Archive of Our Own

It’s still raining when the prickle of dawn begins to creep through Angel’s senses.

This whole night has been a blur, almost a dream – not a good one, but he’s had worse nightmares. Every move has felt surreal, almost like he hasn’t been experiencing any of it himself, like he’s been watching his body from some other place, seeing himself impale demon after demon on his sword and then kick their bodies back off it to free the blade for the next death blow, spinning to one side or the other to do it again. Over and over, like a dance. Stab, kick, turn, stab. Would be more like a devastating fight to the death if he could feel anything at all, but the cold rain and repeated impacts that rattle up from his sword have turned his arm to dull, flexible wood, his fingers only gripping the hilt because they’ve been carved into that position from marble. It feels as if he’ll never put this sword down again.

Nothing even hurts. He’s been stabbed himself, he thinks, and knows he’s been punched and kicked multiple times, but the fists and weapons land against a body that’s totally numb, cold and soaked through, black clothes hiding whatever blood must have seeped out. Stab, kick, turn, stab. A decapitation to change things up, but it’s all just this dream-dancing, this out-of-body experience. Clanking of weapons and rudimentary demon armor, loud though he can barely hear it, growls and screams and barking calls all drowned in the rain. Metallic smell, scent of sulfur and pennies, muffled in the water. Nothing penetrates the dream haze until that familiar sunrise prickle starting at the back of his neck.

This isn’t how he’d expected the fighting to end.

Some of them scatter on their own. Vampires aren’t the only demons sensitive to sunlight. Some take advantage of the moment to charge at him more aggressively, and he continues to dance despite the hour, the bodies falling at his feet, a few disintegrating into blackish sludge that melts away in the rain-currents flowing down the street. Hollywood is unrecognizable after this night of hell on earth, mostly due to the rotting remains piled over everything and the dragon fire that destroyed so many rooftops and palm trees – as well as many of the demons that were supposedly on the dragon’s side to begin with. Angel vaguely recalls the satisfaction of having taken down that beast (after an unexpected but exhilarating flight over Hollywood Boulevard), but that happened hours ago, and since then, he’s been dancing for years.

The crackling stormy sky and cascading sheets of rainwater stave off the flames that would have sprung up along his body by now on any normal morning. It occurs to Angel as he cuts off another horned demon head that he could simply continue this until it all ends in a more permanent way - any small gap in the thick stormclouds could do it now, any pause in the drenching rain - but there’s a strip mall to his back, and after slaying the last snarling figure that’s paying him any attention, whatever’s left of Angel’s survival instinct kicks in and he makes a run for it, wrenches open the locked glass front door to some small business and ducks into the bizarre, untouched stillness of it.

A little bell jingles as he forces his way inside.

As deaf as he’s been throughout the cacophony of the fight, the silence stuffed into this office somehow comes as a shock. He’s breathing heavily, which he hadn’t even noticed before but which the quiet transforms into a powerful bellows. He tries to stop, falling back against the wall beside the doorway, gasping without meaning to, as if he needs to. His fingers slowly peel away from the sword that had become part of him, and the clang of it falling to the floor sounds suddenly so much louder than it ever should, some enormous gong to signal to the remaining demon army where he’s hidden. He hasn’t even gathered himself enough to close the door, gusts of rain blowing in, but just as he reaches toward it with a wooden arm, another panting body stumbles in from the wreckage of the stormy outside world, soaked clothes stuck to him like wet black leaves and the steam from half-formed sunsmoke wisping off his bleached hair.

“Spike?” rasps Angel in disbelief. His outstretched hand veers from reaching for the door to grabbing Spike’s shoulder instead, steadying him. He’s real. The wet leather of Spike’s jacket in his hand is real, and Angel crashes back into himself, hard. He’s real, he’s alive, that means this all really happened, fuck.

“An...gel…” Spike wheezes, hunched over. He’s got one hand pressed to his stomach. When he looks up, the side of his face is a mass of puffy, bruised flesh, purpled eye swollen shut, but the other eye fills with relief. “Lost you… for a few hours there… didn’t know whether…” He sways dangerously, dropping what Angel hadn’t even noticed he was clutching in his other hand. Some kind of axe, must’ve taken it off one of the demon horde. As it clatters to the floor, Angel catches Spike with both hands, eases his body down to sit on the ribbed carpet doormat, rain still falling over Spike’s booted feet.

“You’re alive,” Angel manages. It’s all he can think to say in the shock of realizing he’s not here alone. He’d thought for certain he was the only one left, perhaps even the only remaining ensouled being in the entire world. “We’re alive,” he says, crouching over Spike, holding his shoulders. His knees feel funny, as if he’s bending them this way for the first time in ages.

“Saw you… run in here. Hoped it was you… I almost…” Spike’s head thunks back against the glass of the open door, his jaw clenching through a shudder of pain. Then he lifts his hand from his stomach, looks at the bright red coating it, the half blood and half rainwater mixture rolling down his wrist.

They both look down at Spike’s stomach together, at the sticky black scrap of his shredded t-shirt, and at his body beneath it. The first streak of fear that has felt real all night flares through Angel’s chest, grounding him even harder in the reality of what they’ve done.

“Bugg…” Spike starts. But he passes out before he can finish the word.

Gravity tries to tug Spike’s unconscious body to one side, but Angel instinctively catches and holds him sitting upright against the door. It takes a long moment of staring at the severe abdominal wound before he can even think clearly enough to move Spike out of the doorway. More demons could come flooding in at any moment, and they’re trapped in here now for at least the next twelve hours, so better find a place to hunker down. It’s too bad the front door is entirely glass (and not the fancy sunproof kind he’s become accustomed to) but at least the sunlight won’t angle inside until afternoon. Or maybe not at all, if it continues to rain like this.

Holy shit, they’re still alive. How are they both still alive?

He carefully slips one arm underneath Spike’s knees and the other around Spike’s back and stands slowly, lifting him. Angel’s arms are starting to regain feeling, and the primary feeling is the soreness of swinging a sword all night, repeatedly thrusting it into solid flesh. Oddly, he doesn’t actually feel tired, just stiff and sore. A few other minor aches and twinges of pain start to light up various areas of his body as he steps further inside carrying Spike’s limp form, then nudges the door closed behind them with his foot, jingling the little bell again. There’s blood on the glass. It will be obvious where they’ve gone if anyone were to look for them, but perhaps the rain blowing against the door will take care of that.

They’re in a waiting room of some kind. It smells vaguely medical in here, and in the still-dim morning light, he can make out the smiling faces of characters in colorful posters on the neutral-colored walls. His first guess is pediatrician’s office, but some of the characters are just big teeth. Dentist, then. Not the ideal hideout, but they could’ve done worse for bursting into a place at random. It’s clearly a very small practice, but at least there should be some useful supplies.

Beyond the small waiting room with its rose-colored chairs and gray carpet, there’s a door that leads into a larger work area with two little exam rooms and an office with a desk. Angel carries Spike into one of the exam rooms and gently sits his bedraggled body in the weird-looking chair. A pedal at the base allows him to lean it back so that Spike is almost lying down, the sides of his leather jacket falling open over the arm rests like the spread petals of a black flower with an abstract red center.

Jesus.

Okay. He can’t die from this, but if it’s not taken care of there’s a chance it won’t heal properly and that could leave him in constant pain, or without his full range of motion, or unable to process human food anymore, or any number of other issues that will make eternity a lot less bearable. Angel may have assumed none of them would survive the night, but now that Spike’s made it this far, he’s going to try his damnedest to bring him the rest of the way.

Supplies. He leaves Spike lying there and starts opening cabinets, first the ones in the little exam room and then the bigger cabinets out in the larger work area, which also has a locked storage closet. He breaks the door easily and also rifles through there for anything useful. This is where they’re keeping lots of different medicines, which is good. Spike is still unconscious, but Angel grabs some painkillers for when he wakes up and brings them with the other supplies back to the exam room.

He becomes aware of an annoying pain in his side as he sets everything on a rolling tray. Curious, he peels off his jacket and then lifts his soaked shirt and looks down.

Huh. So he was stabbed.

There’s a fair amount of light bruising also covering most of his side, but nothing he considers very serious – certainly nowhere near the damage that Spike has suffered. On any other day, he’d probably just want a shower and a nap right now, but he’s still feeling wired as hell, knows if the sun hadn’t interrupted then he’d still be out there. Fighting. Dancing. Dreaming. Waiting for it to be over.

He was never going to make it easy for them to take him down; it’s just that he’d expected it to be, that the Senior Partners would have had a few more formidable species on their payroll, not just big but hard to kill.

Sort of blew their wad on that dragon.

Angel unbuttons and shrugs out of the wet shirt and spreads it out on the countertop beside his jacket to start drying, then gives his hands and arms a good wash in the sink. Bruised knuckles. He barely notices.

But whatever got Spike got him good. Angel’s seen a couple of injuries this devastating before, just never on a vampire. Never on anyone who didn’t die from blood loss pretty much immediately, in fact. He uses a tiny pair of scissors to carefully cut away what’s left of Spike’s t-shirt and peels it back, revealing more of the torn flesh. How he was still standing after this thing came for him, Angel has no clue, let alone how he managed to make it in this condition across a war-ravaged city block and into this building while the sun itself was trying to set him on fire.

On the other hand, survival by sheer force of will seems like a very Spike tactic: stubborn and brash but nevertheless effective. That he loosened his fierce grip on consciousness as soon as they were back together was probably just a coincidence.

