Part Two
A one-eyed, underdressed man walks into the joint. It’s almost the beginning of a very stupid joke, except that it’s Xander Harris.
Spike doesn’t stop polishing the surface of the bar as Harris crosses the dim room. In the red and yellow lights from the beer signs, he looks shaggy, and dark as the local Inuits. He sports a slight limp now to go with the eyepatch. Spike would very much like to abandon his rag and slip out the back, but he’s the only one on the bar for the day shift, and he’s got two customers in the corner booth.
Xander is breathing hard and his teeth are chattering when he scrambles up onto a stool. “Jesus fuck. You couldn’t have run off to some place where they put little paper umbrellas in the drinks?”
“What’re you doin’ here, Harris? There’s no slayers in Deadhorse.” Even as he says these discouraging words, Spike pours a mug of coffee, tips some brandy into it, and slides it across the bar. Xander catches it eagerly, just holding the steaming mug for a few moments before he lifts it to his lips. “Haven’t you heard about Alaska, you berk? Gets cold here in winter.”
“This is the warmest damn coat I could get in a hurry in Addis.” Harris looks up from his coffee. “I don’t need to tell you that I’m here because Buffy asked me to come.”
“Asked you.“
“She’s been counting the days. Since she saw you in LA. It’s been six months. She thought that was the least amount she should wait. She would like you to come to London.”
“An’ it’s you tellin’ me this … why?”
Xander fidgets, eyeing his coffee, the shiny surface of the bar, his own reddened fingertips. “Because Buffy thought it would make a difference to you, knowing that her friends would also like to see you … see you back in the club.” He reaches into his clothes, holds something out. An envelope, rolled and squashed from being carried in a front jeans pocket.
Spike tries not to show how much this knocks him back. Xander Harris—never his biggest fan—has dragged himself from Addis Ababa to Deadhorse Alaska, to hand-deliver a billet doux from the slayer. It doesn’t make sense.
When he doesn’t take the envelope, Xander sets it gently on the bar, and takes up his coffee again. “She’s changed this last half year. Since she found out about you. She talks about you all the time.” He sighs. “Hell, we’ve all been talking about you. The emails, they fly like the wind. It’s been a regular Spike symposium in Scoobietown.”
“That so?”
“She kept wanting to come out here herself. She almost did a few times. But I told her six months might not be enough. It’s been four years since Anya, and I still think about her every single day. Every other woman I meet, the first thing I’ll notice about her is that she isn’t Anya.”
This, Spike thinks, is extraordinary. It’s more than that—it’s fucking weird and uncanny, and he’s starting to wonder if Xander isn’t under some kind of spell, or maybe he’s The First, somehow come back to try again to ensnare him. Spike grabs Xander’s wrist.
Xander’s head whips up, and all of a sudden, he smiles.
“Knew that’s what you’d think. Nah, it’s really me. Willow did a locator spell on you, that’s how I knew where to come.” The smile fades. Back to serious, he says, “And Buffy didn’t have to twist my arm—much—to make this trip. I’ve done a lot of thinking, been through a lot of changes, since the Sunnydale Big Bang. Finding out you weren’t dead, I knew there was some stuff I wanted to say to you. I hope you’ll let me.”
He wonders what Clio would make of all this. He never told her much about Buffy and the Scoobies, just like he never told her much about his history prior to meeting up with them, the Drusilla decades, Angelus, Darla. They lived, as demons mostly do, in the present; and of course they didn’t mix with other vampires. He’d explained a little bit about why he had a soul, but that was something Clio accepted without much curiosity, just as she accepted his rules about leaving humans alone, without wanting to have gritty discussions about why. She wasn’t stupid, but she was trusting—which was probably what got her turned in the first place. They didn’t talk much about her past either—he gathered it wasn’t a happy one, and there didn’t seem to be anyone from her human life whom she missed much, except for a mother she’d lost before she was ten, and a girl cousin, nearly a sister, who had died because her boyfriend was driving drunk.
In that respect, she was almost made to be a vampire.
In this cold dark place, Clio is still with him. Sometimes unbearably present, so that at first he couldn’t get out of bed for the heaviness of her fate, and his loneliness. And at other times, increasingly in the last couple of months, she’s just there, a light familiar presence, the imaginary friend he keeps up a running dialogue with as he goes about the small business of the small life he has here. He thinks only of her, so he doesn’t have to think about the slayer, and what she told him in L.A., and how for those few minutes they’d held onto each other, while through her skin and heat and scent and tears Buffy impressed on him that she was not the same girl he’d believed her to be during all the time he’d written her off.
