Modus VivendiBy Wiseacress
Chapter Four
Spike was there, standing over him, and a nurse was fiddling with the tube in his arm, and Spike looked pissed. The nurse went away and Liv appeared at Spike's side. She wasn't wearing her coat, just the T-shirt, and her hair was looking kind of straggly and messed up. She was holding a styrofoam coffee cup. Spike was in full Big Bad regalia, black T and red silk shirt and leather overtop.
It was dim in the room. Night time. That would explain why Spike could be there. Should he be touched that Spike had come to visit him in hospital?
"I said bring him home," Spike said. "Fix him and bring him back, not set him up on a weekly plan."
"I know what you said," Liv said. Her voice was low and edging on irritated. "He needed surgery. They wouldn't let him just walk out."
"So pack him into a wheelchair and roll him out."
"While he yells bloody murder, yes. Good idea."
Spike scowled and pulled a package of cigarettes out of his jacket. Liv watched in silence as he lit one and dragged on it.
"Bring him back tomorrow," he said finally. " I need you around right now. And it's stupid for him to be here."
Pass me the phone, he tried to say, but his mouth wouldn't work. He smiled instead.
Spike narrowed his eyes and stared at him.
"Is he awake?"
It was bright morning, and he was hungry. His face was still stiff, but he didn't hurt as much, and he could feel his feet. He could move his left leg a little bit. He could sit up in bed. He did.
Liv was asleep in the chair at the foot of his bed, slumped low with her head tipped back against the back of the chair, her mouth slightly open. She'd taken her hair out of the ponytail at some point, and it was spread half over her face. A styrofoam coffee cup was tipped at a perilous angle in her hand.
Some bodyguard.
But when he saw her there, he did feel a little safer. Strange. Because he hadn't realized he was feeling unsafe before.
He shifted and she opened her eyes and looked straight at him, which was eerie. Then she blinked and closed her mouth and sat up, looking around. She checked her watch.
"Morning," he said.
She stared at him, and he smiled. She looked down at the cup in her hand, swirled it experimentally, then shrugged and bolted it.
"Mm," he said. "That's good coffee."
She was pulling her hair back into its ponytail. "Quiet night," she said. "You're still lucky."
"I'm thinking of driving out to the casinos tonight, actually."
"They'll bring breakfast soon," she said. "You think you can eat?"
"Only if they have horse."
"That's good. You're feeling better."
He wiggled his toes under the blanket and raised his eyebrows. "It's a dull roar in here, yeah. The miracle of modern medicine."
She turned her head as an orderly wheeled a cart behind her and pulled it between the beds. He flipped up the table on Xander's bed and put down a tray of food. Toast, scrambled eggs the color of mustard, a bowl of oatmeal. Milk and juice. Xander's stomach bellowed and he seized the fork awkwardly with his left hand.
"I'll be back in a minute." She was pulling her jacket on and pushing the chair back to the wall, and he waved the fork absently, already chewing. The eggs were rubbery. Mmm, good.
He finished the breakfast in five minutes, even the oatmeal, chewing carefully to avoid the sore spots in his mouth. Then he piled the cutlery and napkins on the tray, stacked all the plastic lids in a pile, and lay back again. Closed his eyes. Started to tilt.
Outside in the hall there was a clicking sound, like dog nails on linoleum. He listened to it for a minute without thinking, and then his mind slowly rolled over and started to wonder what a dog was doing in the hospital.
"Excuse me."
That would be the orderly, back for the tray. Xander opened his eyes. Bony Nose stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a grey button-down shirt and clean blue jeans. Staring at him. Smiling.
Xander grabbed the nurse buzzer and pressed it. Hard. A lot.
Bony Nose smiled and leaned forward over the foot of the bed. "I'd like to leave a message for your friend," he said. "I'm not sure he got the last one."
He leaned a little farther forward, glanced down at Xander's legs beneath the blanket. Xander looked wildly around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing. He was pinned under the table and tray, and Bony Nose lifted his right hand in a fist, swung it down onto Xander's right knee, and everything exploded into white light and agony.
He sat up gasping, sweating, and Liv jerked awake in the chair at the foot of the bed, her eyes wide, her right hand going to her waist. She was holding a styrofoam cup of coffee, and it went all over her, all over the floor. She and Xander stared at each other.
It was still dark in the room, but the window was deep blue. Almost sunrise. He tried to catch his breath. His heart was hammering through the top of his head. Jesus. Christ. He wanted to lean over the side of the bed and check underneath, make sure Bony Nose wasn't coiled under there in the darkness.
