Willow's News

Author: heather

Rating:  PG

Disclaimer: Characters not mine, I own nothing, don't want any money

Summary: Willow goes to tell Angel some bad news, but when she lingers in LA, Spike comes looking for her with some news of his own.

Parts: 1 - 10
 
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~Part: 1~

The happy trio pranced into the lobby of the hotel where they shared all of life’s ups and downs, as up as they had ever been.  Queens and great warriors they had been in a world where they should have been slaves.  They had changed an entire civilization and been changed in return.  Being worshipped and praised and then suddenly finding your life to be worth about as much as a Canadian penny will do that to a person.  But they had prevailed, escaped intact as a team and as individuals, one more mark on the chart of their many successful missions.  

That’s when they saw her.  A small, sad, red-haired woman sat on their lobby sofa.  Though when any of them had last seen her, she was just a girl, there was no mistaking the person in their midst for a child now.  They knew immediately that whatever she had to say would erase all the joy in their lives for some time to come.  It always seemed to happen that way.  Those who did the most good experienced the least.  No one felt that more acutely than Angel himself.  It was he that knew not only that her news was bad, but exactly why.  “Buffy.”

With that single word his world was destroyed.  Willow did not need to open her mouth.  There was only one reason she would be here in person looking that miserable.  Only one reason that any news out of Sunnydale that was so bad it had to be delivered in person, wouldn’t have been delivered by Buffy herself, was if Buffy were no longer able to deliver it.  Willow could only nod her affirmation of his worst fear.  She stood as Angel sank to his knees, surrounded by his friends, his only family.  She watched as they comforted him, bewildered expressions on their faces.  They didn’t know.  Not yet.  And he couldn’t say it, so she’d have to.

“Buffy… Buffy died saving the world.  Again.”   Two faces looked at her with matching expressions of shock.  Willow had a fleeting thought that Cordelia would probably not appreciate hearing that she looked like Wesley just then.  Before the thought was through her mind, the two of them were on their knees beside their leader, holding him, rocking him, petting him, but neither speaking.

It seemed it might go on that way forever, Willow standing and crying, Angel kneeling and crying, with Wesley and Cordelia consoling him with those eternal looks of empty astonishment.  Willow understood those looks all to well.  Everyone at Buffy’s funeral who had not known her like Willow and Angel knew her wore those looks.  You had to really know Buffy to realize that any part of her was the least bit fragile.  That she was only human.  People who only knew her from school and her mother’s friends felt only strength from Buffy.  They saw her as young and vital and nearly immortal.  Much more so than an ordinary young adult, though most of them did not know why.  They only knew that it seemed impossible that this unquenchable, fiery soul they knew could be dead.

So she had cried, and Xander, Spike, Dawn, and Giles had cried.  Everyone else had worn those looks of vague confusion, as if they couldn’t understand why anyone should be crying when Buffy couldn’t possibly be dead.  Willow knew Angel would cry.  If anyone understood human frailty, it was a vampire who’d killed thousands of humans.  And of course, he knew Buffy, had seen her at her most vulnerable, and had even fought her to the death.  Still, he was really making a spectacle now.

Willow went to the three on the floor and with her hands under as many elbows as she could manage, encouraged them to stand up.  They responded to her prodding, though reluctantly, but when Cordelia and Wesley let go of Angel, he dropped his sobbing head on Willow’s shoulder with unexpected force, making her stumble slightly and grab him around the neck to steady herself.  Now it was her turn to pat his back and offer meaningless comforts.  She felt bad for him in a way she didn’t feel even for herself.  Though he had left Buffy of his own free will, Angel still had delusions that someday he would have her again and they would be together forever.  Willow had always figured one of them wouldn’t live through college, given their extracurricular activities.  Of course, she’d always thought it’d be her that would make the bad move and be a vampire Lunchable.  So, while Willow felt she’d been robbed of maybe a few years of friendship, Angel had just lost an eternal mate.  That had to be worse.

Not too surprisingly, Cordelia was the first one to offer a useful suggestion.  “Does anyone want coffee?” She asked.  There were three affirmative nods.  While Cordelia was occupied, Wesley managed to pry Angel from Willow’s embrace and get them both sitting on the couch.

“Forgive me for asking such a mundane question during your sorrow, but will you be staying with us Willow?  You’re more than welcome to, of course,” Wesley hovered anxiously while both occupants of the couch continued to cry freely, wiping their faces on their sleeves until he produced handkerchiefs for each of them.

“Thanks, Wes.  I’d like to stay,” Willow said in a hoarse whisper.  Wesley immediately excused himself to see about her room, leaving her alone with her sorrows, and Angel on top of it.  She had thought she was done with crying.  Shouldn’t a person have some sort of tear quota?  She’d managed the entire drive to LA without as much as a sniffle.  She simply forced herself to imagine that she was just going to LA to help Angel fight a demon.  That was quite a cheery thought for her, at least, compared to the truth.  But sitting in the lobby the deception fell apart and the tears found her once more.

Angel was speaking, she realized.  “… pointless,” was all she heard.  She didn’t dare ask him to repeat his lamentations, but she didn’t have to.  “Everything is pointless.  Everything I’ve done here, everything we did in Sunnydale, everything we’ve worked for, it’s all pointless.”

That actually kind of ticked her off.  “What do you mean, pointless?  There was a big, huge, gaping-hole-in-the-sky-with-hell-demons-coming-through point to it!  Buffy saved the world!  You, me, Dawn, your friends here, my friends there, and… and lots of other people!  That counts for something!  Don’t you dare say that anything is pointless!  We’ve all made a difference and Buffy most of all.  We’re still here and we should appreciate that because we wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for her.  So you’d better start being grateful for your sorry self because she died for it!”

That shut him up.  At least, it did for a second or two before he started crying some more.  “I’m sorry, Buffy.  I’m so sorry.  I should have been there.  It should have been me.  Why?  Why did it have to be you of all people?”

Willow was well aware that she wasn’t being spoken to, but she answered anyway.  “Well, she was the chosen one after all.  I think that was a big part of it.”  She was being a little mean now, but it made her feel better.  She hadn’t come to play nursemaid to a vampire.  She’d come to deliver some hard news and she’d done that.  She didn’t much want to hear other people feeling sorry for themselves or that their lives had no meaning.  She didn’t feel that way and she had more of a right to than Angel.  He wasn’t the only one who had lost an eternal mate.  No one else knew it, but she’d lost more than anyone.  After all the fires were out and the dust barely settled over Buffy’s grave, she’d learned just how much she lost.  With only the note left on the dresser for comfort, she had faced the empty closets and the cold bed and learned that she’d lost Tara.

~Part: 2~

Willow awoke to the light just filtering in around the edges of the heavy dark curtains to find herself staring at the back of a brown head.  At first she narrowed her eyes at it, and then her eyes flew wide open as she placed whose head it was.  And that wasn’t all.  Her arms were firmly around the waist connected to the brown head, her chest pressed against the matching back and her legs uncomfortably intertwined as well with the legs belonging to the brown head.  Her entire body froze as her mind raced to remember the sequence of events that would have placed her in such a strange situation.  Then she relaxed.  Both she and Angel were fully dressed, right down to the shoes they hadn’t bothered to kick off.  And why would they?  They certainly hadn’t planned on sleeping together.  With emphasis on the sleep, as in, unconsciousness.
 

The previous nights events came back to her slowly, clouded in a haze of teary misery.  She and Angel had sobbed on the couch.  Cordelia had brought coffee spiked with whiskey for the girls and Wes, and with blood for Angel.  That part was pretty clear.  They had sipped their drinks and not said much, passing around a box of tissues as necessary when Wesley ran out of handkerchiefs.  After a few false starts, pathetic attempts to say something eulogistic about the departed Buffy, Wesley gave up and excused himself to go to the room he kept in the hotel for late nights at the office.  The implication that he would be close by was not lost on the grieving vampire, though he could not manage a smile for his friend to match the gratitude he felt.

Cordelia brought more coffee with one cup noticeably missing, her own.  She made her excuses about needing a rest after ruling a dimension and also took her leave to retire to her room of choice on the east side of the building.  She skipped her usual joke about the sunlight keeping Angel from waking her too early and left the room in a quiet way usually reserved for libraries.

With those who wouldn’t understand out of the way, Willow and Angel felt a gentle weight lifted from their shoulders as though a heavy quilt had fallen away.  They were freer in their expressions of grief and in their sharing of fond memories.  Willow did most of the talking and she thought Angel might sit there all night while she told stories of Buffy as he had been unable to see her.  In the sun.  Buffy at the beach, Buffy sitting outside on the lawn during lunch at school, Buffy putting Dawn on the bus in the morning, Buffy getting lost on her way to class the first day of college, it didn’t matter.  If it was about Buffy, Angel would sit there with that far away look on his face and listen to her.  When she came to the story of Buffy racing away from Sunnydale in an RV with a black-goggled vampire at the wheel to save her friends and her little sister from the bitch from Hell, his expression changed and Willow realized it was time to call it a night.

Angel stood up with her, offering to show her to the room Wesley had prepared.  It was on the same floor as his own, Angel preferring to keep guests where he could keep track of what they were up to.  It came from a few decades of being paranoid.  He unlocked the door for her, and that’s when Angel began to talk.  He had stories of his own.  When he began the first one, about how afraid he’d been to tell her he was a vampire when they first met, Willow knew that her night was going to be a lot longer than she’d first thought.

They had entered her room together and Angel sank down on the foot of her bed, pouring his heart out to her, though she had a suspicion that if she could have exchanged herself for a life-sized Willow doll, he would’ve talked to that too.  She sat next to him, alternately patting his back or his knee, switching when her arm got tired of one position or the other.  She could only surmise that at some point sitting had progressed to lying down and crying had become sleeping, and now here she was, sleeping with Angel.  Only she wasn’t asleep anymore.  Now she felt like crying again because she hadn’t meant to snuggle up to Angel.  It was just a sleepy reflex to embrace the person in the bed with her, and that person should have been Tara.

