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Oct. 23rd, 2006 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgrey Spike’s Very Bad Day, Part Two
Spike had never before seen the need to clone himself, but was now kicking himself for not having had the sense to do so years before. All those mages and warlocks he’d hung out with over the years and not once had it occurred to him that what he really needed was two back-up Spikes and a spare. And now he discovered that it was physically impossible, even for an undead creature of the night with preternaturally fast reflexes and centuries of escaping death to hone his reactions, to properly supervise three four year olds in a locked room.
The second he had got them safely ushered into Angel’s office and the door locked behind them, Gunn had made a beeline for the weapons that were damned well everywhere, while Fred had started pulling out drawers and opening cupboards to look for food. Wesley had picked up the first book he came to and had started sounding out the words.
Spike barely got to Gunn in time as the boy yanked purposefully at sword that was mounted on the wall, catching the blade just before it came down and crushed Gunn’s skull. “No! Naughty!” Spike held the sword out of reach, wincing as it cut his palm. “No playing with the weapons.”
Gunn glowered at him, caught sight of an ornamental dagger and grabbed at it. “No!” Spike grabbed his hand. “Bad, Gunn! No touching pointy things!” It occurred to him that he wasn’t four years old and could perhaps expand his vocabulary a tad. “I mean – don’t touch the swords. Or the knives. Or the ceremonial daggers. At all.”
Fred’s triumphant “Sweeties!” made Spike spin around anxiously. She had managed to open the cupboard in which were kept many of the magical ingredients that Wesley used for his hocus pocus. And why Wesley was keeping his warlock juice in Angel’s closet was a question for people over the age of consent, but right now, Spike needed to fling himself across the room –
Fred had the eyeball in her hand and was just about to pop it in her mouth when he grabbed it. “No! Not sweeties!” He held it up out of reach. “Mustn’t eat the Garlock eyeballs! Nasty.” Actually, eyeballs tasted just fine to him, and he rather missed being able to suck the juice out of one after a nice massacre – well, except for the paralysing guilt and self-loathing – but there was no way that Angel wasn’t going to go ballistic about Spike letting his little chums have entrails for entrées. He took the jar from her and put it on a higher shelf, realizing in horror that there there were all manner of dangerous, toxic, or potentially apocalypse-rendering things kept in this cupboard. He quickly shut the doors, turned the key, and put it in his pocket.
He turned to find Fred’s face crumpling into a wail, the sound hitting him a second later at a pitch that made him stagger back in horror. The downside to vampire hearing had always been that loud noises were, well…loud, but the tremulous wailing of a four-year old had just taken him to a whole new place of pain. Through the cacophony of Fred’s grief and disappointment at having the nice sweeties taken from her by the mean horrible vampire, Spike became aware of a suspicious tremor against the soles of his boots. Turning, he saw that Gunn was trying climb onto the chair behind Angel’s desk, presumably so he could reach the really lethal weapons that were up higher, while Wesley was quietly reading aloud from a book.
Spike was halfway across the room to stop Gunn, when it occurred to him that Wesley was reading from the book that he had been looking at earlier. The one that opened trans-dimensional rifts in the fabric of space and time.
He hurled himself towards Wesley just as the big swirly vortex opened up above the child’s head, Grabbing Wesley by the collar of his miniature designer shirt, he hurled him onto Angel’s couch. A fiery eye sign appeared in the vortex – which began to shriek and roar like an office party. What looked like inter-dimensional wormholes zipped out from it in three different directions, punching holes through walls and floor and causing a lot of distant shrieking. Then Spike was being sucked into something that made all his skin feel as if it was being stripped from his bones. With his sinews straining, he could hear the shrieking of the damned coming from the central vortex, and almost feel the flames licking at his marrow, giving him a horribly vivid flashback to burning alive and feeling his eyeballs boil in his head. That fiery eye glaring at him out of the screaming vortex wasn’t helping him to keep his mind on happy thoughts either. He tried to grab at the floor and his fingers furrowed the carpet like a cartoon coyote. Wesley was standing up on the couch open-mouthed, eyes looking huge. Fred gave another shriek as the suck of the vortex began to pull her towards it and Spike grabbed desperately at a table that he hoped was bolted to the floor. As Fred was sucked forward, Wesley grabbed her arm with one hand and clung onto the arm of the couch with the other, while a yell of triumph from Gunn revealed that he had succeeded in getting a vicious-looking ritual dagger from off the wall. He turned around to display it to the others, only to notice the vortex.