But now, facing Xander across the bar, Clio’s nowhere. She’s not part of this at all. He can’t lean on her memory for anything. The time he spent with her isn’t as real, as immediate, as the time before, which Xander embodies by slumping on this stool across from him like a sack of old clothes. Xander fresh from Africa, where, as Andrew told him that time, he scouts for slayers, helps train them and bring them into the fold.
If he were to walk away from Xander right this minute, just drop everything and walk away … no, it wouldn’t work. Not here. Deadhorse isn’t L.A. Xander will be able to find his house by asking any single person he sees, and Spike can’t leave town without some few hours’ preparation, because the plane from Fairbanks only goes once a day.
He’s not going to be able to dodge the slayer’s world this time. Clio’s already falling to dust all over again, dust that isn’t going to re-coalesce at the insistent bidding of his memory. And Buffy’s starting to crowd into his head, the way she always used to.
Spike takes out his wallet, flips it open and looks at Clio. If he sees her, she’ll have to be real again. She was right here, right here when Xander came in.
“Is that her?” Xander says. “May I see?”
Spike doesn’t want to, but he lets Xander look.
“Pretty girl. Great smile. The way she looks at you there … I’m sorry, man.”
Spike grunts. Xander being complimentary to one vampire about another … it’s a bit much to swallow.
“Buffy said you rescued her.”
“Never rescued the slayer from a damn thing.”
Xander pauses for a second. “No, man. I meant—your girl here. Clio? Buffy said you rescued her from the vamps who turned her. That you kept her away from the biting and the mayhem. Kept her innocent.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s impressive.”
He wants to say oh fuck off. This isn’t you, Harris. Taking back the wallet, he flips through the pictures again. His sight dims, he wants to kick something. Sending Xander here, Buffy’s finished the job. Clio is a half dozen little snapshots, and nothing else. He’s lost her.
“Can I have a refill?” Xander slides the cup towards him. “And is there any food here? I’ve been on planes for what feels like days.”
After he pours coffee, Spike steps into the kitchen. The frycook is reading a magazine. He orders up a burger platter, then goes into the men’s room, turns the water on full, and bends over the sink. He feels like he might be sick, but nothing happens.
It’s finished.
He takes the snapshots of Clio and himself out of his wallet, and one by one, he burns them over the sink. Watches the ashes swirl down.
When he emerges from the men’s room, the burger order is up; he brings it back to where Xander is. He’s taken his coat off now, and is sitting up straighter. Spike sees that he’s a real man now, all trace of the fat boy gone. He’s whip-thin, muscled, tanned and seasoned. He bites into the burger with gusto.
“Africa been good to you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. But what I do now sure beats general contracting.” He fixes his one eye on Spike, appraising, intelligent. “Don’t you miss being part of the fight? I used to get your pride in it, even back when I didn’t like you.”
Spike thinks, Now you like me?
Xander touches the crumpled envelope. “You should read this, Spike.”
In the last six months he’s very deliberately not given any thought to what Buffy imagined she wanted from him. Didn’t replay that last scene, what she’d said, how she’d touched him. How, in spite of himself, he’d responded.
But it’s all right there inside him, he’s got it now, as deep and full and clear as he doesn’t have Clio. Buffy Summers, touching him the way he used to yearn to be touched. Looking at him with the expression he’d seen her give to others but never him. Telling her heart, even though she believed it wasn’t going to get her what she was asking for.
It’s all right there, but he still can’t quite believe it. He knew—hell, he saw—that she was getting on with her life just fine post-SunnyD. Running around Rome with The Immortal. If she was doing that within weeks of his supposed death, she wasn’t sitting around pining for him years later.
Chewing, Xander says, “Running into you in L.A. just threw her. Finding out you weren’t really dead … she was beside herself. She came to see me right afterwards. We traveled together in Nigeria and Cameroon for ten days and she never shut up about you, all this yearning and regret came tumbling out. She was honest with me for the first time about what went on between you two. Maybe honest with herself for the first time too, about what she wanted. She was upset about how she’d slain Clio and just how fucked up it all was. She didn’t ask me to say any of this, but I’m telling you, Spike, seeing her like that—it wasn’t easy for me. I wasn’t thrilled to hear you were still around, I didn’t want her being in love with you. No surprise there, right? But she was all spun around, and by time I said goodbye to her, I was too. Talking it all over with her, my fixed ideas about you got knocked loose. I never gave you an inch, and that was wrong.”