Few people are trained in first aid for wounds that expose the internal organs. Angel vaguely recalls that the best thing is to try to keep the organs moist and clean on the way to the hospital, and don’t poke them back in if they’re sticking out. But that’s advice for humans, and anyway there’s no going to a hospital for Spike. Still, clean is always better for healing, and so he starts with saline, rinsing away blood and some of the dark sludge of demon residue. There’s other stuff as well, not just in the wound but on Spike’s skin: greenish pus from a lanced purulentus demon, smear of stinging poison from a veneniferum. Most of the slimy clear stuff with frothy white peaks is the oral secretions of a quibussali, which likely explains the nature of the most severe injury. Spike has been mauled by a large evil dogthing with saber teeth.

Angel remembers seeing a couple of those in the horde, but he can’t recall whether he fought one or not. It’s all still such a blur, like it happened decades ago and lasted so long that the first encounter wasn’t even within the same century as the last. He stabbed something through the roof of its mouth when it roared at him, baring huge fangs, but that can’t have been the same thing that mauled Spike because it was lifetimes ago, and this injury must be less than an hour old. There’s no way Spike has been staggering around trying to hold his insides back with his hand for longer than that.

A similar thing happened to Angel once, although his insides were quite a lot drier and fluffier at the time than Spike’s are now. But he knows the fear and helplessness of seeing yourself emptying of vital material while you try to hold it in with your hands, and he understands the pain.

Why don’t his own injuries hurt very much? How is he not spilling his own guts somewhere right now? Spike looks a lot more like what Angel would have expected himself to look like after a night like this.

The saline carries the various fluids and debris away from the grievous wounds, flowing over Spike’s sides to run down his leather coat and puddle on the floor. Vampires heal in a way that is different from humans; there’s still a certain amount of regeneration, particularly of skin, but as long as the wound isn’t mystical and the body parts still exist it’s like they remember how they were before and mostly pull themselves back into the same old configuration. Torn muscles seal together, veins reconnect, nerves seek their severed strands and join again into long lines of sensation as if nothing had parted them, all without the growth of new tissue. Angel’s hope is that Spike’s jostled entrails will react the same way, re-situating themselves into a familiar alignment as the flesh gradually pulls closed over them. He just needs to make sure they don’t dry out first; it would be a shame for Spike to lose the use of his intestines (and thus the ability to eat food) because Angel wasn’t careful.

Once everything is clean, the wound looks both better and worse than it did before. Angel covers the exposed parts with some plastic wrap he found in the supply closet and tapes it down. This should hold in the moisture better than a bandage would without putting pressure on the organs, and it also leaves a decent view to keep tabs on the healing. He begins addressing Spike’s other injuries then, various lacerations, some deep and some already pulling closed. He bandages the ones that seem to need it, cleaning them first. One stab wound high on his left side. A broken rib. Judging from the bruises, Spike’s clavicle might be fractured, but it’s not sticking out of the skin and seems to be holding steady in the correct place. There’s not a lot he can do for all the bruising.

This isn’t Spike’s prized coat, which got blown up fairly recently in Italy, but a nearly-identical replacement. Still, he knows the younger vampire would be disappointed to lose it despite its superficial damage when another of the replacements isn’t readily accessible, and so instead of cutting it off to check the state of Spike’s arms, he eases Spike’s unconscious body forward just a little and carefully manipulates his arms out of the sleeves, one and then the other, leaving the coat underneath him. His arms seem mostly fine, other than the bruises. Hands are fine. Some swelling around a pinky knuckle, which looks like the digit may have become dislocated and was then popped back into place. Good. He can barely see a silvery white line encircling each wrist, but those scars are from before and will fade completely in time.

There are no windows in the little exam room, but the rain continues to spray down onto the roof like a pressure hose. He can still hear the force of the wind, but it’s strange how quiet the inside of this office is compared to out there, this dim, dry oasis from the chaos of the storm and the night’s screaming battle. As Angel moves around, the water in his boots squishes between his toes, and so he takes the boots off, peels away his socks to wring out over the sink and lays them on the counter with his shirt and jacket, dries his feet with paper towels. Then he removes Spike’s boots and socks and dries his feet as well. They look fine. A bit pale, but that’s hardly abnormal.

Spike’s jeans were dark to begin with but have become solid black with soaked up rain. He should probably remove them to check for other injuries, but there’s only one place where the denim has been sliced open with a blade, leaving a cut on Spike’s thigh that is long but not actually deep, and so instead of taking the jeans off, Angel just runs his hands firmly up Spike’s legs to check for broken bones. None of the weight-bearing ones seem damaged, which is what he expected since Spike had been able to run, but some swelling above his ankle might be a fractured fibula. Same side as the fractured clavicle and rib.

A picture emerges in Angel’s mind: Spike slaying demon after demon all night just as Angel had been doing, but with one of those huge quibussalis watching his movements, crouched and snarling, waiting for the right moment to strike. Maybe even purposely waiting until just before dawn, counting on hurting him bad enough that he couldn’t find shelter afterward. It probably happened when Spike raised his axe above his head to bring it down on some other demon. The quibussali lunged, its massive jaws clamping around Spike’s unprotected stomach and tearing open these deep holes, and then it tossed him several feet through the air with a powerful jerk of its head. Fractures from the impact of landing. Insides squishing out through the horrible gashes.

The amount of determination it would have taken just to get back up. Had he been tempted not to, even for a moment? There’s no way Spike would have been able to fight off anything serious once this had been done to him; he must have known that. And with sunrise coming...

But maybe he hadn’t even considered letting this be the end, allowing a thing that hasn’t actually killed him yet to kill him. Maybe he hadn’t even looked down at all until he was safe from the sun, in the presence of someone he could trust to look after him.

A rogue patch of the blond hair, still beaded with rain, is plastered down to Spike’s forehead. Without thinking about it, Angel passes his hand over it a couple of times, pushing the wet hair back the way Spike normally styles it. He leaves his hand on Spike’s head for a long moment, looking at the battered face, the swollen eye. Down across all the various injuries that will take significant time to heal. And it’s maybe not a conscious thought, but a very strong feeling that sinks down through Angel’s whole self as his hand finally leaves Spike’s body: That should’ve been me.

Just as he’s about to turn away, a twitch. A tiny motion behind Spike’s eyelid, the good one. His lips parting, barest turn of his head as a pained breath huffs out. Angel quickly lays his hand on Spike’s hair again, a place that likely doesn’t hurt. “Hey,” he whispers. “Shhh. You’re okay. Don’t try to wake up yet.”

A mumble. Sounds a bit like “butterfly” slurred into two syllables, but that’s probably not right.

“We’re safe… for a while. Just rest.” His hand passes over Spike’s hair again, then cups the unbruised side of his face in a way he hopes is reassuring. Spike presses his cheek into it, which at first Angel thinks is some type of comfort-seeking, but then he realizes Spike has simply lost consciousness again and it’s just the weight of his head. He lets his hand slip away and leaves the little exam room.

Spike needs blood. He’s not going to heal very fast without it, but the next best thing is sleep.

The chair in the other exam room isn’t exactly uncomfortable, but Angel only lies there for a few minutes before giving up his own attempt at sleep in favor of pacing shirtless and barefoot around the office. It’s weird that he’s not even slightly tired. Really weird, in fact, but he chalks it up to the adrenaline of an apocalypse. He goes into the office with the desk, starts leafing through paperwork just for something to do. Dr. Emilio Folger. Why does that sound familiar?

The name of the dental practice is Transform. In the logo, the M at the end is shaped like butterfly wings.

Huh. Maybe Spike had said butterfly after all. There’s probably a picture of one on the sign outside, so the image may have been in his head.

Out of curiosity, Angel picks up the phone on the desk, but there’s no dial tone. He hadn’t really expected there to be. And he wouldn’t have known who to call anyway; it’s not as if anyone is waiting by a phone to hear that he and Spike are still alive. (Figuratively.)

In the tiny closet at the side of the office, there’s a white labcoat hanging up, a small, cheap-looking vinyl duffel bag with a crossbody strap, and a cardboard box with some purple t-shirts in it. The Transform logo is printed across the bag and the front of the t-shirts with Dr. Folger’s name and the address of the office. Angel takes two of the shirts, one for himself and one for Spike. As he turns to go, a framed photo on a bookshelf catches his eye and he pauses, staring at it. That face...

Oh. That Dr. Folger. The dentist whose office used to be next door to the original Angel Investigations office, before that explosion took out the building. Wesley used to regularly steal his newspaper.

Small world. They’re taking more than his newspaper now, although he may never realize. Depending on whether or not the world actually ends. Thanks, Emilio, wherever you are.

Angel pulls the t-shirt on over his head and leaves the other one in the exam room with Spike before peeking into the waiting area. It’s still empty, quiet, no trace of demons sniffing around for them. The wind continues to blow rain against the glass front door. The streak of blood has washed away, but the axe and Angel’s sword are still on the floor nearby, so he goes and gathers them up, takes them back to Spike’s room to put with the rest of their stuff. He wipes the demon guts from each blade with damp paper towels. Should probably keep their weapons in good shape, given that they’re definitely going to have to use them again tonight.

Or he will, anyway. Spike won’t be in fighting form by then.

It’s strange to consider leaving Spike unconscious in a dentist’s chair to go out tonight and face a horde of demons alone, maybe (probably) never come back for him. What will happen when Spike wakes up? Will he wake up? Or will he just be easy demon food if Angel doesn’t stay here to protect him?