"Fuck." He shook his head and tried to laugh. It came out like a whimper. "Sorry. Sorry, I just—"
She blinked and looked down at herself, the coffee cup still spinning on the ground by her feet, the wet spray across her shirt and jeans. Her expression was sour.
"Sure," she said. Her hair was still in the ponytail, he noticed with relief. His heart was slowing down. She bent over and picked up the coffee cup, held it for a moment, then set it upright on the floor by the leg of her chair. She checked her watch.
"They'll bring breakfast soon," she said. "You think you can eat?"
He swallowed hard. Didn't say anything, and after a couple of beats she looked at him.
"What' s wrong?"
"Nothing. I—" I'm being an idiot. I've just realized I'm being an idiot. Buffy, Willow, Giles, my apologies for all previous idiocies. There have been many, I know. "Let's get me out of here, shall we?"
She stared at him, then nodded. "Okay. Good. Let me clean this up. I'll be back in a minute."
He forced himself to breathe normally. "Sure. Okay. Just—okay."
Just fast, his mind whispered, but he didn't say it. Just be fast.
They didn't want to let him go. He asked the nurse on duty to take the tube out of his arm and she looked at him disapprovingly and called the doctor on shift. He was a little Indian man with a brisk walk and a curling moustache and light, cool fingers. He stood beside Xander's bed shaking his head.
"Mr. Phillips, you're not ready to be discharged. You need several more days of bedrest, and your incision needs to be cleaned and treated properly—"
"I'm a nurse," Liv said quietly. She was standing on the other side of Xander's bed, mostly staying out of it. He tried not to look surprised when she spoke up. "I can take care of it, if he's determined to go."
The doctor looked at Liv, still shaking his head. "He won't be walking for a week," he said. "Not even with crutches. That shoulder is still—frankly, it's a mess. And he's going to be uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable."
"I have to go," Xander said. "My daughter's flying in this afternoon."
"Your daughter can come and see you here," the doctor said, still shaking. "I strongly recommend—"
"She's four," Xander said. "I don't want her to see me here. And my ex-wife will kill me if I'm not at the airport."
"Mr. Phillips, I really don't think you should—"
"She's been suing for full custody," Xander said, a little wildly. "A screwup like this, and I won't see Mindy again until she graduates from vocational college."
"Again, I just can't recommend—"
"I'm going," Xander said, and lifted his left arm up to the nurse. She hesitated, looking at the doctor.
"Maybe you could give us a prescription," Liv said, sounding hesitant and tired. She was good at the sister routine. "Demerol and antibiotics, and I'll keep an eye on the incision. And you are not going to the airport, Xander."
He gave her a surly, we'll-see kind of look, and she glared back. It was kind of fun. In a fucked-up way.
The doctor kept shaking his head, but lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"If you really want to go, Mr. Phillips, I can't stop you. I can advise you very strongly that it's not in your best interest to do so, but I can't stop you."
The nurse untaped the needle and slid it out of Xander's arm, pressing a cotton ball over the tiny drop of blood that followed.
"I'll let the front desk know," the doctor said, and gave Xander a final despairing look. "If that knee gets infected, you'll be back in hospital in a week, and you'll wish you'd stayed put." He disappeared behind the curtain.
The nurse bustled for a minute or two, then left. Xander turned to Liv.
"Are you really a nurse?"
"No."
He was silent for a second. "Infection is an ugly word."
"Don't worry. You'll be fine."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's true."
It'll be the first time then, he thought, but didn't say. Because that was just pathetic.
He was in a hospital johnny, of course, which amounted to a big cotton bib. Fine for watching meerkats, but if he was going to face the world he wanted a little more layering. Still, he wasn't expecting Liv to come back into the room and dump his own duffel bag on the chair beside his bed.
"Either we have very similar taste, or that's my stuff."
"I wouldn't call it taste," she said, unzipping the bag and pulling out a pair of khakis and a T-shirt. "The orderly can get you dressed. I'm going to make a call."
"You went to my place?"
She was already walking away, but she looked back over her shoulder at him. "No. I've been here. With you."
"Yeah, sorry for cramping your style so hard. So who—?"
She rolled her eyes and walked away without answering. He stared at the duffel. Spike. Spike had gone back and got his clothes. That was...weird. Weird to think of Spike walking around his place, looking at his things. Stealing change. Laughing at Willow's bead curtain. Maybe licking a little blood off the walls. That was...disgusting.