As Angel started to stir, Willow had a moment to wonder who he thought he was waking up with.  Certainly he and Buffy had never woken up together on any kind of regular basis, and she had a sneaking suspicion that there hadn’t been anyone more recent to fill that role.  So, who would she be to his sleep addled brain?  Darla?  Drusilla?  Her still-recently opened mind added the option: Spike?

Willow had no hope of untangling herself from Angel until he awoke, and she was glad he seemed to be doing so now.  The arm trapped beneath him was full of pins and needles and his right leg was a dead weight on her knee.  She felt him have the moment of tense uncertainty at feeling her presence in the bed, but it was fleeting.  Like everything else, apparently vampires could identify their bedmates a lot faster than humans.  She was temporarily impressed that he remembered so quickly, since he hadn’t even had the back of her head to jog his memory.  Then it occurred to her that he could probably smell her the second he gained consciousness and that was more disturbing than impressive.

She waited for the moment of distinct awkwardness that inevitably followed accidentally waking up in a bed with your dead best friend’s ex-lover.  It could have been worse.  He gingerly lifted his body, freeing her arm, and then rolled over to face her, allowing her to pull her legs back to her own side of the bed, which should have been the whole bed if things had ever gone according to plan.  They were both still laying on their sides, heads on pillows as if it were perfectly natural when Willow got the impression that at least one of them should have leapt from the bed and declared that nothing happened and that they should never speak of it.  Instead, Angel simply went on looking at her on her pillow and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Willow replied, still keeping up with the “this isn’t at all weird” illusion for the time being.  “How do you feel?”  Then she slapped her still-asleep hand to her forehead, wincing a little at the fresh bout of stinging needles that earned her.  “Sorry, don’t answer that.  Way stupid question.  Brain totally not connected to mouth at this hour.”

He made a shushing motion with a vague wave of his hand and said, “No, it’s ok.  I’m feeling a little better.  I don’t think I’m going to go sing karaoke tonight or anything, but I’ll survive.  I know that now.  Thanks to you.”

Willow blushed and looked away and that was when the moment chose to get awkward.  Angel sat up suddenly and looked around at them.  His eyes confirmed what he already knew, that he was fully dressed and that they weren’t even actually “in” the bed, but rather just sprawled out on top of the covers, and still it didn’t look good.  He glanced back at Willow.  “Oh hell, I’m really sorry Willow.  I didn’t mean to just crash in here with you.  I hope you don’t think-,”   He ran a hand through already tousled hair.  “No, of course you don’t think that, you know that I… well and you… you know.”  He bit his lip and swung his legs off the side of the bed to stand.  “Look, Willow I appreciate you being here last night.  I don’t know how I… how we… how this happened, but I hope you’re not upset.”

Willow rolled over on her back and shrugged.  “Nope, not upset.  Just tired.  I think I’ll sleep a little more if you’ll be ok on your own.”

He nodded vigorously and backed out of the room, nearly crashing into Wesley when he opened the door to the hall.  The vampire jumped almost high enough to crack his head on the door frame and the man on the other side looked equally surprised, though he kept his cool and did not drop the tray he was carrying.  “Angel,” he nodded in greeting.

“Wesley!  What… what are you doing here?  At Willow’s room?”

 “Actually I could ask you the same thing.” Wesley nodded to his tray, “I’m bringing breakfast, what are you doing?”

“Leaving,” was the only answer he got.

Wesley peered into the room and regarded the witch sprawled out, fully dressed on top of the covers on the bed.  She shrugged and gestured for him to come in.  “What was that all about?” He asked.

“Buffy," she said.  No other explanation was needed.

~Part: 3~

After leaving Willow with the tray of coffee, bagels and fresh fruit, Wesley beat a hasty retreat, not eager to prolong the awkwardness spawned by Angel’s mysterious presence in the room.  She didn’t think she would have any interest in the food being as tired as she was, but the aroma of coffee drifted to where she lay on the bed trying to recover her special dreaming place that didn’t have vampires or hellmouths, and girlfriends didn’t pack up and leave while you were grocery shopping.  She tried to ignore it, but her stomach reacted strongly to the presence of the food and she realized that her last real meal had been quite some time ago. Giving in, she sighed and reached for a slice of melon, knowing she wouldn’t be getting back to sleep until there was food in her belly.
 

Eating breakfast in her room, Willow found herself in a position she’d tried her hardest to avoid for the last few days.  She was alone with her thoughts and lately her thoughts weren’t very good company.  Now her thoughts were about heading back to Sunnydale, where she was expected to return after her messenger-girl mission in LA.  Yet no sooner had she had this thought than she wondered who exactly was expecting her back.  Buffy and Dawn’s father had shown up at the funeral and taken Dawn to stay with him for awhile.  Giles flew back to England almost as soon as Buffy was in the ground and Xander was busy being consoled by Anya.  So who exactly would miss her if she didn’t go back today?
 
Going back to Sunnydale would mean returning to an empty house and living alone until the next beast released from Hell decided to come along and eat her.  On the other hand, staying in LA would mean explanations about why she wasn’t going back to Sunnydale.  She wasn’t sure which she dreaded more.
 
Having come to the reluctant conclusion that there would be no more sleep for her that day, Willow wandered down to the hotel lobby to see who else was up and about.  She was unsurprised to see Wesley in his office, apparently doing the books for Angel Investigations, and Cordelia behind the front desk, doing her nails.  They both looked up when she walked in and gave her encouraging smiles.  Wesley came out from his office and Willow noted with mounting dread that he had the look and stance of a host about to see a guest on their way out.  He halted in his approach when he noticed that she lacked the bag she’d arrived with.  His smile faltered a bit and Willow cast frantically around for something sensible to say that would sound like a plausible explanation for prolonging her visit.
 
To her relief, Coredelia saved her from herself.  “Hey, Willow, if you’re not in a big hurry to get back to Sunnydale, do you think you could stick around for a few days?  I think it would help Angel a lot to have you here.  It seemed like he was really able to talk to you when he was upset and usually with us he just sits in his office and broods when something’s bothering him.”
 
Wesley looked back and forth between the two women, perplexed that Cordelia had made such an invitation unaware of the situation he had stumbled across earlier.  Willow didn’t give him even a moment to jump in with an objection.  “You know, I think that’s a great idea, Cordy.  It might be good for him to have someone around that was close to Buffy.  It would help me too,” she added before she could think that it would sound strange since she should have had all sorts of people to turn to that were close with Buffy.
 
“Great!  Then it’s settled!  You can borrow some of my clothes if you need to and you can have that room for as long as you’re here.”
 
Wesley smiled weakly and nodded his consent to the arrangement.  “We’d be glad to have you, Willow.  You can use the phone in my office to let everyone know you’ll be staying.”
 
Willow opened her mouth again, but this time her brain caught up in time and she refrained from saying there was no one to call.  She went into his office anyway and after staring at the phone for a minute, picked it up and called to check in with Dawn at her father’s house.  The answering machine picked up so she left a nice long message about how she was staying with Angel for awhile and how to get in touch with her should Dawn need anything.  She wouldn’t have bothered to leave a message at all if she didn’t need to keep up the illusion that she had some semblance of a life waiting for her in Sunnydale.  But Wes and Cordy could probably hear at least some of what she said so she had to make it sound like someone cared where she was.
 
Angel had gone off to his rooms, under the assumption that Willow would leave when she woke up, so after a few more brief pleasantries with Wes and Cordy, she went to track him down and let him know she would be staying.  She found him just as she expected, sitting in a chair by his bed, his back to her, staring off at nothing.  She didn’t know why she had expected this particular sight since she’d never been in his rooms before, but it didn’t seem odd that she was right.  Only he wasn’t staring at nothing, he was staring at a picture of Buffy that he held in his lap.  In the picture she was laughing and the sun gleamed on her blonde hair, giving her an angelic glow.  He seemed entranced by it, as though he believed that staring at it long enough would bring its subject to life before his eyes.
 
Willow sat in the chair next to his and said nothing.  He did not take his eyes off the picture, or speak to her either, but she knew that he was aware of her presence since he had said, “Come in” when she knocked on his door.  They sat that way for a long time, neither saying anything, but each quietly appreciating that they weren’t alone.  Though even with the presence of a friend Willow’s thoughts were there and they were picking on her again, telling her about how no one was waiting for her, how she would be alone as soon as she left LA.  A tear slipped silently down her cheek and fell in her lap.  She didn’t move to wipe it away, didn’t draw attention to it at all, but Angel must’ve known it was there.  He had sat perfectly still for an untold time, but when the tear escaped Willow he suddenly moved and handed her the picture, as though that was the only comfort he had to give.

~Part: 4~

The phone ringing in the otherwise quiet lobby made Willow jump and scatter the notes  on demon monks she was reviewing with Wesley in his office.  Angel paused as he passed the front desk and reluctantly answered his own phone since Cordelia was off doing whatever it was she did when she wasn't at her desk.

"Angel Investigations," he said in his usual low growly voice, which had been even lower and more growly since Willow had arrived with her life-shattering news.

The not as low, but even more growly voice on the other end had just three little words for Angel.  "Where's my witch?"

Angel cleared his throat and, though Willow couldn't have known what prompted it, through the door of the office she could've sworn she saw the corner of Angel's mouth twitch as it resisted a smirk. "Your what?"

The voice on the other end switched from growly to condecending as though it spoke to a person both deaf and hopelessly stupid.  "Willow.  Where.  Is.  She?"

Angel feigned enlightenment.  "Ohhh, her.  Yeah, Willow is here.  What's it to you, Spike?"

Hearing the name of her Sunnydale slaying buddy, Willow suddenly lost interest in the invasion of demon monks.  She hated to admit it, but with everything else going on she'd more or less forgotten about Spike.  She had no real reason to assume that he would've been interested in her whereabouts.  With the old gang dispersed, she figured he would go back to doing whatever he was doing before he'd hooked up with them.

Angel could sense Spike gritting his teeth.  "The Hellmouth's been unguarded for the last 5 days, Angel.  Send the witch home."

"I see.  So you're concerned about the wellbeing of the citizens of Sunnydale.  Uh huh.  Well, Willow has been a big help here, I'm not sure I'm ready for her to leave."  More growling on the line caused Angel to take a slightly different tack.  "Then again, I'm sure she'd appreciate it if we let her make her own decisions.  I'll tell her you called."  Angel dropped the phone back in the cradle.