It was different yesterday, when they were both fit to fight. They had the same chance as each other, and they both chose this. Both knew the odds. If Spike had been wounded like this before everything went down, Angel would have sent him away somewhere, removed him from the danger before it even started, but what can he do now? He sinks into the smaller rolling chair in the exam room beside Spike’s chair and watches him. When you genuinely don’t expect to survive the night, having to make this kind of decision doesn’t even cross your mind. By all rights, he shouldn’t have a team anymore. But now that he somehow still does, the concept of leaving behind a member of that team, knowing they’re defenseless but still alive, doesn’t feel right. Even when weighed against slaying more of the Senior Partners’ demonic mercenaries.

“Would be really nice,” he says softly, “to have some guidance right about now. You know, from the ones who set this whole thing up to begin with?” He glances up from Spike’s slack face, around the room, waiting to see if there’s some kind of answer. “A vision?” he suggests. “Anything?”

As usual, there’s no acknowledgment from a higher dimension. He might as well be talking into the dead telephone.

“You could at least turn him human,” Angel mutters. That’s supposed to happen to Spike at some point, right? The only vampire with a soul who’s eligible now. Though he supposes after he mentions it that this may actually be the worst possible time for Spike to become mortal, lying helpless in the middle of an apocalypse with his stomach ripped open. Just in case anyone is listening, Angel adds, “But only if you heal him first.”

“Buhrr...fless,” Spike slurs, his eyelashes fluttering briefly. His fingers twitch like he might lift his hand, but Angel rolls his chair forward and rests his hand on top of it.

“Shhh, I’m here, Spike,” murmurs Angel. “Try to sleep.” Spike’s hand is a little colder than his. He can’t remember the last time either of them touched the other for the specific purpose of comfort.

“He needs blood,” Angel says, not bothering to look around. It feels better somehow to say it out loud rather than just thinking it. Maybe because when he inevitably fails to provide the kind of help that’s actually needed, it’ll feel less like he’s the only one at fault. But no blood is forthcoming from whatever silent entities may or may not be paying attention, in exactly the way they’re never around when it would actually be useful. After a while of listening to the relentless rain whistle across the roof, Angel stands and leaves the room again.

There’s not much in this place that he hasn’t already searched or explored. The waiting room feels like the most dangerous area because it’s the most exposed and accessible. The front door lock is broken and so any day-dwelling demon could simply come right in, and as soon as night falls, it’ll be open season again. The Senior Partners have all the resources; they can find him just as easily in a dentist’s office as in an alley behind an old hotel, and their army will have had all day to regroup. It isn’t safe to stay here.

But that means it won’t be safe anywhere.

Are they only targeting him, he wonders, or is there a BOLO on Spike now as well? Maybe if he leaves Spike here, even injured, the horde will follow him away and that will give Spike a better chance at surviving.

Fuck. There were so many of them.

There’s one other way out of the dentist’s office, an emergency back door exit which leads from the work area out to the alley behind the strip mall. The door is solid, no windows. Angel doesn’t open it but takes note of the possible escape route. If he goes out to fight tonight and leaves Spike here, would it be better to barricade him in the little windowless exam room and just hope no demons come snooping around, or should he try to find an actual hiding place?

Near the back door, the large storage closet is still standing open, the shelves in slight disarray because of Angel’s earlier pilfering. At the back of it, there’s another narrow door, which he assumes leads to a water heater or fuse box. It’s locked, but he forces it, and there’s the water heater. But to the side, there’s a very narrow wooden staircase. Attic access. Immediately, Angel climbs the stairs to see what’s up here. It’s pretty much what he expected – the attic. Long wooden beams frame the ceiling, between which rows of pink and gray insulation layer over drywall panels and ceiling tiles. The constant rain outside thumps much louder up here. But this isn’t just the attic space above the Transform office. This space stretches over the top of the next small business in the strip mall as well, and there’s another narrow staircase at the other end leading down.

He hadn’t been paying attention when he burst into the dentist’s office, didn’t even know what the place was going to be until he was already inside it, and so he likewise has no clue what the next business over will be. A laundromat, maybe? A jewelry store? Very quietly, he makes his way over to the other stairs and down, encountering (unsurprisingly) another water heater. But beyond it, the door into the next business is slatted, not solid. Angel peers through between two slats. The look and the scents of this place are unmistakable. It’s an international market.

The kind that carries fresh pig’s blood.

He takes a moment to process this unexpected bit of luck, then identifies the strands of another, much less welcome scent wafting this way. Like a week-old corpse surrounded by twenty wet dogs. He can hear it moving, breathing, knocking things off shelves.

Quibussali.

Silently, Angel ascends the stairs again into the attic, crosses to the other side, and goes back down into Dr. Folger’s practice. In Spike’s exam room, he puts his boots back on. It’s been quite a while since he took them off, but they’re still not dry yet. His fingers close around the hilt of his sword into the familiar position, same grip he held all night. Maybe his hand has become permanently reshaped by this thing. Spike is still asleep, hasn’t moved. Angel goes back up to the attic, back down the stairs on the other side. The slatted door is locked, but that barely slows the turn of the knob in his hand.

He feels fine. Not even tired.

By the time he encounters it, the demon has clearly consumed most of the meat products in the store and has moved on to simple destruction, surrounded by broken glass and puddles of pickling brine, torn cardboard packages, and the various remains of chicken parts, a clawed foot here, a beaked head there. Angel steps around them. The smelly, hulking figure drops whatever it’s currently slobbering over and turns to face him, snarling, the dark red spines along its back raising threateningly. Lips pulling into an impossibly wide smile to bare its long teeth dripping with strings of thick saliva. One of the things Angel hates about these guys is how delighted they look when they snarl, like they just can’t wait to eat you.

“Hey,” he says to it. “I killed your brother last night.”

It may or may not understand the words, but it definitely understands the invitation. It charges at him.

The fight is quick, brutal. No reason to drag it out. A couple of aisles of soup and seasonings are destroyed, and at one point Angel is sideswiped into a metal rack holding bags of spicy crackers, which spills him and the crackers onto the floor, but he’s on his feet again immediately. There’s no pain. He slices the quibussali’s throat open with his sword, and as it chokes on its own clumpy blood, he grabs one of its glistening black saber teeth and snaps it off at the root. Whatever the sludge is that fills this thing’s head, it quickly runs out through the hole left behind.

He leaves the demon’s body in a pool of its own dark filth and walks to the refrigerated section. The power has been out for hours, of course, but it’s still cool inside the case. There are two cartons of fresh pig’s blood. He takes them both. He also stops for a bottle of mineral oil and a microfiber cloth before calmly returning through the attic to the dentist’s office.

Vampire bodies will swallow blood even if they are unconscious. No one ever talks about it, but it’s some kind of instinct, a survival mechanism maybe. Humans will automatically swallow vampire blood – they literally cannot stop themselves if the blood is in their mouth, even if they are conscious – and vampires will automatically swallow any red blood. Maybe it works this way so that vampires can heal each other when something’s wrong, or maybe it’s a leftover reflex from their human body’s last act, drinking. Whatever the case, Angel watches with a certain amount of satisfaction and relief as he holds Spike’s face gently and very slowly pours cold blood from one of the cartons into his mouth, and Spike’s throat works over and over, swallowing.

The label on the carton says it’s from a place called Swallowtail Farm. Appropriate.

Angel himself isn’t hungry, another one for the list of oddities going on with him right now. Nothing hurts, he stood against a demon army for hours and sustained almost no injuries, he’s not tired, and now he doesn’t even feel like drinking blood despite having been stabbed. In fact, once the blood carton is empty, he lifts his Transform t-shirt and looks for the stab wound from earlier just to make sure it’s still there.

It isn’t.

Oh… kay.

He cleans the quibussali’s remains from his sword and sits down in the rolling chair beside Spike, begins to coat the blade with oil in long, contemplative strokes. The bruises are gone from his body as well. If this is happening – if it was happening all night – it’s possible he actually was injured in the battle, maybe even severely, and it simply healed before the injuries had a chance to slow him down. As bizarre and unexpected as that would be, it would actually make more sense than barely being touched. He slayed a fucking dragon, for Christ’s sake. He crashlanded an enormous beast into the burning parking lot of an In-N-Out after aiming its fire breath across a battalion of screaming minions of hell, and somehow he walked away from it. That’s not just a lucky break, is it?

Among the blur of violence from last night, a couple of other demons stick out in his memory for being very, very large. And multiple quibussalis is nothing to sneeze at either. Maybe the Senior Partners really did have some impressive contacts and he only hadn’t noticed because of his own mystical advantage.

Huh.

Angel rests his shiny sword across his lap and frowns down at it. Then he asks out loud, quietly and without expecting an answer, “Did you... cast a spell on me?”

After a moment, a somewhat gravelly voice replies, “Think I’ve only bled on you, mate.”

“Spike?” Angel rolls his chair forward so fast he nearly loses the sword off his thighs and has to grab it before it can slide off. “You’re awake.”

The one good eye squints up, flicks briefly around the exam room with a slight turn of Spike’s head to one side and then the other, taking in the mouth diagrams on the wall, the oversized model of human teeth on the counter. The pained gaze settles on Angel. “Tell me you haven’t decided to pull my fangs. Souvenir for when I’m dead?” He’s grimacing but seems lucid. That’s something.

“We’re just regrouping here,” Angel tells him. “You’re not gonna die.”

The eye closes again. “Agree to disagree.”

“There’s some medicine if you want it. The good kind. Should help with the pain.” Angel stands up to retrieve it.