With a cry of shock, Gunn fell off the chair he was standing on, pulling it over with him, the ritual dagger whistling through the air to land, point down, through Spike’s arm. He yelled in pain, almost letting go of the table leg, and was halfway through a really choice swearword when he remembered that he was surrounded by children. “Fu-dge! Boulders! Sons of birdcages!” He yanked the knife out of his arm, almost passing out with the effort of not swearing as he did so, noticing belatedly that under its liberal coating of his blood, the blade was decorated with the same glowing eye sign that was showing in the vortex. As the fingers on his wounded arm slipped loose from their grip on the table leg, he hurled the dagger at the fiery eye as a last act of defiance. As he was dragged into the vortex, the point of the knife went right through the place where its fiery pupil would have been. The vortex closed up with a snap like a gin trap, every swirling wormhole twisted and turned like the nozzle of a directionless vacuum cleaner before retracting with a sucking sound – just as Spike was thrown straight through the place where the vortex had been to bounce painfully off the wall.
Arm bleeding, ears still ringing, nerves jangling horribly, Spike staggered to his feet to find the three children were all looking at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Gritting his teeth, he crossed the room in a few strides, snatched the book out of Wesley’s hands, and said clearly: “No eating eyeballs. No playing with lethal weapons. And absolutely no opening vortexes!”
Fred began to cry first, while Wesley gave Spike a look of abject terror and dived under Angel’s desk. Hearing Fred crying, Gunn clambered back up onto the fallen-over chair he was using, balanced on it precariously and levered another knife off the wall. He jumped down and ran to stand in front of Fred and Wesley, holding the knife up in threat.
Spike rolled his eyes. “Oh for… I just said not to do anything dangerous, is all. It’s not like I’m threatening to disembowel you with a pair of chopsticks now, is it?”
Fred sobbed louder because, as well as taking away her sweeties, the mean horrible vampire was shouting at them.
“I am not shouting at you!” Spike shouted. “And I’m not a mean horrible vampire. I’m a bleeding soul of patience vampire. Now, will you all sit down quietly and stop trying to kill yourselves for five minutes?”
Wesley started crying, too, and Fred immediately crawled under the desk to comfort him. Gunn glowered at Spike horribly, standing in front of the other two sobbing children – who were now clinging to each other for comfort – in a None Shall Pass fashion.
“I’m not being emotionally blackmailed by a bunch of rugrats.” Edging past Gunn, Spike sat down on Angel’s desk. Wesley and Fred still both sniffing piteously while Fred told Wesley how Spike had taken her sweeties away, and Wesley told her that Spike was going to lock them up in the dark with spiders.
“I am not going to lock you up with the…. They weren’t ‘sweeties’, they were bleeding eyeballs. Literally bleeding. If you think making that row is going to have any effect on me, you’ve got another think coming. I’ve eaten more children than you’ve had hot…” Too late, Spike realized that was probably not the best way to go – and Fred’s wailing shooting up an octave confirmed it. Grabbing the phone, he stabbed desperately at every button that looked even remotely useful. It was unfortunate that the first extension he got through to was Ritual Sacrifices. Even Gunn yelled in fear as that voice came on the line, and dived under the desk to cling to Wesley and Fred. The second extension Spike got was the Embalming Section – he hadn’t even known they had one of those – but, at last, on the third attempt, he was through to Harmony. Never in his life had he been so pleased to hear her voice.
“Harm, you have to help me,” he gabbled. “Don’t ask questions, just do what I say and do it now. This is very important.”
“Yes, Spike.” She sounded as breathless as a creature that needed to exhale and he was glad to hear she had realized the importance of the situation.
“I need candy, I need chocolate, I need fizzy drinks, I need colouring books, and I need crayons….”
