Xander had told Spike he was dying.

All fair and proper.

Told him at least three times now.

Which meant one thing.

"Your follow-through is shite, mate."

"Ow!"

"Serves you bloody right, doesn't it? Jumping in front of a spear like that."

"I said ow."

"Heard you the first time. Git."

"Ow...Spike?"

"Pillock," Spike said and his voice shook.

The world was fucking wobbly lately. All...blurry. And wet.

"Spike."

And there were hands on him and then he was mushed against a bony chest with a collar knob poking him in the temple and Harris was petting him.

Petting him like some kind of -

Like a sort of -

Right.

Couldn't be any harm staying there for a few - minutes.

Harris smelled all right. Shower and blood and smokes.

Spike licked his lips and stared down at the spear.

Its truncated length stared up at him, shuddering gently with Xander's breath.

"Can we get back to the unimpaling of me? Feeling like an hors d'oeuvre here."

"Yeah." Spike sat up and found his tweezers again. "All right."

He slid another splinter out of Xander's chest and watched the skin heal over the moment the splinter was gone.

"Ow," Xander said - another splinter, another healed patch of skin.

"Y'know if you really want to die, you're going about it all wrong, mate."

"I didn't say I want to die."

Spike gave him an eyeball so hairy it needed grooming.

"Okay. Fine. What am I doing wrong?"

"Living." Spike jerked a large splinter of spear out of Xander's chest and a patch of hair with it. "Gets in the way of dying."

"Let's take 'ow' as read." Xander rubbed at his chest and reached over for the cigarettes, fumbling one from the packet and lighting it while blood seeped out around the spear.

"Bloody hell. Hold still, will you?"

"Worried about the carpet?" Xander ashed into the pile of bloody splinters taking up his ashtray.

"Hate to see the waste," Spike said and considered approaching the topic from an angle of a mid-morning snack break.

Xander snorted and puffed smoke from his nostrils.

And his chest.

"Right then," Spike said to the spear. "Time for this to come out."

"I've only been saying that for - " Spike propped a foot against Xander's chest and yanked. "Ow!"

Spike handed Xander the whiskey.

Xander drank.

"Want to keep this?" Spike held the bloodied spear, snapped off at one end. He flicked a piece of lung tissue from it.

"Sure. Why not? And Spike?"

"Yeah?"

"The finger-licking? Really gross."

"Don't look so glum," Spike said to his cigarette, lighting it. They were both flat on their backs, sticky and sweaty - and wet in rude places. And Spike was contentedly smoking and listening to Xander's heartbeat.

Life or something like it went on as it tended to do.

Spike shifted out of the wet spot and considered asking the council for reimbursement.

Order: one set of Queen bedding, damaged in...in... Spike smoked pensively and squinted at the cherry on the end of his fag. Damaged in the aftermath of battle, tending to the wounded.

That sounded right.

"I'm not glum," Xander said and dropped his hand between Spike's thighs, fishing around for the cigarette packet and taking the last cigarette.

"Pull the other one, pet. You look like someone stole your pony."

"I don't have a - okay not exactly on topic." Xander muttered around his cigarette and lit up. "And what kind of word is glum anyway?"

"Sacrificing yourself to the demon for your friends was bloody heroic, mate."

"In case you missed the summary for last week's show, there was no sacrifice, Spike. Still alive. He welshed."

Spike groped vaguely for Xander's thigh and gave it a reassuring pat. "It was a nice gesture."

Xander snorted smoke and flopped over onto his belly making the bed bang against the wall. Nobody banged back anymore.

Spike wondered if his neighbors had moved.

Or gone deaf.

How long since he stomped down to Africa to fetch back Harris the amazing unkillable tosser?

"I could drain you," Spike offered when the idea came to him. He was pretty sure Harris couldn't die. And he was feeling a bit peckish. He wondered if Harris would taste different now - gamier.

"Huh?"

"Drain you. Sink in the fangs and suck till you're a husk. Maybe you'll die," he said in his jolliest encouraging voice.

Xander flailed against the surface of the bed side table and grabbed a handful of menus. Dropped them onto Spike's chest. "If you're hungry, order in. Blood loss makes me queasy."

Spike rifled discontentedly through the menus. "One order of - " he squinted at the blurred and beer-ringed printing, " - Falafel Farookh's Full Fare Fiesta?"

"Make it two."

"Thought you were queasy."

"Might as well have plenty to bring up."

"Sure?"

Xander threw an arm over his eyes and a wrist onto Spike's chest. "Mi sangre es su sangre, pal. But I want to be wined and dined."

Spike ordered.

Spike watched his blood circle round and round in the microwave, counting down the seconds for the cheerful ding!.

"Thought you liked it better fresh from the tap."

Spike downed a gulp, shuddered. "The aftermath puts me off my feed, mate. Can't imagine why."

"Told you it made me queasy."

"You brought up things you never ate. It's just wrong."

"The purple stuff?" Xander thought about it and absently scratched the pink spot on his chest where the spear had gone out, squinting at the ceiling like a man contemplating the last time he'd eaten something purple. "Yeah that was pretty weird. I was never a candidate for Red Cross Donor of the Year."

