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who: Spike and whomever
what: Looking for new digs and scavenging for stuff.
when: Soon after his arrival (2nd week of May)
where: The Inhabited Area and likely the Abandoned City.
warnings: Spike being a jerk? Possible language. Edit: Biting, drinking, the vomiting blood in thread w/Cain.

Flatmates. The only ones he'd ever been able to stand had been the ones he was shacking up with, and for the better part of a century, that had been Dru. Oh, they'd been off and on again a few times, but this... well. This was a bit more permanent. And now he was stuck in a room with a bunch of other living bodies. Ones he couldn't take a nip from. It was likely better than Xander's basement, but only just.

And a job. Seriously? They'd given him a bloody job and expected him to just... do it? Clearly they had no idea who they were dealing with. But, as he hadn't entirely sorted out an alternative yet, he wasn't ready to piss away what was being offered. Not until he'd set something better up for himself. Surely this place had to have a graveyard. A set of crypts. A nice little mausoleum tucked away he could take as his own, yeah?

For the next week, each time the sun dipped down below the horizon, Spike could be found leaving the shared accommodations to go scour the city for just that. Looking for where the city might have its graveyard, and deciding to snoop past the fence that encircled the population and led out past where he'd been told the wild things may roam. Well, that was all fine and dandy, wasn't it? He was a bit wild himself. Could be he'd come across something he could vent a little of his frustrations on -- aside from the small dark shape that smelled like fox that had been shadowing him partway through the week. The area was rife with them, the city boasting people walking around with them like pets.

Spike didn't do pets. He ate pets. Though, he had a feeling that kitten poker would be frowned on here. Pity. He wasn't too bad at it, and they weren't bad for a late morning snack.

Perhaps someone might come across him with a shopping cart full of odds and ends he'd found and salvaged. Or maybe they'd see him slipping into the cemetery, when he finally found one. Or he could be heard talking to the shadows or hissing at one and telling it to stop following him. Who knows? Spike's a bit of an odd duck, but until he figures out or is told a way to be able to not burst into flame in the sun, he'll only be seen during the night-time hours.

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That was... different. Cain had suffered pretty much every kind of wound in some form or another by now (although there was a certain group of people back home determined to prove him wrong), and this was not quite like any of them. Puncture wounds were a thing. Blood loss was a thing. Having it sucked out of him and ingested by an undead creature of the night was not a thing. Until now.

He sucked in a breath as he could start to hear the sound of his heart rushing past his ears. Spike's noise went more or less ignored because he was having his own thing go on right now. It didn't hurt in the ways that Cain knew pain to be. It wasn't like some kind of life-altering epiphany but it didn't bring about agonizing pain and that was good. With teeth still in his wrist and aggravating the wound, it wouldn't even start to heal yet; not unless the obstruction was there for an absurdly long time and his body had reason to push it away.

"No bad juju?" he asked, a little breathlessly. As if this whole thing wasn't answer enough.

Cain's blood was different. Not in the way that a Slayer's was, or any other non-human he may have fed from. Maybe... maybe it was just that it had been long enough since he'd fed right from the source that he was forgetting, but it felt like there was more life in this blood. Like it had just a bit more punch. He had a very real urge to not stop, to just keep going until he'd drained the man dry. Evil, remember.

But not stupid either, and he remembered the phone gadget and the threat of retribution and all those out there who seemed to be waiting on him to take a wrong turn. It was with visible regret that he withdrew, pulling off Cain's arm with a long, drawn in breath, panting a little, face still bumpy and demonic as he looked up at Cain. "Not so far, no. I'd call that a win."

It wasn't much of a hardship for Cain to admit to himself that he needed to sit down after that. He moved slowly and sat himself down on that ratty couch in the middle of the disturbed crypt and leaned himself against the back of it while observed the look on Spike's face. Not a normal face by far, but it still had human features on it and that helped.

"Well now we both know that works," he said, absently running his thumb over the bite marks in his wrist. It had already stopped bleeding no matter where exactly Spike had gone and he could feel a sort of tense stillness in his body while it caught up with what had happened before it would make its reparations. Take back what belonged. "How was it? As good for you as it was for me?"

"Better, I'd wager." He licked his lips, smiling as his face bled back to human. Oh, yes. He'd missed that. Enjoyed the bloody hell out of it. But even as he was standing there, bathing in that sated predatory bliss, he noticed something... off.

Once he fed, that was generally when he felt the new blood start to feed into his system. To warm him up, give him a full body rush. It wasn't unusual for a male vampire to get a little... ahem. But that wasn't exactly happening just then. It felt... different. Like what he'd just drank was sort of... separate. Sealed off from him in a strange way. "You said you were human, yeah?" Spike was giving him a curious look, willing to call bullshit on it just by being able to bite him alone.

