The Universe's Mixer

Just because he had a soul, that didn't mean the need for blood stopped. It didn't mean Spike wasn't hungry. And though he seriously considered offing his neighbor, Spike instead went out, grabbed pints of blood from the butcher shop (oh, he thought, how the mighty have fallen), and came home.

It was quiet here, right now. And he wanted it to be quiet. Spike wanted to think. He'd downed a pint of the blood and stashed the rest in the fridge, where there was a leftover flowering onion (mmm)and a case of beer.

He sat in the window--the window he'd once hopped right out of under Buffy and Wes's noses--and looked out on the City. He hated how much he was changing, but he wondered if it were not for the good. The things he'd been doing in Sunnydale... had he not already been headed this way? He'd helped. Helped. Saved Dawn, he knew, from what Willow said before she got all terrifying.

But... Jesse said this was not the way it was supposed to be. Jesse who was... sort of like God. Spike didn't believe in God, but he thought Jesse was a good guy, and hell, if there had to be a God, why not him? At least with Jesse, he stood a chance at getting out of that fire and damnation and torment, right?

Things moved and shifted outside his window, and he did not expect there to be a knock at the front door.

But there was.

Spike looked at the door, half-hoping he'd gone insane again. Because if Dru was on the other side of it, or Darla, or ANY version of Angel, he was breaking a leg off the wooden chair in the corner and ending it all. He'd only been sitting at that window five sodding minutes.

Whatever. If he was going crazy, he was going all the way. "Yeah, come in, s'open," he said, standing and waiting to see what the hell else this place had in store for him.

"No, honey, I told you it was me and Candice Bergen, not Candice Cameron. Bergen." Karen was smiling big, talking to somebody she didn't know. The conversation might have been going for hours, and it might have just started. "The last good time she and I had together is that time we set up Martha Stewart, everything since then has been one long horror ride." A dreamy look overtook her features. "I just love her to bits."

She was sitting in a bar. Or maybe it was a waiting room. For all Karen knew, it could have been a fancy new fangled indoor park, for all the plants hanging out all over the place. She'd not seen so much foliage since nineteen fifty four when she went out with Green Peace that one time to Viet Nam.

"You're not even listening."