It'd been like that since the spear went in. Spike tried to remember the stages of grief and whether they applied to a bloke discovering he wasn't dead - and wasn't going to get deader any time soon.

Denial. Denial was on the list. He watched Xander wander into the kitchen and come back with two beers. Course, denial was a tricky one. Harris didn't deny anything. He just went on.

And how the bloody hell a bloke was he supposed to tell denial from acceptance?

Spike had to stop reading the pamphlets Willow left with him. She was worse than a Jehovah's Witness.

"Here."

"Cheers, mate." With moderate horror, and no permission from himself, Spike heard himself ask: "Given any thought to what you're going to do with your suddenly prolonged life?"

"I thought I was doing it." Xander lifted one hand. Cigarette. The other. Beer. Then jerked his chin at the telly. Spike had to admit he had the essentials.

So when he kept talking, Spike seriously considered finding out how many times a vampire had to pound his head against a wall before he couldn't talk anymore. "Can't do that all your life," he said and blamed the soul. And the pamphlets. Then he had another drink.

"Cutting me off?"

Spike grappled his soul into a full nelson and shoved its head in the loo. "Nah." From the watery depths, it spoke. "Bit of a waste, isn't it?"

Brown-nosed little git.

They compromised. "Listen, Harris. You're alive and there's a whole great big world out there. So fucking stop faffing about and find something to do with your life."

"Something to do."

"That's right. Like a hobby." Spike looked around for his cigarette and spotted it in the ashtray. It'd gone out amongst the blood and splinter muck.

"A hobby."

"Sure." He mumbled around the filter, trying to light it again. Wouldn't take. Tasted like piss.

Spike tossed down the cigarette and took a fresh one.

"Death is my hobby?"

"You're a miserable fucking failure at it. And depressing, besides."

"How about needlepoint?"

"You'd look a right ponce doing needlepoint, Harris. Choose a manly hobby."

"Porn marathons and big gay sex aren't manly?"

Spike scowled at his cigarette - and Xander.

"I get it, Spike. I do. Unkillable Xander Harris. Kinda lame sitting around waiting to die."

"Got it in one." Spike reconsidered that, frowned. "Well, two. Or ten. Words - "

"Of course, the sex is pretty great."

"Oh. Yeah, absolutely."

"But here's the thing. I've still got a deal with that demon. What happens if I make a nice little life. You and me, crime fighters of the century! Super Bleachy Vamp and the Guy Who Lived - "

"That one's been taken, mate," the happy little tremor in Spike's heart who'd always wanted to be picked first for cricket said.

"Unkillable Man," Xander corrected himself. "We're out there, fighting crime, killing demons, stopping unstoppable evil from taking over the world. Then, one night - or maybe in the middle of a fight - the demon shows up and collects. What then?"

"You die," Spike admitted. Pretty much had to. "But the folks you saved go on living. Harris I knew would've been into that."

"The Harris you knew didn't have a death sentence."

Spike squinted. Leaned forward and put out his cigarette and fixed Xander with a laser beam of you sodding idiot.

He enunciated. "Every human has a death sentence, mate."

Then Spike stole the remote and changed discs. They had another forty minutes of Wilde Nights to watch and Oscar was still looking for the buggering of a lifetime.

Oscar was having tea with Jack and Algernon - if a bloke can call it tea when it's being taken bollocks naked and they're eating it off the guest - when Xander spoke again. "It felt good."

"Yeah," Spike said, rubbing his cock absently with his mostly empty beer bottle, full attention on the screen. "It does."

"Not that."

Spike swiveled his head. "Trust me, Harris. That feels fucking fantastic."

"Okay. But not what I mean. It felt good helping save the world again."

"Yeah?"

"Would that be a hobby?" Xander asked and drained his warm beer without a grimace.

There was hope for the boy yet.

"Could be."

They subsided, watching Jack lick clotted cream from places Oscar couldn't reach - which was everywhere with his hands tied to the table like that with Algernon's tie. It was quickly becoming more sticky than erotic so when Xander stood and disappeared into the bathroom, Spike followed him before the water ran hot.

He considered asking the Council for a bigger tub.

For...for tending to the wounded after every battle. Harris might be unkillable but he was still a clumsy git. And he'd need Spike to look after him - pull bloody great spears from him and stitch bits and pieces back on when he got them chopped off.

"Budge up and give me the shampoo."

Spike's hindsight was better than twenty-twenty. It was twenty-sodding-fifteen.

But Spike's foresight was blind as a bloody bat and saw him stomping barefoot and soapy to the door and wrenching it open when someone knocked.

His life would be better the day he bought Harris a hammer and nails and told him to nail the front door shut.

Rupert would stop visiting them then.

"What?" Spike asked around the door - not a bit like a nervous washerwoman with a masher on her stoop, dripping guava-papaya hair suds down his shoulders and onto his toes.

"Is Xander there?"

"He's busy. Shove off."

"Yes. Well. There's someone here to see him who's come rather a long way to be here."

"Who?"

"Me."

"Oh fuck me." Spike opened the door wider and mentally gave up on the hammer and nails - already fantasizing about visiting the home improvement store for bricks, trowels and fast-set cement.

"How's the soul been working out for you, William?" asked the demon from the desert.