Spike had got his clothes for him, and that was a humane and considerate and deeply disturbing thing for him to have done. Because he hadn't got just a couple of shirts, he'd got everything.
Either Spike had been dead long enough to forget how many clothes a person actually needed for a few days, or he expected Xander to stay longer than that.
Well, he could expect away. Xander would be upright in a week, according to the good doctor, and then he'd be putting on some Nancy Sinatra and making for the door. These uneasy truces were all well and good, but sooner or later you had to remember whose side you were supposed to be keeping up.
A guy in pink scrubs—somewhere a scrub farmer was making millions—came around the curtain and said, "Mr. Phillips, right? We getting you dressed?" Xander paused, then nodded, and they both looked at the shirt Liv had pulled out of the bag. It was bright orange, with Scooby Doo on the front. Willow had given it to him years ago, kind of as a joke. It was two sizes too small.
"Let me just find something a little less—"
"Sure," the guy said immediately. "Take your time."
Together they got him into the khakis and an old white button-down that the orderly pulled closed over his right arm and the sling. It was fairly quick and painful, and he didn't have much chance to feel weird about having a guy pull his boxers on and zip his fly for him. He'd save that for another time, when he had the leisure to really wallow in the awkward and humiliating. They got him into a wheelchair, and the orderly pushed him out to the front desk, where Liv was wrangling with a steely-looking woman wearing a headset.
"I'll just park him over here," the orderly said, and Liv glanced over and nodded. Xander sat with his head propped on his hand, his eyes closed. He was tired again, or still. And he was sore. The tube in his arm had been a wonderful thing. He could feel an ominous low heat starting up in his shoulder and his legs, an itchy kind of precursor to pain. Finally, she came and got him.
They rolled out through the white maze of hallways and she left him waiting edgily by the check-in desk while she pulled the car around. The Nova. Too bad. Would have been nice to ride out in style, in the Jag.
Another orderly helped her maneuver him into the passenger seat, and the whole experience left him gasping and woozy. He wasn't exactly bouncing back in true Scooby style. But he'd never been trashed quite so badly before, either. Just the regular Sunnydale trashings, and this was L.A. style.
He closed his eyes without waiting for her to ask—and maybe she wouldn't ask, but he wasn't going to bet on it—and slept.
He woke up when she cut the engine, and found that they were back in the underground garage.
"Oh good. I think I dropped my wallet last time I was here."
She got out, leaving the keys in the ignition, and walked around to his door. He started to shift sideways, gritting his teeth in anticipation of the awkwardness and pain.
"Hang on a second."
She didn't move to grab him, just propped her arm against the roof of the car and waited. After a minute the door in the far wall opened and Spike came out.
"About bloody time," he said. He got to the car and leaned over to look in at Xander. "Hello, ducks."
"Spike. You’re looking evil as always. "
Liv was already walking toward the door, and Spike reached in and pulled Xander smoothly out of the car. Easy to forget how strong he was. Thank God for the chip factor.
"Come on, little mermaid." Spike shifted his grip and swept Xander’s legs up, kicked the car door closed, and started carrying him. The way grooms carried brides over thresholds. The way butchers carried pigs to the slaughter, more likely.
His knees were heating up fast, and his shoulder was crushed painfully against Spike's. He bit his tongue and tried not to show it. But Spike could hear his pulse, couldn't he? Fuck Spike. It hurt. He was sweating.
"'s all right," Spike said quietly, and Xander jerked his head up. Spike was looking at him oddly, intently. His face was very close to Xander's. Even through his shirt, his skin felt cold.
Xander tried to think of something snappy to say, but his mind was blank. Jesus, it fucking hurt. He looked away and shut his eyes. Spike made some kind of noise, like a soft low growl, or maybe Xander imagined it, maybe it was just the sound of his own blood in his ears.
Somehow, they got up all three flights of stairs, and into the loft, and Spike was walking fast all the way to the back. It was a very big loft. It took about an hour to get all the way to wherever they were going, and by the time they got there Xander was gasping.
Spike leaned over and put him down on something soft, and he lay without moving, his eyes squeezed shut, his shirt cold and wet against his back.
Next time he'd have to tell Spike to just leave him by the door with the empty milk bottles. He could sleep on the boot mat. That would be just fine.
"Take these."