Angel turned to see Willow standing in the doorway of Wesley's office, eyes wide in anticipation, utterly ignoring Wesley's polite but impatient geustures to get her attention back to the matter at hand.  "What did Spike say?"  She asked.

Angel studied her a moment, eyes half closed as if he were trying to see something that wasn't quite there.  Then he blinked and said, "It seems Spike is worried that the Hellmouth is unguarded with you here."  He paused, waiting for her reaction.  When she only gaped at him, he added, "It was nice that you stayed as long as you have, but I understand if you have to go back."

Willow frowned and shook her head.  "No, that's ridiculous!  I'm not the slayer!" She paused at Angel's pained expression and continued in a quieter voice, "I mean, there's not much I can do.  There's not much anyone can do in Sunnydale anymore.  I'm better off here."  And then she stopped and knew she'd said too much, that in spite of all the pain the LA gang was dealing with, all the effort she'd made to hide her own and not dump it on her friends, they couldn't help but know now that all was not well.

"Willow?" Wesley approached her, having given up getting anyone's attention back on demon monks.  She turned to face him, though her feet felt like lead.  "What's wrong?"  He sighed and made a dismissive gesture.  "Besides the obvious.  Why don't you want to go home?"

"I... I don't feel very well.  I think I'm going to go lay down."  She hurried out of the lobby for the stairs, brushing past Angel without meeting his eyes.  He exchanged a glance with Wesley and for the first time in 5 days, Wesley could see that Angel was concerned for someone besides himself.

Willow threw herself down on her bed and beat her hands against her head.  How could she be so stupid?  So insensitive!  Here everyone was grieving for Buffy and she had to act like it was the end of the world that she'd had a bad breakup and her friends at home were a little preoccupied.  She dreaded giving the explanations for her sudden outburst that would be required when she came out of her room.  What would they think of her?  Would they even let her stay knowing that she felt pain for anything besides Buffy?  Why did Spike have to call and remind her of Sunnydale?

For the last five days it had been easy to pretend that she'd never been anywhere but in LA.  She integrated seamlessly with the rest of the group, helping Wesley with research in the mornings, having lunch with Cordelia and bringing something back for the strange little reclusive girl, Fred, who refused to come out of her room. She spent whole afternoons with Fred, listening to her ramblings and trying to make sense out of her pictures and formulas on the walls.  Willow was the only one allowed in Fred's room.  The two had connected somehow from their very first meeting.

On quiet evenings, Willow and Angel sat together in his room and let the day of going through the motions of normalcy slip away.  Alone they were allowed to acknowledge that it wasn't just another ordinary day at the office, that there was no such thing anymore.  Sometimes they would talk, sometimes not.  Sometimes there was coffee, sometimes wine.  Always there were tears from both of them, though perhaps a few less in number with each day that passed.  They didn't know, they didn't count.

Willow knew she was taking the open invitation to stay as long as she liked to an extreme literal.  She was hyper aware for any subtle hints that she had overstayed her welcome, but so far had seen none.  Sooner or later someone would ask about what was going on in Sunnydale and find it strange when she didn't know.  Now her own thoughtless words had brought that day much sooner than she'd hoped.  She wondered how much she would be welcome to stay when they learned that she had no plans to leave.

As Willow left off beating herself up, she puzzled about what Spike had wanted so badly that he would call Angel.  Maybe something terrible was happening and he wanted her help.  But wouldn't he have said so if that were the case?  Some sarcastic part of her suggested that maybe he really missed her.  She snorted a laugh at the thought and rolled over on her back to stare at the unremarkable white ceiling.

If Spike had been anything other than a back-stabbing soulless demon, she might have considered him a friend.  Ever since she had saved him from staking himself in Xander's basement, he had been a bit more pleasant to her than to the rest of the gang.  Once he actually started fighting on their side of his own free will, if they were outnumbered in a battle, he came to kill the demons coming after her first.  Before Tara had joined the slayer's team, he would sometimes walk her back to her room after late night research sessions, if Buffy was going off on patrol.

In his own snarky way, Spike spent quite a bit of his time looking out for Willow whether she had noticed it or not, which for the most part, she did.  Or at least, looking back, she did now.  Maybe she'd been surprised at first, but at some point she'd come to take it for granted that Spike would be there just when she needed him.

A knock on her door interrupted any further Spike-induced musings.  "Yeah?" she called by way of vague invitation, not wanting to risk any more words through the lump in her throat.  The door creaked open, admitting Angel and a shaft of light from the hall.  Though it was still daylight out, Willow had her vampire-friendly curtains drawn so when Angel closed the door she could see nothing but a hulking shadow at the end of her room.

He made his way closer to her bed without being asked, and then laid down and pulled her to him, still not speaking or asking for permission or explanations.  Willow cried herself out on his chest and when she was done, she felt a sort of peaceful emptiness and Angel was in need of a fresh shirt.  He didn't seem to notice his soggy attire as he stroked her red hair and pulled tissue after tissue from the box on the nightstand, letting Willow blow her nose and wipe smeared mascara from beneath her eyes.

"They've all left you," he said.  It was not a question.  She looked up at him, opened her mouth, and closed it again.  She said nothing, but her question was clear.  "I've seen it before," he explained.  "A death like that, it tears a family apart.  Everyone has to go their own way for awhile, deal with it the best they can.  They'll come back, Willow."

"Not all..."  It was as close as she could bring herself to the full confession.

"No," he agreed.  "Not her.  Not Tara."

Willow couldn't stop the gasp that escaped her.  Angel shrugged. "Didn't think I knew, huh?  Cordy keeps me pretty well informed whether I like it or not."  Willow looked around the room frantically, not sure what to make of the revelation that Angel knew vastly more than she'd imagined.  He went on, "I don't know her, but I know people like her.  Most people are like her…at least in some ways," he added when Willow seemed about to object.  Of course she wouldn't think her girlfriend, her Wiccan lesbian girlfriend, was like most people.  "Most people can't handle the kind of life you live.  I don't know how you do it, or how you did it for so long without magic, and I have even less idea how Xander does it.  But there's no shame in wanting to be a regular person with a normal life.  That's what I've wanted for 100 years, but I can't have it.  She can, and should have it, if that's what she wants.  I think it must be or I wouldn't have had the pleasure of your company for the last five days?"

His tone invited her to contradict him.  She couldn't.  "I want to be happy for her.  She's making a new life... without me.  I just... I just have to let her go."  Willow wanted to cry but found she had no tears left that day.  She settled for slumping back on the bed and pressing her hands over her eyes.  She felt Angel climb off to stand up.

"You should get some sleep.  We were up late last night."

He turned to go but before she knew what she was going to say, Willow called out, "Stay!"  He turned back and watched as she lowered her hands and repeated her request.  "Stay, please.  Just, if you could, until I fall asleep.  Like the other night, only you don't have to sleep too.  Is it ok?"

Angel nodded and came back to lie down next to her.  He didn't think he would sleep, but a few minutes after Willow's heartbeat evened out and slowed down to its own slumbering rhythm, he found himself drifting off.

This time when Willow awoke, it was not to gently diffused sunlight drifting in around her curtains.  This time it was full dark and someone slamming the bedroom door open to bang against the wall and flipping on the overhead light woke her up.  That and the question directed angrily to both of the bedmates.

"Just what the Hell do you think you're doing?" Demanded Spike.

~Part: 5~

Willow and Angel shot out of the bed from opposite sides as though the bed had suddenly shocked them with an electric surge. It was one thing to have Wesley catch Angel leaving the room, but Spike seeing them snuggling together under the covers was flat-out terrifying. Even though nothing was going on, who would believe them?

Both of them began stuttering and stammering, trying to find words to explain away the situation and pacify the blonde vampire who was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, tapping his foot as he glared at them.

After a moment, Willow abruptly switched from being embarrassed and flustered to angry and indignant.  “Since when do I have to explain myself to you?” She asked, finding her voice.

“Since when do you desert your duties in Sunnydale for a toss in the hay with a vampire?” Spike shot back.

Before Willow could respond, Angel rolled his eyes and approached the younger vampire.  “Spike, are you blind?  We’re fully dressed.  We were just sleeping.”

“Right, and I like kittens ‘cause they purr. Not like you really need to be naked to get at the right parts.”

“Spike!” Willow was right back to being horrified.  “Would you please stop?  What are you doing here, anyway?”

He sauntered into the room without being invited and plopped down on Willow’s recently vacated bed.  “Well, when you didn’t return my call I figured Angel didn’t give you my message.  How else was I supposed to get in touch with you?”

Willow spread her hands out in front of her in a wide, encompassing gesture.  “You could have called again, you could have emailed me, you could have waited for me to come back, heck you could’ve sent a singing telegram!  But you didn’t have to drive 2 hours just to wake me up and harass me!”  Angry Willow was back again.

“Well, I’m here now.” He stood up and yanked open her closet door where he assumed he’d find whatever overnight bag she would have brought with her.  “So, as long as I came all this way, you might as well come back with me.”  He stooped to pick up her backpack from the closet floor.

Willow came around from behind him, grabbed her belongings, shoved them back in the closet and slammed the door.  “Ok, Spike.  I don’t know what you really want, but I’m tired and you’re being weird.  Can’t we at least deal with this downstairs where there’s coffee?”  Not waiting for an answer, Willow turned and shuffled out of the room.  The vampires followed along behind her.

When they got to the stairs at the end of the hall, Spike rounded on Angel.  “This doesn’t concern you, you know.  Why don’t you go back to ‘just sleeping’?”

“The guests in this hotel are my concern.  Willow is my guest and I’m coming along to make sure she’s comfortable.” Angel said, raising his chin against Spike’s glare.

Willow sighed.  “It’s alright Angel.  Maybe you should just let me handle this. I’ll come see you when he’s gone.”

“Hey, right here, you know,” Spike said.

Angel looked back and forth between them, “You’re sure?” He asked Willow.  She nodded and he turned to go to his own room without another word.

