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“Where am I?” Faye mutters drowsily, and for a brief and alarming moment Spike thinks she’s lost her memory all over again. Then she falls, almost too dramatically, back into a sprawl on the floor. “Head hurts.”
Spike frowns. “You, uh, don’t remember?”
“I remember—you,” Faye says. Her breathing is strangely shallow. She’s about to close her eyes, and some small panic seizes Spike in his chest. “And Jet. Ed. Then nothing.”
“Hey,” Spike says as soon as her eyes squeeze shut, “keep ‘em open.”
Faye’s head lolls to the side. “’m sleepy.”
Spike huffs, and a shroud of smoke clouds his vision. He flicks at it aimlessly before slumping down onto the floor. His right knee meets Faye’s shoulder, but she doesn’t budge. Besides the unkempt hair and the hideous SCRATCH uniform she’s got on, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. But Spike pokes at her cheek all the same, just to make sure she’s at least breathing fine.
“Stop that,” she mutters, more coherently this time. Her eyes flutter open, and she lifts two fingers up over her head. “Hand me a cig?”
“You’re outta luck, Faye.” Spike gives her a smirk. “It’s my last stick.”
“Hmph.” Faye drops her hand to her chest. “Where’s that generosity you talk about so much?”
“Used it all up to come here and get you,” Spike counters, and takes a long drag of his cigarette. “So, why’d you try to leave this time?”
Faye doesn’t answer immediately. There’s some faraway look in her eyes, and Spike wonders if Londes’ effect still hasn’t worn off. He follows her gaze, fixed firmly on one of the broken screens, but her eyes are distant, as if caught in a memory.
Finally, she sighs. “I’m in debt.”
“You’re kidding? Next you’re gonna tell me that Jet’s an ex-cop, and that I’m supposed to be dead.” Spike scoffs. It’s a game he’s always liked to play, especially with those who put up a challenge—poke at the beast until it talks. “Try again.”
She tilts her head to face him then, and Spike fully expects her to shoot him a glare. But what he finds instead is something he can’t quite describe: something a little soft, a little wounded. The kind of look that’s never made itself known on her face until right now.
“Is this a test?” Faye asks quietly.
Spike doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but he decides to play along. “I dunno, maybe. Humour me.”
“A dream, then,” Faye murmurs, closing her eyes again. “Maybe none of this is real. Just a meaningless dream… and a lunkhead.”
Spike blinks at her. “What’d you say?”
“Lunkhead?”
Almost instinctively, a noise slips out of him that sounds a little like a chuckle. He shakes his head and takes the final pull of his cigarette before flicking it away. There’s not a lot in this universe that can count as coincidences—Spike knows that. It’s what keeps his head on straight when he starts to slip. But sometimes it’s stuff like this that gets him wondering.
He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, and touches the edge of her boot with his own.
“Hey,” he calls again, and Faye hums in response. “Think you can you get up?”
She shakes her head. “It’s too cold.”
Spike clicks his tongue. This is the part of their back-and-forth where he would tell her what a troublesome pain she is, and she’d make some cutting retort about his wayward emotions and altogether blasé attitude, and then Jet would have to intervene just to pull them apart. But Jet’s not here right now, and Spike can’t bring himself to stir anything up when Faye looks about as broken as he has never seen before.
He shrugs his jacket off and reaches over to pull Faye up to a sitting position. She sways slightly, her hands settling on the cold ground in the space between their knees. He slides the jacket over her shoulders, and it falls heavy against her flimsy SCRATCH uniform.
“Thanks,” she says.
Spike lifts his own shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “Don’t mention it.”
As the last of the television screens fizzles out, Spike reaches into his back pocket for his lighter. He glances over at Faye as he clicks it, but says nothing. She’s not shaking like a leaf anymore, which is probably as good as it’s going to get. The lighter gives off no more than a dim glow, but it’s just clear enough for Spike to see that the exit is a little ways ahead.
“Faye,” Spike says, and the look she gives him, wide-eyed and ingenuous, settles somewhere in the hollows of his chest. “C’mon.”
He thrusts his hands in his pockets and hunches forward. Wordlessly, Faye clambers up onto his back. She curls her arms around his neck, linking her fingers together, and props her legs up on either side of his waist. Her breath is warm against his skin, almost prickling.
“Fluffy,” Faye says suddenly, and reaches up to pat his head. “Your hair’s, like, stupidly fluffy.”
Spike bites back a laugh. There’s a lot he still has yet to learn about Faye and, truth be told, he’s really not the most eager to—yet little by little, new notches of her character keep getting thrown his way anyhow, whether it’s a piece of her lost childhood or a favourite gambling trick; or some memory of her convict ex-lover.
“You leave my hair alone,” Spike grumbles.
A hush falls over them. The weight of Faye’s body presses against his own, and Spike becomes aware of the way his own body familiarises with it. Faye plants her chin firmly against shoulder, and lifts a hand to skim lightly across the nape of his neck.
“No ID barcode,” she murmurs. “That’s good, right? It means you’re good. I thought…”
“Huh?”
“I was never actually going to shoot you the other day, you know,” Faye goes on. “I know how it looked, but I missed on purpose. I just needed to get Whitney alone for a while—”
“I know.” Spike finds himself smiling. “And so does Jet. What, you’ve been beating yourself up over that?”
“No,” Faye hurls back abruptly, and sits up so quick she almost slips from him altogether. Spike braces his hands more firmly around her knees. “And I bet you’re lying anyway. How could you even tell?”
“You’re a good shot, Faye. The best I’ve seen in a long time.” He shoves aside the thought of the last woman he’d encountered in his life, who’d held him down like that, at the barrel of her gun. “If you really wanted to shoot us, you would’ve done it.”
Faye’s mouth curves into a smile against his skin. She ducks her head, and her cheek brushes his jaw—very bruised, and close to swelling up, he’s just now realised, from Londes’ attack earlier. She pulls her face away when she catches him flinching. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry about that,” Spike scoffs. “Be sorry about the backache I’m gonna get when I wake up tomorrow.”
“What,” Faye’s voice is shrill in his ear, “is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re a lot heavier than you look—ow!”