![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Paper Pusher
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fenderlove
Pairing: Spike/Fred
Warnings: This chapter is rate PG for language.
Summary: This is a new ongoing series forsockmonkeyhere's Fantasy Island request on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
nekid_spike. The events of this story include plot points from Angel: After the Fall. Spike is working at a medical examiner's office to earn extra cash after being brought back from Hell. Gunn arrives with a proposition that Spike can't refuse.
Paper Pusher
Chapter Six
The Los Angeles branch of Wolfram and Hart had been in operation for almost two hundred years, flourishing like a Venus Flytrap off the carcasses of its clients’ enemies. It seemed fitting that the spot, which had been de-consecrated by the blood of a mass-murderer and had once held such a hothouse of evil, would now be the future home of a disgusting fast food eatery. A billboard proudly displaying “Doublemeat Palace- Coming Soon!!!” loomed over the construction zone, ominous with its cheerful cartoon cow and chicken advertising the death of their brethren.
“Feed me, Seymour,” Spike muttered, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows. He was feeling a bit naked without his jacket, and it was making him fidgety.
Gunn was pulling a duffel bag from his truck while the kids from the East Hills Teen Center were hopping off the tailgate, each armed with baseball bats and other weapons for causing blunt-force trauma (Spike had learned that proper bit of terminology from Dr. Dominick).
“Please tell me you don’t eat that stuff,” Gunn looked rather nauseous as he stared at the Doublemeat Palace sign.
Spike huffed, “I have some pride, Charlie.” He paused and then added, “I did have sex behind one of their dumpsters though...”
“I don’t want to know,” Gunn shook his head.
“If you want to know what’s in their secret recipe, I could tell you-”
Gunn held up a hand to shush the vampire, “Please stop, for the love of Baby Jesus.” Shoving the duffel bag into Spike’s arms, he began to dig through it, hauling out a rather musty tome. He was looking a little green-around-gills, and it wasn’t a friendly Lorne type of green either.
Spike tilted his head to this side, “A few quips and you’re about to hurl on my shoes? We’re about to go into the inter-dimensional bowels of Evil, Inc.; you need to get your tummy under control.”
“I may have imbibed something not non-alcoholic in the storage closet back at the Center,” Gunn replied. “I thought it would steady my nerves, but I was wrong… very, very wrong.”
“Am I the sober one? Oh, no, this is no good,” Spike shouldered the duffel bag, glancing at the all-too-eager-to-tussle teenagers meandering around Gunn’s truck. “You’re drunk, I’m not drunk enough, and we’ve got children to protect us. We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Gunn opened the book with a sigh, “I’m not drunk. And besides, we may be up shit-creek, but at least we still have the paddles.”
“If there were paddles involved, I might actually have a good time,” Spike smirked.
“Again with the over-sharing,” Gunn admonished, flipping through the moldy pages.
Spike leaned over to get a peek at the book, “I take it that the Crypt Keeper and his creeper-kids gave you that.”
“It’s going to open up the portal to Wolfram and Hart’s permanent records storage,” Gunn reached a dog-eared page and started to read aloud, but Spike interrupted him.
“So you’ll say a bit of hoodoo, and the portal opens up?”
“Yes,” Gunn replied and then tried to recite the spell again.
“And we just walk through?”
Gunn gritted his teeth, “Yes.” He added, “Do you have any more questions?”
Thinking it over for a moment, Spike responded, “Yep,” and began to tick off his fingers as he asked, “Do we know where to go once we’re in there? Did Old Man Creakybones tell you if there were any traps? Am I the only one who finds it suspicious that Wolfram and Hart didn’t move the location of its storage? And why’d you bring along the Little Orphan Annies if they’re not going inside?”
Sighing heavily, Gunn answered, “Yes, I know where to go, and the kids are staying out here because Hargreaves warned me that something could come out of the portal as we go through. They’ve done patrol; they can handle themselves.”
“Thank you, Mr. Exposition. Can you tell me which way to go in case you meet an untimely demise so that I’m not trapped in a mystical filing cabinet for all eternity?”
“Damn it, Spike. What’s with you? I thought you wanted to do this,” Gunn was growing impatient.
“I do, but I don’t particularly want to leap into a Wolfram and Hart-owned dimension without some basic information,” Spike’s expression was serious.