“Laughing gas?”

“I couldn’t find any.”

“Shame.”

The dosage on the pills is marked two for adults, so he shakes out six into his hand and fills a paper cup with water from the sink. He helps Spike take them two at a time with a water chaser. Spike doesn’t otherwise move at all, not even his arms.

Why didn’t the Powers cast a healing charm on Spike as well? If they were both in Angel’s current shape, deciding what to do now wouldn’t even be an issue. They’d simply both go out and fight again as soon as the sun sets. Hell, with both of them working together and healing over and over, it might only take them a few nights to slay the entire evil army.

But instead: this. It’s bullshit.

Angel sits in the rolling chair again and tries to calculate how long they’ve already been in here. Or more accurately how much daylight they have left. Time is doing that weird thing again where it feels both interminably slow and like it’s flying by without even an acknowledgment.

“Did you know,” Spike manages eventually, “you brood so loud a man can barely have his coma in peace?”

“Want me to knock you out?” offers Angel.

“Actually think I’ve had enough of that for a while.” Spike’s eye hasn’t opened again. It’s weird, watching him lying there not moving at all. Looking like a beaten and mauled corpse.

“You did good out there,” Angel tells him.

“The bits of my stomach currently being digested by hellspawn would beg to differ.”

“You survived.”

“You say that like it’s over.” The eye comes open suddenly, looking straight up. “Wait. How long’s it been?”

“It’s only the next day,” says Angel. “Still a couple hours until sunset. Or I guess… three, three and a half hours. The power’s out, so...”

Spike grunts, letting his eye fall closed again.

After a long silence, Angel says, “It’s dead now. The quibussali. Might’ve been the one that… It was making a mess next door, the market where I got the blood. Anyway, I killed it.”

“You killed a lot of things,” says Spike.

“So did you.” Angel hadn’t actually seen this happen, but he knows it must be true given that Spike is still here.

“Not… not like you did.” His voice is quieter now. Angel can’t tell if it’s because he’s being introspective or because he’s about to lose consciousness again. Maybe both. “I mean. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I was amazing. But you? Bloody master class. Exceptional. And, you know, I don’t say it lightly. When I saw you fly away on that actual bleeding dragon…”

It’s been a pretty long time since Spike offered him a compliment that actually seemed genuine. So long that he doesn’t really know how to respond. “Thanks.”

“So, I have to ask—”

Oh, here it comes.

“—why the hell don’t you look a little less GQ and a little more like you’ve been through the same shredder as the rest of us?” One hand makes a tiny gesture toward his stomach.

GQ? Without intending to, Angel reaches up to fluff his hair. “I don’t know. Maybe I accidentally got the easy ones.”

An incredulous huff, followed by a flinch of pain. “None of them were easy, Angel. And the biggest uglies clearly had you in their crosshairs all night. Kept losing sight of you behind their giant rocky arses. I don’t even know how to kill a scopulosa. Didn’t even think they could die.”

“You have to cut off their—”

“And every time you came back into view, you were already onto the next. Like it was nothing. Meanwhile I’m getting chewed up and spat out like a ragdoll.”

“You were still on your feet at sunrise,” Angel points out. “After an injury like that, I don’t know anyone else who would be.”

“Not on my feet now, am I?”

“You’ll heal.”

“Yeah. Not by sunset, though. And we both know it.”

Angel doesn’t know how he’s meant to respond to this, so he doesn’t. The mess of Spike’s abdomen is redder behind the plastic now than it was before; some of the blood he drank has seeped out. Perforated stomach, probably. It will heal given enough time, but Spike is right. It’s time they don’t have.

“You’re gonna leave me here,” Spike says after a while. “Tonight. Soon as it’s dark. Aren’t you?” When Angel continues to say nothing, Spike goes on a little more quietly, “Makes sense.”

“Is that what you would do?” Angel asks him.

“You mean if it was you lying here like a half-dissected frog? Yeah.” A beat while he reconsiders. “Maybe. I don’t know. Not a lot of options, are there?”

There aren’t. “There’s a place upstairs,” says Angel. “The attic. It’s out of the way. Kind of hard to get to actually. I could put you up there for the night and block the door.” He can’t really imagine another rampaging quibussali or a veneniferum - if they even came across the storage closet and decided to enter it in the first place - thinking through the logic of moving a blockade to open a separate door and climb a narrow staircase just to kill an unmoving, wounded vampire. Especially if Spike stayed quiet. It could work. “I would… try to come back.”

“Every vampire’s dream,” says Spike. “Being stored in the attic while the other kiddies get to play.” He doesn’t comment on the bit about trying to come back. They both know not to count on that.

“If you have a better idea,” says Angel, “I’m all ears.” He waits, but Spike doesn’t seem to have anything else to offer. Maybe he’s fallen back to sleep. After a long silence, Angel stands and walks out.

He gets the small duffel bag from Dr. Folger’s closet and takes it back across the attic to the market on the other side, listening first to see if any other demons have wandered in there. It’s quiet. There’s no more blood here, but he takes a few other things, a couple of magazines for Spike to read if he gets bored and can’t sleep, a bag of crackers and some chocolate for when his wounds heal, because he remembers that Spike likes to munch and there’s no telling if any of these groceries will survive another night of chaos. There’s also a display of outdoor grills with cast iron and cold rolled steel cooking surfaces. Angel examines these for a moment, then dismantles three of them and takes the solid metal sheets with him back through the slatted door, wedging each of them tightly at different points between the door and the water heater. It’s impossible to open the door this way from the market side now; it would have to be broken into pieces and the metal sheets pulled forward in order for anyone to get by.

There’s still plenty of room in the bag. He puts the remaining carton of blood in it, more saline, a full bottle of the medicine, fresh bandages and plastic wrap and medical tape, the tiny pair of scissors, another of the Transform t-shirts. The cloth and oil. In the storage closet, he decides which things to move in front of the door to hide it from view once he puts Spike up there with his bag and the axe. The big medicine cabinet is the obvious choice, but it’s not tall enough to cover the top of the door frame from view. He’ll stack something on top of it. Pile some stuff in the space where it used to be so that it doesn’t look obviously moved.

Ideally, there won’t be demons coming into the dentist’s office during the night anyway. There hadn’t been any the first night, and since then the only two here have been Angel and Spike. The quibussali next door had probably just happened to get trapped by the sun the same way they were.

On the other hand, Angel being here makes this place a target. In all likelihood, it’ll be ground zero for the first attack of night two. If he’s found defending a storage closet, it won’t even matter if he can heal fast and kill several demons; something will get past him during the fight just to destroy whatever he’s hidden in there.

He sighs heavily, leaning his head against the storage closet doorway. It won’t be long now. Maybe they should say some kind of goodbye before he heads back into battle for the last time, but he’s not even sure what that conversation would look like. Anyway, they hadn’t expected an extra day. Whatever they said when they both expected to die fighting yesterday should’ve been good enough.

The good fight. That’s what he and Doyle had called it.

Actually helping people, though... God, it feels like so long since he’s done that, but he remembers what it was like. Individuals, one at a time, who just needed one other person to support them through something they didn’t know how to navigate alone. There are so many people out there who still need the kind of help he can give them. Slaying demons is good, but helping those people… that’s all he’d wanted to do. How does it keep bringing him to the end of the world?

“Could really use that vision,” he mutters aloud, lifting his head. “Any time now, some help would be great.” As usual, no response. “You really gonna let one of your champions die in the attic of a dentist’s office? What was the point of giving us one more day?”

Nothing.

It’s still raining. The water sounds like fat plops now instead of the stinging spray it’s been for most of the day. Angel comes out of the storage area and hesitates by the back door. Then, what the hell, he carefully pushes it open and peeks out. Still daylight, so he doesn’t go outside, but the back of the strip mall is in shadow now. He pushes the door open a little further and watches the currents of rainwater sluice down the empty alley, drops falling onto his hand and wrist as he holds the door open.

There’s a dumpster nearby, and a gust of wind lifts a wet piece of trash off the top and flutters it in Angel’s direction. It lands close enough that he can identify it as a child’s coloring page, red and yellow scribbles filling in the spread wings of a black butterfly outline. He looks at it, tries to think of a way to find out where all the humans from this part of LA have gone. Evacuated? Hiding in their homes? The lone coloring sheet rotates slowly in the puddle where it landed, then gets overwhelmed by the current and pushed along over the asphalt, finally going over the edge of a large, square-shaped hole surrounded by concrete. An uncovered storm drain.

Angel continues to stare at the large hole in the ground, thinking. The sun is starting to get low. Twenty, thirty minutes until sunset, maybe? His attention is caught by a movement off in the distance, the loping of some several-legged dark shapes followed by a few upright ones. Far enough away that they haven’t noticed him. Probably on their way to join up with whatever might be meeting out front, ready to attack the moment it falls dark. He closes the door.

“Time to go,” Angel says quietly as he enters Spike’s exam room again. The blond head turns toward him, blue eye opening. The other one is starting to look better, just a little. Some of the swelling is less, but it’s still severely bruised. He’ll need more blood soon.

Spike doesn’t say anything as Angel puts his socks back onto his bare feet, followed by his boots. Sitting up for one of the purple Transform t-shirts is clearly painful, but they get it onto him, putting his arms through the sleeves of his coat as well. “Butterflies,” he says, lying back again.

The side of the duffel bag has a vinyl strap sewn across it, and Angel is cutting some of the threads. He slides the handle of Spike’s axe through the gap he’s made between the strap and the bag itself. It seems to hold. He starts making another similar gap. “What?”

