__On The Town__
By Dutchbuffy



Something woke Wesley, but when he listened nothing seemed amiss, so he turned around to snuggle closer against his lover's back. Spike was gone. Wesley sat straight up, instantly wide-awake, listening as hard as he could. He heard stealthy footsteps and sprang toward the door, flinging it open. Spike was about to leave the apartment, fully dressed and ready to go out by the looks of it. Wesley flipped on the light. Spike was wearing tight black leather pants and an even tighter T-shirt, and his face was adorned with a lot of black mascara and eyeliner. Expensive cologne wafted into Wesley's nose.

He felt very foolish, standing there bare naked with creases from the sheets all over his body and his hair rumpled. He squinted his eyes to see in the bright light and without contacts.

"Going out?"

"Yeah. Don't wait up."

Spike turned to go.

Desperately, Wesley said, "Can I come with you?"

Spike looked at him for a moment, impossibly beautiful in his paint and sexy finery. "Not tonight, love. Take you some other time. Just wanna be by myself a bit, okay?"

He left, carefully clicking the door shut.

Wesley threw himself back on the bed and lay staring dry-eyed and sleepless at the ceiling. Of course Spike needed some time alone. Anybody would. They'd been almost constantly together since his strange appearance in the White Room. He wasn't a pet, he was a human being and had his own needs. Wesley couldn't imagine how he'd stood cooping himself up in the apartment the whole time. And, being Spike, his first time out was not a gentle stroll in the park. Although Wesley thought it was high time Spike got rid of his understandable but superfluous fear of sunlight.

Underneath the rational thoughts, there ran an X-rated movie, featuring Spike shaking his hips in gay discos. Being sucked off in sleazy toilets and saying I love you to a thousand beautiful young people of either sex. He was an idiot, being so needy and lonely, and he'd crowded Spike. Absolutely. It was his fault. Starting tomorrow, he'd keep more distance, go to the office more, go out alone if need be.

He turned on his belly and tried to sleep. Images of Spike begging him to hurt him and use him danced across his eyelids, pulsing with red when he squeezed his eyes more tightly shut. It would be so easy to find people who were willing to do just that. It should have been him. At least he'd take care of Spike. Why hadn't he? Morality was such a cold guideline, love should have guided him to do the right thing. He turned again. There was no cool fresh place in the whole bed. He kicked off the covers and lay panting while his thoughts churned out rancid lumps of regret and helplessness.

When he was woken up by a sudden absence of sound, the grey light of early morning pressed against the curtains. The place beside him was still empty, the pillows undented. He sat up groggily and put on his glasses to peer at the alarm. Five thirty. He rubbed his face and scratched his scalp in an attempt to shake off sleep. There were no sounds from anywhere in the apartment, but he couldn't shuck the feeling that he was not alone. At last, he sat up, stepped into yesterday's jeans and went to investigate.

He found Spike in the bathroom, passed out in a pool of vomit. His color, or what could be seen of it under the bruises and filth was ghastly, and Wesley almost stepped into the muck in his haste to check Spike's pulse. It was slow but steady. Wesley thought he looked like he'd had a combination of alcohol and some kind of drug. He manhandled him with difficulty into the bathtub and turned a lukewarm shower on, went to put on a pot of coffee and check on the web what to do and how to find out what kind of drug Spike had taken.

Wesley thought he was calm, but when he opened his mouth, sipping the coffee to make sure Spike didn't burn his mouth, his jaws and teeth ached from clenching them so tightly. He cleaned Spike up, pulled off the sodden, rent clothes and threw them away. They stank of a combination of booze and piss and vomit, and God knows what else. After half a mug of coffee, Spike started to struggle faintly.

"Put it all on me," he mumbled. "That's my girl."

Wesley thought he might be speaking to Drusilla, his paramour of a hundred years. Carefully he wiped Spike's sweating brow with a wet cloth.

"It burns," Spike went on, frowning in his drugged sleep. "I wanna see how it ends."

Spike regained a healthier color and seemed to slip into normal sleep. Wesley half walked, half carried him to bed and began his own interrupted morning routine of putting in contact lenses, shaving, showering and dressing. He called Wolfram & Hart to tell them he'd be working at home today and settled himself at his desk. There was always some translation work waiting for his attention.