Gunn returned his gaze to the page detailing the spell he would need to open the portal, “You have before.”
Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, Spike groused, “That was different.”
“Because Angel was with us?”
“Yeah, actually,” Spike didn’t offer any further explanation. After a second or two of silence, he added, “I don’t like hocus pocus, all right? It makes me nervous.”
“Then it’s probably a good thing that I’ve got the book, and you don’t,” Gunn remarked.
After uttering a few standard variety Latin-y dead language-sounding phrases, the earth shook momentarily, and then there was a wall. It was a normal enough wall, besides not being rooted to anything in particular, with an elevator door at its center.
“That’s a portal?” Patrick, a lanky young fellow with a tribal-ish tattoo on his throat, walked over, choking up on his baseball bat. “I thought it would be, I don’t know, glowing or something.”
“Me too,” Spike said, sounding equally disappointed. He took a few steps to get a glance at the backside of the wall, but all he saw was Gunn, his truck, and his crew, as if the wall was not there at all.
Gunn pressed the button beside the elevator. There was only one option- down.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Spike shoved his hands into his pockets. God, he wished he’d brought his cigarettes to distract him from being jacket-less.
As the lift door slid open with a sharp ding, Gunn stepped into the empty compartment, and Spike followed. Before the door could shift close, Gunn thrust an arm out to activate the safety catch.
“Once we’re in, don’t assume that we’ll be the ones coming back out,” Gunn called out to Patrick and the others. “If anything comes through that is strictly not us, do not, under any circumstances, allow it to get by you and into the city.”
The rag-tag group of teens readied their weapons and came a bit closer to the elevator.
Spike had to admire Gunn’s take-charge attitude. Good or evil, he had a way of leading a group that Spike envied. Sure, there had been moments in Spike’s life where he had been the leader, but he usually found himself barking orders and throwing tantrums, all sound and fury signaling nothing. He could swagger about in his big leather coat and even bigger attitude, but it was a disguise. Not once in one and fifty-two years of combined life and death did Spike ever truly feel like he was in charge of anything. The only troubling feeling that Spike had about that fact was that it did not trouble him at all. He did not mind being a lieutenant, a second-in-command. For Angel and for Buffy and for Angel again, he fell in step like a good little soldier. He took orders though doing so usually came with much snarking and quipping, but none-the-less he followed because it meant that he would not be ultimately responsible if everything went tits-up. Giving comfort, picking up the pieces, and adapting were the things Spike was good at, even if he wound up needing a shoulder rather than being one most of the time.
Allowing the door to finally close, both men noticed there were no buttons on the inside to direct the car up or down to a specific floor. Luckily enough, the elevator shifted into a shuddery descent. From unseen speakers, The Girl from Ipanema began to play.
“Great,” Spike sighed, tilting his head towards the ceiling, “now I’ll have that song stuck in my head forever.”
“It could be worse,” Gunn replied, sounding so calm, so nonchalant. “It could be Gilbert and Sullivan.”
Spike was still for a moment, but groaned, swiping his hands over his face in irritation, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Charlie! We could be walking into a potential magical minefield, and now I’ve got “I’m a modern Major-General” stuck on repeat in my brain.”
Gunn couldn’t stop the slight smile that appeared on his face. He seemed to be taking this whole mission in stride. He either had complete confidence in himself, or it might have also had something to do with all the time Gunn had spent traveling to the White Room. Maybe creepy lift rides to the inner-workings of one of the most evil organizations on the planet got less creepy after a while.
The elevator door opened slowly, revealing what appeared to be the lobby of Wolfram and Hart before L.A.’s fall into Hell.
“It looks exactly the same,” Gunn took his exit from the elevator.
Spike glanced around, “I wonder if the offices are the same ‘cause, if they are, there was this one sword in Angel’s office that I was particularly fond of-”
“Sorry to say that it’s just window-dressing,” Lilah Morgan stepped out from the front desk. She was poised and immaculate in a well-tailored suit with a small silk scarf daintily tied around her neck. “I just thought that it would be the most familiar setting for you both to see upon arriving. If it would make you more comfortable, it could even look like a gentlemen’s club.”
“So, do you mean one of those high class gentlemen’s club or one of those electric STD-o-rama jobs down by L.A.X?” Spike asked.