Well, that was a pretty immediate call out. What was it that was tipping Spike off? As far as Cain was aware, he was entirely human — just someone with a bullshit fate that he couldn't really deny since it had been written on him since birth. The one in charge of that decision was completely out of his and every other being's reach, so he would just have to live with it. And live with it... and live. For a very, very long and indeterminate amount of time.

Sometimes he hated the general rule of never telling someone else their time. Other days, it kept him sane. Either way, it didn't seem to really factor in to his humanity or not.

"Born and bred," he answered. If he was lucky, he could get an answer before his blood started trying to go back where it belonged. If he was even luckier, Spike wouldn't try and murder him for knowingly offering himself like that. If he was going to win the lottery, he'd still get to walk out with that charger sitting in the cart. "Why?"

"Couple of things," he said, hand moving up to his stomach, a curious look on his face as he felt an odd sort of roiling inside him. "Aside from you tasting good enough I could drain you dry and come back for seconds and thirds, there's... something a little off."

And he couldn't put his finger on it. Spike didn't exactly experiment with blood much. He drank human, animal, and now the synthetic nonsense. He'd never felt anything quite as strange as this. There'd been that one insect demon he'd nipped once that had left a nasty taste in his mouth. Ichor instead of blood didn't go down quite so well. But this? This was blood. This was blood that tasted sweet and hot and delicious, but he couldn't feel that rush anymore. In fact, he was feeling a little nauseous. "You didn't drink holy water or anything daft like that beforehand, did you?"

"No," Cain said truthfully. Please don't be a chestburster. Much as he didn't actually care for the continued state of things against the natural order, that would be way more than just desserts for something he'd lured into biting him. Unnecessary cruelty was just cruel. The fact that he apparently tasted rather good to a vampire's senses might have put him in a more entertained mood than before, too.

His wrist was dry, empty where it was about to start calling his blood back. Now he was feeling the tingling like pins and needles, blood moving in an absence and knew it was basically now or never. "But I do have a condition that might make things unpleasant. Friendly reminder I haven't turned that text off yet, so try not to go into a raging fit," he added perhaps quicker than necessary. "And I honestly wasn't sure if anything would come of it, either."

Oh yeah, here it came. Healing. Forceful and abrupt and whether he wanted it or not.

"Condition?" There was a crack in his voice, a broken bit of pitch as Spike started to realize that something was horribly, horribly wrong. "What bloody sort of conditi-- hurrrrk." Spike's question was answered when he found himself bending over, falling down onto his knees as his mouth opened and a globule of the blood he'd drank forced its way up his throat and out onto the floor. Before he could do more than stare at the blob that was moving back towards Cain, he felt another painful cramp, the rest of the blood working its way back up his body, dragging along his stomach and esophagus, as if it would be just as happy to tear its way through him to leave him than to be vomited out onto the floor.

All he could do was kneel there, hands splayed on the ground as he heaved and regurgitated the blood he'd been so happy to have been able to have consumed not a moment earlier; eyes watering from the force of it, the pain of the bloody still in him dragging harder in its attempt to get back to where it belonged.

Someone a lot more heartless than Cain would have a hard time not flinching at the sight. As it was, he grimaced and shifted off the couch, moving closer with his wrist to the floor in order to shorten the length his blood would have to go in order to return. Perhaps it would lessen the force of the blood trying to push and shove its away through. He had no idea — no vampires where he came from, okay?

He waited. Didn't try to comfort Spike or anything like that, although he was definitely within striking range where he was now. It was with a lot of depressing practice that he could tell when his blood was about back to full and finally answered. "Immortality," said Cain, simply. Softly. He could have gone on, explained himself further or quipped or any number of things, but he fell silent. Let Spike have the next move. Braced himself for something decidedly not pretty if it came to that.

Edited 2017-05-21 07:44 (UTC)

Through the sheen of tears, Spike watched the little blobs and dribbles of red make their way back to the arm he'd taken them from. Another heaving gag and he felt like someone was pulling out a string from down in his stomach, one long line of something solid that was tickling his gag reflex all the way up. Then it was over. He hoped. No more tugging or pulling or regurgitating. Spike fell on his side, then rolled onto his back, panting as he looked up at the stone of the ceiling over him, wiping at his eyes before glaring at Cain. "You knew?! You bloody well knew that would happen and you let me do it anyway?"

He pushed away, torn between wanting to plant a boot in Cain's face and snarling at him. "What the bloody hell is wrong with you? What, do people just think it's fine to experiment on the undead because we're not human anymore? I have feelings, you wanker."

That was definitely an interesting reaction, and the only movement Cain made was to watch Spike and to rub at the shiny clean skin where the bite mark had been moments before. With all of the blood collected, it had taken only seconds to close up and fix itself. It was... an interesting thing to watch Spike go on about feelings when it really did not jive with everything they'd spoken about before. Hidden depths or a good act. Either way.

