Spike had three dreams, knotted together at the edges:

In the first, he was sitting on a beach, under a cloudless sky.  A huge yellow sun was warming his face and chest, and the deep song of the tides soothed him like a mother’s touch.

Out in the swells, he saw a silhouette bobbing up and down and wiggling its arm.  At first, Spike thought the wanker was just saying hello, but the little shape kept dipping under the waves, and each time it resurfaced the arm wagged faster and more frantically.

So, he swam out to save the stupid git, cursing his rotten luck with every stroke.  The boy’s face looked strangely familiar, with his twinkling blue eyes and sandy curls.  When he put his arm around the lad’s back it shifted sharply, fangs plunging down.  The monster clamped its jaws around Spike’s neck, and they tumbled into the briny depths together.  As they sank, Spike peered down into the void and suddenly realized that it had no bottom, and that the two of them would fall forever.

In the second dream, he awoke in a windowless New York hotel room.  Everything – the walls and floor, the bed sheets, even the ceiling – was soaked in gallons and gallons of fresh, steaming blood.  Spike was coated in blood, too, and he began to lick it off his wrists and fingers, laughing as the sweet, wonderful warmth drained down his throat. 

When he’d finished licking his arms clean, he got down on all fours and started lapping it off the floorboards.  He’d almost mopped a clear path to the bathroom door when he was gripped with a feeling of sudden horror.  He stared at the crimson beddings, and then at the red slick smeared down his chest, and in a moment of bright agony he knew who it belonged to.

The last dream – the one he actually remembered upon waking – was as bewildering as it was short:

He was back at the factory, out on Sunnydale’s rusting industrial edge.  He knew he was building something, but he wasn’t quite sure what.  Sparks flew up at his face as his blowtorch welded together two hunks of steel.  Buffy walked into the room.  She was smiling, and had a leather sack slung over her shoulder.  He turned off the torch and asked her what it was.

“It’s the last piece,” she told him, gently opening the bag.

He looked inside and saw a beating heart.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

And then he woke up.

~*~*~

He sat bolt upright.  She was gone, of course.  The bedclothes were a ripe mess, tangled and streaked with mud.

Dollar a wash, he thought.

He wandered out to the sitting room.  She wasn’t there either, and he knew that before looking, but it still stung a bit.  He tried to imagine her leaving a note, and immediately scribbled one in his head:

Dear Brainless Poof,

Thanks for the giggles!  Sorry about drinking all your booze and sodding the place up, even though you richly deserve it.  See you next time the battery runs out on my feminine massage wand.

Sincerely,
Heartless Bitch

Spike grabbed a carafe of blood out of the fridge.  It hadn’t gone all the way south quite yet, but it was still ripe enough that he had to sort of choke it down.

He circled the room a few times like a dazed buzzard before finally switching on the telly and settling into the chair.  She’d left the top sheet there, so he wrapped it around his shoulders, bathing himself in the wonderful and terrible scents she’d left behind.

He’d slept a bit late, so he was only able to nick the very end of Passions.  They’d put Rebecca Blackstone in a coma, again – her second one in seventeen years.  Spike imagined her shooting a roll of silent film in the hospital bed and then jetting off to Monte Carlo, or wherever actresses holidayed while they were comatose or had lost their memory or were jammed down bloody wells.  Meanwhile, Billy was setting himself up for yet another heartbreak with that conniving bint, Jessica.  Poor bugger would never learn.

Up next was The Winnie Ramirez Show.  The theme today was “I’ve Got a Secret.”  Spike lit a smoke and watched the inevitable tragedy play out.  A woman would be carted into the studio under false pretenses.  Winnie would hit her with a bunch of sly questions about her love life, while slack-jawed morons in the audience tittered nervously.

After a bit of this dance, they’d drop the bombshell.  They’d call her precious loverboy out, and reveal that he was a crossdressing queen, or he’d been shagging her sister, or he was married to a bloody horse, or all three.

This episode turned out to be somewhat less dramatic – buggering the babysitter – but the crowd did their best to gasp and jeer and throw their little imaginary stones regardless.  The producers doubtless thought their formula was very modern and unique, but none of this was novel to William the Bloody.  People had always put on these sorts of shows, he knew.  The only difference was, the stones used to be real.

Spike sat there for what felt like an eternity, smoking cigarettes and staring into the bland, glowing square of the telly screen.  After a few hours, all the programs began to blend together.  The news became a cop-and-robber show.  A cartoon about Martian cat-people seemed to co-star Dr. Phil.  He began pacing in triangles: into the bedroom and then to the fridge and then back to the chair.

When the sun finally sank to a red line on the horizon, he hosed himself off and got dressed.  He gave the stained beddings a resentful glare, then balled them up, stuffed them in the big blue laundry bag.  Next, he grabbed a wad of bills out of the dresser and booted out the door.

The rickety shopping cart was still parked around the other side of the crypt, so he tossed the sack into it, lit another smoke and started pushing it up the path.  After he crossed the threshold of the boneyard’s east gates, as he merged the cart into the bustling foot traffic of Williamson Street, it occurred to him how dodgy he must’ve looked, like a half-wit beggar.