Lilah smiled charmingly, all perfect teeth and hair like a well-coiffed shark, “Anything you like.”
“That’s enough bullshit, Lilah. You know why we’re here,” Gunn snapped, tossing the Hargreaves’ book to Spike.
Spike turned to Gunn as he returned the book to the duffel bag, “Am I supposed to know her? I seem to be having a really hard time with remembering these things lately.”
“She used to be a lawyer for Wolfram and Hart,” Gunn explained, “before we got there.”
“Lilah Morgan,” she extended her hand to Spike while correcting Gunn, “And it’s not used to be; it’s still am.”
Spike stared at her hand for a moment, not making any move to reciprocate the gesture, “You’re not human.”
“Not anymore, no,” she said. “As Mr. Gunn knows, the Wolfram and Hart contract extend beyond death. ”
“Which is a lesson to us all to read the fine print,” Eve materialized from nowhere, looking somewhat shabby standing next to the statuesque Lilah. Her shoulders were hunched, her appearance disheveled. Mascara was smudged around her eyes and streaked down both cheeks.
“A lesson that some of us should have known beforehand,” Lilah’s tone was quite condescending though her polite smile never faltered.
Eve glared at her, “I went to UC Santa Cruz, all right? I’m not a lawyer.”
“You’re a creation of the Senior Partners. Yes, I believe you should have,” came the retort.
“I thought that you were fired?” Spike gestured to Eve. “That enormous bloke with the pen fired you, didn’t he?”
With a very put-on sigh, Eve answered, “I signed what I thought was a release, firing me. It wasn’t. It was a demotion, which took away my position as liaison to the Senior Partners, rendering me mortal. It wasn’t until I had my accident,” she held up both wrists with matching vertical scars down each, “ that I learned I was stuck being a paper pusher for all eternity.”
“Please,” Lilah rolled her eyes, “you killed yourself when you realized Lindsey was dead. Pathetic. At least I have the excuse of having not one but three members of Angel’s little team play a role in my death.” She removed the scarf from her neck revealing a scar from her decapitation.
“Technically, Jasmine killed you,” Gunn replied, “Angel drank your blood, and Wesley removed your head.”
“Where was I for that party? Bloody hell, I missed out,” Spike quipped. Quipping was good, kept his mind occupied and away from thinking about any fears he might have. A well-timed quip can throw off an opponent; give you an extra second of reaction time. It was an art form, really.
“Not that I’m not thrilled to be in the company of Angel Investigations’ most phallically named members, but can we get on with the tour?” Eve crossed her twig-like arms in a nervous motion. Her eyes darted around, and she appeared on the verge of vomiting, like a junkie coming down off a wild binge.
Gunn’s eyes narrowed, “You’ve got somewhere else to be?”
Lilah replied, “You’ll have to excuse Eve, gentlemen. The Senior Partners are keeping Lindsey away from her. Well, Lindsey’s zombie anyway.”
Spike figured that that was a smart move on the Senior Partners’ part. Lindsey had a way of scurrying away like a rat when the heat was on, and he was very skilled at it. He was able to go off the Senior Partners’ radar with a pot of India Ink. If they had brought him back like Eve, he’d find a way out. One had to admire his tenacity.
“This way, please,” Lilah motioned to the hallway. “We’ll take you to the records office.”
Allowing Lilah to play hostess, they filed in line behind her. Spike had to wonder why Wolfram and Hart would allow its playthings to be so accommodating. Perhaps it’s because they knew that this mission, the purpose of which they seemed to be fully aware of, was futile, that there was no way to make the contracts null-and-void no matter what magic Hargreaves Sr. could cook up. Then again, the Senior Partners might have been just plotting something. Eve kept glancing over her shoulder as though she was afraid something might jump out and grab her. Maybe that was all part of the act.
The hallway was suddenly an endless array of filing cabinets, boxes, and storage cages. There was no transition; the hall simply became the storage room. Lilah approached a cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and removed a manila folder.
“Here we are. The contracts for Charles Gunn, Winifred Burkle, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, and Angel No-Surname-Provided as needed,” Lilah held out the folder to Gunn.
Gunn was just as skeptical as Spike, “And you’re just handing them over?”