Willow and Spike went downstairs together to the dark lobby.  Everyone else had already called it a night and gone their separate ways.  “’Bout time I got you alone,” Spike said.  “So, how about it?  Are you coming back, or are you really shacking up with Angel?  Kind of a rebound thing, is it?”

Willow frowned at him over the coffee maker.  “None of the above.  I am not coming back, and I’m not shacking up with Angel.  We’re just friends.  It’s no big deal.  I was crying and he was comforting me and we fell asleep, it could happen to anyone.”

“Never happened to us,” Spike muttered under his breath so low that Willow missed it entirely.  He hopped up on Cordelia’s desk to watch her make the coffee.  Louder he said, “Well if you and soul-boy aren’t doing the deed, why not come home?”

Willow flicked on the pot and gave him her full attention.  “Why should I?”
Spike listed the obvious reasons. The Hellmouth was unguarded, classes at UC Sunnydale would be starting soon, her parents might eventually realize she wasn’t in town, and all her stuff was in Sunnydale.
 
Her gaze never wavered as he ran through everything that used to be important to her.  “I don’t care about any of that now,” she told him.

Looking for all the world like it was killing him to do it, Spike brought out his trump card with a twisted grimace.  “Xander is there.”

For a moment Willow said nothing and Spike’s face broke into a slow smile of triumph, until she said, “I’ve been here 5, no wait – 6 days and he hasn’t even called to see why I’m not back yet.  Somehow, I don’t think I need to rush back to Xander.”  The vampire opened his mouth, ready to try some new route of persuasion, but Willow held up a hand to hush him.  “Spike, why don’t you try the truth?  If there’s a reason you know of that I really need to be in Sunnydale, just tell me.”

Spike began rummaging through the pockets of his leather duster for a pack of cigarettes.  Willow took the opportunity to pour herself a cup of the freshly brewed coffee and sat down behind the counter in Cordelia’s chair, looking up at Spike.  He lit his cigarette and finally looked at her.  “Fine, you really wanna know?  I’m lonely.  There, you happy?  You made the big bad vampire admit that he got used to the comforts of human companionship and feels like a ponce for missing it.”

Willow paused with the coffee mug halfway to her lips, too shocked to move or respond.  Spike continued.  “I thought I was finally rid of you ridiculous humans and all your petty little problems.  Believe me, I was plenty ready to get on with my life as a badass demon, but of course I still have this bloody chip in my head.” He paused for a deep drag.  “Most real demons wouldn’t associate with me after how long I fought on the slayer’s side, even if she is dead now.  I killed a few more of them, just for fun, and the others backed off, but it wasn’t the same.  Sitting in a bar drinking blood just isn’t as fulfilling as it used to be.  I actually found myself wondering if I shouldn’t be at the Magic Box checking for the next apocalypse.”  He rolled his eyes at himself.

Eyeing the vampire suspiciously, Willow asked, “Ok, so you still want to fight the big nasties, what do you need me for?  You can’t tell me you want my help?  You always complained about how you had to watch out for me.  You can even have my room on campus if you want comfort.  It’s paid up for the whole year and no one is using it.  There are lots of humans around that wouldn’t know you were a vampire if you didn’t go all grrr.  I bet the girls on my floor would just love to have a guy that looks like you living there.”

Spike shook his head.  “No, it turns out that wasn’t it.  I tried going on patrols and taking out the bad guys.  That’s not what I missed about being on the side of good.  And my crypt is more comfortable than any hell-forsaken dorm.  It turns out what I really missed…”  Spike paused, took another drag, and looked away.  “Was you,” he finished softly.

~Part: 6~

The rest of the conversation didn’t go very well after Spike’s confession.  In spite of how much she insisted she was very flattered, Willow made it clear that she still had no intention of returning to Sunnydale with him.  Stopping just short of begging her to reconsider, Spike finally made the inevitable switch from desperate to angry.  “Fine,” he had said before storming out, “I hope you and Angel will be very happy together.  Perfectly happy.”  Then he was gone and Willow was left staring at the closed door, listening to tires peeling out into the night.

When it sank in for her that Spike had left, Willow shook her head slowly and stood up from the reception desk to pour out the coffee.  She suddenly didn’t have a taste for it anymore.  She felt terrible that she had hurt Spike’s feelings.  How was she supposed to know how he felt?  She had handled it badly and now he might never forgive her.  She  thought that it shouldn’t matter if he forgave her, but it did.  He’d been an ally, a friend almost, and she didn’t like the idea of just tossing him aside now that she didn’t need him anymore.  He still seemed to think he needed her and that should count for something.  She should be there for him like he always was for her.  But she couldn’t.  Not if it meant going back to Sunnydale, aka: Memory Lane.  No, she wasn’t ready for that, not even to repay her debt to Spike.

Spike knew that Tara had left.  He had been the first one there to comfort Willow when she discovered the half-empty closet and had offered to hunt down the offending lover and drag her back by her hair.  Willow had politely declined and rewarded Spike’s efforts with a tiny smile that was becoming all too infrequently seen on her face.  Now she tried to console her conscience by reminding herself that Spike must have had this ulterior motive all along, every time he did something nice for her.  He was really just waiting to make his move.  But then another voice in her head spoke up and said that was ridiculous since Spike had no reason to think Tara would ever leave and give him this chance.

Frustrated with second guessing both herself and Spike, Willow went upstairs to locate Angel.  At least someone might as well take comfort in Spike’s sudden departure.  Somehow it did not occur to Willow that Angel had become her Spike-substitute since her arrival in LA.  She couldn’t have noticed because she never noticed how much she had depended on Spike in the past and had even less idea how much she’d been depending on Angel lately.

She knocked on the door to Angel’s rooms, waiting for the usual invitation.  Instead, he came to the door himself and opened it for her with a grin that was so foreign to him that it looked almost scary.  “He’s gone!”  Willow stared at Angel wondering what in their history could possibly warrant Angel being so pleased at the mere absence of Spike’s presence.

“Um, yeah.  He took off,” she summarized, not caring to elaborate.

“Great!  Fantastic, really.  I don’t know what you said, but great job!”  Angel gave Willow a playful punch in the shoulder before sinking back into his usual chair.

“Angel…” Willow began.  “Um, never mind.”   Part of her wanted to ask what it was he so disliked about Spike, besides that he was a soulless vampire and therefore, a sworn enemy.  Another part of her wanted to tell him about the conversation that had transpired in the lobby so that she could have the benefit of Angel’s consolation to make her feel better about the whole thing.  The larger part, the part that cursed her for a selfish fool to say anything that would spoil his temporary good mood, was the part that won.

Abruptly, Angel sprang to his feet.  “Hey!  I have an idea!  Lorne is having his 3rd, or is it his 4th? Grand reopening of Caritas tonight.  We could go!”  He saw the hesitant look on her face.  “We don’t have to sing,” he assured her.  “We can just sit there and have a couple of drinks and watch other people sing.  It would get us out of the hotel,” he added.

Willow was more surprised by the minute.  Angel suggesting that they leave the hotel?  For social reasons?  That was something he usually avoided at all costs.  What was it about Spike?  She wasn’t about to question her good fortune at that moment.  Watching a bunch of drunks sing karaoke sounded like just the thing to get her mind off her assorted troubles.  “Sounds great,” was all she said, trying not to break the strange giddy spell on Angel.

After throwing on some clothes she hadn’t slept in, Willow joined Angel in the lobby and they left for the infamous demon bar.  They chatted easily on the way there, as though they had had much longer than a week to get used to each other’s company again.  The two years that Angel had been gone from Sunnydale seemed to melt away along with the more recent past that neither of them wanted to think about on a night that each quietly felt would be the first small stepping stone towards their futures, whatever they might be.

The music was already pumping when Angel and Willow descended the stairs to the club.  In spite of the throng of customers, Lorne made his way through the crowd to greet them the second they came in the door.  “Angel cakes!  Willow darling!  I can’t believe you came!  My best table just opened up!  Right this way, never mind that guy, he’s just drunk, ah here we are!”
 
Even though she’d already seen him once at the hotel when he came by to offer his sympathies, Willow was far from used to the sight of the green, horned demon and his eccentric wardrobe.  Still, his personality was disarming and she followed along behind him with no qualms.  True to his word, he led them to a table right in front of the stage where they had a great view of a trio of fungus demons singing “I Shot the Sheriff”.  Willow had a strange feeling that they weren’t just Clapton fans.

Before her thoughts could lead her to any more disturbing conclusions, Willow found herself with a Seabreeze in one hand and a very handsome vampire gazing at her over his goblet of blood.  She took a sip of her drink and wondered when it was that Angel had earned the title of handsome in her mental catalogue.  Of course, she realized, he’d had it all along, it was just classified information about someone in love with her best friend.  She would have to be completely oblivious not to realize it there in the club when nearly every female of every species in the room was casting glances his way that varied only in levels of subtlety.

Two tables away, a raven haired vampiress was staring at them with such intensity that Willow finally glared at her and gathered just enough power around her to make it clear that she was serious.  The vampiress sensed the strength of the witch, gave her an admiring grin, licked her lips and then looked away.  Willow was startled when it occurred to her that maybe the other woman wasn’t looking at Angel at all.  She blushed and let the power dissipate, turning back to Angel who hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.  He was busy watching a drunk, overweight, middle aged human man singing “Day-O” and butchering the words.  Willow wasn’t sure why Angel was so amused, but then, she had never heard him sing karaoke.

When the man was finished and had stumbled off the stage to hear what Lorne had to say about his dismal life, Angel looked at Willow to see what she thought of the performance, and was surprised to see that she was gazing at him with a vague smile on her lips and an empty glass in front of her.  His glass was empty too, so instead of dwelling on why Willow had been looking at him like that, Angel quickly got up and headed for the bar, muttering that he would see about getting them fresh drinks.

Willow watched him go, that same vague smile not leaving her face.  The smile widened when she saw not a few other heads turn to watch him walk away.  She could hardly blame them, it was a good view.  She wondered how that had escaped her notice for so long.  She must have had that particular view in the past.  But, of course, the answer came to her again, only delayed a moment by the drink.  Buffy.  She had always seen Angel through some kind of Buffy-filter that only allowed through the most basic details about the vampire she had spent so much time with, but never really gotten to know until the past week.

