--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Their world is small now, made up of tiny rituals that work in an absurd parody of domesticity. Chairs, a shovel, the smell of dirt and blood, and worn soft blankets that reek of sex are all ornaments in their little universe; memorabilia of lives best not lived. The table has dents and scratches on it from Spike throwing the car keys on there when he comes in.

"Don't do that." Angel doesn't bother to look up from the book he's reading. Spike just rolls his eyes as he grabs a bag of blood from the refrigerator. He drinks it cold, sticky and hard he doesn't care. Much. He throws himself down on the couch next to Angel, propping his legs up in the other man's lap. in the other man's lap. Mud smears across Angel's pants and Spike smiles.

"What are you on?" Angel asks. Spike shrugs. It's a question he's not sure he can answer at the moment. He smoked, inhaled, snorted, and drank more things in the past five hours than he could really remember. This was, of course, the entire point.

He passes out lying on the couch waiting for nightfall. He's in and out and he hears Angel moving about the flat. Dishes clinking around in the sink and the rustle of paper as Angel reads are all comforting sounds to Spike. They mix into his dreams; the rustling paper becomes the rustling silk bed sheets covering a blonde glassy-eyed girl. He dreams of Buffy as if she were still alive, he dreams as if he was still alive. He's a dead shell, burnt through, that should have been buried long ago. Spike thinks that his life didn't used to suck quite so hard way back when. He also knows that he is, if nothing else, a creature of many delusions.

This is a house of delusions, a life built with brutal honesty but tenuously held together with a web of painful lies. They like to think they're still heroes. They still help the helpless and they don't cling to one another in a desperate attempt to remember the world as a better place. They aren't heroes with happy endings. That's all a fairy tales, pretty stories where the good guys win and in the end the big strong hero gets the girl. Or the big strong hero dies nobly and his much more attractive sidekick gets the girl.

But here they are, last men standing and all that. Each one leaning on the other to keep up. He wants to hate Angel, but long ago found something between solace and catharsis with him, and Spike can't let that go. He has so little else now.

When he wakes up he changes his shirt, adding the other one, which reeks of vomit and alcohol, to a pile of faded black clothing in the corner. Angel's in the shower and Spike truly doesn't understand a man that showers when he's about to go out to fight and dig giant holes in the ground. Moron.

They do this every night; another of their tiny rituals that keep life running. They drive through crowded streets searching through the chaos for the scent of blood, like scavengers. The streets are crowded, people smashing into each other, screaming and cursing. Chaos leaks out of every doorway, spilling onto the dirty streets.

Angel parks the car, there is no shiny classic convertible anymore. Nice cars get stripped and stolen far too easily. Instead it's a station wagon, one of those classic bits of Americana with paneling down the sides. They walk the streets for a while breaking up fights, Angel dragging Spike away from whores.

"She doesn't even look fourteen!" He says pulling the back of Spike's shirt.

"I wasn't interested in her age, *Angel*," Spike rolls his eyes and lights another cigarette in pointless protest. This is what his life is - a mixture of pointless heroics and grasping at small vices. He loves these girls with their pink lipstick and high-heeled shoes that are a size too big for them. The streets are lined with them, little girls with soft skin and little boys with fuck-me lips. But in the end they're just one more piece of garbage lining the sidewalks. Even breathing, Spike knows he'll find them eventually dead from something or someone.

They do what they can, but what they have is never enough. It's been that way for fifty, no, sixty years now. Spike forgets. The world has blurred together for him in a fog of dead faces and madness. Sixty years in this godless world. That's the thing; when people talk about God and Powers and higher things, they seem to do fuck all; but all that balance and shit; you miss it when it's gone. When it's gone, all you're left with are people, demons, and all the things left in-between.

There are no demons anymore. Well very few, except for Spike and Angel. Spared by their limbo status. Too human to die like the rest at the hands of an army of slayers, too damned to really live within the cesspool of humanity.

So this is what they do to bide their time, waiting to see what man will do to destroy the world and get them into to hell. They break up the fights, stop what they can, and bury the dead in a pointless attempt to bring some sort of rest to the world. Suicide was once an option for them, the unspoken threat held in the air. The idea that one can leave, and not in the “fucking off because you’re an asshole and I hate you” way, but in the “I just swept up your ashes in the dustpan" way haunts them. Spike and Angel are connected somehow in a way that Spike only ponders when he's drunk, and hates the rest of the time.

Tonight there are only a few bodies. Which is good, because Spike can feel sunrise coming as they dig. They once entertained the notion that burning the bodies would be more efficient. But Spike feels the need to dig graves for people long since turned to dust anyway, nameless people left with bloody necks and glassy eyes. When it's done, bodies are thrown into unmarked graves in a field already full of them. The shovels hit the back of the wagon with a clatter and Spike throws himself in the front seat, waiting for Angel to start the car.

Some nights, Spike can't go back to the apartment and look at him. He wants to fuck off, and he finds a club with good drugs and a quiet corner for him and a cherry-lipped girl who wants money that Spike's not going to give her afterward. When he's feeling like a real bastard, he'll remind them how many cute little girls end up dead rotting bodies in the gutter, their cute red lips smeared and turned blue. If he's feeling good, and that's such a rare occasion, he'll share his drugs, a post-cheap fuck blunt usually. But in the end he's always back with Angel, because no matter how much he thinks he hates it, that's where he fits.

Spike always ends up tightly wrapped around Angel, and when the nightmares and sickness hit, he digs his nails into the other man's skin. Tonight they're a mess of limbs, each man grabbing, pushing, and biting into the other. They don't talk. There are no tender words left for them to exchange. There is no forgiveness left for them in this world. No Gods that grant humanity, or even little blonde slayers that personify salvation. But Spike has found a peace of sorts, something uneasy and loaded that exists in the moments his skin presses against Angel's, a comfort in Angel's body lying on his. He'll take these tiny moments as he can, feeding Angel whatever little he has left to give, and maybe that will be enough.

~Finis~