“Shut it.”
“No, I … okay, keep that for later. Point is, I really do wish you’d go to her, because she’s never gonna be happy if you don’t.”
Spike fingers the envelope. He’s not sure how much more of this vindication shit he can stand, but then he decides to get it over with, and tears it open.
It’s a courting note, sure enough, but it’s not from Buffy.
Dear Spike,
One hardly knows how to begin a letter like this, which must in a few short lines begin the process of turning an enemy into, if not a friend, then a trusted associate.
Given our history, you have every reason not to trust me. I went on mistrusting you long after I should’ve seen that you were on our side, and my machinations nearly cost Buffy her best ally.
You made what you assumed would be the supreme sacrifice, and we allowed you to do so without acknowledgement, let alone thanks.
This is one of my great regrets, of many in my career.
I don’t think I can ever offer to ‘make it up to you.’ I certainly hope there will be a time—soon—when we can talk about it over a drink, and come to an understanding. When you will consent to shake my hand, if you can bring yourself to do so.
Spike, we need all our allies again now. We need your skills, your unique knowledge, your passion to do what is right in the struggle that, as you certainly know, goes on even now that the Sunnydale hellmouth is shut. If you will come to London, I’m prepared to discuss generous terms with you, to attach yourself to the reformed Council of Watchers and fight alongside us, as a colleague and—I do hope—a friend.
I can assure you that the reception you’ll receive will be commensurate with the respect and esteem in which we all hold you. It has taken us too long to acknowledge the ways in which you changed, but I hope you will allow that we too have—finally—changed as well.
Xander is my agent in making all arrangements for your passage to London, should you decide to accept.
Sincerely,
Rupert Giles
“S’touching, Harris, you journeyin’ all this way to see me. Bring me this.” He says it like he doesn’t give a fuck, but the hell of it is, he is touched. Touched to his core. As much as Xander’s coming here has robbed him of Clio, it’s left something else in the hollow place where she resided. It’s something he’s not sure he wants, because it’s going to require that he try, that he care. Since Angel and Co. went down, he’s pulled in his horns on that front. But as much as he had no control over Clio’s slipping away, he has no control over how his soul and his reason and the part of him that’s got no reason at all, that’s pure emotion, responds to this visit, and to the letter, and to the strong sense memory of Buffy holding him in her arms, wanting to console him for Clio even as she knows he’s going to pull away from her. He puts the letter back in the envelope. Xander is watching him with curiosity.
“You seen this?”
“No, but I know what it says.” He crams a last few french fries into his mouth. “Buffy hopes you’ll team up with her, but that’s not a pre-condition. We’ve got slayers by the car-load, and a serious watcher shortage. A serious experience shortage. We need what you know just as much as we need your muscle. More.”
“I figured you lot must be strapped, what with Andrew bein’ one of the leading lights.”
A grin crooks Xander’s mouth. “Oh, he’s come a long way.” Then the smile fades. “Wait. How do you know about that?”
It’s surprising to realize that Xander and the others have no idea that he was with Angel. Andrew, instructed to keep schtum, really has. Spike wonders if Rupert has realized his mistake about Angel as well. His refusal to send help when Angel called for it almost certainly contributed to the deaths of the lot of them: Wesley, Charles, and Angel himself; that Giles doesn’t mention this in the letter indicates that he doesn’t know Spike was in on that apocalypse either.
He’s got a lot to answer for, that Rupert Giles.
“You lot got Angel wrong at the end, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can talk about it later.” Spike puts the letter back in the envelope. “I’ll come to London an’ see Giles. But I need some time to wrap things up here, an’ I can get there on my own.”
“I’ve got the Council’s plane, though.”
“Council’s got a bloody plane now?”
“They always did. More than one. Now Giles runs the place, the people who do the real work actually get to use the real tools.”
Might as well, Spike thinks. Might as well go back with bloody Harris on the bloody Council plane. It’s only pride that would keep him from saying yes to that, and he feels too tired suddenly to exercise any more pride.
They leave in the morning. Though Xander claims he slept overnight, in his room at Deadhorse’s finest tourist accomodations, he falls asleep almost as soon as they’re airborne, which suits Spike fine, because he has no clue what he’s going to chat to him about for five or six hours. Unlike the Wolfram and Hart plane, this one has regular window-glass, so Spike has to stay in the back, with the shades pulled down, and can’t watch the snowfields and seas of Deadhorse recede. Also unlike the W&H vehicle, this one lacks grown-up refreshments—he finds soft drinks and sugary snacks suitable for pubescent slayers, and not much else. He still carries a flask, but it’s not enough to get drunk and stay drunk through this whole transformative journey, so he doesn’t even start.
