He tries to hide his grimace as he knocks back a shot straight from the bottle, but I know him all too well. He talks big, like any Irishman, but he can't hold a candle to me when it comes to the drinking. I'll drink him into the bloody ground. Granted, I'm not feeling too sober at the moment, but I did have a head start after all, give him time, soon he'll be right shnockered.
"You done yet?" I say impatiently, snatching the bottle from his grasp. I take a shot in kind, without a blink, and thrust the bottle back into his hands.
He looks at me stupidly. "Drink," I encourage him. I'll be damned if I'm the only one who gets plastered tonight. "I don't-"
"Drink," I growl, vaguely aware of the sudden surfacing of fangs and yellow eyes on my visage. "I'm not leaving until you're well and fully fucked. I'll camp out in your living room. I'll stalk you and your pet humans until the end of time. Just see if I don't."
He knows I'm too drunk to know what I'm saying. He also knows that I have an unpleasant habit of actually following through on promises I make while intoxicated. And that's why, with fear in his eyes, Angel seizes the bottle from me once again. I grin. He's a lightweight. He'll never admit it, but he is. He's well on his way to getting drunk off his ass.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
I'm not drunk. I'm not. I'm perfectly coherent and I can form intelligible sentences and I still remember who's the President. Okay, that's a lie. I don't remember who's President. But I don't know who's the President when I haven't been drinking. I could even get up from this chair and walk in a perfectly straight line. If I chose to do so. I just don't feel like it right now. The chair's... nice. I mean, it's just your average, normal, garden-variety (what does that mean, garden-variety? chairs don't grow in gardens, and if they did, it would be an outdoor carpentry shop, not a garden) wooden kitchen chair. But it's suddenly so comfortable. The chair's so comfortable and the air's so warm and the whiskey's so nice. Whiskey. Earlier there was vodka. It's gone now. All gone. I giggle suddenly, for no apparent reason. He stares at me across the kitchen table, one eyebrow slightly crooked, whiskey clenched tightly in one fist.
"You're plastered." His mouth moves quickly, but it takes ten or twelve minutes for his voice to say the words.
"Am not," I retort hotly when his voice finally makes it to my ears. I've been vehemently denying his accusations of drunkenness for the past hour now. I'm not sure why, but it's a particular point of pride for some reason I can't quite remember. Something to do with the mighty falling and drinking him under the table. But I don't want to drink under the table. It's dark down there and the floor's so cold. I like my chair. I don't wanna leave my chair. Even if sitting up is something of a challenge right now. I'm not giving up my chair, goddamnit. I'm not going anywhere. Hell no, we won't go. I giggle again.
"Whasswrong wiv you?" he asks me, pulling a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and staring at it in befuddlement. I try to shake my head, but the room starts to swing alarmingly back and forth.
"Nothing. Nevermind."
"Oh yeah, whatever, nevermind," Spike sings in an offkey voice.
"What's that?" I inquire, reaching for the bottle again. He shrugs, continuing to stare at his cigarettes.
"Nothin'. It's a song. Band from Seattle. You ever been to Seattle? It rains there. Guy named Kurt. He's dead." "Dead?" I inquire, lifting the bottle to my lips.
"You mean undead?" I don't feel undead right now. I feel warm all over.
"No, no," Spike protests, shaking his head vehemently. "Dead, like really dead." He points his index finger to his temple, miming a pistol. "Ka-pow."
"His head exploded?"
"No. Well, kind of. Yes." I shrug and take another swallow before passing the bottle to him again. I still don't understand what any of this has to do with outdoor carpentry. He's sitting backwards in the chair, black-clad legs stretched over the sides. Very nice to look at, so I stare for awhile. He doesn't seem to notice or mind.
He stares at the end of his cigarette in utmost concentration as he tries to make it meet the flame of his Zippo. In the other hand, the nearly empty bottle of whiskey dangles from his black-polished fingers. "Bloody hell," he mutters drunkenly, tossing down both cigarette and lighter. "Fuck it." I say nothing; I merely hold out my hand for the bottle. I'm starting to enjoy this.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Why don't you have any food?" I bitch, going through the empty cabinets again. It's absurd. He wants to act all bloody human. He's got a kitchen. He's got cabinets. And I've got more food in the little mini-fridge in my crypt than he does in the whole bleeding apartment.
"Spike," he says patiently, "I don't eat."
"I don't see why the hell not." "I'm a vampire. There wouldn't be much point."
"It's fun! It tastes good! That's the FUN!!!" I peek into the refrigerator. I need pretzels. You can't get plastered without eating pretzels. It's a rule. Well, it's *my* rule, anyway. "You do remember fun, don't you, Peaches?" I peer into desolate, chilly shelves. Six bags of blood and a bag of ice. "You certainly don't remember pretzels, at any rate."
"Why the fuck would I have pretzels? I don't even *like* pretzels."
"If you were a real man you'd have pretzels," I retort. "To go with your beer."