***
Spike wiped a hand across his brow and took another look around the room. Weapons removed from walls and locked away safely – check; magical ingredients and potions also locked away safely – check; books containing spells, incantations, curses, hexes, summonings, invocations and rituals locked away safely – check; windows secured – check; anything with which small children could stab themselves or other people, or on which they could choke, cut, eloctrocute, smother, maim, mutilate or disfigure themselves or others removed from their reach – check. All it had taken was the combined resources of a pan-dimensional law firm of super-powered evil.
He leant back against the wall, his head thumping the way other men’s hearts beat, and wondered if he had ever been this exhausted in his life before. On the plus side, the children had seemed to enjoy the trifle, sandwiches, ice cream cake, jelly, iced buns, chocolate mousse, six different flavours of chips, four different kinds of fizzy pop, and demonstration of balloon animals by a clown kidnapped at gunpoint and brought in an armoured van under pain of dismemberment. They had also enjoyed all of the five different stories that they had then made Spike read to them, including the one about the tiny little ballerina who lived in the matchbox, and the truly nauseating one about the dear little family of squirrelly-squirrels that lived in the woodsy-woods and collected acorns all bleeding day tralalalalala. They had made him read that one twice. With all the voices.
Now, they were at last quietening down. Gunn and Wesley had finally stopped having the burping contest that they had found so funny, and Fred had stopped being the tiny little ballerina and making Spike hum the music she was dancing to. There was the quiet rustle of pages being turned on a colouring book and the near-silent splatter of fingerpaints irretrievably ruining Angel’s carpet. Wesley coloured in carefully, eyes squinty with concentration and his tongue protruding with the effort of keeping his fingers steady, as if going over the lines was like stepping on the cracks and would break his mother’s back. Gunn had more of a Jackson Pollock approach to art and liked to spread big sheets of paper on the floor, then paddle through the paint and splatter as many different colours in as wide an arc as possible. He had taken off his shoes and socks so he could add the paint with his feet as well as his fingers, the soles of which were now blue, yellow and a fire engine red. Fred was watching the ‘choo-choo train’ go around and around on the track that Spike had constructed with enormous difficulty, crawling around on the floor of Angel’s office while the children asked for tunnels and sidings and exciting derailments. As Fred watched the train, she was making calculations on a piece of paper, and although she was having trouble holding the crayon firmly enough they seemed to be equations about its estimated time and speed.
Angel’s big swanky office now looked like a playschool after a hurricane. Crisps and crumbs had been trodden in everywhere, there were sticky puddles still drying from where bottles of pop had been knocked over, a few contorted balloon animals were drifting disconsolately around the ceiling, and everything that wasn’t slightly damp from spilled soda was slightly sticky from jam, jelly or paint. A dozen hastily purchased toys lay scattered like the dead on a battlefield after the victorious army had swept on to sack the next town.
Spike would have liked to lie down and sleep for a week, but Fred, Wes, and Gunn still had to be restored to their normal size, not just because Angel would kill him if he came back and found them like this, but because there was no way in hell that Spike could keep up this jolly-cheerful-happy face for more than another ten minutes at the most. Not without class ‘A’ drugs anyway. Wearily, he wondered why every parent with a pre-schooler wasn’t on crack.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if this hadn’t happened in an evil law firm, but it made life difficult when there was absolutely no one he could trust to take care of the rugrats who wouldn’t be selling them off to sorcerers the second he turned his back. Everyone had been threatened with nasty protracted death if they breathed a word of what had happened to Fred, Wes, and Gunn, of course, but them being transformed bang in the middle of the lobby where about fifty passing lawyers had witnessed it, suggested it wasn’t going to remain a secret for long. He would have hoped to have an ally in Harmony, but she had been quite vocal about how much she thought the children were in need of smothering, particularly after Gunn had spattered her with fingerpaints and Fred’s sticky little fingers had ruined what was apparently a very expensive dress. Spike didn’t really see how anyone could be immune to their amazing cuteness, but it turned out that everyone in the building was – except for him. Knowing that if Angel were here, he would be acting just as sappy as Spike wasn’t much help when Angel wasn’t here and could always take refuge in plausible deniability later.