He tries to prepare himself, but he’s not really sure what he’s preparing for. Rereading Giles’ letter, he can’t imagine Giles talking to him like that face-to-face. Can’t imagine really being a part of the organization. The words esteem and respect alarm him. Who uses words like that in the normal course of things?
Will Buffy be there when the plane lands? Will she expect that his coming there means he’s going to assent to whatever she wants? And what is that, exactly? What does she imagine, when she thinks of being with him? He’s only ever fucked her in abandoned houses and musty crypts; their few meaningful moments took place in borrowed spots, on borrowed time. They don’t belong to the same world. He used to tell her that she should dwell in the darkness with him, but he didn’t believe that even at the time. Wasn’t she right, when she decided to stay aloof from him, at the end? He still felt it was right, keeping her from knowing he didn’t really die.
Yet the thought of seeing her again, knowing she might look at him the way she did in his L.A. flat, might touch him so longingly with her small warm hands, has Spike at such a pitch of excitement that he needs the seat belt to keep him from bouncing around the inside of the plane. Time and distance and Clio might’ve made his thing for the slayer go into abeyance, but it’s all still there. He’s not sure that’s such a good thing.
The years with Clio were so simple. Deceptively simple. He squints at the light coming in through the windows at the front of the fusillage. He didn’t make her exactly, but she was a sort of monster’s bride, tailored to live neither in one world nor the other, neither truly demon nor truly human, existing for no other purpose but to ease his loneliness. For the first time it occurs to him to ponder what he’d have done about it if, after rescuing her, he hadn’t gotten on with her. Would he have staked her, if she didn’t please him in bed, if her talk bored him or she gave herself to other men? Or would he have sent her off to take her chances as a vampire like other vampires? And would he have let himself see that as a mercy? It wouldn’t really be one, not for her and certainly not for the victims she’d have taken.
What would Buffy do if he wasn’t the kind of demon lover she saw in her imagination?
“Oh my God. I was sure you’d have changed, but I couldn’t picture how, so I kept thinking of you looking the same, and feeling stupid for it, but … you are the same.”
At first glimpse, moving towards him in the hanger where they disembark, Dawn’s the same too—same bright face, same long hair, same nervous babble and big grin. But then she steps in to embrace him, and he can feel that she’s turned into an adult woman, and the babble stops as she holds him. At first her hug is tepid, but then he realizes its because she’s unsure of herself; when he pulls her against him, she sighs and squeezes him tight. “Spike.”
“You’re all grown up.”
“Not really. Not yet. I’m still a student. Spike, I’m sorry I—”
“Hush.” It’s one thing to see Rupert’s apologies on paper, another to hear Dawn start in as if she’s got anything to beg his pardon for. The world feels upside down when that happens. “You’ve nothing to say sorry for.”
Dawn glances away for a moment, then back at him. “I would never have burned you.”
It makes him sad, to think that threat has been weighing on her, even for a day. He never resented her for it—it was no more than he deserved. He’s never felt that anything he did afterwards really takes away from his assault on Buffy. Apart from everything else, it put the lie to his illusion about himself, that even as a demon he was a sort of gentleman when it came to the woman of his affections. He can shrug his shoulders over what he did as a vampire—he’s not the brooding type like Angel, he had his month of madness over it and has had his bad half hours since. But what he did to Buffy, even if he failed to do the worst—that will always stay with him, and he means never to let himself off the hook for it. No matter that she’d assaulted and belittled him over and over … he kept showing up for it, didn’t he, though nothing forced him to but his own obsession with her. Couldn’t compare her behavior to his—she hadn’t loved him, and so owed him no compassion. It was worse, immeasureably and irremediably worse, to hurt the person who owned your heart.
All this floods his mind even as Dawn waits for some reassurance that he’s forgiven her for her girlish vehemence.
“I know, Bit. No worries. Thanks for meetin’ our flight.”
“Will you promise to have dinner with me? Sometime this week? Just us. I have so much I’d like to tell you.”