“Butterflies,” Spike repeats, plucking at his new t-shirt. He gestures toward Angel’s as well. “Cute. Always wanted us to die in matching outfits.”

“Oh. Right.” Strange feeling of deja vu. Angel almost mentions that Spike brought up butterflies twice while he was unconscious, without having seen the shirts yet, but instead he says, “Too bad we don’t have a camera,” and puts on his own jacket over his t-shirt.

“The apocalypse will not be televised,” murmurs Spike.

“Here, take some more of these,” Angel says, and gives him a handful of pills with a paper cup of water. It’s several more pills than what he took earlier.

“This’ll put me out.”

“I’m about to carry you a pretty long way, and it’s going to hurt. Might run into some demons. I don’t want you trying to help.”

“No way I’d be much help right now.”

“And I don’t want to listen to you complain,” adds Angel.

Obligingly, Spike takes the pills. There are so many he has to do them in multiple swallows. Angel puts the duffel bag on across his body, leaving his hands free. Spike’s axe dangles from the side. He slides his sword into the other gap he made between the bag and the vinyl strap. It works. Over the steady sounds of the rain, there is another type of noise rising from the parking lot in front of the strip mall. He can feel the buildup of evil gathering there, a force almost like nausea. Waiting for him.

“Not going to the attic, are we?” Spike clarifies.

“No,” says Angel. He scoops Spike into his arms, one under Spike’s knees and the other around his back, and hoists him up from the dentist’s chair. Spike bites his lip not to groan, but those injuries are about to get a much harder workout than this. Angel carries him out through the back area of the office, past the storage closet door, and to the solid emergency door. Pushes it open as quietly as he can and peers out. There’s nothing back here; they’re all gathered in the front. The shadow of the building stretches almost all the way to the storm drain in the last light of the day, the world dimming slowly all around. At the exact moment the shadow melts away with the final ray of sun, Angel steps outside with Spike.

Right before the emergency door clicks closed behind them, the little bell on the handle of the front door jingles faintly.

The hole is only about thirty feet away. Angel walks briskly through the rain, quiet, another shadow melting into the familiar night. It’s about a ten foot drop to the bottom, and the splash of his feet landing in the four inches of flowing water is disguised by the sounds of the storm. The tunnel itself is only six feet tall so he has to duck his head to enter, but at least it’s wide enough to carry Spike through, the two weapons dangling from his bag swaying gently as they go.

He moves as fast as he can, not quite a run but not quite not one either, following the same current as the runoff from the storm. It’s been a long time since he ran from a fight, but he’s not too proud to do it to save someone. Even if the person he’s saving is a pain in the ass most of the time. Not very far in, Spike loses consciousness, sagging in his arms. Angel readjusts his grip and moves faster. He doesn’t hear anything behind them, but there’s no guarantee they aren’t being chased, or that they won’t be once the forces of the Senior Partners figure out where they’ve gone.

This type of stormwater drain uses gravity to move the water, so the further they go, the deeper underground they get. It’s part of an old combined system, which means it eventually flows into the sewer. He can tell they’re getting close to this junction by the smell of the gasses ahead, and is relieved to finally step into the familiar – if dirty and stinky – LA sewer system. At least in these tunnels, he doesn’t have to duck. But which way? He didn’t exactly have a plan when they left other than to get as far away as possible. Turning right will lead closer to downtown and left will lead in the direction of the coast, but without a destination in mind it’s a tossup which way would be better.

There are no lights on down here. He can still see well enough to walk, but the tunnel leading right just sort of fades into the darkness. It does the same on the left as well, but there’s some graffiti on the tunnel wall in that direction, the outline of an insect with big spread wings with lots of curlicues inside, and because it looks friendly, he lets that be the deciding factor and turns to the left. Might as well.

They go on for what feels like hours. Probably is hours. Despite a couple of random groans, Spike stays asleep, for which Angel is grateful. He’s a lot easier to get along with when he’s asleep, plus there’s the whole ‘helpless’ look, which may have affected Angel’s decision to rescue him from the middle of the apocalypse instead of actually fighting the apocalypse like he was supposed to. With every step, despite not really knowing where he’s going, this feels more and more like the right decision. Fight when he has to and save who he can. He can save Spike. And isn’t saving people the reason for fighting in the first place?

Anyway, if it’s his destiny to die for his moral convictions, he can still do that once Spike is healed enough to look after himself again.

After miles of endless sewer, the tunnel ahead begins to brighten. Odd. A wide swath of LA had lost power last night – he could tell from the back of a dragon really fucking high up above the dark city – so either the power has come back on or they’re close to the edge of the affected area. Or it’s some other kind of light.

No, it’s actual electricity, those dim little lights near each ladder up to the surface. At the first ladder with a lit light, Angel pauses. Should he… is this where they should come up? It’ll be a struggle, but he’s pretty sure he could get Spike up a ladder. But here? The sudden uncertainty is a stark contrast to the confidence in his decision that he’d been feeling up until now.

Near the light, a Luna moth flaps its distracting green wings, drawing his attention. Strangely, it flutters away from the light and further down the tunnel instead, and Angel watches it go. He’s seen moths down here before, but never the big, pretty ones. After a moment, he follows.

The Luna flies over to the next two lights in a row and bumps clumsily against them, but changes its mind both times and keeps going further along the tunnel. Angel continues to follow it until an opening from another storm drain joins the sewer, and the large moth lands on the dark tunnel wall at the edge of the opening, takes a few steps, and then just sits there.

Angel looks up the slight incline of the smaller tunnel, a shallow current of rainwater flowing steadily down from it. “This is the one, huh?” he murmurs to the moth. It doesn’t reply, but there’s no denying that it will be easier to carry Spike up to the surface this way than to try to get him up a ladder. So Angel ducks his head and enters the second concrete storm drain of the night. At least it smells a little better than the sewer itself does.

Taking advice from a moth. Well, what’s the worst that could happen? The world ends?

This drain is a bit longer than the other one was, and Angel takes it a little slower, more cautiously. He’s not certain exactly how far they’ve come or whether he’s actually brought them away from the danger at all or simply further into it. For all he knows, the drain entrance could be surrounded by the Senior Partners themselves and he’s only bringing Spike directly to them like a bottle of wine for a housewarming.

At the end of the tunnel, he slows further, barely creeping forward, ready to turn and run back down it if he has to. But he eventually comes to another square, concrete hole, uncovered like the first one was. He peers around the rain-soaked night before emerging into it and straightening up. This hole is shallower than the last, only about six feet deep, and once he’s fairly certain there are no demons waiting for them at the top, he heaves Spike’s body up onto the wet concrete above and then climbs out. The nice thing about sewers is at least you don’t get rained on, but the nice thing about being rained on is at least it means you’re not in the sewer anymore. He scoops Spike back up in his arms and looks around.

They’re at the edge of a paved area, facing the emergency door at the side of a brick building about thirty feet away. The back of the building has an alley running behind it similar to the strip mall, dumpster in the same place and everything, and the other side of the alley is woods. From here, Angel can tell that there’s a smallish parking lot in the front, but there aren’t any cars or streetlights. He carries Spike around to face the building, crossing the space quickly, eyes peeled for movement. There’s no one.

From the front, it’s a lot smaller than he’d thought at first, basically a three-story brick cube with only one business inside. There’s a row of five arched windows, and a peeling wooden sign stretches across the front of the building underneath with the name of the place drawn on in stylized cursive: The Painted Lady Playhouse. There’s a mysterious cartoon woman’s face on the sign holding a feathered mask up to her eyes. The mask is shaped like butterfly wings. Beneath the sign, a recess into the brick wall houses the entrance to the building, a set of wooden double doors. There are framed posters to each side of the doors for plays that Angel doesn’t recognize, with show dates from years past. A nearby set of two windows serves as the box office.

The whole theater looks like it was built in the 1920s and last remodeled in the 1960s perhaps. It doesn’t seem to have been in regular use for at least a decade, and at any rate no one is here now. The front doors are locked, so Angel lays Spike down gently on the ground, then stands and takes hold of one of the brass door handles. A sharp yank breaks it open – no one accounts for vampire strength during construction – and then he’s picking Spike up once more and going inside.

Dusty. That’s the overwhelming impression, very different from the sparkling clean of the dentist’s office. But it feels familiar somehow, sort of like when he first rediscovered the Hyperion, except he can’t recall ever having been here before. The theater atrium is hardwood, but when he passes into the auditorium itself, his boots sink into thick red carpet. It’s actually quite small for a theater, no more than three hundred seats max on the floor, with maybe a hundred more in the single balcony. One aisle down the center. The empty stage fills the entire front of the house, a small set of stairs leading up to it on both sides.

He carries Spike to the stairs and climbs up onto the stage exactly as if he knows where he’s going. They’re both soaked to the bone and he needs to find a place to lay Spike down, so he turns toward the wings, looking for an entrance from here to the backstage area. Surely there’ll be a dressing room of some kind.

He finds it immediately, a door that leads away from the stage and into the rooms behind it, starting with one large area that has racks of old costumes lining the walls and a few scattered tables and chairs, with one whole wall lined with mirrors and counter space and chairs for doing makeup. Off this room in one direction is a bathroom with four toilet stalls on one side and four shower stalls on the other. Some sinks and more mirrors. And in the other direction, there is a single private dressing room. It’s small, with one vanity mirror and chair, but the far wall has a wide, squishy green couch pressed against it with a throw blanket and some pillows, and there’s a coffee table in front of it as well as one of those little refrigerators and a coffee maker. The room is hardly bigger than a closet, with most of the space being taken by the overstuffed couch, but it’s the only place back here where it makes sense to lay Spike down. Spike, who is beginning to twitch and groan.

