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The Magic Number part 10
It worked. Sort of. Twenty minutes after drinking the water, Harris drifted in a waking doze, his face slack and all his movements slowed to quarter-speed. He followed Spike back downstairs and collapsed on the sofa, his face turned to the telly but his eyelids so low they were almost closed. Somewhere in there, Harris pupils glittered like black glass. Somewhere beyond that, Harris brain lay submerged like a mastadon in tar.
"Witches mix a good roofie," Spike noted, studying Harris briefly before going back to the wasteland of the television listings.
They were stuck in a trough of late-night rubbish, none of it bad enough to be really interesting, and after a while he fell asleep himself. He woke up with a start when something landed on the roof.
He sat straight up and stared at the ceiling, supersonic vampire senses deployed--then heard a wheezy grunt behind him and realized that it hadn't been the roof after all. Harris had fallen off the sofa.
He was lying on the carpet, staring around with an expression of surprise and dismay. Spike sighed and relaxed back into his chair.
"Bloody idiot."
Harris didn't answer, of course. He didn't seem to notice the comment at all, in fact--after a few seconds he pushed himself cautiously to his feet and started for the kitchen. He had some trouble walking straight. He was still naked.
"Where are you going?"
The twin moons of Harris's albino ass cheeks disappeared into the darkness of the kitchen. Spike waited warily. Just as he was starting to relax again, he heard the faint metallic scrabbling of a hand at the door chain.
"Fuck."
He got up, clamped a hand to his forehead for the ice pick that immediately impaled his brain, and went into the kitchen. Harris was at the door, messing with the lock.
"Cut that out." Spike stood still a minute, letting his brain pound, then went to the sink and drew a glass of water. "Stop it, will you? Go back to sleep." The clock on the microwave read 3:45.
Harris didn't stop pawing, like a cat that refused to listen when you told it, well, anything. Spike drank some water, then put the glass down and walked over. Before he was even halfway there, he knew Harris wasn't awake.
He can't sleep all by himself, he has nightmares. Red had said that, a million years ago when she'd walked him through his new job as Harris's keeper. And apparently it was true, because Harris was giving off a sleepy low-level adrenaline cloud, a smell like licking a battery. Spike's nose wrinkled.
"Just...go back to bed." He reached out, caught hold of Harris's shoulder, and jumped back when Harris spun around. They'd already done this dance once, out in the garden, and he didn't need another punch in the face. But Harris wasn't in a punching mood. He stared at Spike with wide, fear-blackened eyes for a few long seconds, then blinked, visibly shook himself, and floated up the last few inches to break the surface of sleep.
"You awake now?" Spike kept his hands to himself, watching Harris look around. Troubled expression, where the hell am I? expression. "You're in the kitchen." That seemed too vague, so he added, "Slayer's house. Slayer's kitchen."
Harris sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and turned the same look on Spike. Now, the translation was clearly, Who the hell are you?
"I'm..." Spike sighed and massaged his eyelids. "I'm your good friend Spike. My job's to walk around after you with a folded newspaper and a spray bottle." He gave Harris a smile that was mostly a sneer. "Been doing that all day already, and I'm fucking tired and fucking drunk, and please just go to fucking bed. All right?"
Harris stood there, considering. His eyes drifted away from Spike and off towards the sink. Spike turned to look--his glass of water.
"You want a drink?" He walked back and lifted the glass. "You want some water?"
Like a zombie, Harris took a step forward. Then he stopped. Spike raised the glass to his lips, sipped, and smiled. "Mmm. Water. Want some?"
He kept the glass raised, and Harris came stumbling after it, all the way back to the living room. At the couch, Spike handed it over. Harris drank it noisily, spilling a little down his front. Spike tried not to notice its progress towards Harris's trouserlessness. The television was showing some kind of local fishing program. Cable access. Christ.
"Good. Now go back to sleep." Spike gathered up the telly schedule and considered the booze that was left to him. He had almost a whole week left here, and he wasn't sure he could leave Xander alone in the house to get more--he should ease up. He sighed and flipped pages, then noticed that Harris was still standing beside the sofa, staring at him.
"What?"
He has nightmares, but he's okay if there's someone in the bed.
They stood there in silence, stalemated. Harris's lips were still wet. His fingers played nervously at the rim of the glass.
Through the shrieking of the four thousand infuriated baboons inside his skull, Spike said slowly, "Do you want to sleep upstairs?"
Harris's eyes flickered. Yes.
"In your own bed?"
Yes.
Spike waved a regal hand. "Right then. Off you go."
Harris's eyes widened slightly, and the baboons started pummeling and eating each other. Spike tried killing Harris with his brain. No luck.
It was amazing how irritating silence could be. It wasn't more than a few seconds before Spike heard himself say, "What if I walk you up there? That make you happy?"