"I didn't know," he said calmly. Part of him wanted to snap but it wouldn't do any good for them to get into an argument. "I figured if you were eating it, absorbing it and breaking it down, it had a pretty good chance of not doing that. But... this isn't the first time someone's experimented with you," he added after a moment of consideration, thoughts suddenly coming into alignment.

Really, his biggest dilemma was not the morals of what he had done. It was more about the emotional tirade going on now and whether he should apologize to assuage it, to make nice. He didn't want to totally alienate a potential resource (everyone was a potential resource, when it came down to it) just because he'd made a bad move.

Exhaling, he sat back on the cold, stone floor and ran a hand through his hair. "You can attack if you want," he offered. "Nothing stops you if someone's willing, right?"

"Of course you didn't," he spat out, scowling at Cain. "That's why you look so very surprised to see it happening. Only not at all, if you get my drift. You lying sack of... lies." He rolled over, reaching to prop himself up against the edge of the sofa, scrambling in his pockets to pull out his cigarettes to try to get rid of that sensation of something crawling up through him. "There's things you don't feed from and there's reasons why. If you'd bloody well explained that you were whatever you are, I might have come to my own conclusions. You're as human as I am, meaning you aren't. Regular folk don't call themselves 'immortals'. Regular folk are born, they age, then they die. How long you been all undying like, eh? Long enough to know better, I'll wager."

He lit his smoke, the rasp of flint on steel loud in the crypt, as was the crackle of dried leaves catching flame. "That's not how it works, but if I can feed from you, I can beat the bloody hell out of you too. Doesn't to much if you won't die, though. Wanker."

"I was regular folk for a while," he said with a shrug. He shifted when Spike did, levering himself to his feet and wandering over to the cart in the corner. Lot of junk in there and fancy little things to spice the place up but there was still the piece he had come here for in the first place.

Grabbing the TV, he moved to the couch and sat against the foot of it, opposite to Spike. Grabbing the multitool from his pocket, he started to pry the back panel apart to get a better look. He wasn't exactly beyond keeping his hands busy to avoid looking at someone during a hard confrontation — but then again, he wasn't beyond pretending that this bothered him more than it did, either.

"It's been two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-seven years since then," he answered. "I'm serious, though, we don't have non-humans where I'm from. I'd... hoped that it would work. You get over being surprised at everything pretty quickly, though. What's the word, jaded? Experienced?" He shrugged, glancing over to Spike.

"I would think after the first bloody millennium passed you might want to question whether or not you fit into the category of a normal human." His voiced was laced with sarcasm and smoke, the trails of it leaving him as he exhaled and continued to frown over at the man who seemed to be more than a man. And who, apparently, was still going to fidget with what he'd brought in. The whole manner of everything seemed so incredibly off to him, as if this was so casual. This was something more akin to his world than this muddled mix of one that seemed to be luring in all manner of beings from all manner of worlds.

"Ignorant. The word you're looking for is ignorant. And you're it in spades."

Being called a fool was nothing new. Hell, his brother practically owned the trademark and they had only known each other again for a few months. It didn't take a lot to know Cain was impulsive and didn't think through as many things as he probably should; he'd tried, when he was younger, and it was miserable to constantly be on guard when the lasting consequences were far and few between. So he'd sworn that off for a while.

Not that it helped when the Death Erasers came knocking, but they were something else all together. He was working on that one.

The TV panel popped off and he started to poke around the guts. Hopefully the sound issue wasn't anything too serious, and it probably wasn't if the picture itself was just fine...

"Here?" he asked thoughtfully. "Probably. Maybe back home, too. I haven't been this out of my depth since I was actually twenty-four."

Humans. If Cain could even be thought of as that anymore. But, the man was still a man, after all. He hadn't been possessed by anything, and it wasn't as if there weren't witches that had found ways to extend their lives in his world. Still... two thousand years old put him well past that of the Master's age, or of most vampire-kind he'd ever known. That made him the age of one of the true demons. That made him more dangerous than he let on, and Spike wasn't about to forget that.

"Is that about how old you were when your logic centers stopped working? Makes sense."

Perhaps it was because he didn't feel any threat at all, or maybe it was because it was actually funny, but Cain laughed. His hands were feeling along the innards of his project while his eyes scanned for anything obvious. He paused only to turn and give Spike an amused look, and said, "You know recent studies have figured out the brain doesn't fully and totally mature until your mid-twenties? I wonder about that sometimes."

It was definitely food for thought. Had Cain's brain finished developing by the time he'd started to grow? He was closer than not, of course, yet there was a lingering doubt. Maybe things were even harder than they needed to be. Maybe the youthfulness he was stuck with made it easier. No real way to tell.

"Yeah, it's when I stopped aging," he said more helpfully when he went back to his task.