Normally, Spike took advantage of the Suds-R-Us twenty-four hour policy, but for some reason it felt good to get this particular chore out of the way early tonight.  Happily, the place was still mostly empty.  He jammed the blankets and sheets in one washer and the pillows and covers in the other, and then started feeding the same crumpled bill into the change machine, over and over, cursing every time it spit it back out.

“Come bloody on,” he snarled.

“Oh, perfect.”  The wanker’s nasal whine skewered Spike’s ears like an arrow.  “Laundry of the Living Dead.”

He turned to watch Xander saunter up the aisle, wearing that familiar half-smirk Spike so desperately wished he could chew away.

“Goody,” he muttered.  “You got any fresh bills?”

“Hmmm… Me handing you my hard-earned money.  What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Your prattling, manky gob is in it?”

“I’m gonna pretend I don’t know what any of that meant,” the todger replied.  “Because, I don’t.”   He started eyeing the contents of Spike’s washers suspiciously.  “What happened, O Prince of Dorkness.  Did somebody wet his wittle bed?”

Spike fed the dollar in again.  It hit pay-dirt this time, and the change rattled out.  “S’none of your business, ponce.”

“Oh, but you are my business,” Xander said.  “I’m in the monster biz.  Remember?  And, hey look!  A monster washing dark stains out of stuff.”

“It’s mud, you git.”

“What a relief!  Muddy bed sheets.  Because that’s way less weird and disturbing…”

Spike shoved past him and began feeding quarters into the machines.  “And here I’m wondering, ‘What kind of nancy goes ‘round narrating the contents of another bloke’s washing?’”  He shot Xander a bitter sneer.  “For instance, you don’t see me talkin’ about how every stitch you wear smells like Johnson & Johnson baby powder.”

Xander laughed, but deliciously nervous.  “You… you can’t,” he stammered.  His eyes shot wide.  “You can smell that?”

“Should call it Mary & Mary…”

“What?”

“Nothing.  Look, could you please piss off now?”

Xander finally turned away, and started sifting through his own pile.  After Spike plunked the last quarter down the robot banker’s throat, he gave the shop a cursory survey.  At the bottom of a laundry tram, beside a stack of dryers, was an orphaned bottle of Tide.  He wove through the maze of folding tables, grabbed it, and upended it over the little soap ducts.

“Hey!” Xander barked.

“What?”

“Evil!”  After a moment, the boy’s outrage melted to a disgusted scowl.  “Holy crap… even your laundry is evil.”

Spike dumped out the last sticky drops of blue goo, and then casually tossed the bottle over a shoulder.  He punched the little buttons to get things going.

“Well, duh,” he said.

~*~*~

Spike stomped up Main, filled with irrational hatred and the busted, sparking circuitry of devil logic.

Why’s the boy always got to act so high and bloody-mighty, he thought.  Okay, yeah, sure, Spike might’ve tried to murder him, six or seven dozen times.  But that was years ago. 

Couldn’t bygones-be-bloody-bygones already?

He had about forty-five minutes to kill, so he just stuffed his hands in his pockets and let his feet carry him for a while.

They brought him by the Butcher Shop, of course.  The aproned git there snapped into action as soon as he swung through the door, grabbing the bucket out of the fridge and pouring a pint into a little plastic To-Go tub.  Spike tossed a few crumpled bills on the counter and studied him through the slots of his eyes.

The bastard knew, of course.  It was an unspoken knowledge, the sort of quiet agreement two boxers sometimes make in the ring when one of them is old and half-dead and doomed.  For the first couple of weeks, the poor bugger was terrified, his shaking hands spilling more blood on the floor than into the little tubby.  But eventually that scent of fear had faded away, and turned into something far less delightful.

Now, when he snapped the lid on and plopped the tub down on the counter, his lips were curled, all smirky-smirky.

“Wanna straw with that, pal?” he said, his clever eyes gleaming.

For a few moments, Spike toyed with the idea of flashing some fang.  Instead, he just sneered the word yeah, and gave the bloke a look like he was composed of lovely steaks.  He recoiled a bit, the curl fading from his lips, and gave him the sodding straw.

Back out in the street, Spike took three laps around the Magic Box.  On the last of these, he stood slurping and staring, his horrible brain wrestling with the notion of strolling inside to grab some burba.  The hag squad was in there holding down the shop; he obtained this fact with a wolfish little snort.  That was fine, in his book.  He hated them nearly as much as he hated Xander, but at least they treated him with some modicum of respect.  Didn’t point and shout, “Evil!” whenever he was about, anyway.

But there was another scent in there, tangled in the stew of doe-eyed patrons and mystical whatnots.

He stamped back to the launderette, where he sat and brooded and counted the final watery flips of his wash.  The beddings were jammed in a cart and then in a dryer.  He fought a few more rounds with the bloody change machine, paid the dryer its due and then he was out again, back to the butcher shop for another drink.  The bartender was quick, this time, and not at all smarmy.  They had reached a second understanding.

He circled the Box again, veins tingling like there was an invisible fence of red hot atoms circling the place.