He had tried calling Lorne. He had tried calling Lorne twenty-seven times. No answer, and leaving a message was difficult when he didn’t want Angel to hear. It wasn’t that he was scared of Angel, because he so wasn’t, it was just that Angel would freak like no one had ever freaked in the history of freaking. There would be yelling and threats and recriminations and hysteria, and it would be very, very loud, and there was no way that Spike could take anything that loud happening near his headache right now.
“All right, kiddywinks….”
They stopped what they were doing and looked up at him out of their ridiculously big eyes in their unbearably cute little faces. His stomach squirmed with the almost overpowering urge to cuddle them while cooing idiotically, but he trod it down. He resisted ripping throats out every day, despite decades of dependence on the warm salt sweetness of human blood, he could manage to not pick up Fred and gawp dotingly at her while she giggled adorably and stuffed her tiny little fists in her mouth. He was a hero and a champion; he could hold out.
“I need to go out for a while and talk to Mr. Sirk.” His heart fell just at the thought. Sirk – the guy who made Wesley on his worst day ever still look warm, cuddly and approachable. He could hear the sneering already.
Fred’s lower lip trembled, and she ran across to wrap her arms around his knees, gazing up at him woefully. “Don’t go, Uncle Spike.”
It was no good, even a hero could only withstand so much. He scooped her up into his arms and cooed idotically while she wrapped her arms around his neck and gazed up at him out of huge brown eyes. He may possibly have called her ‘Freddy-Weddy’; he was trying hard to blot it out.
“Please, don’t leave us alone, Uncle Spike.”
Someone was tugging at his coat while talking in a slightly lisping English accent. If he looked down, he was going to be lost. Must not look down, Spike told himself firmly. Must not….
“We’ll be very good and quiet.” Oh hell, Wesley had pronounced it ‘kwy-et’. Before he could stop himself, Spike looked down. The big blue eyes of unbearable cuteness gazed up at him. Argh, and there was the tufty hair too. And the little fingers clinging onto his coat. Okay, this was tough – really tough – but he could get through it. Just as long as Gunn stayed where he was….
Gunn came over to him and stood next to Wesley, gazing up at Spike out of big brown eyes of equally unbearable cuteness. When he rubbed his eyes, sleepily, he left a dab of blue paint on his nose, while all the while being dressed in a miniature Armani suit. The cuteness was so overpowering that Spike almost fell over. Gunn said pleadingly: “If you stay with us, we could make demons out of balloons and then hit them with axes and they would go bang.”
Spike made himself think about wearing that amulet, about standing there bouncing sunbeams onto Turok-Han, feeling himself beginning to smoke, then smoulder, then fry. A guy had to have resolve to do something like that. He had to have backbone. Carefully not looking at her, he lifted Fred down onto the ground. He took care not to make eye contact with Gunn or Wesley either, gazing stolidly at the far wall as he said: “I won’t be long. I want you to stay here and play and be good. I’ll be back very soon.”
Still not looking down, he tugged his coat free from Wesley’s clingy little fingers, and then dived for the exit. His fingers trembled with the effort as he locked the door behind him, locking the children in where it was safe, and himself away from the felling power of their combined cuteness. He made the mistake of looking back at the last minute, to find them all with their paint-spattered little hands pressed against the glass, looking at him woefully. Fluffy puppies in a pet shop window could only try to look that much in need of rescuing.
Uttering an inarticulate cry of pain, Spike turned and ran for the lift as if all the hounds of hell were after him.
***
Left alone, Fred thought that she might need to cry again. She tried to calculate how many paces Uncle Spike would have to take to reach Mr Sirk’s office, and how long it would take him, allowing for his height and stride length to get there and then come back again, but it just added up to much too long a time that they would be left on their own. She sat down under Angel’s desk and felt the tears begin to well up. A tentative tug at her sleeve made her turn to find that Wesley had crawled under the desk with her and was holding out a paper plate with two sandwiches on it. He looked very shy and as if he wasn’t sure if she would like him doing that, which made her feel braver, especially as she liked Wesley even more than she liked sandwiches. She felt much happier and took the sandwich, finding that even though she had thought she was too full of jello and chips and jellybeans and custard to eat another bite, that she still had room after all. She munched on it, happily, and gave Wesley a shy smile. He smiled back in relief and nibbled on his own sandwich, although he seemed to be doing that just to keep her company.