With the filter gone, Willow saw Angel for the first time as he really was.  Sensitive, heroic, gorgeous, and… available.  Strange that she had to see other women seeing that before she could see it herself.  The very thought of it made her dizzy. Unfortunately, even though her Buffy-filter was gone, she doubted Angel’s was.  He would still see her the same way as always.  Just Buffy’s fuzzy sweater wearing friend that wasn’t allowed to have boys in her room.  She knew she would never have a chance with him.  Did she even want a chance?  She didn’t remember wanting a chance just the day before.  Willow could see Angel picking his way through the crowd to get back to their table, trying not to spill their drinks.  Who wouldn’t want a chance with that?  It wasn’t like she was in love with him, at least not yet.  But he was nice, and he made her comfortable, and she thought they might have a chance for more.  Too bad she could never tell him that.  Her eyes drifted to the empty stage and the gleaming microphone.  She had a really terrible idea, made all the worse by how good it seemed at the time.

When Angel finally reached his table, it was empty.  He set the drinks down and craned his neck to scan the room for his companion.  When his head turned back to the stage he froze in shock.  There she was, sitting on the high stool next to the tiny karaoke screen.  When she saw him looking at her, she flashed him a hesitant smile and then looked back at the screen as the music started.  Angel didn’t know what else to do, so he sat down to hear what she would sing.

A soft piano ballad gave her an intro, and then she began.

“In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along”

There was a pause and Willow looked up for a moment to smile at Angel again.  He smiled back, unfamiliar with the song, but liking the idea so far.

”I spoke to you in cautious tones
You answered me with no pretense
And still I feel I said too much
My silence is my self defense”

Willow wondered if Angel had any idea what she was trying to convey with the song.  She chanced another quick look at him, but his face revealed nothing.

”And every time I've held a rose
It seems I only felt the thorns
And so it goes, and so it goes
And so will you soon I suppose”

Still no telltale signs on Angel’s face, though he was swaying just a little as though he liked the melody.  Willow took a deep breath and continued with a verse that she doubted even Angel could misinterpret.

”But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
So I will share this room with you
And you can have this heart to break”

He still looked like he thought she was just singing the song because she liked it!  There was a short instrumental break and Willow used it to lock eyes with Angel and give him the most meaningful look she could muster.  She placed one hand over her heard and then slowly held it out towards him.  Finally his eyes widened and she had to look away in time for her cue.

”And this is why my eyes are closed
It's just as well for all I've seen
And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows”

”So I would choose to be with you
That's if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break “
 

It didn’t get any clearer than that.  Willow looked up again to see Angel still staring at her with the same wide-eyed shock.  So he hadn’t seen her the way she saw him.  Suddenly, she felt completely naked on the stage and wanted to get away immediately.  She dropped the microphone and ran behind the curtain, hoping for a stage door that would take her outside.  She was not disappointed, and before anyone could have stopped her, she was running blindly through the streets of LA.  Back on stage, the song finished up without her.

”And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows.”

~Part: 7~

Lorne hurried over to the table where Angel sat staring at an empty stage with a glass of blood halfway to his lips.  He sat down next to the vampire and waved a hand in front of his face to get his attention.  When Angel looked at him he leaned in close.  “Angel, sugar plum, we need to talk.”

Angel started to stand up, “Willow, I have to find her…”  But Lorne’s firm hand on his arm stopped him.

“You won’t find her now and you really need to hear this.  It’ll only take a minute.”  Angel nodded and reluctantly sat down again.  “I read Willow while she was singing and I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to tell you.”  Angel gestured for him to get on with it.  Lorne took a deep breath and said, “Willow thinks you can make her happy.”

Angel tried again to stand up.  “Thanks for the analysis Lorne, but I kinda got that from the song.  Now if that’s all, I should go look for her.”

Lorne shook his head and flapped his hand back at the seat that Angel kept leaving.  The vampire sat.  “Not only is she completely wrong about you, but if someone doesn’t do something, she’ll never even realize who it is that can make her happy.”

Angel was finally paying attention.  “What do you mean completely wrong about me?  And who’s supposed to make her happy?  It’s not Tara?”

The green demon gave a deep sigh.  “You can only make Willow miserable because she can never have you.”  Angel nodded, shoulders slumped in recognition of the truth.  “But here’s the part you really won’t like:  The one that can make her happy is Spike.”

Angel’s eyebrows rose so far on his forehead that they nearly disappeared into his hairline.  “Spike?!  Oh, you have got to be kidding, right?  Right?”

Lorne could only shake his head.  “Spike.  It’s him, or a life of blaming herself for things she has no business being blamed for.”

“Let me guess.  I’m the only one that can make her realize she’s supposed to be with him.”

“’Fraid so, dumpling.  You’re the closest thing she has to a best friend right now.  She won’t take it quite so well from anyone else.  Do you have any idea about Spike?  I wouldn’t have seen this in the reading if there wasn’t some way to convince him too, but I don’t know how hard it will be.”

Angel thought back to Spike’s inexplicable appearance in LA and his sudden departure.  “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

As soon as he was sure the empath had nothing else to share pertaining to Willow, Angel was out of the club and combing the streets for his missing friend.  It didn’t take him long to realize he had no idea where to start looking. Willow hadn’t been in LA often enough to know any particular places to go.  On a hunch, he decided to head back to the hotel.

Pausing outside the door to Willow’s room, Angel could tell that his hunch had paid off.  There were soft sobs coming from within, accompanied by an intermittent metallic clinking.  Not wanting to risk having her refuse to see him, Angel simply opened the door and let himself in instead of knocking.

Willow was alternately pulling clothes off the metal hangers in the closet to shove them in a suitcase laid open on the bed, and grabbing tissues to blow her nose as she was hit with wave after wave of tears.  When Angel walked in she froze, horrified that he had caught her in the hotel at all, and crying over him at that.  She was well aware that it was ridiculous to cry over the loss of something she had never had, but that didn’t make it any less humiliating to pour your heart out and have it kicked aside like a bit of debris in the road.

“Willow…” he began, but she held up a hand to silence him.

“Don’t.  Just don’t, Angel.  I’ll be out of here in a minute; out of your life and you’ll never have to see me again.  Sorry to have bothered you.”  She turned back to her suitcase trying to block him from her sight.

Angel hesitated, not wanting to make her angrier and not wanting to give her the wrong idea, but he didn’t have any other great ideas so he went with his first instinct which was to cross the room and pull her into his embrace for a soothing hug.  When his arms first went around her from behind, she stiffened.  As the significance of his touch occurred to her, she relaxed and let herself be held.  He didn’t hate her, which was something.  Maybe he wouldn’t make her go back to Sunnydale.  She wasn’t sure she could stay in LA knowing that she and Angel had no future together, but that hadn’t bothered her yesterday, so maybe she could get past it again.

He turned her around to face him.  “You’ve been good to me, Willow.  I don’t want you to go.  You don’t know how much I wish I could give you what you want, make you happy, but I can’t.  It’s not meant to be.”

Willow gave him a puzzled frown.  “Meant to be?  That doesn’t sound like something you usually give much thought to, Angel.  Where did that come from?”

Angel closed his eyes, cursing himself for his choice of words.  He hadn’t wanted to have to explain Lorne’s reading to her just yet.  She was still getting over the disappointment of her failed proposition to him.  The last thing she needed was another complication, aka Spike, to worry about.  When he opened his eyes she was still waiting for him to speak.  Maybe it would be better to just get everything out in the open now.  “Lorne read you while you were singing.  You can probably tell that he didn’t see you and me living happily ever after.”

Willow looked at him carefully.  “Yeah, I think I got that.  What’s the part you’re not telling me?”

“What I’m not telling you is that he saw who you are supposed to be with.”

Her eyes brightened and she actually smiled.  “Really?  He saw my future and who I end up with?  Is it Tara?”

Angel’s heart broke a little more seeing the hope in her face that he was about to crush.  He had hoped that with her little song at Caritas she’d been getting over the other witch, but apparently he was just a rebound opportunity.  “No, Willow.”  Her face fell and he had to force himself to continue, choking on the words.  “It’s Spike.”

She looked at him as if he had lost his mind.  “Lorne saw me with Spike?”

“Well no, not exactly.  You’re future isn’t predetermined.  It’s still up to you, and him, to get together.  It’s just that, apparently, he’s the only one that can make you happy.”

Willow’s mouth hung open slightly and she felt behind herself for the bed before she sat down, hard.  “Spike…” she whispered.  “I – oh god.  I totally blew him off!”  She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth in quiet horror.  Then she began to look confused again and a little annoyed.  Angel simply stood by to see what she would do.  “This can’t be right.  I mean, I don’t even think about Spike that way!  Sure he’s hot and he’s been a good friend at times, but hello!  Soulless demon!  How could he make anyone happy?”

Angel did not say that the same soulless demon had once made him quite happy.  It just wasn’t the kind of encouragement Willow needed.  Instead he said, “I’ll let you have some time to think.  Whatever you want to do, I’ll help you.  If you want to go back to Sunnydale, I’ll understand.  If not, maybe we can bring Spike here.”

Willow nodded slowly, still taking in the bizarre twist her life had taken.  “I’ll think about it,” she promised as Angel showed himself out of her room.

Angel knew what he had to do.  It didn’t make it any more pleasant.  Spike needed to be clued in about what was going on and Angel was the only one to give the clue.  When Willow decided to contact him, he needed to be on his best behavior to win her over.  Willow’s entire future happiness depended on it.  Just the kind of thing Spike would love to hear.

~Part: 8~

He put it off as long as he could, but by the following night, he couldn’t stand it hanging over his head any more.  Work had been slow and the gang had already gone home.  Sitting at the desk in his office, Angel picked up the phone to make the call he dreaded.  His finger hovered over the buttons for a moment, and then he replaced the phone in its charger.  He couldn’t do it.  Not because he hated Spike all that much, but because Spike didn’t have a phone number.  Angel had never given much thought to how he would get in touch with Spike, should the need arise, without driving to Sunnydale.  Since his return to California, he’d never been far from someone Angel was in contact with.  Had he needed to reach Spike a few weeks ago, he could’ve just called Buffy and asked her to give him a message.  Even without Buffy, there was Giles, or Willow, but now they weren’t in Sunnydale any longer either.  The only one left was Xander Harris, the one phone number Angel had never bothered to add to the Rolodex.