“Well, we’re here,” Angel says quietly to him, as if this were the place he’d been intending to go to all along. “Theater at the end of the world.”

Spike mumbles something incoherent.

“Yeah, but it'll do for now.”

Once he puts Spike on the couch, he’ll likely be lying there for a while, so it seems a shame to put him there while he’s soaked with rainwater and smelling a bit like he’s been in a sewer for hours. Angel takes him back into the larger room instead, lays him across six chairs with vinyl seats. “Wait there for a second,” he says, though he’s not sure if Spike can understand him yet. There were a lot of pills. “I’m just going to see if the showers work.”

It feels weird to finally take off the duffel bag with the weapons hanging from it. After wearing it all night – running, jumping, climbing with it – he’d gotten used to the weight, and now he feels slightly off balance. Not tired, though, and not hungry, which is still weird. He leaves their meager supplies on a nearby table, strips off his leather jacket and hangs it at the end of one of the costume racks.

As abandoned as the playhouse seems, someone is apparently still paying utility bills. The bathroom lights work when he tries them, and since there are no windows in this room, he leaves them on. It takes a few minutes for the water to warm up, but it does. Angel very intentionally does not shout with joy, but immediately pulls off his Transform t-shirt and rinses it in the warm water, then squeezes it out. He takes off his boots and then rinses and wrings his socks as well, lays them to dry on the counter beside the sink. Turns off the shower to go in search of other essentials.

There are some small terry-cloth towels near the makeup stations, not big enough to wrap up in but certainly useful for washing with or for drying off, and he also locates some fluffy HIS-and-HERS style robes among the costume racks, smelling a little stale but still perfectly serviceable. He doesn't see any shampoo, but there’s an unopened bar of soap, which might be the luckiest find yet (after the electricity).

Easing Spike’s arms out of his duster while he’s still groggy is a delicate matter, but it’s soon hanging near Angel’s own leather jacket. He takes off Spike’s boots and socks as well, and starts working on the purple t-shirt. The wetness is mostly rainwater, but there are spots of blood, too, escaped from the protection of the plastic wrap taped over his belly wound. When Spike starts trying to help get the shirt off by attempting to raise his arms on his own, Angel asks him gently, “How do you feel?”

The answer is muffled into the shirt as they get it off over Spike’s head.

Angel lays the wet shirt over the back of a chair. “What?”

“I said,” Spike replies slowly, like he’s trying out his mouth for the first time, “did you carry me here or drag me face down over a lot of very big rocks?”

“See,” Angel tells him. “I knew you’d want to be asleep for it.”

“So, the rocks, then?” Spike hasn’t opened his eyes, not even the good one. If he weren’t in such bad shape, he’d almost look like he had a hangover, lying sideways across these chairs in just his jeans.

“Let’s take a shower,” says Angel.

This gets an attempt at open eyes. The good one squints up at him in confusion and the other one opens for the first time. Just a little bit, but there’s definitely some blue showing. The swelling has gone down a lot more, though he’s still darkly bruised. “What, you mean like… an actual shower?”

Angel nods. “Warm water and everything.”

“Together?”

“Unless you don’t want to. I’m having one, thought I’d offer.”

“No, yeah, I… yeah. Just.” He blinks a few times, exhales a sigh that seems to hurt a little. “This is still the end of the world, right?”

“Last I heard.”

“And I’m not still unconscious? Being dragged over rocks?”

“You’re awake. But I brought some of those painkillers if you want more.”

“Maybe after. If we’re showering together I need to maintain my faculties to make sure you don’t take advantage of me.”

Angel’s eyebrow twitches upward. “Yeah, you’re real sexy with your guts hanging out.”

“Are they?” Spike’s eyes have closed again, but he sounds disappointed. “Was hoping I’d dreamed that part.” He starts attempting to unfasten his jeans without looking, so Angel reaches down to help, and Spike manages to lift his hips just enough for Angel to pull the wet denim down his legs and off. The bruising extends down his entire right side, in some places so dark against his pale skin that it almost looks black, but there’s also evidence of some yellowish healing, and the long cut on his thigh is still obvious but no longer open.

Progress.

Angel lays the jeans over the back of a chair. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and takes a couple of the straight-backed chairs with padded vinyl seats into the bathroom. The showers have dividers between them to create stalls, and each stall isn’t very big, but the one on the end is slightly bigger than the others, and so Angel takes the chairs into that one. It also differs from the others by having a detachable shower head with a long hose, which will be extra convenient in this case. He comes out to get three more of the chairs and line them up with the other two, leaving some space in between for the water to run down, then gathers their other supplies. Once everything’s in place, he takes off his own trousers and scoops Spike into his arms again.

Spike’s body feels colder than his, probably due to Angel’s brief time under the warm water already. Everywhere their skin presses together, he can tell the difference of at least a couple of degrees. He carefully lays the shorter vampire across the chairs in the shower stall and then begins peeling the tape away from the plastic wrap covering the deep wound of Spike’s belly. Being wet, the tape comes off easily.

“Probably shouldn’t let the water hit that,” Spike points out quietly, grimacing. “Just saying.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m going to clean and cover it again before I start the shower. Didn’t want to make a mess out there.”

“Oh. Right.”

He very gently rinses Spike’s wound with some of the saline stolen from Dr. Folger’s office, leaked diluted pig’s blood flowing over Spike’s sides onto the shower tiles and running pink toward the drain. It’s still very bad, but compared to how it was several hours ago, there’s definite improvement. He’d been concerned the long journey through the sewers would irritate the injury too much for any noticeable healing, but the tears in the organs appear to be closing on their own, the soft tissues retreating behind muscle in a way that looks more natural than before, even though the muscles themselves haven’t started sealing back together. He covers the wound with another piece of the thin plastic wrap, taping the edges securely around the perimeter.

Angel also checks the other injuries he’d bandaged earlier and decides that the only one that continues to need a bandage is the stab wound on his left side under his arm. He cleans it as well as he can and leaves it uncovered for now, to bandage after. Then he turns on the water.

The thing about being room temperature most of the time is that you get used to it – you even stop noticing it after a while – but during moments when your body warms up, it’s like you remember what it was like to generate your own heat, and that if you had a choice, you’d always want to be warm. It’s part of why drinking human blood is so enjoyable, why some vampires will keep human pets. A few sips of living blood every so often is like a direct shot of sunshine through the veins.

A warm shower is the next best thing.

He adjusts the spray so that it’s firm but not stinging, then takes a moment to let the heated water run down through his hair and over his shoulders, his eyes falling closed briefly. But before he can lose himself in the sensation, Angel detaches the shower head and turns the water onto Spike’s body instead, starting at his feet. He aims back and forth from one side to the other, slowly running the spray up the pale legs, giving the water enough time to warm Spike’s body while trying not to linger on bruised areas. Spike sighs softly, practically melting into the row of chairs underneath him as the warmth relaxes his stiff muscles.

Avoiding the plastic-covered belly wound, Angel goes on to direct the water over Spike’s hips and up his torso, spraying into his free hand to let the water drip down more gently over the areas with the worst bruising, over the stab wound and the broken rib and clavicle. He uses this method over Spike’s face as well, letting the warm water swell soothingly over his features rather than just spraying him directly. But he lets the direct spray move Spike’s hair around in a way that probably shouldn’t be as amusing as it is, and Spike turns his head one way and then the other, clearly enjoying the feel of it.

He hangs the shower head back up while he works up a lather with the soap and one of the washcloths, the spray aimed away from the majority of Spike’s body but still hitting his feet. Warm feet are maybe the best thing, particularly after wearing cold, wet shoes for hours. Angel washes Spike’s arms and neck with the soapy cloth, rubs very gently at the areas of his battered torso that seem worth the discomfort, down over his hips and thighs, then his calves while avoiding the fibula fracture. When he gets to Spike’s pale feet, he washes them with the cloth but then works up a soapy lather between his bare hands and goes over them again, squeezing firmly and separating Spike’s slippery toes with his fingers, working the pad of his thumb intently against the arch. Spike groans quietly.

“I take it back,” he says, flexing his foot in Angel’s hands. “You’re allowed to take advantage of me, as long as you do more of this after. And don’t tell anyone.”

Angel huffs. “I’m just helping you. Don’t make it weird.”

“Because a naked foot massage during the apocalypse isn’t weird.”

“Oh hey, looks like we’re done with this forever.” Angel releases the foot and turns to get the shower head to rinse Spike off, but he takes a moment to relax under the spray again himself. When he does release the attachment and turn back toward Spike, the blond is looking at him with an expression that is hard to read. “What?” says Angel, spraying Spike’s feet.

“Not one sodding scratch.” He doesn’t look at the suds sliding off his skin as Angel rinses his legs, just continues to rake his gaze over all of Angel’s unmarked flesh. “Starting to wonder if you and I were at the same party last night.”

Angel doesn’t meet his eyes, shielding the spray with his hand to rinse the soap more gently from the rest of Spike’s body. “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that, too,” he admits. “I think maybe… something happened to me. A spell or something.”

“Or something?”

“I don’t know. I’m healing faster than before. I was stabbed here—” He indicates the smooth, undisturbed skin where the wound had been, “—but now it’s like nothing happened. And I haven’t had any blood, but I don’t feel hungry. Haven’t slept, but I’m not tired.” He shrugs, then turns to hang up the shower head again and stand under it, grabbing the soap.