He was on some kind of cot, lying on top of a scratchy blanket, and Liv was kneeling down beside him. She was holding out some pills in her palm, and he tried to grab them, but his hand was shaking like a topless dancer and he stared at it in amazement and humiliation. Liv put her palm up to his mouth and tipped the pills in, then held a glass to his lips. He drank. He was very thirsty.
It was dark in the loft. Of course, it was daytime. Spike would have the curtains drawn. The darkness felt good. He wanted to swan-dive into it. For the first time, he could see the appeal of a really dark, quiet crypt.
"Down for the count," Liv said, from somewhere near the ceiling.
"You lot are so fucking fragile," Spike said. The click of his lighter, the smell of smoke. "Hard to see how you beat out lemurs, really."
He woke up because he had to piss.
At first he couldn't even figure that out—he was still swimming through a soft black film, and the pain in his belly was just another pain, part of the package deal. But something kept nagging him, and he pushed wearily up through the layers until he was lying on his back on a scratchy blanket, staring at the ceiling. Not a familiar ceiling. High and dirty and covered in flaking grey paint. Pipes running across it. Fascinating. Why was he awake?
Oh. Right. Time for a trip to the head. If he was lucky it might be as nice as the one at Rosie's, and he could read a little poetry off the walls. He sat up, and a ball of pain bloomed in his stomach. He sat for a second, considering it. It was strange; he could feel pain, but it didn't matter so much. Everything was muted. His body felt soft and warm, and the pain seemed to just lie on the surface of his skin.
He moved his feet experimentally, and that didn't hurt badly, so he edged to the corner of the cot and put his feet down on the floor. So far so good. He looked around. He was surrounded by a folding screen, rice paper and wood, maybe six or seven feet tall. The kind of thing Anya had wanted to put in the apartment, for no purpose he could understand. Here, it made a little room around the cot he'd been lying on.
The cot was covered with a grey blanket, a white pillow at the end where his head had been. There was a small dresser against the wall beside him, just two drawers, and a steel gooseneck lamp on top. Nothing else.
Was this Spike's idea of a guestroom?
He wiped his mouth slowly and looked down at his feet. He was doing everything slowly, because his brain was soaking in a hot bath, and didn't feel much like picking up the phone. That was okay. It made his body feel a whole lot better. Just...slower.
His mind drifted back to the pain in his belly and he sighed. Time to find the john. He braced his hands on the edge of the bed and pushed up, and he was standing. His legs were hot, okay, searing, begging for mercy, but it didn't matter so much. When you gotta go.
He pushed his right leg forward and that went okay, but then the left one had to come along too. He put his weight on his right foot, and suddenly there was nothing between him and the floor, and down he went. He landed on his right hip and since his right arm was still tied to his chest inside his shirt, he really went sprawling. His shoulder hit the floor and he saw stars. Head, too. Made a sound like a coconut.
He lay there, feeling the teeth in his shoulder and knee, and thinking how interesting it was to feel that without caring. The clonk of his head on the floor was deeply amusing. He started to laugh.
Footsteps were coming for him. Sweet Jesus, save him from the disembodied feet. He laughed harder, couldn't breathe, kept laughing.
Spike came around the end of the screen and stood staring at him. Oh Jesus, Spike. What a fucking mess this was.
He laughed harder, hugging his stomach with his good arm, tears running down his face. Fuck. No good. He had to stop. Couldn't, though.
"Right, come on." And wasn't that exactly what he'd said once already, back in Xander's apartment, when he'd helped him off the floor the first time? Spike was starting a career out of scraping Xander off the linoleum. Well, at least there was a future in it.
He giggled helplessly as Spike lifted him up and put him back on the bed. Scratchy fucking blanket. Hilarious.
"Stay put. Go to sleep."
Spike's hand was on his forehead. It felt cool. Of course it did. Spike was dead.
It felt good.
The laughing stopped and he just breathed, his eyes closed. Strange, how he didn't feel strange. He knew he should.
After a minute Spike's hand went away and Xander remembered the pain in his belly. It was worse now. He opened his eyes and saw that Spike was leaving.
"Shit. Wait, I have to—"
His face was hot and he knew he was blushing. Partly because he had to ask for help to the john. Partly because speaking made Spike real, not just a cool hand on his head.
And that was truly weird, the hand on his head, and his letting it happen. But if he just let his brain sink a little deeper into the bath, he didn't have to think about it. Shouldn't think about it, anyway. Bury it.
Spike looked at him with his eyebrows raised and Xander sat up slowly.