He tells her he’d like this. She’s leading him towards a car with black windows; Xander’s already climbing inside. It occurs to him that he might as well be a prisoner, one of those important political prisoners who is treated politely even as he’s completely deprived of his liberty. He doesn’t know where they’re going or what the plans for him are, and he doesn’t quite want to ask.
It’s still daytime, but the sky is overcast. As they reach the outskirts of London, it begins to rain. The Council’s new headquarters occupy some contiguous townhouses on Gower Street. He’s already inside before he realizes that neither Dawn nor Xander explicitly invited him; Giles must have issued the invitation already, to spare him even that small embarrassment at the door. He’s the first person to greet Spike once he’s climbed the stairs and entered a cozy former parlor, now a reception room. Willow is there as well, and Andrew, who embraces him with even more brio and exclamation than he did in Los Angeles; it takes a few beats for Spike to realize that at least part of this is a performance for the others, because Andrew is still keeping his promise of not letting on that he’s seen Spike before.
He expects Buffy to show herself, but she’s not there; no one mentions her. He’s given a tour of the facilities, meets some watchers and slayers, and then Giles announces a dinner. They leave the Council headquarters, the whole group of them, and walking for ten minutes, end up at Giles’ house, where Spike sees the woman he remembers visiting him when they all lost their voices. She’s Mrs Giles now, and she’s huge with child. Olivia welcomes him with a handshake and a smile as if she has no idea that he’s a vampire, or that they’ve met before. Seated in the dining room, he finds himself at a proper candlelit London dinner party for twelve, of the sort he hasn’t attended since he had a surname and kept a carriage. Dawn sits beside him, and keeps smiling at him and finding little excuses to touch him; she’s brimming with happiness. On his other side is Giles, who, heartily keeps his wine-glass topped up. The table and the guests surrounding it seem to float; the voices swirl and jangle around him, and he doesn’t really hear anything that’s said. It’s nice enough that they’ve welcomed him at last, the Scoobies and their associates, but this is not a way he can live. He thinks yearningly of getting up, going downstairs and out the door, treading his silent way along the pavement to disappear into the demon parts of the town.
Finally it’s over, and he finds himself in a black cab with Xander, on their way to a hotel. The hotel turns out to be the Savoy. Spike has never stayed here per se, but he’s debauched people in its rooms. That was a long time ago, during the War. He doesn’t mention it to Xander.
“The Council does right by us these days,” Xander says, leading the way through the opulent lobby. Spike thinks he’s a little drunk.
Their rooms are on different floors. Xander says goodnight, and they part.
When he walks into his room—which is vast, and smells of fresh flowers—Buffy rises from the sofa.
“I hope this doesn’t seem like an ambush. I didn’t know what wouldn’t feel like an ambush. I didn’t want to do this in front of the others.”
It would be sweet to follow her up the narrow staircase to her bed. But after more breathless kissing—Buffy can’t seem to stop once she starts, something overwhelms her when his mouth engages hers, so that plaintive noises escape her throat and she presses herself against him, pleadingly, needingly—he pulls back.
“Need to settle things with Rupert first.”
“You know you don’t need his permission, I hope.”
“Course not.” He smiles. “Not talkin’ to him about you. Got some points to go over though, yeah?”
She gets a canny gleam in her eye then. “The Council is not in any way strapped for funds,” she says. “Know-how, yeah. Money, not.”
Which he understands to mean that she fully supports him in holding Giles up for a princely salary before he’ll agree to sign on.
“And I hope … I hope you’ll want to team up with me. But if there’s something else you’d rather do … whatever it is ….”
“Was thinkin’ I’d like to go back out to Botswana with Xander—”
Her pout shows that, for a moment, she’s taking this seriously. Then she smiles.
There’s more kissing, and he almost doesn’t leave. But if he’s going to make it back on foot to the shelter of the Savoy before dawn, he’s got to get started. Buffy gives him a copy of the key to her door, and watches him walk off across the cobbles. He pauses again at the corner, the place where the confluence of shapes and shadows became familiar to him. What does it mean, that she’s living in the very place where he died? It’s the kind of thing someone given to brooding, someone like Angel, could make a lot of. Spike decides he’s not going to do that. London, like all big cities, is a place of coincidence and confluence. Everything overlaps everything else.
It’s a place where he was once very unhappy. Where he suffered and made mistakes.
He’s glad to be back here again. It won’t be like it was before.