Late in the afternoon, he stepped out to get some groceries, and found Spike awake on his return. He was hanging limply on the sofa, his face a patchwork of cuts and blue-black bruising, flicking at breakneck speed through Wesley's satellite channels. He turned his face away from Wesley when he entered the room, projecting leave me alone vibes.

"I hope you had some fun last night," Wesley said sarcastically, his hackles rising at Spike's body language.

Spike mumbled, "Sod off."

Wesley raised his eyebrows, well aware that Spike couldn't see him, and went to put his purchases in the fridge. His cheeks hurt with muscle tension. He would not turn into his father. He would not hurt Spike.

Spike refused to tell anything about where he'd been or what he'd done. Wesley managed to botch up a question about safe sex so spectacularly that they both tried to walk out in a huff. Wesley won.

"I do keep up with the times, unlike my bloody grandsire, you ponce!" Spike screamed after him.

It became a regular pattern. Spike would sneak out of the apartment at the oddest hours, dressed to the hilt, and come back in various stages of inebriation, druggedness or external damage, presumably gained in fights.

Wesley had learned his lesson and didn't ask. He thought it might be a phase, a newly risen human testing out the limits of his new body. When the going out at night and coming back smashed in all senses of the word didn't peter out in a few weeks, the obvious yearning for self-destruction began to worry him. He didn't even know how or why Spike had become a vampire more than century ago. That he had put himself sufficiently at risk that it could have happened at all raised the possibility of the same behavior even then. Especially if it were true what his former colleague Lydia Chalmers had postulated; that William the Bloody had been an educated man of at least middle-class origins.

Wesley desperately didn't want to hurt or alienate Spike, but when he came home early one day and found him, as usual, deep in the bottle of the day he finally plucked up the courage to speak out, "When are you going to pull your weight around here, Spike? No answers in that bottle, you know."

"Pull my weight? Pull my weight? Isn't the bloke who saved the world entitled to some R&R? Should I save it on a weekly basis or just charge per apocalypse?"

Wesley had no idea what Spike was talking about. "I assume you were never taught Sartre in school? I've just about forgotten everything I knew about existentialism, but I do remember something about finding meaning in one's own life."

Spike turned his bloodshot eyes on him and stabbed a finger coated in black glitter polish in his direction. "If you're going to talk philosophy at me, I'm out of here right now."

Wesley lifted his hands. "Not a single iota shall pass my lips!

Spike looked at him suspiciously and set down the bottle. "Easy for you to say. Your job in life is to follow your perfect hero, the vampire who can do no wrong."

Wesley drew himself up. "My job is to fight evil. I don't care if I work alone, or in a small detective agency or with a huge corporation. If I were to think that Wolfram& Hart were still pursuing their former evil interest, I'd leave immediately."

Spike dipped his head and raised his eyebrows.

"Of course I would," Wesley said defensively.

Spike remained expressively silent.

"If you don't trust Angel, or Wolfram & Hart, why don't you go join the Vampire Slayer in Cleveland?"

Wesley saw Spike flinch. "Well?" he prodded. "Why not?"

Spike's lips pursed together and outwards and his face clouded.

"I'm not sure of the terms Buffy and me are on," he said heavily.

Wesley pressed on, aware of many occasions in the past weeks when he hadn't persevered.

"So you knew her? You could hardly have avoided her in a town the size of Sunnydale," he said. "How did you manage not to get staked? Did she know about the soul?"

"She did stake me once," Spike said with a wistful smile, "but as I was wearing the gem of Amara at the time, it had bloody little effect."

Wesley waited. Spike got up and started to pace.

"We were allies, most of the time," he said at last.

Spike paced and fretted as if a whole epic was going to burst forth at any moment, but in fact he wasn't going to divulge anything that night. Wesley gave up on it and went into the kitchen to get a beer. To his surprise Spike came after him.

"Sorry, Pryce," Spike said. "Didn't mean to snap at you. This is something I need, to find out who I am, what I can do…"

"I get that," Wesley said evenly. "And don't call me Pryce, we're not in school anymore."

He righted himself, and saw that Spike was frowning uncertainly at him. He handed Spike one of the cold beers he'd been getting and motioned his head to the couch.

"What were you watching?"

* * *