Harris didn't seem to know what to make of that--he rubbed his jaw carefully, his eyes still on Spike's face as if he were waiting for the subtitles to show up. Spike sighed and dropped the schedule.
"Come on."
He trudged up the stairs without bothering to look back. He could hear Harris's bare feet following along behind, docile as a lamb now that he was getting what he wanted.
"Only poofs need to be put to bed," he narrated glumly, rounding the top of the stairs. "Sad, really. Full-grown semi-sentient thing like you." At the door to Harris's room, he stopped and made an ushering gesture. "In you go."
In Harris went, without a second look. Spike briefly entertained a fantasy of slamming the door and nailing it shut. Instead, he hovered in the gloom of the hallway and waited. Sure enough, Harris didn't lie down on his cot right away, but turned back to face the door.
"I'm not sleeping with you."
At the sound of Spike's voice, Harris shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, and scratched his head. Like a big, naked monkey.
"I'm coming in there until you fall asleep, and then I'm going to leave, so when you wake up you'll be alone and terrified. Sound all right?"
Harris didn't move until Spike crossed the threshold; then he slumped down on his cot and melted into the blankets. His breathing slowed, his heartbeat quieted.
"I'm only toying with you," Spike said, easing himself onto the witches' bed. It was soft and the blankets smelled good. The room was dark. He lay down on his back and laced his fingers over his belly, staring up at the ceiling. As soon as the Scoobies got back, he was going to LA. Going to pay a little visit to Angel and his bloody team. Maybe call in a little of what they owed him for this. He could get a flat. Dawn could visit...
"He keeps singing 'Blister in the Sun,'" Willow said, turning to frown at them over her shoulder. "That's not the way to make a cat yawn."
"It works in the Alleghenies," Harris said absently. He was leafing through a magazine, which was unbelievably irritating, because it was the exact magazine Spike had wanted to read. There were corset ads in the back, grainy black-and-white illustrations of boning and gussets, all of them unbearably erotic. He didn't want any of them to know about those, least of all bloody Harris.
"Shut up, both of you." He yanked at the chain around his ankles again, but it didn't bend. Made a nice loud clanking sound when he let it fall in the bottom of the tub, though. "God, I want you dead."
"Just wait," Harris said, smirking at the magazine. "We'll all be dead sooner or later. Hello." He raised the magazine and let the centerfold gate fall open. "I didn't even know they had indoor plumbing in 1883."
"Because you're an idiot." Spike sank down into the tub and watched the little blue bird alight on the faucet. "You're an idiot too."
The Watcher was due back shortly, probably not with good news, and there was the sound of music out in the streets, which was why they'd drawn all the shades. Willow's concoction smelled like burnt hair and coconut. Upstairs, Dawn was still in the shower. That bothered him--she needed to get out and get dressed. You couldn't be in the shower when bad things were about to happen.
"Did you ever meet the Violent Femmes?" Willow asked, stirring some kind of leafy greens into the pot.
"They're not dead," Spike said grumpily. "Why does everyone assume I've met every important person in the history of time? I'm not Forrest fucking Gump."
"No, but you are a starfucker." Harris licked his thumb and turned the page. "You'd sleep with Mick if you got the chance."
"Wrong band," Spike snapped. Then, with great amusement at his own cleverness, he added, "I have shagged a mick, though."
They both turned to watch him laugh, and he noticed that the chains on his wrists were tearing long red wounds in his skin, and then someone knocked on the door and it was Harris riding an elephant, with oompah music in the background, and the elephant could fly.
He flipped over into consciousness without knowing why. It was dark, the room was silent. He was...in the witches' bed. He'd fallen asleep there. He was lying on his back on top of the blankets, his arms up over his head in an attitude of surrender, all his clothes still on. He wasn't quite conscious enough to feel the state of his head, but he was receiving shadowy communications, whispers along the line, telling him that when he did finally break that seal, there would be no beauty in the revelation. His mouth tasted like cat shit.
Why was he awake?
He rolled his head to one side and noticed that he wasn't alone in the bed. Harris was lying next to him, curled in the other direction with a foot or two of mattress between them. In the darkness, the scars on his back made an interesting pattern, like a series of attempted sketches that had been vigorously crossed out. He was asleep, breathing quietly.
Spike blinked slowly. He considered lifting his left arm and poking Harris in the shoulder, telling him to get out. Then he considered lifting his right leg and getting out on his own side of the bed. Then he fell asleep again.
When he woke up again it was still dark, but a few things had changed. There was a warm body tucked along the length of his, a warm heavy arm circling his waist. He was lying on his side now, and there was hot, rapid breath on the back of his neck. Harris was lying behind him, gasping and shoving, and the zip of Spike's jeans was open. His belt was undone, and his shirt had been pulled up a few inches. His dick was out. Harris was jerking him off.