She vaguely remembered that she had almost kissed Wesley a few days before, after they had got rid of those bad puppets. Her heat began to thump harder as she thought about how much courage it would take, but when she risked a look at him, he was looking at her wistfully, and he definitely looked as if he would quite like her to kiss him. She decided that as soon as she had finished her sandwich – oh and that cookie he was offering her – she would kiss him for sure. She had just come to that decision, and was licking the last of the cookie crumbs from her fingers in readiness when the phone on Angel’s desk rang, making her and Wesley both jump. It sounded odd from under the desk, a strange burring going right through the wood to the floor, as well as the sound of the bell. They looked at each other in shock, which turned to the relieved realization that it wasn’t as frightening as they thought, and was just the silly old telephone.
Fred remembered that to answer the phone you had to press buttons, but she couldn’t remember which ones they were. They scrambled out from under the desk and found that Gunn was trying to pull the chair upright so they could reach the desk and answer the phone. Fred quickly estimated that Gunn’s height and weight when set against the size an weight of the chair, would make that almost impossible for him to do alone, and they hurried to help him, finding the chair was even heavier than it looked, and difficult to pull or push. Wesley fell over and banged his head. His face scrunched up as if he was going to cry, but he bit his lip and didn’t. Fred told him that she thought he was very brave and he gave her a big smile of happiness and got to his feet and dusted himself off a little self-consciously. She bravely reached out and took his hand in hers and squeezed it and he looked at her shyly and squeezed her hand back. Gunn rolled his eyes and said they were both acting like grown-ups. Wesley looked stung at the insult and said they so weren’t. Gunn said they were too and pushed him. Wesley pushed Gunn back. They reminded her of someone, especially when Gunn pushed Wesley again and said that he was a poopyhead and Wesley said he was not but Gunn was, so there.
“Oh!” She clapped her hands to her mouth in realization. “You are behaving like grown-ups! You’re acting just like Uncle Spike and Uncle Angel!”
That shocked them into stopping fighting at once. They exchanged a look of horrified embarrassment and then began to tug on the chair again. This time it came much more easily and they pulled it back upright and into place. Fred climbed up onto it and was just reaching for the phone when it stopped ringing and clicked and whirred instead. She heard Knox saying into the phone:
“Fred, I don’t know if you’re in Angel’s office, but I’ve tried everywhere else and I can’t find you. Something showed up here in the lab that I think you’ll really want to see. It’s pretty exciting and I don’t have a clue what it is.”
She tried to remember which buttons she needed to press to tell Knox she had heard him and wanted to see the exciting present but he would have to come and let them out, but by the time she had given up pressing and picked up the receiver – it was heavy and she needed both hands – he had gone and the phone just buzzed at her. Annoyed, she put it down again.
“I don’t like Knox,” Wesley said.
“I don’t like him either if Wesley doesn’t,” Gunn said loyally, and to be as unlike Spike and Angel as possible.
“Well, I like Knox,” Fred said firmly. But Wesley looked so sad that she had to scramble down quickly from the desk to give him a hug. Taking her courage in her hands she said: “But I don’t like him as much as you.” Wesley looked much happier and Fred stood on tiptoe and gave him a little kiss on the nose. Breathlessly, she said: “I like you best of anyone.”
“I like you best of anyone, too,” Wesley said shyly. He blinked hard. “Well, you and Angel. I like you both the same.”
Gunn sat down on the carpet and looked sulky. “Now no one likes me best.”
“Oh, we like you, Charles!” Fred sat down next to him and gave him a hug while Wesley scrambled to give him some reassurances as well.
“We like you lots.”
Gunn looked a little happier. “I like you both, too.” He and Wesley hugged and sniffed a bit and then wiped their eyes with paint-spattered knuckles.
Fred watched them proudly. “You’re not acting anything like grown ups now.”
Gunn and Wesley seemed in danger of being distracted by the choo choo train that chuffed past them at that point. Gunn was already getting his ‘let’s have another derailment’ expression when Fred decided she needed to be firm. “We need to go and see the exciting present that Knox wants to show me.”
