slightly crashed Xander's rental car while driving to the UCLA library for a dictionary. Spike spent the day translating, and Xander spent the day dealing with crashed-car paperwork and resenting Spike. Then Spike's phone went dead so Xander had to go visit him in person to find out how the translating was going. He discovered that Spike wasn't in good shape; he was getting sick with a cold, and also hadn't eaten for a couple days. Xander went to get food. He came back with KFC, and he shared its greasy goodness with Spike while they chatted a bit. Then Xander slept in Spike's bed while Spike kept working. All that effort finally paid off; Spike found the right page and called Giles.

The following night, Xander showed up at the porn store during Spike's shift with subs to share. He hung around while Spike worked, and finally kissed him. Spike's reaction was unthrilled, and Xander worried he'd made a mistake. They talked in the back room for a while without mentioning the kiss, and Xander seemed to make some progress in convincing Spike to come to Rome. Then Angel came by and had an argument with Spike. He told Xander he was worried because Spike was sick; Xander told him to lay off, but then invited him to work for the Council. Finally Spike left Xander alone in the back room with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a bondage magazine.

Previous parts can be found here.

Chapter 12

"Spike?"

"Yeah?"

"I may be drunk, but you just missed another stop sign."

Spike snorted. "Wasn't anyone coming, was there?"

"You crashed the other rental. Dunno why I'm letting you drive." Xander let his forehead rest against the cool window glass; the city lights streaked sideways, making him dizzy.

"Because you polished off my boss's entire rainy day insurance, that's why. And you're going to bloody well buy him another bottle before he fires me."

"Yeah, yeah. Said I would."

He wasn't that drunk. He probably could've made it back to the hotel all right. He just hadn't felt like fighting Spike for his car keys.

"This is the one, right?"

Xander let his head loll around so he could see the Ramada sign. "Yeah, this's it. Home sweet home."

Spike managed to get the car parked in the underground garage without causing any property damage, and they took the elevator up to Xander's room. Xander got the key card in the slot the right way up on the third try.

"Posh," Spike said as they walked in. It was a small single, the cheapest style the hotel offered, but by his standards 'posh' probably meant anything with unstained wallpaper.

And then Xander realized: Spike had come up to his room. They'd kissed earlier tonight, and now Spike was in his room. Say something, Xander, before he leaves.

"I can get room service to send up some beer," he offered.

Spike shook his head. "You've had enough, mate." He closed the door behind them and cocked his head. "Let's have a sit, shall we?"

There was nowhere to sit but the bed. They perched side by side on its edge, and Xander touched Spike's thigh. "I read the magazine," he said.

"What maga—oh."

"If you want to try—I mean, I don't have any of the stuff, but—"

Spike put his hand over Xander's, immobilizing it. "Sorry, pet, I didn't come up here for that." He said it gently. "I just wanted to talk, like."

Damn it. Who knew Spike knew how to play hard-to-get? "Talk, then." Xander tried to nuzzle Spike's neck. "Buffy said you can talk so dirty she'd almost come just from listening to you."

Spike jerked away from him. "She said what?"

Buffy references, maybe not the best idea here. "Never mind. It was a thing, we were drunk..."

"Were you throwing yourself at her, too?"

"I'm not throwing myself at you. You're the one who keeps—with the dancing, and the kissing, and the pictures, and your hair and your eyes and the smirks..."

A pale shadow of a smirk played on Spike's lips right now. "You think you fancy me, do you?"

"I did not say that. Fancy boy," Xander muttered, not sure what it meant but pretty confident it was some kind of insult.

Spike rolled his eyes and squirmed a little further away from Xander. "You've changed since Sunnydale."

"Who hasn't?" Xander suddenly felt on guard. Spike really did want to talk. Shit.

"You have nightmares now."

He should've known that night at Spike's place would come back to bite him in the ass. "You would too, if you'd seen some of the freaky, messed-up shit I have."

"I do have nightmares," Spike said quietly, "ever since the soul. But you never used to have them, and you'd seen plenty of 'freaky, messed-up' shite already."

"Guess some straw broke the camel's back."

"Which straw?"

"I don't want to talk about it. If you're so fucking curious, ask Giles." His buzz was well and truly killed. His hand felt shaky, reaching for his cigarettes, and then he remembered he couldn't smoke around Spike and fuck.

"I already asked Red, this afternoon," Spike said. "She told me about the Slayer you lost. I want to hear it from you."

"What are your nightmares about?" He didn't expect Spike to answer, but he bet it would stop his questions.

Spike raised an eyebrow. "What do you think? I spent a hundred-odd years killing people, got a soul to load me up with guilt for it, then lost the bloody demon that told me why all the murder and mayhem seemed like such a good idea in the first place." He backed up further so he could lean against the pillows. "Satisfied? Your turn." He coughed, and hugged himself, and waited.

Maybe it was the Wild Turkey in him, but Xander started to wonder if he could tell Spike. Compared to Spike's own bloodsoaked history, maybe his story wouldn't seem like such a big deal. He'd kept this secret for too damn long, and he knew it was killing him.

He needed a cigarette so fucking badly. He fumbled one out, just to roll between his fingers. "You met Andrew when he went to LA, right? Do you know why he was there?"

"Dana."

"Huh?" Xander looked up from the cigarette to see Spike had gone tense. "Did you meet her?"

"Yeah." He didn't elaborate.

"Okay. So you know...crazy traumatized girl, Slayer powers, not a great combo."