As Angel works up a lather with a washcloth to begin washing himself, Spike says, “The not sleeping thing. Could be adrenaline. I’m not sure how much sleep I’d’ve had if not for those pills. And, you know, all the grievous wounds and concussions and things.”

“I had the same thought at first,” says Angel. “But I don’t think that’s it. But if it is a spell, I don’t know who did it to me. Unless…” He hesitates, the cloth stopping against his body.

“Oh, right.” Spike rolls his eye. “These are your Powers That bloody Be, aren’t they? Paragons of righteousness throwing a bone to their golden boy while everyone else becomes a chew toy.”

“I don’t know,” Angel says quietly. “I keep asking them for help, guidance, something, and they haven’t answered. Doesn’t make sense why they’d protect me and then ignore me, you know? Maybe it wasn’t them.”

Spike doesn’t say anything else, so Angel finishes washing in silent introspection, then shuts off the shower and dries them both. Rebandages the stab wound. Spike doesn’t protest the fluffy robe that says HERS. Once he’s wrapped up in it and Angel has deposited him on the squishy green couch in the private dressing room, Angel says, “Do you want those pills now?”

“Yeah,” says Spike. “But just enough for the pain. I’d rather not spend my potential last couple of days on earth unconscious the whole time.”

Angel brings him the pills with the remaining carton of pig’s blood. Awake, Spike can feed himself, so Angel just sits down nearby and listens to the rain blow against the building. It’s still dark outside at the moment, but the sun is coming. Maybe they’re actually safe for another whole day.

After drinking about half the carton, Spike stops. “Reckon I should save some for when it won’t leak out.”

“Not a bad idea,” Angel says. He puts the remaining blood in the little refrigerator. How funny that he stumbled across this old theater by complete accident and it has everything they need to be comfortable for the next several hours. How funny that Dr. Folger’s new practice just happened to be in the exact place where Angel ran without thinking, right beside a market that had blood for Spike.

How funny.

“Where are we, anyway?” Spike asks him.

“It’s an old theater. The Painted Lady Playhouse. I’m not exactly sure where.”

“Santa Monica,” says Spike.

Angel frowns. “Santa Monica?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“The Painted Lady? Yeah, Santa Monica. Friend of mine from The Peppermint Stick – well, not a friend, more like an acquaintance really, the kind that gives you a lapdance on the house if you get rid of the wraither demon hanging around outside her flat – she used to do shows here on the side. Plays, I mean. Never been here myself, but I know she said it was in Santa Monica.”

“Huh. Then… we’re not actually in LA anymore.”

“Still LA County.” Spike squints. “That’s what, fifteen miles by sewer? Glad I missed it now.”

This kinda makes sense, in a way. No demons around, the power actually being on. It’s because they’ve skipped town completely.

“So,” says Spike, “we picked a fight with the biggest bads this city had to offer – you picked a fight – all of them at once, and then… we scarpered off to the theater. Not sure how I feel about that. Running away.”

You would have died, Angel almost says. But he doesn’t know how to explain why he couldn’t allow that to happen, when the previous night he was ready to let it happen to them both. Somehow, I help the helpless seems a lot cornier when he considers saying it to Spike. Instead, he says, “We’re regrouping.”

“Meaning we’ve got plans to go back?” Spike studies him for a moment, then sighs when Angel says nothing. “Maybe you should try to sleep,” he suggests.

“Maybe,” says Angel.

In his fluffy HERS robe on the green sofa, Spike begins making a pathetic effort to scoot closer to the front edge of the cushions, biting back a groan.

“What are you doing?”

“Making room for your wide arse.”

“I’m fine, Spike. You really don’t have to do that.”

“Seen anything else that passes for a bed around here? Get in before I change my mind.”

With a sigh, Angel slowly climbs over Spike, trying not to jostle him around too much. Spike lets out a pained grunt as Angel carefully settles in next to him, slotting into the narrow space between Spike’s body and the fat cushion of the back of the squishy green sofa, his front to Spike’s side, his head resting on the same pillow where Spike’s is resting.

Lying so close together in such a small space, there’s no way to avoid touching each other all the way from shoulders to feet. Angel can feel every shallow breath Spike takes, can smell his familiar hair over the oily smoke-and-popcorn scent that has soaked into this sofa over the course of at least twenty years in this tiny theater. Angel allows himself to sink into the sponge-like furniture, appreciating the opportunity to stretch out his entire body. Maybe he will finally be able to rest here the way he hasn’t been able to yet.

Once he’s stopped shifting around and sinking, he says quietly to Spike, “Thanks.”

“We’ve shared worse,” Spike says.

“It’s been a long time,” murmurs Angel.

They don’t say anything again for a while. Angel doesn’t fall asleep, though he wishes he could, but it’s comfortable enough to lie here listening to the rain. If he wasn’t on the couch, he’d just be pacing anyway. But after several minutes of silence, from what seems like nowhere, Spike says, “Are you afraid to go back?”

The question takes him by surprise, not just because he’d thought Spike was asleep but because he doesn’t understand why Spike is asking him this. Curiosity? Sympathy? Derision? “No,” says Angel. “It’s not like that.” He knows now that he’d be fine. He’d fight and he’d be fine and nothing would touch him and it would be meaningless, and he’d be fine.

“What's it like, then?” Spike asks.

It's a feeling. Something he understands but hasn't put words to in his head yet. “It’s… It's like...” How can he explain this? “A few years ago,” he starts, “back in Sunnydale, I dusted a vampire at a funeral home.” He pauses because he hadn’t realized this was what he was going to say.

Spike doesn’t reply but shifts his head slightly on the pillow, listening.

“It was in the evening... of course it was. New vampires only rise at night. But there was still a man there. Human, not too old, in his fifties maybe. It was the night before his mother’s funeral. He was just sitting there alone in one of the visitation rooms. Her casket right there at the front, still open. There were photos of her all around. Flowers.” In his mind, he can still see the back of the man’s head and shoulders as he sat staring forward, totally still. The dead woman’s relaxed face as she lay there. They always put smiling photos of the deceased around so you can remember what they looked like in life; they never look the same dead. “I didn’t know what he was waiting for. I guess I thought… I thought maybe she’d been turned, too, and he was waiting for her to rise. So I came in, in case I had to… you know.”

Almost imperceptibly, Spike nods.

“You know what the man said to me? He said, She paid all her bills last week. His mother always paid her bills on time. She’d just gone to the doctor a few days before. Everything looked fine, and she paid her bills, the bill for the doctor’s visit, and the cable, and the electricity. House, car, telephone, insurance. She didn’t leave anything for him to do. People… you know, when they lose someone, they want you to know the story. How much they loved them, how unexpected it all was. He kept saying that, She paid all her bills.”

After the story, Angel falls silent again, and for a long moment they lie there together underneath the rain tapping the theater roof almost politely, as if asking to be allowed inside. Strange that this is the same rain that’s been falling since the fight began. Then Spike says, “Anyone ever tell you how bloody cryptic you are?”

Angel frowns. “Cryptic?”

“God, I love that. Totally inscrutable. Just when I start to forget, out you come with a story about how you used to like lurking around strangers’ mothers’ funerals.”

“That’s not… I wasn’t lurking. There was a vampire. It’s not like—”

“Nah, I mean, I get it. You know, half the fun is being the only one who can understand what the fuck you’re on about most of the time.”

He says this pretty confidently for someone that Angel feels often misunderstands him on purpose. “Yeah? So what am I on about?”

“You thought you were done,” says Spike.

Hearing it put in such unexpectedly simple terms is almost dizzying. Angel is totally still for a moment, then exhales a slow breath. “Done,” he says softly. It’s a thing humans get to be, sometimes. They pay their bills, and then they leave. Like Doyle. Like Cordelia. Wesley and Gunn. But not him. Not with such an outstanding balance and almost nothing in the bank. He’d always be... fine. Quietly, he says, “I’ll never be done.” It isn’t even the first time he’s said it out loud, but somehow he’d still really thought, this time, maybe...

“Good.” There’s something almost defiant in the tone, as if they’re having an argument.

“Good?”

“Still got some life left in me – apparently,” says Spike. “I’m not ready for us to be done yet.”

“Us?” Angel asks.

“That’s right. I may not be walking yet, but when I am, it won’t be away. Don’t go thinking you’re getting out of this alone, Angel.”

Oh. This is what Spike does, assigns himself to someone and then stays, whether or not they've asked for it. He wouldn't have expected Spike to stay with him, not at this age, but in fairness he hadn't thought they'd see the other side of this apocalypse together at all. On the other hand, maybe he should’ve expected an extended partnership the moment he dressed them in matching embroidered bathrobes. “Stuck with you, huh?” It doesn't come out harsh, but for good measure he adds, “Damn.”

“What, the man who drugged and abducted me before stripping us both naked and molesting my feet suddenly wants privacy? That ship has long sailed, mate.”

Leave it to Spike to make his altruism sound horrifying. “Well, if you’re really not going anywhere,” Angel says, “I guess it’s a good thing you can understand my inscrutable stories.”

“Honestly. Could teach whole classes on how to scrute you.”

“Except it’s… it’s not just that I thought…”

Spike’s head tilts with interest again, his ear close to Angel’s mouth on the shared pillow.

“If they did this to me, the Powers, if they made it so that I couldn’t be killed – an entire horde of demons, Spike, think about that, and it’s like they didn’t even touch me – then when I make a stand for what’s right, to fight for what’s good in the world… it means nothing, because I’m risking nothing. Sacrificing nothing.”