“He didn’t say it was a present,” Wesley pointed out, clearly torn between the train and the mystery of the unknown exciting thing.
“It sounded like a present, and I want to see it.”
Fred gave Wesley her best pleading look, the one that made Uncle Spike give in so quickly that it was really funny. Wesley held out for a few more seconds and then sighed and said: “I want to see it, too, if Fred does.”
Gunn looked back at the train and then back at them. His expression brightened. “Maybe it’s a weapon.”
“It could be a bomb.” Wesley nodded. “Knox isn’t very good with bombs. Sometimes the ones he makes don’t even work. Maybe he had to send away for a new one and he doesn’t know how to make it explode.”
“Fred could make it explode.” Gunn nodded eagerly. “Fred can make anything explode. Even things that aren’t supposed to.”
Fred made a face at him. “That was an accident.” It was difficult getting used to a new laboratory, and it was no wonder a few of the things she had tried in the first few days hadn’t gone exactly to plan. She pulled a hairpin from her hair. “Now, who is bestest at picking locks…?”
***
In the velvety darkness of the cavernous cellars beneath the mansion in which Archduke Sebassis made his home, Angel said: “I spy with my little eye…”
“Not funny,” Lorne told him shortly.
“I’m just saying, I’m not the one who said ‘Hey, let’s go and visit the incredibly evil guy, because it’s not as if that could be a trap or anything…’.”
Lorne thought about glowering and then realized it would be a waste of a good facial expression, as not even super vampire sight could penetrate this level of blackness. “On the bright side, no one has tried to kill us yet.”
“We still walked straight into a trap! ‘Come this way, sir. The archduke is expecting you. Right through here, sir…’ Straight into the room with no floor!”
“You’re just pissed because you want one of those rooms with a floor that gives out and drops your enemies into an impenetrable pit of darkness, too.”
The moment’s pause that it took Angel to come up with an answer suggested that Lorne had been right. Angel rallied, however: “It’s not that, at all. I just know that today is the day when Sebassis makes his sacrifice to Kali Ma, and I want to be out there, saving the children from the murderous demonic ritual, not sitting here wondering if I have a tear in my coat.”
“You tore your coat?”
“Well, I heard something rip, and I’m sure I can feel fraying.”
“Let me feel.” Lorne felt along the seam of Angel’s coat until he reached –
“Ow!”
“I didn’t know that was how you were sitting.”
“Enough feeling. No more feeling.”
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t think it’s torn, just weakened at the seam.”
“We need to get out of here and save the babies.”
Lorne thought about what he knew about sacrificial rituals. “They’re probably children, not babies. It’s usually Hecate who wants babies. Kali tends to like them a bit older and juicier.”
“We still need to get out of here.”
“Well, if you’ve been keeping to yourself that useful spell to make a solid box of reinforced concrete melt away and turn into a magic carpet, now would be the time to share.”
Another awkward pause before Angel said a little sulkily: “I thought you might know one.”
“Well, I don’t.” As the waves of blackness continued to beat around them, Lorne tried his cellphone. Okay, it hadn’t worked on the last fifty-three times that he had tried to use it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work this time, and the important thing was to remain calm. He flicked it open and looked at the No Signal read out. Then he jumped to his feet, screamed, threw it to the ground and stamped on it repeatedly. Then he sat back down again.
“Feel better?” Angel asked.
“A little.”
“Good.”
They sat in silence as the blackness continued to roll over them, and the time before the evil demonic ritual they were supposed to be preventing ticked relentlessly away.
***
Picking locks was much harder than it looked. Fred had tried to do it, so had Wesley, and so had Gunn. For a moment it had seemed as if Gunn was going to manage it but then the hairpin had snapped and stabbed him in the thumb and he had needed to sit down hard and not cry for a while. But the effort of not crying had made his eyes go very bright and he had needed a lot of hugs from both of them before he felt better. It was while she was patting Gunn’s head and thinking how nice his little fuzz of hair felt and how she and Wesley should get a puppy as soon as they got married, which they should probably do today, so as to make it quicker for them to be able to start living in a little house with a garden where they could have a puppy, the way married people did, that Fred remembered that Angel had a secret elevator in his office.