“They are the reason you’re paying us a visit, right?” Lilah sounded coy, playful. “The physical contracts are meaningless. You can’t break them, destroy them, or renegotiate them without the Senior Partners’ permission. I can, however, make you as many copies as you like-”
Snatching the folder from her hand, Gunn smirked as he glanced over the pages, “Yeah, I believe that.”
“Okay, you caught me,” Lilah feigned sincerity and held up her hands in a placating gesture, “The Xeroxes are twenty-five cents a piece.”
“Wes managed to get out from under the incorporeal thumb of the Senior Partners,” Gunn took obvious pleasure in pointing it out.
Lilah’s cool façade faltered for a moment. Spike wondered if Gunn caught it.
“Well, I don’t think that the Powers that Be will be stepping in for a man who murdered his friend and his friend’s child any time soon,” Lilah brushed a lock of hair from her face with a delicate motion of the hand. “Angel, on the other hand, might have a little bit of hope if he gets killed again.” She turned to Spike, “And why are you here again?”
“Moral support,” he spoke flatly.
“I’m surprised you’d be moral anything,” Eve snorted, leaning against a metal filing cabinet.
Spike tilted his head, “A lot more moral than a pretentious little leprechaun like you on any count.”
“It’s very noble of you, Charles, trying to save your friends, making amends for your little trip on the Evil Express while in hell. I get that,” Lilah said, “But what exactly does Class of 1873 get out of this? We didn’t have him sign a contract.”
Gunn’s eyes narrowed, “He’s part of the team. He wants to help.”
Those were the same words Gunn had used in describing Illyria’s part in their mission, yet she had not made her presence known once since this whole enterprise began. Spike felt that small knot of uncertainty creeping up on him again.
“But he wasn’t part of the team when Non had him locked up? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t have a soul,” Lilah’s expression was cruel, taunting, “so it was okay for you to leave him at her mercy.”
“We got what we came for,” Gunn shut the folder as forcefully as one can with a thin piece of cardstock. “Let’s get gone.”
Spike could rationalize why Gunn wouldn’t have tried to rescue him in hell, the most glaring of those reasons being that Gunn had been evil. It shouldn’t have, but it felt a little like betrayal. This, however, wasn’t the time or the place to ask questions about past motives; the most important thing for them to focus on was making it out of this inter-dimensional repository in one piece.
Before they could take more than five steps away from the ex-lawyer and the ex-liaison, both Gunn and Spike smacked into a wall, the same mysteriously materializing wall that they had conjured earlier. The elevator door swung open with its annoyingly cheerful ding. They stepped inside, preparing for an ascent.
As the door began to close, Lilah waved to them, “I hope you don’t mind, but the Conduit needs a word with you.”
The elevator door slammed closed as Gunn threw himself against it, trying to pry it back open.
“I hope this isn’t going to take long. House is on in twenty,” Spike sighed as the elevator muzak began to play. He let the duffel bag he had been shouldering drop to the floor while keeping his hand on the strap.
“Fuck your TV watching schedule!” Gunn shouted, pounding his fist against the paneled walls as though he could halt the lift as it began to take them lower rather than back the way they came. “This wasn’t part of my plan!”
“I take it that this Conduit isn’t a good thing, then?” Spike asked. Just watching Gunn’s sudden burst of angry movement was exhausting.
Gunn slumped to the floor, “Let’s just say that my last meeting with the Big Cat was not productive, and that it was less of a big cat and more of a very angry doppelganger.”
The elevator jerked to a stop suddenly causing Spike to brace himself to keep from losing his balance. A white light flooded into the lift as the doors opened. Spike shielded himself with his arms out of habit, the inherent fear of coming into contact with sunlight. When he realized the light did not have any negative effects, like burning him to a cinder, Spike looked up.
“It’s a big, white room,” the blonde said, looking around.
“You’ve very perceptive,” Gunn shook his head as he got to his feet.
The White Room was laid out before them, an endless expanse of nothing in particular, a dimension within a dimension outside of normal reality, home to the Conduit to the Senior Partners, but it didn’t appear that the Conduit was home.
To be continued…
Previous Chapters: One :: Two :: Three :: Four :: Five.
x-posted onnekid_spike and darker_spike
Author:
fenderlovePairing: Spike/Fred
Warnings: This chapter is rate PG for language.