Angel pushed away from his desk and leaned back in the chair, arms behind his head, glaring at the innocent, if useless, phone.  He liked Willow well enough, but there was no way he was driving to Sunnydale to confront Spike on his home turf for her.  No, there were some things even friendship could not demand.  He wouldn’t put himself in a position where Spike had the upper hand, not for anyone.  It didn’t matter how much he had hurt Willow when she was just trying to move on with her life.  All those tears she cried over him had no effect whatsoever.  None at all.

“Damn it to hell!”  Angel stood up so fast his chair crashed into the wall behind him.  He ripped open his desk drawer, grabbed a set of keys and left the hotel without telling anyone where he was going or when he would be back.  He didn’t want to think about either of those things long enough to explain them to someone else.

He sped down the highway that separated him from the place where the world had nearly ended more times than even made sense.  Once, he had died to prevent it.  Now the one who had sacrificed him had made her own sacrifice.  He could appreciate the cruelty of irony better than most people.  If the universe had one shred of decency though, Buffy would be in heaven.  It was no small contradiction for a vampire to believe in heaven at all, but he had been to hell.  Having proof of hell and not assuming that there must also be a heaven was too pessimistic even for Angel.  So he let himself be assured that Buffy was safe at last, that there was nothing more he could do for her.

Someone else needed him now.  He swung the car past the “Welcome to Sunnydale” sign remembering how many times he had come rushing down here to help Buffy.  It only seemed right that he do the same for Willow.  It was all part of the mission statement, helping the hopeless.  No one had ever looked more hopeless than Willow when she ran off the stage at Caritas.   Angel rolled his eyes at himself.  The last thing he needed was something else to feel guilty about for the rest of eternity.

He was at the cemetery.  He looked at the sky, which was still dark, but not dark enough, and cursed his rash decision to come tonight.  There was no way he could make it back to LA before sunrise.  There was also no way he was spending the day in a crypt.  He shook his head.  First things first.  Get Spike to agree to come to LA sometime in the near future and try his charms out on Willow again.  He shuddered to imagine it.  Willow was just too nice for Spike.  Maybe Lorne had been wrong.  Lorne was never wrong, though.  Damn.

He pounded on a heavy door, hearing his knocks reverberate through the stone walls within.  He waited.  No one came.  Furious, he pounded harder.  Nothing.  Where the hell was Spike?  Angel knew he wasn’t out hunting, that chip in his head might be cruel and unusual, but it did make Spike a little more predictable than he used to be.  So what would a Spike that wasn’t out hunting be doing at this hour?  Drinking, of course.  Angel had no intention of combing the seedier side of Sunnydale looking for him.  Instead, he kicked open the door of the crypt and went inside to wait for Spike to come home.

Angel wandered around, checking out how the other vampire lived.  He had known where Spike’s crypt was from his last trip to Sunnydale, but he had never been in it.  He was shocked to see a refrigerator and a television set.  Spike had managed to get electricity but not a phone?  There were times like this that Angel couldn’t believe they had ever gotten along.

With nothing better to do, Angel helped himself to some blood from the fridge and settled down on a couch of questionable origin.  After all, he was really doing Spike a favor by coming there, even though he was sure that when he explained the situation, Spike would find a way to make it seem like the other way around.

Just when he thought he would have to resort to turning on the television to keep himself from going crazy with frustration at waiting around, Spike stumbled through the door.  Though he was obviously very drunk, he did manage to shut the door behind himself and block out the first rays of sun that were just beginning to feel their way past the horizon.  Angel regarded both the vampire and the sun with equal looks of loathing.  Thanks to the latter, he was stuck with the former for an entire day.  This could not get any worse.

Angel stood up to announce his presence.  Spike was totally off his game and stumbled back in surprise, connecting his head with the door.  He slumped to the ground and stared up at Angel, working up enough of a coherent thought to respond to the intrusion.  “What the fuck?”  Was his best effort.

The smirk was inevitable.  No matter how much time passed, getting the jump on Spike never got old.  “What’s wrong Spike?  You’re allowed to come visit me and I can’t return the favor?”  No one could be drunk enough to miss the sarcasm.

Spike’s eyes narrowed.  There was something wrong with Angel being in his crypt, that much he was sure of.  This wasn’t supposed to happen.  “Bugger off, Angel.”  There.  That oughta tell him.

“Not going anywhere, Spike. Since I had to wait around all night for you, I’m stuck here.”

Spike knew he was way too drunk.  He didn’t even want to bother with tormenting Angel about his predicament.  He just wanted him gone so he could get some sleep.  He tried one last time as he picked himself up and shuffled over to the opening in the floor leading to his bedroom.  “Go ‘way.”

It didn’t work.  Walking with his head down so he wouldn’t accidentally fall through the trap door, he crashed into a solid, immobile object.  He snarled at Angel, daring him to try to continue blocking his way.  Angel was unfazed and simply pushed him away in the direction of the couch.  Spike grumbled but flopped down obediently, knowing when he was beat.  Angel was stronger than him when he wanted to be, and lots more sober.  His loss.  “Ok, what?”  Maybe if he played along he’d still get some sleep.

Angel looked at the drunken, sloppy vampire and did not see a future mate for Willow.  He reminded himself that it was in no way his decision.  He was also unwillingly reminded of a loving, devoted Spike who spent 100 years taking care of Drusilla’s every need.  If he could do that, Willow should be a snap.  “What are your intentions with Willow?”  The words were out of his mouth before he’d really thought about how they would sound.

Spike gaped at him for a fraction of a second before bursting out laughing.  He hooted and howled for a good three minutes before pausing long enough to ask, “What are you supposed to be now?  Her Dad?”  He didn’t wait for an answer before breaking into fresh peals of laughter.

“Enough Spike!  Just answer the question, would you?  The sooner we get this over with the better.”

Spike stopped.  Not because Angel told him to, rather he was suddenly interested in the real reason Angel was standing in enemy territory playing Meet the Parents.  “What’s it to you anyway?  You know she turned me down flat.”

Angel found himself unsure how to proceed.  He suddenly realized that telling Spike what Lorne had said was not the best course of action.  That would leave Spike holding all the cards.  If he believed that Angel really cared for Willow’s happiness, he could make him do anything he wanted in exchange for agreeing to pursue the relationship.  “Willow’s had a change of heart.  She wants to see you.”  There, that was informative, yet non-revealing.

Spike began to seem more sober than he had any right to be.  “So you just came tearing down here to tell me this good news?”

Angel was unprepared again.  It hadn’t occurred to him that Spike might not believe him at all.  “Well, yeah.  She was upset and I thought asking you to come to LA would cheer her up.  I know you like her, Spike.  Why don’t you just accept that she might be willing to give it a try with you and stop being so damn suspicious?”  He was so annoyed he didn’t even realize all the things he’d said wrong.

Spike chuckled softly to himself.  Then to Angel he said, “Broke her heart, did you?  Too busy grieving for the slayer to try out the witch?”

Angel opened his mouth to deny everything, and then closed it.  It was pointless. “Yeah.  I mean, no!  It wasn’t like that.  It was just a rebound thing, nothing serious, but - .”

“She cried,” Spike offered.

“Yeah.”  Angel looked at his feet, feeling ashamed of himself all over again.

“Asshole.”

He looked up in surprise.  “Hey!  It’s not like I meant for it to happen!  I had no idea…” He stopped when he saw Spike grinning at him.  “What?”

“Well that’s what you wanted to hear, right?  That it was your fault so you could go and brood over it.  God, Angel.  Get over yourself.  I’m sure Willow will.  Especially when yours truly comes a callin’.”

 Angel wasn’t sure when this disaster of a conversation had taken a turn toward him getting what he came for.  “So you’ll come then?”

“’Course, whenever she wants to see me.  I’ll call her tonight from the bar.”

“Thank you, Spike.”

“Oh no you don’t!  Don’t think for a minute that I’d do this for you!  I like Willow enough that I don’t even mind that I’m almost doing you a favor, easing your overblown conscience and all.”

“Of course.  You just want to see Willow, I understand.”

“Damn straight!  Now if you’re done harassing me, I’m going to bed.”

“Um, Spike.  Where can I…?”

“On the couch, where else?  Didn’t think you were gonna crawl in with me?  That’ll be the day!”

“Right.  So, I’ll just be up here then.”  Spike glared at him and pushed past to go down below.  Angel didn’t argue since he already had what he wanted.  Spike was coming and Willow would be happy.  He stretched out as much as the narrow couch would allow, exhausted from playing matchmaker.  His last thought as he drifted off was, Lorne better be right or he was going to be one sorry Host.

~Part: 9~

Angel woke up with an inexplicably sore neck.  In all his years of being dead, he couldn’t recall ever being afflicted with that particular ailment.  Looking at his surroundings, things began to make more sense, since this was also the first time he’d crashed for the day on a lumpy couch in a crypt.  Funny, he’d spent years sleeping in sewers and never woke up with a stiff neck.  Apparently the recent years in more plush environs were making him soft.  Giving himself a mini massage, he considered whether or not to rouse Spike.  It was nearly dark and he could have just left and gone back to LA, but he wanted to be sure that Spike would remember his promise.

Stirrings from below saved him from making a choice.  A few minutes later, a tousled blonde head emerged from the floor, followed by the rest of a half-naked Spike.  The vampire hitched up his black jeans and headed for the refrigerator without so much as a glance at Angel. He snatched up a packet of blood and pierced it with his fangs, drinking it cold.  Angel grimaced and tried not to watch Spike’s nipples harden as he fed.

When he was done, he tossed the empty bag aside, resumed his human face, and turned, seeming to notice Angel for the first time.  “You still here, then?”  Angel just shrugged, still unsure of how to bring up the matter of Willow again.  “Well, you’d best shove off.  I’m heading out myself in a bit and I don’t want you hanging around the place.  Give me a bad reputation if anyone saw the likes of you coming for a visit.”