Spike watched as Cain tinkered, idly wondering what it was about certain types of people that found whatever comfort they found in technology. Most of the creatures he'd met who'd been alive before tech had invaded the world like a cancer were almost pathologically afraid of it. Oh, Spike wasn't terrified of computers or phones, but he just didn't care for them. He liked TV because it entertained him. Outside of that, he wasn't the type to take classes on coding or whatever other geekery the redheaded witch might have been into. "So you're a perpetual frat bro. Congratulations, you're a bigger ass than I."

For Cain, it was his survivor instinct that first pushed him toward it. Then he'd come to accept it, become good at it, have fun with it. Not necessarily in that order. It was like magic for humans, in some ways, the sort that didn't break any natural order yet opened the eyes of countless people across the world. It helped, it hindered, the world kept on spinning, and nothing would ever be the same as it was beforehand.

For someone who'd seen so much of what had come before, technology was a breath Cain hadn't known he was holding. Besides, it meant he could be perpetually lazy and most people would think he was still working hard on things that simply came naturally to him.

"How old were you?" he asked, brows raised and curiosity obvious. Pretty much every source agreed that vampires weren't born into it so much as dragged to that depth. There was a past there. Not one that Cain wanted to know entirely, just the context.

"What, when I died the first time?" He took another drag, leaning back against the couch and swallowing slowly, feeling that sting as the inside of his throat reminded him of what had almost been. "Older than you. Twenty-eight. All nice and proper posh. Then my dark angel came into my life, and... well. Ended it nice and quick and brought me into something I was better at." His eyes were unfocused as he looked across the room, remembering the first time he'd seen Druscilla. The first time she'd bled her face from that pretty doll-like vacant look to the predatory demon. And still, he'd tipped his throat to her, let her sink her fangs in and bleed him dry.

He never regretted it. Even if thinking of her now still hurt.

"So you grew out of the proper posh pretty well, I'd say," Cain said with more than a hint of amusement. He was tempted to switch accents right there but held off for now. This wasn't as much of a joking conversation as he usually saved that sort of thing for.

He pulled out a panel and set it behind him on the cushion, unfolding and folding the tool in his hand until it would be better to twist and manipulate the TV's innards as he went. "And that would make this dark angel of yours your sire? That the word?"

"That would be it. Sire, grandsire, sired... It's a whole little thing. Nothing beholden or anything like that. I've read some of those ridiculous books. There's no compulsion or whatever to keep a sired to their sire. It's just... love." Which was odd in and of itself. Angelus had no humanity to be burned out as a vampire. Without his soul, he was pure evil. Spike and Druscilla, on the other hand... were apparently flawed. Too human. If he took a moment to think about it, he'd blame Angel for that. Broke Dru a bit too much before he turned her, and she turned him, so it only stood to reason that there was a bit of a mess up there.

He missed her, though. He'd been with her for a hundred years. She'd been his entire reason for existing -- other than the few rows they had now and then. They never lasted long, though. And here he was. On another bloody reality with no way to get back to her or anyone he knew.

Thankfully for them both, Cain didn't go for the low-hanging fruit when Spike mentioned those ridiculous books. It seemed too obvious, although he did have to wonder after whether that series would have ever gotten off the ground with vampires being a real thing where Spike came from... Something for another day, probably. He didn't want to detract from what they were talking about just quite yet.

"It's like family," he summarized. Cain definitely knew a lot about that subject and it showed in his voice. Family of choice rather than family by blood. Or—some of both? He wasn't sure how being made a vampire quite worked but there was definitely blood involved. Whatever. "Do you... have people? Waiting back home?"

The problem with 'those ridiculous books' was that there were far too many. Too many authors who romanticized what one drunk Irish twat scribbled down once upon a moon ago. If there weren't people asking about sparkling, there were others who thought all vampires brooded in puffy shirts, or liked to drink fake blood down on the bayou. There was no winning with idiocy.

"No," he answered, a short, simple word bitten off before he went into any depth about it. No, Druscilla had left him over visions that were ridiculous, and while he dabbled and rolled in the hay with Harmony, he'd just as happily stake her as sleep with her. No, he had no one waiting. No one who'd miss him.

That wasn't what Cain expected the answer to be, but he couldn't really argue with a statement like that. No way he could cajole and convince and look for something deeper in a stranger's life that perhaps Spike had overlooked about the caring situation, not when he was an undead bloodsucker with a diet problem. He nodded to that answer, moving to set the TV aside and levering himself to his feet in order to check inside the cart for what else Spike had found.

"Pretty sure it's just a blown fuse in there," he explained. "If you don't have anything in here that I can swap it out with, it wouldn't take much to get a replacement in the city. Pretty lucky problem to have."

It was almost like he was saying sorry this was the only simple thing going on right now. Or maybe he was just being sentimental in his old age.

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