Summary: This is a new ongoing series for
sockmonkeyhere's Fantasy Island request on nekid_spike. The events of this story include plot points from Angel: After the Fall. Spike is working at a medical examiner's office to earn extra cash after being brought back from Hell. Gunn arrives with a proposition that Spike can't refuse.Paper Pusher
Chapter Six
The Los Angeles branch of Wolfram and Hart had been in operation for almost two hundred years, flourishing like a Venus Flytrap off the carcasses of its clients’ enemies. It seemed fitting that the spot, which had been de-consecrated by the blood of a mass-murderer and had once held such a hothouse of evil, would now be the future home of a disgusting fast food eatery. A billboard proudly displaying “Doublemeat Palace- Coming Soon!!!” loomed over the construction zone, ominous with its cheerful cartoon cow and chicken advertising the death of their brethren.
“Feed me, Seymour,” Spike muttered, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows. He was feeling a bit naked without his jacket, and it was making him fidgety.
Gunn was pulling a duffel bag from his truck while the kids from the East Hills Teen Center were hopping off the tailgate, each armed with baseball bats and other weapons for causing blunt-force trauma (Spike had learned that proper bit of terminology from Dr. Dominick).
“Please tell me you don’t eat that stuff,” Gunn looked rather nauseous as he stared at the Doublemeat Palace sign.
Spike huffed, “I have some pride, Charlie.” He paused and then added, “I did have sex behind one of their dumpsters though...”
“I don’t want to know,” Gunn shook his head.
“If you want to know what’s in their secret recipe, I could tell you-”
Gunn held up a hand to shush the vampire, “Please stop, for the love of Baby Jesus.” Shoving the duffel bag into Spike’s arms, he began to dig through it, hauling out a rather musty tome. He was looking a little green-around-gills, and it wasn’t a friendly Lorne type of green either.
Spike tilted his head to this side, “A few quips and you’re about to hurl on my shoes? We’re about to go into the inter-dimensional bowels of Evil, Inc.; you need to get your tummy under control.”
“I may have imbibed something not non-alcoholic in the storage closet back at the Center,” Gunn replied. “I thought it would steady my nerves, but I was wrong… very, very wrong.”
“Am I the sober one? Oh, no, this is no good,” Spike shouldered the duffel bag, glancing at the all-too-eager-to-tussle teenagers meandering around Gunn’s truck. “You’re drunk, I’m not drunk enough, and we’ve got children to protect us. We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Gunn opened the book with a sigh, “I’m not drunk. And besides, we may be up shit-creek, but at least we still have the paddles.”
“If there were paddles involved, I might actually have a good time,” Spike smirked.
“Again with the over-sharing,” Gunn admonished, flipping through the moldy pages.
Spike leaned over to get a peek at the book, “I take it that the Crypt Keeper and his creeper-kids gave you that.”
“It’s going to open up the portal to Wolfram and Hart’s permanent records storage,” Gunn reached a dog-eared page and started to read aloud, but Spike interrupted him.
“So you’ll say a bit of hoodoo, and the portal opens up?”
“Yes,” Gunn replied and then tried to recite the spell again.
“And we just walk through?”
Gunn gritted his teeth, “Yes.” He added, “Do you have any more questions?”
Thinking it over for a moment, Spike responded, “Yep,” and began to tick off his fingers as he asked, “Do we know where to go once we’re in there? Did Old Man Creakybones tell you if there were any traps? Am I the only one who finds it suspicious that Wolfram and Hart didn’t move the location of its storage? And why’d you bring along the Little Orphan Annies if they’re not going inside?”
Sighing heavily, Gunn answered, “Yes, I know where to go, and the kids are staying out here because Hargreaves warned me that something could come out of the portal as we go through. They’ve done patrol; they can handle themselves.”
“Thank you, Mr. Exposition. Can you tell me which way to go in case you meet an untimely demise so that I’m not trapped in a mystical filing cabinet for all eternity?”
“Damn it, Spike. What’s with you? I thought you wanted to do this,” Gunn was growing impatient.
“I do, but I don’t particularly want to leap into a Wolfram and Hart-owned dimension without some basic information,” Spike’s expression was serious.
Gunn returned his gaze to the page detailing the spell he would need to open the portal, “You have before.”
Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, Spike groused, “That was different.”
“Because Angel was with us?”
“Yeah, actually,” Spike didn’t offer any further explanation. After a second or two of silence, he added, “I don’t like hocus pocus, all right? It makes me nervous.”
“Then it’s probably a good thing that I’ve got the book, and you don’t,” Gunn remarked.
After uttering a few standard variety Latin-y dead language-sounding phrases, the earth shook momentarily, and then there was a wall. It was a normal enough wall, besides not being rooted to anything in particular, with an elevator door at its center.
“That’s a portal?” Patrick, a lanky young fellow with a tribal-ish tattoo on his throat, walked over, choking up on his baseball bat. “I thought it would be, I don’t know, glowing or something.”
“Me too,” Spike said, sounding equally disappointed. He took a few steps to get a glance at the backside of the wall, but all he saw was Gunn, his truck, and his crew, as if the wall was not there at all.
Gunn pressed the button beside the elevator. There was only one option- down.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Spike shoved his hands into his pockets. God, he wished he’d brought his cigarettes to distract him from being jacket-less.
As the lift door slid open with a sharp ding, Gunn stepped into the empty compartment, and Spike followed. Before the door could shift close, Gunn thrust an arm out to activate the safety catch.
“Once we’re in, don’t assume that we’ll be the ones coming back out,” Gunn called out to Patrick and the others. “If anything comes through that is strictly not us, do not, under any circumstances, allow it to get by you and into the city.”
The rag-tag group of teens readied their weapons and came a bit closer to the elevator.
Spike had to admire Gunn’s take-charge attitude. Good or evil, he had a way of leading a group that Spike envied. Sure, there had been moments in Spike’s life where he had been the leader, but he usually found himself barking orders and throwing tantrums, all sound and fury signaling nothing. He could swagger about in his big leather coat and even bigger attitude, but it was a disguise. Not once in one and fifty-two years of combined life and death did Spike ever truly feel like he was in charge of anything. The only troubling feeling that Spike had about that fact was that it did not trouble him at all. He did not mind being a lieutenant, a second-in-command. For Angel and for Buffy and for Angel again, he fell in step like a good little soldier. He took orders though doing so usually came with much snarking and quipping, but none-the-less he followed because it meant that he would not be ultimately responsible if everything went tits-up. Giving comfort, picking up the pieces, and adapting were the things Spike was good at, even if he wound up needing a shoulder rather than being one most of the time.
Allowing the door to finally close, both men noticed there were no buttons on the inside to direct the car up or down to a specific floor. Luckily enough, the elevator shifted into a shuddery descent. From unseen speakers, The Girl from Ipanema began to play.
“Great,” Spike sighed, tilting his head towards the ceiling, “now I’ll have that song stuck in my head forever.”
“It could be worse,” Gunn replied, sounding so calm, so nonchalant. “It could be Gilbert and Sullivan.”
Spike was still for a moment, but groaned, swiping his hands over his face in irritation, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Charlie! We could be walking into a potential magical minefield, and now I’ve got “I’m a modern Major-General” stuck on repeat in my brain.”
Gunn couldn’t stop the slight smile that appeared on his face. He seemed to be taking this whole mission in stride. He either had complete confidence in himself, or it might have also had something to do with all the time Gunn had spent traveling to the White Room. Maybe creepy lift rides to the inner-workings of one of the most evil organizations on the planet got less creepy after a while.
The elevator door opened slowly, revealing what appeared to be the lobby of Wolfram and Hart before L.A.’s fall into Hell.
“It looks exactly the same,” Gunn took his exit from the elevator.
Spike glanced around, “I wonder if the offices are the same ‘cause, if they are, there was this one sword in Angel’s office that I was particularly fond of-”
“Sorry to say that it’s just window-dressing,” Lilah Morgan stepped out from the front desk. She was poised and immaculate in a well-tailored suit with a small silk scarf daintily tied around her neck. “I just thought that it would be the most familiar setting for you both to see upon arriving. If it would make you more comfortable, it could even look like a gentlemen’s club.”
“So, do you mean one of those high class gentlemen’s club or one of those electric STD-o-rama jobs down by L.A.X?” Spike asked.
Lilah smiled charmingly, all perfect teeth and hair like a well-coiffed shark, “Anything you like.”