“I’m leaving.  Just tell me what you promised.”

“Promised?”  Spike raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.  “I don’t make promises to soul-having, childe-abandoning, slayer-shagging losers!  I said I might call the witch when I get a chance.  Take her mind off certain dark, brooding ponces.  But that’s between me and her.  I’m not promising you anything.”

Angel was speechless in his distress.  Drunk Spike was a lot more agreeable than sober-just-rolled-out-of-bed Spike.  There was only one thing to do.  “Fine, I’ll leave, but you’re coming with me,” Angel said with utter finality.

“And what in hell makes you think I’d go along with that?” Spike demanded, turning his back on Angel to go back to his room below.  He was soon sorry he asked.

The next instant Spike found his back against the stone wall of his crypt, Angel pressed uncomfortably close to him with a stake in between them, pointed at his heart.  “This makes me think you’ll go along with whatever I say.  The only reason you’re not already dust is because it might upset Willow.  But if you don’t come with me and be nice to her…”

Spike sneered in his face.  “You wouldn’t.  You don’t have the balls, and besides,” his lips drew down in a tiny pout and he batted his eyes, “you’d miss me.”

Angel didn’t respond.  He pushed a little harder with the stake so that it dimpled the pale flesh and drew just a trickle of blood that dribbled enticingly down his chest.  Angel’s eyes flashed yellow and at that, Spike finally held up his hands.  “All right!  Forget it!  I’ll come with you, just back off already.”

Angel backed off.  Spike pushed at him for good measure and then dropped down his hole.  He appeared moments later having combed his hair and added a shirt, boots, and his black duster to his attire.  An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips.  “Ready,” he announced and nodded towards the door.  Angel didn’t move.

“You’re not smoking in the car.”  This earned him a good look at Spike’s middle finger and then at his back as he led the way out of the crypt.

~~

Somehow they managed not to kill each other on the way back to LA, but it was a near thing.  Angel got out of the car in a rush to get back to his office, knowing he was already late for work and would have some explaining to do when he showed up with Spike instead of the goo of a slain demon.

“Angel, wait!”  The unusual desperation in Spike’s voice made Angel pause and turn to see what was wrong with him.  The other vampire smoked and paced furiously back and forth next to the car.  When he saw he had Angel’s attention, he stopped and blew out a puff of smoke in a frustrated breath.  He gestured towards the hotel.  “I can’t just go in there!  What am I supposed to say?  Here I am, Red, let’s shag?”  Angel shrugged.  His plan hadn’t really extended far enough to consider how Spike would explain his sudden presence. “I need some time, a day or two anyway.  I gotta work up to this, plan it out.”

Angel felt a smirk tug at his lips.  Spike was nervous.  He didn’t want to be rejected again, and that was understandable, but he must like Willow even more than he let on.  Spike had never been one to be shy around girls, and here he was, sweating like a teenager about to ask his crush to the prom.  “Ok, Spike, you can hide out for now.  But don’t think you’re leaving until you talk to Willow.  Come on, I’m not standing out here all night.”

Spike nodded and crushed out his cigarette before following Angel up the steps and into the hotel.  As soon as they were in the door, Angel pointed to the flight of stairs leading to the upper levels of the hotel.  Spike didn’t need any further encouragement. He took off with all his vampiric speed to find a room to hole up in before any of the AI team could spot him.

Willow heard the front door open and came out of Wesley’s office to see if a client had arrived.  Cordelia was off picking up Chinese takeout so the front desk wasn’t staffed.  She saw that it was just Angel and gave him a smile, then turned her head as movement registered at the corner of her eye. She was just in time to see a black flash disappear around the corner at the top of the stairs, but it happened so fast that she couldn’t be sure she’d seen anything at all.  Angel hadn’t seemed to notice anything, and he had much better vision than her.  She must be tired.  She shook her head to clear it and found herself thinking of how Spike always wore black and wishing that he would come to visit again.  Well, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, her grandmother had said on more than one occasion.

Angel retuned Willow’s smile, hoping to distract her from any more glances at the stairs and asked how the night had been so far.
 
“Pretty quiet,” she admitted.  “Cordelia went out to get us some dinner.  You know it’s a dull night when she’s so bored she offers to do errands.”

Angel chuckled, amused at how fast Willow had picked up on the rhythms of the group.  “Glad I didn’t miss anything.  Look, just yell if you need me, I need a shower.  It’s been a long day.”  Without offering any further explanation, he trudged up the staircase, knowing Spike would be long gone and out of sight.

Willow stared after him, knowing full well that something was going on that Angel didn’t want her to know about.  Not that she thought that would last long.  It hadn’t taken her more than a day to notice that there were no secrets in the old hotel.  The group was just too close for that.  Everything came out eventually and they were all the better and more effective for it.

Wesley came to stand next to Willow, having heard their conversation.  “I wonder where he’s been.  It’s not like him not to call if he’s to be out all day.  Strange.”  Yet, he couldn’t have been too concerned since he headed back to his office to finish reading the newspaper without any further investigation.

Cordelia came back a few minutes later laden with paper bags emitting a delightful aroma.  One plastic bag hung from her arm, its thin white color not doing a very good job of concealing the bright red packets within.  “Food, people!” She called, opening the door for herself with her foot.  Wesley rushed forward to relieve some of her burden.  “Is Angel back yet?” She asked.  “I went to that smelly butcher for him so he better be around.”

“Yes, he’s just returned,” Wesley told her.  “He won’t say where he’s been but his car was gone all day.”

Cordelia set the rest of the bags down on the reception desk and started passing out little white boxes of steaming food.  “Well, we can get it out of him later.  Food first.  If he wants any dinner, he’ll fess up.”

Willow opened her own box of sweet and sour shrimp and poked at it with a chopstick.  It was all very amusing to speculate on how Angel had spent his day and how they would get him to tell about it, but she had bigger problems.  She’d thought of little but Spike since hearing about Lorne’s reading and she was still no closer to figuring out what to do about it.  She couldn’t even call him to chat, much less invite him out for coffee.  Going to Sunnydale was still out of the question, but she was running out of ideas.  No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t picture showing up at the door of his crypt and telling him they were supposed to be soul mates.  It was ridiculous!  He’d think she was crazy, and besides, she wasn’t even sure she would ever like him that way.  No, she would just have to come up with some other way to be happy.  After the way she’d rejected him, she had no reason to hope that he would ever come back to see her.  If only he would though, he wouldn’t be sorry; she’d at least give him a chance.  If only.

~Part: 10~

Seeing an opportunity to get away from the activity of the main floor, Willow picked up the box of vegetable lo mein for Fred and took it upstairs.  As she passed by Angel’s room, she thought she heard voices from behind the door.  When she paused, they stopped, so she continued down the corridor assuming he’d been on the phone.  Over the scent of the Chinese food, Willow thought the hallway smelled faintly of smoke.  Not the kind of smell where things were on fire, but a cigarette smell.  It was odd, none of Team Angel smoked.  She made a mental note to bring up some air freshener from the storage closet, and then she was at Fred’s room.  She knocked and waited for the door to creak open its usual half-inch, allowing the room’s occupant to see that it really was just Willow before it opened the rest of the way.

Fred did not trust peepholes.  When Willow questioned her on it, Fred had asked what good it would do you to put your eye against one if it was the barrel of a gun looking back at you from the other side of the door.  It was an excellent point that allowed no argument, though Willow couldn’t figure out where that particular paranoia had come from.  As far as she could tell from the stories Cordy and Wes told, there hadn’t been any guns in Pylea.

Willow smiled at her friend and handed over the food.  They sat on the floor together and Willow looked up to study the latest additions to the ever-increasing formulas and diagrams that covered the walls while Fred dug into her dinner.  She was a fast eater, still not quite over the idea that no one was going to come along and rip the food from her hands.  Once she was done, her mind was free to consider her new friend.  "What's wrong, Willow?"

Willow started and tried to smile.  It didn't quite work.  What was she supposed to say?      Fred had spent the last 5 years as a slave or a fugitive, would she even understand relationship problems?  Heartbreak?  Of course she would.  She was, after all, still a woman.  As simply as she could, she described Tara's sudden departure, finding solace in Angel only to be rejected, and learning that she was supposed to love someone she didn't understand.  It was a lot to take in.  Fred knew that Willow had dated a woman, and that part didn't faze her.  She hadn't met Lorne or Spike though, so those parts led to some questions that Willow didn't have answers for.  "So, he's a good vampire?  Like Angel?"

Willow was not so caught up in her own misery that she didn't notice the breathy little sigh when Fred spoke Angel's name.  She had a strong suspicion that the pretty Texan would be the vampire's next heartbreak victim.  "No, trust me, Spike is nothing like Angel.  He doesn't have a soul, for one thing, and the only thing that keeps him from killing people is a microchip the government put in his head.  Heck, if it wasn’t for that, right now, you’d be talking to vamp Willow.  Only, I guess you wouldn’t be talking to me because I wouldn’t be here talking to you, I’d be trying to eat you.  Anyway, I don’t think Spike would kill me now, but when he first got the chip?  He was pretty mad that he couldn’t get the job done, if you know what I mean."

Fred had lots of questions about the chip and how it worked, but Willow could only tell her what it did, not how it did it.  "He can't hurt any people, but it doesn’t go off if he kills another demon.  He was really happy when he figured that out.  Made him feel all tough and dangerous again, I guess.  That's when he really started fighting on our side.  It let him get in lots of good kills, and no migraines.  It's just so hard to tell what he really thinks.  Sometimes it seems like he actually does believe that he's doing the right thing, and then other times, I'm sure he'd kill half the town given the slightest chance.  I just don't see how I'm supposed to be with him."

"But do you like him?  Is he strong and brave and handsome?"  Willow was pretty sure she knew who Fred was using as a measuring stick to see how all other men compared.

"Well, he's a vampire, so yeah he's strong, 'cause they all are.  And brave, I guess so.  He's saved my life a few times at least.  Definitely handsome.  He's probably the best looking man, er, male... creature I've ever seen."

Fred's eyebrows were raised.  "Better looking than Angel?"

