It wasn't often that Spike woke up with a hangover. For one thing, when Spike drank enough to get hung over, he bloody well kept drinking. "Bloody hell. My head..."

"Yeah, you knocked it pretty hard after the sixth or seventh bottle," the red and white moving blur said.

Spike squinted until the blur resolved itself into a vaguely familiar looking young man. "Who're you?"

"Oz," He said. And then, to elaborate, but not much, he added: "I'm the guitarist"

Spike dropped back onto whatever he was lying on with a thump and a groan. "I shagged a member of the band? Sodding hell. I'm turning into a bloody groupie." And yet, there was something more nagging at him. Something other than 'member of the band', but whatever it was, it was buried beneath the merry drum line performing in his head. "Do I know you?" He tracked Oz's movements as he crossed the room with the comfort of a man at home.

"Sort of," Oz said, and Spike could make out a head tilt. "I ran into you with a van once."

That sounded vaguely familiar. "You did?"

"Yeah. We can call last night making up for it." Oz turned, coming back more slowly, carrying a tray.

"That you did, mate." His scent preceded him, and Spike was hit with a wave of pheromones that did wonders for sparking his memory. At least of last night. Pale flesh tasting of forest and meadow and something spicy pinned beneath him, and buggering hell, above him too. The sharp smell of whiskey cut through musk and memory, and Spike refocused his eyes on the tumbler held before him, taking it. "Oh. Ta very much." He drained the tumbler in one go, drowning the bloody drum line, he hoped, and let the glass fall to the side. Yeah. That was the trick. Just keep drinkin'.

"So," Oz said, still sitting close to Spike.

"So," Spike echoed, because what the buggering fuck else was there to say?

"Still evil?"

Well, all right, there was that. "Oh. Yeah. Guess so. Still good?"

"Nah." Oz shrugged. "Not so much so."

Now there was an interesting response. Wasn't the lad a Scooby once? "That so?"

"Pretty much."

They stared at each other for a time. Come to think of it, Spike didn't remember talking featuring prominently in their roll in the - Spike checked - sleeping bags the night before. "Right." More silence, more staring, broken when Oz took a sip of his soda. Spike cracked first with an explosive sigh. "All right. I hate to be the drunken cliché, mate, but where the fuck am I, how did I get here, and why am I here?"

Oz ticked the answers off on his fingers. "Seattle."

Spike blinked. *Sodding Seattle? How the fuck...?*

"Car. Um. It's pretty much totaled now."

"Black DeSoto?"

"Blue Taurus."

"Oh, that's all right then."

Oz nodded, checked over fingers one and two, then added three, "to get your chip out."

Well that was no surprise. There hadn't been a moment since the chip was in that he hadn't been looking for a way to get it out, so he supposed that made some sense. "Yeah, but why here in your apartment?"

"Oh. That." Oz shrugged. "I was lonely." He stood, pulling on a flannel over shirt. "I've gotta get to work, but you're welcome to stay. There's more booze in the kitchen. I'll bring back a couple more bottles if you want."

Spike lunged forward, catching Oz's ankle and squinted up at him, head tilted, then reached up, grabbed Oz's shirt, and pulled down until he could grab the back of his neck. "Sod the whiskey," Spike said, tasting himself on Oz's breath, on his lip, against the two day stubble that scratched his cheek as he kissed him. "Think I want to remember this time." He looked up, uncertainly. "All right?"

Oz crouched, resting his forehead against Spike's in a way that made Spike's chest ache with a hundred year's worth of memories. "All right."