He hates this over-decorated hotel room, and won’t stay here another night. What little sleep he manages is pervaded by disturbing images of Clio. Clio in tears, looking small and confused. Clio with blood running down her neck. Clio heaped on her side on a dirty floor; when he turns her over, her face is a terrible blank, and there’s a stake in her breast. Spike knows he’s dreaming; finally he wrenches himself awake. What part of his subconscious is sending him these scolding dreams? Staring at the ceiling, he wonders what would’ve happened if Buffy hadn’t dusted her. If the timing was just a little different, they might’ve seen each other in the club, on the dancefloor, at the bar.
If she’d followed them, if she’d said to both their faces what she’d only said to his: doesn’t your soul rebel against this?
He wants to think that it wouldn’t have mattered. That he’d have kept faith with her. That he’d have turned his back on Buffy, gone on as happily with little Clio as ever.
He begins to cry. Lets himself sob it all out, because he knows he’ll never cry over Clio again.
He’s glad Buffy dusted her.
He goes back to the Council headquarters in a black car with black windows that Giles sends to the hotel. Today there’s no one waiting to greet or meet him. He’s ushered straight into Giles’s large book-lined room.
The man looks older. Having seen him at home, Spike knows he’s happier than before, but the weight of responsibility he’s taken on shows in his face, his carriage. He seems to be constantly aware of the dead whose places he’s trying to fill, whose work he must carry on.
Spike says, “Don’t want to hear you go through any apologetic speeches. The past is the past, an’ neither of us is goin’ to be better for rehearsin’ it. Got your letter, an’ I’m here, so we can take that as read.”
Giles’ expression lightens. “I’m jolly glad to hear you say that. Let me just say I’m immensely glad—we all are—that you’ve come here. When I learned that you’d survived—”
“Yeah, you danced a little jig,” Spike says. “Wait a bit. There is one thing. This business of Angel. That’s all done an’ dusted too. He’s dead, an’ far as I can tell, he’s not coming back. But I want you to know you made a mother of a bad call there.”
Giles gives a start. “What do you know about it?”
“I was there. Thanks to that amulet. An’ then there were good reasons why I hung around an’ helped Angel’s crew.”
“Good reasons? He’d associated himself with an organization we’ve long known to be the representatives—and facilitators—of most of the biggest evil that—”
“Yeah, certainly looked bad. ‘Course, if you’d really looked, you’d have known it wasn’t so simple. They weren’t pure—who is?—but they were workin’ to take W&H down from inside.”
Giles frowns. “It’s been all we can do here to put our own house in order.”
With a shrug, Spike says, “So I see. Seems to me half the problems you evil-fightin’ lot have, you create on your own through keepin’ secrets an’ omittin’ to mention things others should know.”
“There have been many miscalculations and mistakes,” Giles replies. He takes a deep breath. “I’ve made many mistakes.”
“We all have,” Spike says. He’s not interested in rubbing the watcher’s nose too hard in all of them. He’s said his piece.
But Giles turns to him now with a different expression. “It’s all very well to tell me what I should’ve done. But after I wouldn’t speak to Angel, why didn’t you ring me? In fact, why didn’t you contact us here as soon as you were able?”
“Like you’d have taken a call from me!”
“From you, I certainly would’ve.”
Spike opens his mouth, but Giles’s seriousness precludes any remark. He sees what the letter, and yesterday’s meeting, didn’t yet convince him of: Giles’ attitude towards him really has changed. He regards Spike not as a nuisance, or as some necessary evil of Buffy’s, but as a colleague. A colleague who is just as culpable in the general failure as he is.
The moment elapses. Giles’s eyes release him.
“I’d like to sit down with you soon and hear the whole history of this business as you understand it. I want the Council to learn from this.”
“‘Course.”
“Very good, then.”
There’s a silence; Spike waits for the other man to break it. When he doesn’t, Spike thrusts his hands in his pockets and plunges on. “Right. Here’s how it’ll be. I’m with Buffy, first an’ foremost. Go where she goes, do what she needs me to do. Which isn’t to say I won’t pitch in on anything else called for by the greater good. As for remuneration, I’ll take same as she gets, money an’ perks an’ all.”
Giles’ brows shoot up, then he goes to his desk and shuffles some papers. “That’s acceptable, of course.”
“And if Angel does come back somehow, he reports to me.”
“Quite.”
“An’ one last thing. Don’t need the Andrew Fanclub trailin’ round after me.”
“Andrew’s duties will keep him, for the most part, in other spheres.”
“Right. That’s me sorted, then.”
Giles extends a hand. “Well then, Spike, it only remains for me to welcome you to the Council of Watchers.”