She jumped up and clapped her hands, making a high-pitched sound of happiness, worrying Wesley and Gunn – who edged a little closer to one another and a little further away from her.
“We can go now!” They still didn’t seem to understand but just looked more frightened, and now they were holding hands. She felt quite cross and glared at Gunn. “Wesley’s my boyfriend. Otherwise, I can’t have a puppy.”
As Gunn hastily let go of Wesley’s hand, Wesley reached for one of the fluffy toys that Uncle Spike had offered to them earlier if they would stop making squirrel noises for the love of all that was unholy, and tentatively held it out to Fred. “I think this one’s meant to be a puppy.”
Fred looked at big eyes in a fuzzy face and was momentarily distracted, squishing it happily until it made a cute little growly sound. She wondered if Wesley could make cute little growly sounds if she squished him, too, and thought that she would quite like to squish him just to find out. Then she remembered that she sort of knew how those growly things worked, just vaguely, and rather wanted to take it apart so she could see if she could put it back together again, but there was something else she really wanted to do, something interesting….
“The present!” She dropped the puppy toy and ran over to where the secret elevator was. Wesley and Gunn were just standing there looking silly, although nice, too, because she liked the way Wesley’s hair stuck up, and how cute he looked without his glasses, and how smart Gunn looked even with the blue paint on his shirt. She jumped up to try to press the button, and then had to jump up again. This time she managed to reach it, and the elevator doors opened. Looking back, she saw Gunn and Wesley get ‘Oh!” expressions of understanding, and then they were running across the room to join her. Then Wesley ran back and picked up a piece of chalk, holding it up and saying: “In case we have to go into any mazes – we can draw arrows to find out way back.”
They all piled into the elevator just as someone tapped on the outside door and said in a falsely sweet, creepy voice: “Children? Are you in there? I’ve brought you some candy.”
“Candy?” Fred whispered hopefully.
But Gunn grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the elevator, wrinkling his blue-tipped nose. “That’s Malcolm from Rituals. I don’t like him.”
“Here.” Wesley pocketed the chalk and held out a slightly-melted piece of chocolate to Fred as consolation for the lack of candy. “I saved this for you.”
It only had a bit of fluff on it from his pocket, which he picked off for her, and she took it eagerly. She looked up at Wesley and thought that he was the nicest person ever. “Thank you.”
As she sucked, enjoying the rich sweet chocolateyness of it, Malcolm rattled the door handle again and his voice sounded a lot less sweet as he said: “Open the door, children! Open it now.”
Gunn made a naughty gesture and looked up at the lift buttons. They were all quite a way over their heads. “Which one do we press?”
Fred giggled and licked the chocolate from her fingers. “Any one we want!” And then they were all jumping up to press buttons as the elevator doors swished shut and the elevator began to whoosh them down as fast as any funfair.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-06 08:39 am (UTC)This is great - I haven't seen a lot of writers who've thought about the downside of super-hearing!
“Fu-dge! Boulders! Sons of birdcages!” Oh, this is grand. Hee!
“I am not going to lock you up with the…. They weren’t ‘sweeties’, they were bleeding eyeballs. Literally bleeding. If you think making that row is going to have any effect on me, you’ve got another think coming. I’ve eaten more children than you’ve had hot…” Too late, Spike realized that was probably not the best way to go – and Fred’s wailing shooting up an octave confirmed it. Grabbing the phone, he stabbed desperately at every button that looked even remotely useful. It was unfortunate that the first extension he got through to was Ritual Sacrifices. Even Gunn yelled in fear as that voice came on the line, and dived under the desk to cling to Wesley and Fred. The second extension Spike got was the Embalming Section – he hadn’t even known they had one of those – but, at last, on the third attempt, he was through to Harmony. Never in his life had he been so pleased to hear her voice.
Spike's frantic attempts to assert his authority and soothe his charges are so Spike. Oh, AtS season 5 fix-it team farce, where have you been for so long? Thank you for writing this!