"I don't have beer."
"Exactly my point," I reply, shutting the refrigerator door. "Oh, that's right, you can't eat because it would remind you that you're not a human and then you'd feel all guilty and have to go brood some more." I shake my head and light a cigarette. "You are such a fucking nonce."
"Am not," he says, a bit defensively.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Am not!"
"Are too!"
"Am not!"
"Are too!"
"Am NOT!!!"
"Are bloody fuck-all soddin' fuckin bloody TOO!!!" I pause for a moment, struggling to deconstruct a string of drunken British expletives.
"Am not," I deny vehemently. I can't quite remember what we're arguing about, but I am most definitely certain that I am NOT... not... whatever it was that I wasn't. I think it might have something to do with me being a ponce or a poof. Or a nonce or a pillock. Or a wanker or a tosser. Or something. And my hair. There was something about my hair thrown in there somewhere.
"Oh, yeah you are," he snickers, lighting yet another cigarette.
"You want to take this outside?" I challenge. He tilts his head slightly, considering the question.
"No," he answers. "No, not really."
I shrug. Neither do I. I know this is silly. I know that I should just let it go. And I know that the argument has been further trivialized by the fact that neither of us knows what it's about. But that doesn't stop me from muttering "am not" into the mouth of the whiskey bottle as I take another swallow. And that's when he pelts me in the left temple with an empty cigarette pack. From here on out it gets violent.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Ow," I whine as I crash into the floor. I raise a finger to my lip and it comes away bloodied from harsh and sudden contact with Angel`s fist. He stands over me, hands on hips, expression slightly arrogant.
"Am not," he says with finality. He expects me to cave to his superior age, experience, authority. He expects me to give in and admit defeat. At the very least, he expects me to stand up and fight him like a man. So I wrap my arms around his knees and bite him on the ankle like a demented puppy. He crashes on top of me with a loud thud. I'd forgotten how nice it was to have him on top of me. Or underneath me, for that matter. Or sideways or upside-down... And there was that one time, Paris, 1876, when he strapped me to a velvet chaise lounge and-
But I am ripped suddenly and violently out of then and back into now as he punches me in the ribs, quite possibly cracking two or three of them in the process, spilling my liquor and crushing my other pack of cigarettes. All right, that's it. He's going down.
Gathering my strength, I prepare to attack right at his weakest point. His hair. I gather a handful of the spiky mess, still slick with the last remnants of demon slime, and proceed to bang his head against a nearby end table.
"Are
((thunk))
bloody
((thunk))
too!!!"
((thunk))
He howls, more in outrage than in pain, and reaches up with one hand to grasp tightly around my throat. Within a few flurried seconds, we have reached an impasse. My arms are locked around his knees in a crushing grip. He pins my legs to the floor, fangs buried in the faded denim covering my thigh. Neither one of us can move and I suspect that we are both in very great pain. We vaguely resemble some sort of half-assed vampire pretzel. In fact, if it weren't for the mussed hair, game faces, and spilled blood and liquor, we'd look like a couple of performers in the Cirque de Soleil. And while it would be very pleasant to escape this death-lock, we both know that no quarter shall be given.
"You know," I mutter against his kneecap, "there are easier ways of settling this."
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The night air has a slightly sobering effect as we stumble into the dimly lit parking garage below the office. "Jesus, Spike," I mutter. "Where the hell did you park?"
"Shuddup," he retorts. "This'll only take a minute."
We finally locate Spike's ancient DeSoto, parked at the edge of the lot. Then I spend a good ten minutes leaning against the wall, trying to fight the urge to either throw up or pass out, as Spike searches in vain for his car keys. He goes through every pocket of his duster fourteen times separately before he finally concludes that the keys are somewhere in my apartment. But by this point it would be silly to go back inside, so, with a grunt and a sigh, he just wrenches the trunk open with his bare hands. I take the flashlight from his hand and shine it into the trunk as he begins to paw through the contents.
"What is this shit?" I ask as he throws things out of the trunk and onto the concrete at our feet. "Why do you have a pogo stick, Spike?" He shrugs, pushing a collection of origami swans out of the way.
"Dunno. Most of this stuff is Dru's." There is a murmur of pained regret in his voice that we both choose to ignore. Is that, I wonder, why he's here? Has she left him again? I direct the flashlight's beam on a suspicious-looking object located near the bottom of the cesspool that is Spike's trunk.
"And *that*?" I inquire, my voice tight. "What is *that*?"
He lifts the object out of the trunk with one hand. A human skull, clearly several decades old. "Souvenir," he says offhandedly, before tossing it over his shoulder. I shake my head in wonder.
What the hell have I gotten myself into? "There it is," he says finally, with an air of triumph. He clears away two basketballs and a case of champagne, Vintage 1926, to reveal the cherished object.
"What's that?" I ask, shining the flashlight into the bottom of the trunk.
He smiles. "The playing field."