Bloody, buggering bollocks, shit and fucking hell, is what he thought.

He barged in, the chimes jangling their irritable welcome, and headed straight for the counter.

Anya.

“Why, hello, paying customer,” she chirped.  “Can I help you purchase some moderately priced mystical paraphernalia, preferably with cash?”

“Might want to work on your sales pitch, poppet.  The change machine was warmer.”

“Let’s try this again.  Buy something.”

“Burba,” he said, furtively nosing the air.  Trails of her scent were all around him, strung like garlands.  But she was nowhere in sight, and probably already left and probably that was for the best.

Probably…

“It’s downstairs.”

They stood staring for a long moment.  “Well, go an’ fetch it.”

“You go and fetch it!”

“Fine!”

He stomped off.  “And you better pay for it this time,” he heard her say, the words tossing after him like tiny darts.

His foot had just barely grazed the second step when he heard another, somewhat more pleasant sound.

“…it’s just lame.  I don’t even know how the managers can stand her.  Her Indian name would be Runs At Mouth…”

“Native Americans, Buffy…”

Spike froze, his boot bickering with gravity.

“…and she’s always talking about herself.  Always me, me, me.  But, of course, who gets the raise?”

“Uh... Oh!  Spike.”

“No, she does.”  Buffy flinched.  “Why would you say… oh.”

They were stocking cardboard boxes on shelves, Buffy tossing up two and three at a time, one-handed.  She turned, her green eyes already throwing up their barbed wire walls.  He didn’t want her to see how deep her bite wound had gone, so he loaded his own with cannonballs. 

“Hell-oh,” he said.  “Forgot to stick the hell in there, lamb.”

“When you’re around, I thought that was implied.” 

Balls!

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered and stamped off to grab the weed.  “Where’s my bleeding gear?”

“Burba?” said Willow.  “Oh, yeah I think we’re out.  Next week.”

“Out?  How could you be out?”

She crossed her arms and cocked her head accusingly.  “You know, it’s hard to say.  It keeps mysteriously disappearing.”

“Now, hang on a bloody minute–”

Suddenly, there came a shrieking, yammering sound, like a tortured monkey.  It was Anya, probably going ballistic on some poor sot who sampled the Newt’s Eye.

“Uh, yeah,” said Willow.  “I should probably check in on that.  Buffy would you mind finishing up?”

Before she could protest, Lady Morgana went zipping up the steps.  Buffy blew out a long breath, and then went back to stacking.  Spike lit a smoke and went picking through the shelves for a burba substitute.

Or maybe for something to turn them all to stone, he thought.

Although, in her case…

“Is this fun for you?” she asked.  “Do you seriously have nothing better to do?”

“Well, you can relax,” he said.  “Didn’t hunt you down, love.  Just out runnin’ a few errands.”

“Errands?  Vampire errands?”

He shot her an indignant look.  “Yeah, well some thoughtless bird sodded up my sheets last night,” he growled.

“You’re doing laundry?”

“Why the bloody hell does everyone say it like that?” he snapped.  “Yes I’m doing laundry.  What, you think magic elves do my wash?  Or, my legion of maids and butlers?”

She snorted out a tiny laugh.  It wasn’t cruel this time, just indecipherable and fleeting.  Then her smile faded to the same old cool line.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re still here.”

“So are you.”

Cue uncomfortable silence.  Cue bewitched, longing gazes.  Cue smart lip.

“Not anymore,” she said, hoisting the last parcel onto the shelf.  She brushed past him and headed for the stairs.

“You patrollin’ tonight?”

“I patrol every night,” she sighed.  He noticed her shoulders slump just a bit when she said it, perhaps realizing this wasn’t exactly true.  Not lately.  “And, no, you can’t come with.”

Her footsteps gradually thinned to nothing.  He cursed under his breath and went back to fiddling with the tiny jars.  Didn’t ask to, bitc–

“Meet me back here at midnight,” she said, as flat and monotone as a nun.

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

And then she was gone.

~*~*~

“Because I said so,” he spat.  “Queen of the bloody castle!”

A narrow-nosed lass with mousy hair stared at him from her little plastic chair across the way, trying to suss out whether the vampire was mad or…

Well, ‘mad.’   He figured he was probably both, thanks to her.

“Aye, aye, Your Royal Highness!” he thundered, not caring what his audience thought.  “Your wish is my command, Your Sodding Grace!”

The dryer was still going, his bed-things tossing around like a tongue in an iron bum-hole.  It made him think of the Bot, again.  He thought the android would have been a welcome relief, right about now.  He could spend a pleasant evening diddling it, and then shut it the Hell off – put her out of his bloody mind.

When the clothes stopped tumbling, he skipped the folding bit and stuffed them all directly in his sack.  Sadly, some derelict had wandered off with the shopping cart while he was away, so he just slung the sack over his shoulder and marched mechanically back to his lair.

He booted through the door, fangs akimbo and gnashing. 

Dumped the bag out on the mattress. 

Smoothed and straightened with his hands. 

Climbed in.

Watched the bloody clock.