He leant back against the wall, his head thumping the way other men’s hearts beat, and wondered if he had ever been this exhausted in his life before. On the plus side, the children had seemed to enjoy the trifle, sandwiches, ice cream cake, jelly, iced buns, chocolate mousse, six different flavours of chips, four different kinds of fizzy pop, and demonstration of balloon animals by a clown kidnapped at gunpoint and brought in an armoured van under pain of dismemberment. They had also enjoyed all of the five different stories that they had then made Spike read to them, including the one about the tiny little ballerina who lived in the matchbox, and the truly nauseating one about the dear little family of squirrelly-squirrels that lived in the woodsy-woods and collected acorns all bleeding day tralalalalala. They had made him read that one twice. With all the voices.
Once again, perfect Spike voice, plus hilarious use of detail.
Angel’s big swanky office now looked like a playschool after a hurricane. Crisps and crumbs had been trodden in everywhere, there were sticky puddles still drying from where bottles of pop had been knocked over, a few contorted balloon animals were drifting disconsolately around the ceiling, and everything that wasn’t slightly damp from spilled soda was slightly sticky from jam, jelly or paint. A dozen hastily purchased toys lay scattered like the dead on a battlefield after the victorious army had swept on to sack the next town.
Spike would have liked to lie down and sleep for a week, but Fred, Wes, and Gunn still had to be restored to their normal size, not just because Angel would kill him if he came back and found them like this, but because there was no way in hell that Spike could keep up this jolly-cheerful-happy face for more than another ten minutes at the most. Not without class ‘A’ drugs anyway. Wearily, he wondered why every parent with a pre-schooler wasn’t on crack.
Ahahaha, you certainly said it! Especially the stickiness everywhere.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-06 08:41 am (UTC)“We’ll be very good and quiet.” Oh hell, Wesley had pronounced it ‘kwy-et’. Before he could stop himself, Spike looked down. The big blue eyes of unbearable cuteness gazed up at him. Argh, and there was the tufty hair too. And the little fingers clinging onto his coat. Okay, this was tough – really tough – but he could get through it. Just as long as Gunn stayed where he was….
Gunn came over to him and stood next to Wesley, gazing up at Spike out of big brown eyes of equally unbearable cuteness. When he rubbed his eyes, sleepily, he left a dab of blue paint on his nose, while all the while being dressed in a miniature Armani suit. The cuteness was so overpowering that Spike almost fell over. Gunn said pleadingly: “If you stay with us, we could make demons out of balloons and then hit them with axes and they would go bang.”
Spike made himself think about wearing that amulet, about standing there bouncing sunbeams onto Turok-Han, feeling himself beginning to smoke, then smoulder, then fry. A guy had to have resolve to do something like that. He had to have backbone.
He made the mistake of looking back at the last minute, to find them all with their paint-spattered little hands pressed against the glass, looking at him woefully. Fluffy puppies in a pet shop window could only try to look that much in need of rescuing.
Uttering an inarticulate cry of pain, Spike turned and ran for the lift as if all the hounds of hell were after him.
This whole scene is a gem. The kids are superlatively adorable and Spike's reactions are spot-on.
“Oh!” She clapped her hands to her mouth in realization. “You are behaving like grown-ups! You’re acting just like Uncle Spike and Uncle Angel!” This is so, so great.
“I like you best of anyone, too,” Wesley said shyly. He blinked hard. “Well, you and Angel. I like you both the same.” Aww, this is so Wesley - before the mindwipe was reversed, anyway.
The Angel and Lorne scene in this chapter is the best ever. Plus Lorne POV!
if they would stop making squirrel noises for the love of all that was unholy - ahahaha!
Good job including subtle but distinctive characteristics of a Fred POV, and capturing the easily-distracted quality of a small child, too.
Wesley and Gunn were just standing there looking silly, although nice, too, because she liked the way Wesley’s hair stuck up, and how cute he looked without his glasses, and how smart Gunn looked even with the blue paint on his shirt.
Then Wesley ran back and picked up a piece of chalk, holding it up and saying: “In case we have to go into any mazes – we can draw arrows to find out way back.
I love this. They're all so smart and in character as themselves-become-children.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-06 09:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-06 09:11 am (UTC)