It all hit him in less than a couple of seconds, intermingled with a half-memory of dreamed oompah and gigantic fishes, and with the realization that he was urgently, frantically hard. Harris's hand was hot and fast, and Spike rode hips-first into it without a second thought, closing his eyes right after he'd opened them, and grabbing a fistful of blanket to add leverage. He could feel Harris's dick shoving into the small of his back, blunt needy stabs that made him jerk even harder into Harris's fist. They were both gasping. The headboard banged. Then Harris buried his forehead in the blanket, snapped his teeth, and soaked the back of Spike's shirt in a series of warm, wet pulses.
His grip didn't loosen, and in three, four, five more thrusts, Spike came too. It was white-hot and partially paralyzing. He heard himself make a sound like a man being gutted.
He drifted slowly back down, or up. Harris lay breathing into the blanket for a minute or so. Spike lay trying to feel his feet.
Then Harris rolled back onto his side, and his breath was hot on the nape of Spike's neck again. He disengaged his hand gently from Spike's cock, wiped off in a desultory way on the top blanket, and rolled over onto his back. Spike licked his lips and glanced down at the mess on the blanket in front of him.
He was still trying to decide what to say when he realized Harris had fallen asleep.
He woke up for the millionth time in pale gloom. It was morning outside, or maybe afternoon. He felt dead. The bed was cold and empty except for him, curled up flat under the blankets like a hibernating snake. Still wearing all his clothes, still innocent as a babe if you overlooked the fact that his jeans were wide open and the back of his shirt was stuck to his skin.
He lay for a few minutes, mostly brain-dead.
It had been a really good orgasm.
Eventually he had to form a plan, or at least get out of bed. He was relieved to be alone for this part of things, and it only took a few seconds of actual thought to reach a decision: deny everything. He couldn't quite believe any of it had happened anyway. Harris was catatonic, imbecilic, traumatized, and a berk. Harris had not given him a fantastically-timed handjob in the middle of the night, with no explanation or apology. Harris had not basically rubbed off on his back. Harris was American. Americans weren't like the French; they didn't do that kind of thing.
Picking his shirt uneasily away from his back, he headed down the hall to the bathroom.
The shirt was a loss, so he dumped it in the hamper for the Slayer to discover months from now, ran a hot washcloth over his face and under his arms and in the general, unexamined direction of his crotch, then loitered a little in the hallway, reading the spines of Joyce's self-help manuals. He couldn't hear anything downstairs except the television, which he'd left on last night. That realization brought on a memory of Harris scrabbling at the lock on the back door, which in turn dropped a lead balloon into his gut. Harris could be halfway to Modesto by now. Or, more likely, roadkill.
He came down the stairs at a lively jog, ready to see the front door standing wide open and a deathly spill of sunshine on the hall carpet. Things were still dim and shuttered. He took a quick stock of the bottles on the carpet, already heading through to the kitchen. Where Harris was sitting at the table in a T-shirt and pajama pants, a bowl of cornflakes deteriorating at his elbow, the previous day's paper open in front of him.
Spike stopped short in the doorway, and tried to look casual. "Still working on those funnies, I see."
The look Harris gave him was mild, but more alert than any he'd dredged up the day before. Not catatonic anymore, that was good. Not dope-addled, not panicky. There wasn't any particle physics going on in there, but at least he seemed to know where he was. All good, in terms of keeping Spike's anatomy intact and mold-free.
Also, they were both now wearing clothes. That was good.
"Right," Spike said, suddenly uncomfortable in his shirtlessness. "I'm just going to..." He made a vague backward gesture with one hand, then turned and started for the living room. Something niggled in a corner of his mind. It was one thing to decide to play it as if nothing had happened; it was another to find that Harris had beat him to it. There'd been no flicker in Harris's expression. Not a single spark of recognition or regret. With faint surprise, Spike realized he'd sort of been looking forward to taking that particular piss, possibly for years to come.
He hoisted bottles in front of the television, absent-mindedly gauging their contents even though the smell of the whiskey made his nostrils curl. The television yapped about laundry soap until he muted it with his toe. Then he realized that Harris was standing in the kitchen doorway.
"Yeah?" He turned, a bottle dangling belligerently from each hand, expecting to see the flood tide of American heterosexual panic.
Harris was yawning, scratching his belly with one hand. In the other, he held a milk carton. Spike stared at it. "What?"
Harris gave him a look of sleepy condescension, and shook the carton. Empty.
"We're out of milk?" Spike asked.
Harris walked over, held out the carton, and waited until Spike juggled the bottles and took it from him. Empty, yeah.
Message delivered, Harris walked past Spike, went up the stairs, and disappeared back to bed.