“Angel... just because something won't kill you, that doesn’t necessarily make it worthless.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe not yet. Maybe not for another century. But if it’s without risk, then I don’t have to care. And if I stop caring, how long before I stop fighting?” Angel sighs. “For me, fighting the good fight isn’t about killing demons. At least, not always. It’s about helping people. Saving souls. Changing lives. And succeeding at that is something that will never be guaranteed, and that I will always have to care about in order to do. I think… this last year, I got so caught up in the big picture that I started losing sight of what I actually care about. I just. I want to help, you know? That’s where all this started. That’s where I want to be. Not riding dragons at the end of the world.” After a short pause, he adds, “Metaphorically, I mean. The actual dragon riding was pretty cool.”

Spike turns his head on the pillow to face Angel. Their noses are very close to each other. “Are you saying,” he says, “the reason we ran away from the apocalypse is because…”

“I still think what we did was right,” says Angel. “Don’t hear me saying it wasn’t. Taking out the Black Thorn was necessary, and in the time it takes to replace them, there are a lot of people who’ll find out for the first time what it means not to live with an evil boot on their neck. But the Senior Partners’ demon army? They’re not hiding in the system, disguised as part of the world, slowly turning the world into hell. They’re evil, sure, but they’re obvious, not insidious. And tonight it was more important to save you than to kill them.”

“Even if it’s not what your Powers wanted?”

“I did everything they asked me to,” Angel says. “Not my fault they stopped asking today.”

The eye on the purpled side of Spike’s face is opened fully now. The shower seems to have done him good. “So," he says. "Not going back?”

Angel shrugs against the comfortable squishiness of the couch. “Ask me again when you can walk.”

When sunrise comes, Spike is already asleep, his battered body still holding onto some of the warmth from the shower, sharing it with Angel’s own warmth. But Angel still can’t sleep, and after convincing himself that brooding too loudly will wake Spike up anyway, he finally makes the decision to climb over the younger vampire and off of the sofa so he can pace around the backstage area of the little theater. Spike grunts in pain as he’s jostled by Angel’s movements, but doesn’t appear to completely wake up.

There aren’t any windows to the outside in this part of the building, but Angel can sense the day beginning. This close to a dense outgrowth of trees, he would normally have expected to hear lots of birds singing at this hour, but what he hears instead is the same old rain drumming against the building… and an odd, faint sort of snorting and grunting. There’s an emergency exit at the back of the communal dressing room, probably the same door he saw when he and Spike first climbed out of the storm drain, so Angel goes over to it and gently presses the door open to peer outside and see what is making the noise.

It takes a long moment of staring before he fully comprehends the drove of pigs wandering close to the building in the light morning rain. There are nine of them, pale with dark blotchy spots. They don’t seem to notice him. After a while, he closes the door. Just stands there in the dimness of the dressing room thinking, then opens the door and looks out again.

Yep, still a bunch of pigs there.

He doesn’t exactly know what to make of it, except that this will be an acceptable food source if they’re still around tonight. The pigs are quite large; they won’t even have to kill one to get plenty of blood. The only way this could have gotten more convenient would be if the blood had arrived in cartons rather than actual pigs, and Angel finds himself looking up, raising his eyebrows skeptically toward the rainy sky. “Did you…?” he starts. But it seems so silly. First they’re going to cast some sort of healing-no-sleeping-or-eating charm on him, and then after ignoring his pleas for guidance, they’re sending him nine spotted pigs? To feed to Spike?

He’s still not hungry. Idly, he tries to remember the last time he ate. Before the grueling nightlong fight, obviously, but all of that is still playing weird tricks with time in his head, and so it’s hard to remember all the way back past the beginning of it. He’d been in the office. Connor was there. And they’d fought with—

The realization hits him like a pickup truck, then backs over him again. Hamilton. Hamilton who boasted that his blood was filled with the ancient power of the wolf, the ram, and the hart. Hamilton who didn’t appear to feel much pain, who fought relentlessly without showing signs of injury, who could have easily slain a dragon. Angel had drunk him with the specific intent of absorbing those abilities from his blood, so how could he have forgotten? It crosses his mind to wonder if Hamilton also never slept, but as soon as he thinks of it, his knees go suddenly weak with the realization that the only person he's ever known who needed no sleep was Drogyn the Battlebrand, Demonbane and Keeper of the Well, whose blood also ran with an ancient power of a very different origin. He had no need of either food or sleep in his duties at the Well, so the Powers blessed his blood to provide for his needs without those things, and Angel drank him, too.

Angel’s last two meals were imbued with the literal essence of good and evil, and now he’s accidentally become practically invincible. Not totally invincible – he did kill both Drogyn and Hamilton after all, and if they could die then so can he – but he did this to himself… without the intervention of the Powers at all. He’s changed because of his own choices, not because of a spell or any higher beings looking after him.

He feels so stupid.

“This whole time,” he says quietly, looking out at the pigs happily rooting through the grass between the building and the alleyway, “I thought I had someone on my side. Protecting me. I thought something bigger than me had an interest in this world and in the ways I can be used to help. I thought you actually cared. But this wasn't you. This was me. In the middle of the biggest fight of my life, after I’ve lost so much, you couldn’t even let me know you were there.” The hand not holding the door clenches into a fist at his side. “Are you there?!” His throat tightens as he looks up into the clouds. “Are you just sitting up there watching us like some kind of ant farm? You have the power to do anything, but you can’t even send one little sign? Support, encouragement, acknowledgment of any kind? The past twenty-four hours, I have been lost and confused and willing to do whatever was asked of me, but I’ve asked for guidance so many times, and you! never! answered! I’m 251 years old and I’m down here taking directions from a goddamn butterfly—”

The diatribe abruptly stops as the pig closest to Angel snorts loudly. He glares down at it, but it turns its back on him and begins rooting in the grass again, shaking its fat backside. The pig has one large dark spot taking up its whole butt, a symmetrical shape with two big upper quadrants and two small lower ones. Looks kind of like a…

“Butterfly,” Angel repeats quietly.

The Transform logo. Spike talking in his sleep. Swallowtail Farm.

Angel lets the door close and slowly sinks down to sit on the floor of the dressing room with his back to the wall.

The coloring page that showed him the storm drain. The graffiti on the tunnel wall. The moth that led him out. The Painted Lady Playhouse.

A goddamn pig’s ass.

“Okay,” Angel murmurs, feeling very, very small and stupid all over again. “Okay. I see it now. You’ve been whistling at me all day but I’ve only been listening for screams.” He sighs. “Or I’m assigning meaning to butterflies because I’ve gone insane. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Of course, now that he sees the pattern, he can’t help dissecting it. The signs were always leading him here. Starting at the office of Angel's old neighbor, through storm drains and the sewer to this exact random theater in Santa Monica where Spike’s friend used to perform. Every indication is that he’s in the right place, and he was definitely meant to bring Spike here with him. But now what? He backtracks their day together, all the way up to the moment they both ran into the dentist’s office. That flash of fear when he saw how terribly Spike had been hurt.

Matching t-shirts marked with signs.

Angel wore it first. Then he put it on Spike as well.

Transform.

Right. Angel stands up again, pushing up the sleeve of his HIS robe as he walks toward the private dressing room. He lets down his fangs with a soft snarl and bites into his own wrist, tears at it with his teeth. It doesn’t really hurt, but he can taste the blood. Quickly, before it has a chance to heal, he holds the wound to Spike’s mouth where he lies unmoving on the sofa, and even in his sleep Spike’s throat begins to work. He wakes up on the third or fourth swallow of slow drops, instinctively reaching up to grab at Angels arm to hold it firmly against his lips and suck. Angel gasps at the old sensation, one he hasn’t felt in so long, and kneels down beside the sofa to put his free hand on Spike’s hair. Without stopping the pull against the wound at his mouth, Spike’s eyes dart over to Angel’s. Angel nods, strokes the blond hair, tangles his fingers through it. Spike’s eyes close again. So do Angel’s.

He doesn’t know how long he’s supposed to let it go on, how much it will take to change him. It’s not like turning a new vampire. When he drank Drogyn and Hamilton, it felt fast, but the blood was pumping hot into his mouth and this is slower, a hypnotic pull, pull, pull. But his body makes the decision for them, and eventually the bite mark begins to close, slowing the flow of blood until it stops. Spike hasn’t pushed out his own fangs at all and so he doesn’t bite or burrow to prolong it, just licks over the closed mark and then his own lips before letting go of Angel’s arm.

They look at each other. Already, the bruising around Spike’s eye is fading. Angel watches it happen. He smiles, weaves his fingers through Spike’s hair again. “Good,” he says softly.

“Thanks,” Spike whispers back.

After a moment, he stands from the floor and climbs over Spike to fit himself back into his place on the sofa from earlier. Spike moves naturally to make room, and he doesn’t even grunt in pain. They lie there pressed together, listening to the polite tapping of the rain on the roof.

There's no way to know what will happen now. In his healed body, maybe Spike will become as invincible as Angel is, and the only ones who will ever be able to defeat either of them will be each other. Maybe sharing these ancient powers will cause them to fade immediately, or only last half as long. Maybe they’ll both sleep now and both wake up hungry and they’ll share a spotted pig for supper and then go their separate ways, either back to LA or somewhere totally new. Or maybe at some point during the last several hours, something small was transformed into a winged thing. And some things, when they change, never do go back to the way they used to be.