"I need the head," he said. No pun intended.
Spike shrugged and came back. "Let's go," he said.
He pulled Xander's left arm around his neck and grabbed him around the waist, and they were walking out around the screen. Well, Spike was walking. Xander was getting a free ride, and no complaints. The loft was dim and silent. The curtains were pulled across the windows, pure black rectangles. No sign of Liv.
There was a door in the wall to their left, and Spike opened it with his free hand, reached around and flicked a light switch. Inside was a long white room with a cement floor and peeling cement walls. There was a bank of urinals against one wall, and a couple of stalls further down. Sinks opposite, and at the back, a pair of showers without curtains. The sound of dripping water.
"Nice. Very Better Homes and Sewers."
"Oh, I'm wounded."
"I wish." He said it absently, because Spike was walking toward the urinals, and how was this going to work? Letting an orderly pull his khakis up was one thing. Letting Spike's hand stay on his head was—buried. But standing there like an innocent bystander while Spike took him out and held him, shook him off and put him back again—that wasn't going to happen. Not. Going. To happen.
They reached the urinals and Xander let his feet hit the floor. More yammering from his knees. Fuck his knees. Time to earn their keep.
"I can take it from here."
Spike snorted. "Like hell," he said. "I'm not fishing you out of this thing when you do another swoon, thanks very much."
"Spike, you just dragged me into a room with urinals in it. That's about as much trauma as I can take for the day."
"Don't be so bloody soft."
"Spike, get out. I'll...call when I'm done."
"I'll just listen for the sound of your skull smacking the floor, shall I?"
The pain in his belly was getting serious, filtering through the soft layers and jabbing at him. If he didn't piss now, he was going to leave a pool.
"Spike. Get. The fuck. Out."
Spike sighed and shrugged. "Right. Be lovely to see you topple."
He unslung Xander's arm from around his neck, and Xander grabbed for the top of the urinal. More weight on his knees, and they started cussing him in low regular backwoods tones, but he could take it. He bent his head and clung to the urinal. Spike was standing next to him, not going anywhere.
"This is the part where you leave," Xander said. After a moment, Spike turned and walked out. He pulled the door to, but didn't close it completely.
Xander took a deep breath. He took his hand off of the urinal, and when he was sure his legs would hold he unzipped in a hurry, pulled himself out, and—merciful Minerva—let go. The pain was worse for the first few seconds, and then it ebbed and he started to breathe normally again. Jesus. If he'd had to wait another five minutes he would have pissed down his leg.
Finally he was done. He shook off and put himself away, then grabbed the urinal for support again while he flushed. He turned his head and looked toward the door. No sign of Spike.
If he put his weight on his left leg and ignored the white flare it sent up, he could turn himself around, toward the sinks. There was a sign by the door, he noticed: Employees must wash hands before returning to work. Funny. But not so funny he had to laugh. Because there was a long mirror along the far wall, over the sinks.
And there he was.
Skinny cheeks, big sunken eyes, dark stubble over his cheeks and chin and jaw. Under the stubble, paler than he'd been in months. Shit, he was thin. But what really got his attention was the Gleesome Threesome's handiwork.
They did quality work, those guys.
Bruises around both eyes, his left cheek swollen all the way up to his temple, green and purple with a black spider of stitches over the bone. He couldn't remember when the bandage had come off. More stitches in his forehead, over his right eye. Black bruise along his jaw, his neck, disappearing down into his shirt. And the shirt tented out over his right arm, tied to his neck with a neat white knot nestled in the hollow of his collarbone. Quite a hollow, that. How much weight had he lost?
His eyes looked wrong. Glassy and black and strange. His lips were purple and cut. He looked dead. Shouldn't he be dead, looking like this? Maybe he was. Maybe he was a zombie, or a ghost.
Except zombies and ghosts didn't need to piss.
He was still staring at himself, clinging to the urinal behind him with a shaking hand, when Spike opened the door and put his head in.
"All done, Lady Di?"
He looked down quickly. "Yeah."
Spike paused, then came in and took hold of him again. Xander's head came up and he glanced in the mirror again without meaning to. No Spike there, of course. Just himself, looking awkward and bent out of shape. Weird.
"Come on then."
Spike lifted him and walked out of the bathroom, across the loft, back behind the screen. Turned and lowered him back onto the bed. Xander closed his eyes immediately and willed himself to sleep. Thought for a split second about a cool hand on his forehead, then kicked that thought in the gut and just thought, sleep.
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