"Sort of.  They're good looking in different ways.  But hey, Angel is right up there for sure.  Besides, looks aren't everything.  You've got to have some kind of connection, and I don't know if I have that with Spike."

Fred considered this, then announced, "You should do what makes you happy.  You deserve to be happy, Willow."

"Apparently doing Spike is supposed to make me happy," she muttered under her breath.  Out loud she said, "What about you, Fred?  I don't want to see you get hurt, either."

Fred's blinked rapidly, looking alarmed.  "What do you mean?  No one hurts me here.  That's why I stay in here."

Willow leaned across the floor and put her hand over Fred's.  "You know what I mean.  Angel.  I know you like him."

A ferocious shade of red overtook Fred's face.  "No... no, no I don't," she objected.

Willow finally found herself able to smile.  "Sure ya do.  Why wouldn't you?  Big strong man came and rescued you from that hell you were living in, made you safe, protected you, and he's cute, what's not to like?"

"He's ok, I guess." She admitted.  Willow tried not to giggle at the understatement.  "He'll never notice me, though.  Not in here," she gestured around her room.  "Not out there.  I'm not her, the one he lost.  I'll never be his, no one will."  She looked so perfectly miserable after that admission that Willow was sorry she brought it up at all.  Still, it was important that Fred face the truth if she was ever to have a normal life in this world.

"He cares about you," Willow assured her.  "He says you'll always have a place here for as long as you want it.  He's a good person, he's just not relationship guy right now."

"Yeah, I know.  That's ok, I don't mind.  He's done so much for me already, I can't ask for anything else.  So, you think you'll go see Spike?"

Willow could appreciate that Fred didn't want to dwell on her own dismal prospects for meeting an eligible man in her room.  "Yep, I guess I better.  I didn't want to go back to Sunnydale so soon, but it's not like he's gonna suddenly discover on his own that I'm supposed to fall in love with him and come out here to woo me."

~~

It felt good to have her mind made up.  She wouldn't wait for her fate to come to her, she would go and meet it head on.  She could think of worse things than finding happiness with Spike.  Having to itemize his virtues to Fred made it seem slightly more possible that they could actually have something together.  Now she just had to find out what.

The next morning she slept late and decided when she woke up that she might as well start out for Sunnydale.  No sense in delaying the inevitable.  She could be there early in the afternoon, giving her a good chance of finding Spike at home.

She figured it'd be a good idea to stop by and tell Angel she was going.  He'd be happy for her, or at least pretend to be.  After throwing some clothes in her bag, she made her way to his room.  She knocked on the door but didn't hear a response.  She tried the knob and found that the door was unlocked, so she let herself in, meaning to leave a note.  She got most of the way into the room before she saw what was wrong and stopped, her mouth hanging open in disbelief.  There in Angel's bed, naked at least from the waist up where the covers ended, was Spike, fast asleep.

After a moment, she realized she could hear the shower in the bathroom.  Her brain simply refused to process what she was seeing and she could not seem to make her feet move to leave the room.  Instead she dropped down in the chair at the end of the bed, her forgotten bag falling to the floor next to her, and continued to stare at the sleeping vampire even as she heard the shower knobs squeak off in the bathroom.  She was still sitting there when Angel came out, wrapped in a towel, and did a fairly good impression of Willow's reaction to seeing Spike when he saw her sitting in his chair.

Willow looked back and forth between them for a moment, and found her voice.  "I thought he was supposed to make me happy?"

Angel blinked at her, then began to splutter an explanation.  "What?  Oh no, no no no, you don't think?  Heh heh.  No way.  Willow, you can't really think this is what it looks like?  He's here for you.  I told him you wanted to see him and he came.  For you!"

Their conversation finally roused Spike. "Eh?"  He saw Willow sitting just a few feet away from him and scrambled back towards the headboard, "Oh shit!  Willow, Love, you're not supposed to be in here."

"So I see," she agreed.

Spike looked up at Angel in his towel. "Well, for fuck's sake, put some clothes on!  You're scaring the poor girl and giving her all kinds of wrong ideas!"

Angel raised an eyebrow at Spike, drawing his attention to his own lack of appropriate attire, but went to his closet to retrieve an outfit, then disappeared back into the bathroom to dress.  Willow sat quietly.  She could wait, they weren't getting out of this.  She would know soon enough what the hell was going on.  None of the scenarios she came up with were particularly reassuring and she had a sinking feeling that the truth would prove worse still.

Spike, as it turned out, was wearing jeans under the covers, which made her feel a little better.  He got up to find a shirt, or maybe to put off answering Willow's questions, it was hard to tell. Finally Angel came back out, dressed decently but not looking any less uncomfortable.  Willow did not feel sorry for him.  "So, you were explaining why you were sleeping with Spike?" She prompted.

Angel looked aghast.  "No, I told you, he's here for you.  He's just staying in my room because none of the others were made up and I couldn't get one ready without someone realizing we were having a... guest."

"And he had to sleep in your bed?"

"Well, yeah," Spike said, sounding indignant.  "I am the guest after all.  I should get the bed."

"I slept on the floor," Angel added, glaring at the bed thief.

Willow considered that Spike *had* been wearing pants, and there was even a pillow on the floor.  Not to mention that the two vampires hated each other and Spike was supposed to have the hots for her.  She decided that their story did make a lot more sense than the conclusion she had jumped to.  For one moment she felt guilty for judging them wrongly, then a new reason to be pissed off occurred to her.  "Wait a minute.  So you just went to Sunnydale to tell Spike all this stuff about me and him and you didn't even ask me if that's what I wanted?"

Angel shifted his weight back and forth on his feet and looked at the ceiling.  “Well, yeah.  But only because I wanted to make sure Spike would treat you right.  I didn’t want him to find out he had a chance with you and then have him act like the idiot he usually is and blow it.”

“Hey!” Spike interrupted.  “Wait just a damn minute.  You know you only came tearing down to Sunnydale because you felt guilty for breakin’ the girl’s heart and wanted me to come kiss it better!”

Willow was a quick study.  She noticed that neither of them mentioned Lorne’s reading and wondered why that had been left out of whatever story Angel had concocted to get Spike to LA.  She stood up and held her hands out to silence them before the argument could escalate.  “Spike, I’m glad you’re here, I really am.  I was even thinking about coming to see you.  But right now, I need to talk to Angel alone.”  The tone of her voice dared either vampire to contradict her.

“Oh ho!  Sounds like someone’s got his balls in the fire!”  At Willow’s freezing glare Spike added, “Right then.  I’ll just be downstairs fetching breakfast.”  He nodded to Willow and slipped out of the room.

When he was gone, Willow turned back to Angel, who winced seeing the murderous look in her eyes.  “How could you do that?” She demanded.  She didn’t let him answer.  “I never said I was ready to see him!  What if I decided Lorne was wrong and tried to go after Tara?  Huh?  What then?  Then I’d have to turn him down again?  And how did you even get him to come here anyway?  What did you tell him?”

Angel, who had opened and closed his mouth several times in attempt to answer any part of Willow’s litany of questions, seized on the last one and said, “I just told him you were willing to give him another chance.  I said you wanted to see him.”  He stopped, but Willow was still looking at him, expecting the rest of the story.  “I didn’t want to tell him what Lorne said.  That would give him too much control over the situation and I wanted to leave most of what happened up to you.”  Willow snorted her disbelief.  Angel sighed.  “Ok, I didn’t want him to blackmail me into God knows what in exchange for coming to see you.  He had already guessed that I felt guilty about what I… about the other night.”

“So you just had my best interests at heart?” Willow asked.

Angel nodded eagerly.  “Of course, the whole time.  It was all for you!  I wouldn’t go visit Spike for just anyone,” he added.  If he was hoping for brownie points, Willow’s next words made it clear he wasn’t getting any.

“Just don’t do anything else for me anytime soon.  I’m pretty sure I can handle my own relationships, or destinies, or whatever this is supposed to be.”  With that, she turned and left the room to find Spike and have her second uncomfortable conversation of the morning.

~~

Spike was lounging on one of the plush chairs in the lobby, looking supremely bored.  None of the AI team was in for work yet.  When he saw Willow he sat up straight and gave her his most devastating smile.  “Stick it to Peaches good and hard for messing in your affairs, Love?”

She managed a half smile in return.  “Yeah, I think so.  I know he means well, but he can’t just go dragging you up here because I get it in my head that I want to see you.”

Spike cocked his head at her.  “I can think of worse reasons to be dragged about.”

Willow found a full smile for that.  “I really am glad you’re here.  And that… you know, you wanted to see me too.”

Spike held out a hand to her and motioned for her to sit beside him in the adjoining chair.  When she was comfortable he said, “Well, of course I wanted to see you.  I already told you how I feel.  But why, Love?  Why change your mind all of a sudden?  Not that I’m not thrilled, it’s just odd is all.”

Willow took a deep breath.  “Let’s just say I’ve been given some new perspective on my life.  I’ve decided to take happiness wherever I can find it.  And,” she lowered her voice a little, “I think that could be with you.”

“But you’re not sure?” Spike asked.

“How can I be?  I haven’t even tried!”  She was torn between trying not to give Spike false hope, and not rejecting him again either.

“It’s alright.  Didn’t expect you to propose right away,” he joked, trying to get her to smile again.  It worked.  “’Sides, you can’t do all the work figuring this thing out.  I’m going to take you out.  Let you have a bit of a test drive.  Sound good?”

Willow nodded.  “I’d love to go out with you, Spike.  Where’re we going?”

Spike thought for a moment.  “I supposed a film is traditional first date material.  What do you say?  You busy tonight?”  Willow shook her head.  “Great!  Shall we say 8 o’clock?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” she promised.

Spike practically beamed at her.  “I’ll pick you up here in the lobby.  Now, you’ve probably got loads of boring work to do for Angel, so I’ll just take off for awhile.”  He stood, took her hand, and kissed it.  “’Till tonight.”  He vanished up the stairs, leaving Willow with her head spinning.  Such a short time ago she had been dreading the drive to Sunnydale to convince Spike to give her a chance.  Now suddenly they had a date with almost no effort on her part whatsoever.  It almost seemed too good to be true.

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