“That’s enough bullshit, Lilah. You know why we’re here,” Gunn snapped, tossing the Hargreaves’ book to Spike.
Spike turned to Gunn as he returned the book to the duffel bag, “Am I supposed to know her? I seem to be having a really hard time with remembering these things lately.”
“She used to be a lawyer for Wolfram and Hart,” Gunn explained, “before we got there.”
“Lilah Morgan,” she extended her hand to Spike while correcting Gunn, “And it’s not used to be; it’s still am.”
Spike stared at her hand for a moment, not making any move to reciprocate the gesture, “You’re not human.”
“Not anymore, no,” she said. “As Mr. Gunn knows, the Wolfram and Hart contract extend beyond death. ”
“Which is a lesson to us all to read the fine print,” Eve materialized from nowhere, looking somewhat shabby standing next to the statuesque Lilah. Her shoulders were hunched, her appearance disheveled. Mascara was smudged around her eyes and streaked down both cheeks.
“A lesson that some of us should have known beforehand,” Lilah’s tone was quite condescending though her polite smile never faltered.
Eve glared at her, “I went to UC Santa Cruz, all right? I’m not a lawyer.”
“You’re a creation of the Senior Partners. Yes, I believe you should have,” came the retort.
“I thought that you were fired?” Spike gestured to Eve. “That enormous bloke with the pen fired you, didn’t he?”
With a very put-on sigh, Eve answered, “I signed what I thought was a release, firing me. It wasn’t. It was a demotion, which took away my position as liaison to the Senior Partners, rendering me mortal. It wasn’t until I had my accident,” she held up both wrists with matching vertical scars down each, “ that I learned I was stuck being a paper pusher for all eternity.”
“Please,” Lilah rolled her eyes, “you killed yourself when you realized Lindsey was dead. Pathetic. At least I have the excuse of having not one but three members of Angel’s little team play a role in my death.” She removed the scarf from her neck revealing a scar from her decapitation.
“Technically, Jasmine killed you,” Gunn replied, “Angel drank your blood, and Wesley removed your head.”
“Where was I for that party? Bloody hell, I missed out,” Spike quipped. Quipping was good, kept his mind occupied and away from thinking about any fears he might have. A well-timed quip can throw off an opponent; give you an extra second of reaction time. It was an art form, really.
“Not that I’m not thrilled to be in the company of Angel Investigations’ most phallically named members, but can we get on with the tour?” Eve crossed her twig-like arms in a nervous motion. Her eyes darted around, and she appeared on the verge of vomiting, like a junkie coming down off a wild binge.
Gunn’s eyes narrowed, “You’ve got somewhere else to be?”
Lilah replied, “You’ll have to excuse Eve, gentlemen. The Senior Partners are keeping Lindsey away from her. Well, Lindsey’s zombie anyway.”
Spike figured that that was a smart move on the Senior Partners’ part. Lindsey had a way of scurrying away like a rat when the heat was on, and he was very skilled at it. He was able to go off the Senior Partners’ radar with a pot of India Ink. If they had brought him back like Eve, he’d find a way out. One had to admire his tenacity.
“This way, please,” Lilah motioned to the hallway. “We’ll take you to the records office.”
Allowing Lilah to play hostess, they filed in line behind her. Spike had to wonder why Wolfram and Hart would allow its playthings to be so accommodating. Perhaps it’s because they knew that this mission, the purpose of which they seemed to be fully aware of, was futile, that there was no way to make the contracts null-and-void no matter what magic Hargreaves Sr. could cook up. Then again, the Senior Partners might have been just plotting something. Eve kept glancing over her shoulder as though she was afraid something might jump out and grab her. Maybe that was all part of the act.
The hallway was suddenly an endless array of filing cabinets, boxes, and storage cages. There was no transition; the hall simply became the storage room. Lilah approached a cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and removed a manila folder.
“Here we are. The contracts for Charles Gunn, Winifred Burkle, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, and Angel No-Surname-Provided as needed,” Lilah held out the folder to Gunn.
Gunn was just as skeptical as Spike, “And you’re just handing them over?”