"Yeah." Spike's left thumb traced his right wrist in an odd unconscious gesture. "But she's all right now, isn't she?"

Xander gave a jerky half-shrug. "I heard she was making progress. Dunno what that means. I haven't met her."

"Count yourself lucky, mate." Spike rubbed his wrist again, as though it hurt. "A good few of the blokes who met her didn't survive the experience."

Xander looked down at the cigarette he held; it was crumpled now, with bits of tobacco falling out the end. "Lucky. Yeah. Not so much. Imagine Dana with an AK-47 and her own small army." He looked up and saw Spike watching him steadily, waiting for him to continue. "Her name was Mathilde. She—do you know anything about the Democratic Republic of Congo?"

Spike coughed, shook his head. "Never been."

"What about child soldiers?"

"Heard the term before. So this Mathilde...that what she was?"

Xander gave a tight nod. "Her parents were killed and she was kidnapped and forced to fight for—God, I don't enough know whether it was the rebels or the government to start with. Apparently at the exact moment the Slayer spell hit, her commander was raping her. She killed him."

"Good for her," Spike murmured.

"Sure, nobody's going to cry over that one. But after she killed him, she took his command. She started gathering her own little army of kids with guns. They called themselves les Enfants de Dieu."

Spike tilted his head. "Children of God?"

"They figured that's where she got her power from—she was God's instrument for vengeance, or something. The war ended just about a month after our fight with the First Evil, but Mathilde was in the eastern part of the country, where the government had no fucking control. They'd—the Enfants would go into a village and...well, pretty much they'd kill everyone. And then they'd live in the village for a while, and then they'd move on."

Xander didn't realize he'd stopped talking until Spike touched his shoulder and prompted him, "And how did you come into it?"

"I was already in Africa—I mean, I was in Zimbabwe, which isn't exactly close, but..." His voice was shaking a little. "But the main thing was, Giles figured I was good at...talking people down from that kind of place." He'd done it with Anya, and with Willow. Even with Ampata back in high school.

But not Mathilde.

Beside him, Spike coughed. "It was a hell of a job he gave you," he said.

"I took it. I wanted to do it. There was a squad of government troops tracking the Enfants, and I knew they were planning to kill Mathilde when they caught her. I wanted to find her first."

"So you went after her alone? Good to know you're still brave and bloody stupid."

"I had a translator with me, a local guy. Joseph." Xander closed his eye, remembering. His ears were starting to ring. "We found a dead village first. There were flies everywhere. The bodies were mostly piled in this one building, looked like it used to be a school. It was half burned." He opened his eye again, and turned to Spike. "I'd seen gruesome slaughters before, you know that. But this—it was humans who did it. Kids." God, he needed Spike to understand.

Spike's hand was warm and firm on his shoulder. "I've seen a few wars, pet. I know what humans are capable of, even children."

"We caught up to them before we expected to. They captured us." When he first saw Mathilde, she'd been wearing camo pants cut off at the knee and cinched at the waist, and a crisp white too-big men's dress shirt. She was skinny and small, with big bright eyes and tight black hair cut raggedly close to her scalp. He'd been told she was fifteen but she looked more like twelve: a sweet little girl with a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder. "Joseph tried to talk, and they killed him right away. They would have killed me too, only Willow had done this protection spell on me—a kind of magical bulletproof vest. It was only good for a couple shots, but when the first bullets didn't kill me they must have decided I was special somehow. They kept me alive, tied up. The government troops found us three days later." He hadn't seen the battle, being tied up in an oven-hot outbuilding, half delirious from thirst, but he remembered the screams, and the short bursts of machine-gun fire. "They captured Mathilde alive. They rescued me. And then they executed her."

Spike squeezed his shoulder. "It sounds like it was a fucking awful situation from beginning to end, Harris, but you did all you could."

"No." He could smell the gunpowder and the bitter blood. "I didn't stop them from killing her."

"And what were you going to do against a bloody army?"

He shook his head. His whole body was shaking, actually. "I had papers that said I was a U.N. guy. The squad's commander spoke some English. He was ready to defer to me. They already had her up against the wall, but then he asked me if...if I ordered them to take her to Kinshasa instead. I said...no." The ringing in his ears got louder.

"You haven't told anyone that last part, have you?" he heard, gentle and far away.

He tried to answer, but only a ragged sob escaped. He felt like throwing up.

"Let it out," Spike said. He sounded weary and sad, but there wasn't any recrimination in his tone. "Put it on me." He hugged his arm around Xander, and somehow Xander found himself leaning against Spike and weeping. He wanted to say something, anything, but his throat was too tight and he couldn't properly breathe. The pent-up guilt and grief seemed to be physical things, choking him. His face under his good eye was soaked with tears, and he couldn't stop the wracking sobs. He buried his face against Spike's shoulder. "That's it," Spike murmured, rubbing his back. "Put it all on me."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sunnyd-lite.livejournal.com

If you want to try - I mean, I don't have any of the stuff, but Ah tippsy Xander, so only sort of sees, but is willing to experiment!

Spike's left thumb traced his right wrist in an odd unconscious gesture very nice detail, shows so much without telling.

I was already in Africa - I mean, I was in Zimbabwe, which isn't exactly close, but great acknowledgement of relative distance, something the show often skimmed over.

Love your broken boys, but it looks like someone might be on the mend! Being them, not counting on too much. Great to see another chapter!

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How the Light Gets In (12/?)

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