“They are the reason you’re paying us a visit, right?” Lilah sounded coy, playful. “The physical contracts are meaningless. You can’t break them, destroy them, or renegotiate them without the Senior Partners’ permission. I can, however, make you as many copies as you like-”
Snatching the folder from her hand, Gunn smirked as he glanced over the pages, “Yeah, I believe that.”
“Okay, you caught me,” Lilah feigned sincerity and held up her hands in a placating gesture, “The Xeroxes are twenty-five cents a piece.”
“Wes managed to get out from under the incorporeal thumb of the Senior Partners,” Gunn took obvious pleasure in pointing it out.
Lilah’s cool façade faltered for a moment. Spike wondered if Gunn caught it.
“Well, I don’t think that the Powers that Be will be stepping in for a man who murdered his friend and his friend’s child any time soon,” Lilah brushed a lock of hair from her face with a delicate motion of the hand. “Angel, on the other hand, might have a little bit of hope if he gets killed again.” She turned to Spike, “And why are you here again?”
“Moral support,” he spoke flatly.
“I’m surprised you’d be moral anything,” Eve snorted, leaning against a metal filing cabinet.
Spike tilted his head, “A lot more moral than a pretentious little leprechaun like you on any count.”
“It’s very noble of you, Charles, trying to save your friends, making amends for your little trip on the Evil Express while in hell. I get that,” Lilah said, “But what exactly does Class of 1873 get out of this? We didn’t have him sign a contract.”
Gunn’s eyes narrowed, “He’s part of the team. He wants to help.”
Those were the same words Gunn had used in describing Illyria’s part in their mission, yet she had not made her presence known once since this whole enterprise began. Spike felt that small knot of uncertainty creeping up on him again.
“But he wasn’t part of the team when Non had him locked up? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t have a soul,” Lilah’s expression was cruel, taunting, “so it was okay for you to leave him at her mercy.”
“We got what we came for,” Gunn shut the folder as forcefully as one can with a thin piece of cardstock. “Let’s get gone.”
Spike could rationalize why Gunn wouldn’t have tried to rescue him in hell, the most glaring of those reasons being that Gunn had been evil. It shouldn’t have, but it felt a little like betrayal. This, however, wasn’t the time or the place to ask questions about past motives; the most important thing for them to focus on was making it out of this inter-dimensional repository in one piece.
Before they could take more than five steps away from the ex-lawyer and the ex-liaison, both Gunn and Spike smacked into a wall, the same mysteriously materializing wall that they had conjured earlier. The elevator door swung open with its annoyingly cheerful ding. They stepped inside, preparing for an ascent.
As the door began to close, Lilah waved to them, “I hope you don’t mind, but the Conduit needs a word with you.”
The elevator door slammed closed as Gunn threw himself against it, trying to pry it back open.
“I hope this isn’t going to take long. House is on in twenty,” Spike sighed as the elevator muzak began to play. He let the duffel bag he had been shouldering drop to the floor while keeping his hand on the strap.
“Fuck your TV watching schedule!” Gunn shouted, pounding his fist against the paneled walls as though he could halt the lift as it began to take them lower rather than back the way they came. “This wasn’t part of my plan!”
“I take it that this Conduit isn’t a good thing, then?” Spike asked. Just watching Gunn’s sudden burst of angry movement was exhausting.
Gunn slumped to the floor, “Let’s just say that my last meeting with the Big Cat was not productive, and that it was less of a big cat and more of a very angry doppelganger.”
The elevator jerked to a stop suddenly causing Spike to brace himself to keep from losing his balance. A white light flooded into the lift as the doors opened. Spike shielded himself with his arms out of habit, the inherent fear of coming into contact with sunlight. When he realized the light did not have any negative effects, like burning him to a cinder, Spike looked up.
“It’s a big, white room,” the blonde said, looking around.
“You’ve very perceptive,” Gunn shook his head as he got to his feet.
The White Room was laid out before them, an endless expanse of nothing in particular, a dimension within a dimension outside of normal reality, home to the Conduit to the Senior Partners, but it didn’t appear that the Conduit was home.
To be continued…
Previous Chapters: One :: Two :: Three :: Four :: Five.
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nekid_spike and darker_spike
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Thanks for reading. :D
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“If there were paddles involved, I might actually have a good time,” Spike smirked.
“Again with the over-sharing,” XD
and LILAH!
Damn, it's all so good.
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