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[idolpire]

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.

Comments

[idolpire]

"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.

[aeturnus]

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?"

[idolpire]

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.

[aeturnus]

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.

[idolpire]

Spike let him pick through the cart of odds and ends. If it would fix his telly, he'd sacrifice something else in there for it. If not, well, it may be good just to know what it was he'd wound up picking up. Another drag, another roll of his eyes, as if he was listening to Cain in the first place. "Right. Well, see if you can find a bit for it. If not..." A shrug.

That was an answer, right?

[aeturnus]

There was a lot of junk, stuff more decorative than anything that could serve a purpose. He was taking his time, however, to examine each piece since this place was weird and there could be plenty of weird functions he wouldn't usually anticipate on the baubles. That part was good to learn just from a curiosity standpoint.

Cain paused momentarily to glance at him when he trailed off. "If not, what?" he asked. Not enough of an answer for him, apparently.

[idolpire]

"I'll figure out something, won't I? Always do." Whether it was finding something he could piece together, nicking a bit he needed, or finding money to put down for it, he'd manage. Spike was a survivor. A scavenger. He had no problem with surrounding himself with used items. Maybe he felt a bit of a connection to it. Him and other people's trash. Other things people had just tossed aside because it wasn't any use anymore. He gave it a home. He found a use for it.

[aeturnus]

Cain nodded. Yeah, Spike would get by with something or other but now that Cain had begun working on it, he wanted to see it through. If for no other reason than to give someone else an idea to look at things the other way. It wasn't necessarily helpful spirit so much as loving a good shake-up but those two things weren't mutually exclusive, either.

It's what he tended to tell himself, anyway.

"Might not need to," he said, pulling out what looked like a bluetooth speaker. Nothing fancy but if it was the audio connection that was broken in the TV, what better place than an audio device to look for a replacement?

[idolpire]

Spike looked over, all the while pretending he didn't care in the slightest what Cain may or may not have figured out. Another last pull on his smoke before he ground it out against the floor, huffing out something close to a scoff. "That so? What, you managed to cram something in there that works? I may have to not kill you after all."

Bluff and bravado, Cain. Spike liked to bark a lot now that he couldn't bite so much.

[aeturnus]

"We'll see if it works." Potential fix in hand, Cain came back over to the couch where he had left the gutted TV and sat down, starting to take the speak apart this time. He wasn't even bothered by the threats, and while Spike's delivery made it obvious he wouldn't much follow up, there was the whole immortality thing that had left him incredibly unphased and blase about physical harm coming to him. It had lost its luster a while ago.

Except for the times they were followed through on, and when those times went far beyond the pale in executing it. But those were times he couldn't think about correctly and so he wasn't going to. Think about them. Nope.

"How would you do it, anyway? Kill me."

[idolpire]

"Beheadings seem to work on a lot of things that think they can't die. Works on vampires. I'm assuming you can walk willy nilly in the sun, eh? Yeah, maybe a good old fashioned beheading. Or fire." Both things that Spike knew definitively could kill a vampire, so... if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for a blood-stealing ass.

[aeturnus]

"Nope," he said cheerfully. That was from definitive testing (okay, it hadn't been on purpose but it definitely left out some options for later experimentation when he got desperate) and although he wasn't eager to try it again, Cain was relatively okay with proving a point. Talking tough alone wouldn't really endear him to anyone.

This time, he didn't stop with his playing around in the device. He knew what to look for and what to do with it, so it was more of a background action than anything. Calming.

"I mean, you can try," he offered, "but those have been proven livable for me. Recoverable, anyway."

[idolpire]

"Really? What about... dropped in a vat of acid? Eaten by a demon? Chopped up into a million pieces, burned, then scattered over the oceans?" Yes, he may have mocked most vampire literature out there, but it didn't mean he hadn't read it.

[aeturnus]

He canted his head to allow for those possibilities, then shook it to indicate nada. "No, eventually I'd still come back," he said slowly. "Like, eventually. Please don't actually do that last one, that's just a dick move."

[idolpire]

"You had it done?" Was there a story there? A story involving pain and discomfort? Spike might demand that story in return for someone being a poncy twat who tried to kill him with blood.

[aeturnus]

"To various extremes," he allowed. It wasn't the most fun story in the world, but he was talking to a vampire who seemed to have a thing for visualizing horrible atrocities. Maybe this would actually be an appropriate story. "Once had someone steal my eyes for a few decades."

[idolpire]

"What, they didn't grow back?" See, now, that was the downside of Cain's immortality, or so Spike was thinking. "What if they burned you to ash, then kept you in little airtight jars? Ziplock bags?"

[aeturnus]

"No, my body doesn't do that kind of fun, useful immortal," he said with a shrug. No matter how long someone might put him to pasture, he knew he'd win out in the end and as long as the person that mattered most to him was still hanging around, he would deal with it when the problem actually occurred. "Pretty sure it would eventually wear it down."

[idolpire]

"Yeah? Bits of you rubbing up against something until it wears through?" He paused, leaning his head back against the couch, eyes up on the room of the mausoleum. "S'pose that makes sense. If water can carve through rock, don't see why a bit of vibrating ash can't bleed through plastic. Or glass."

[aeturnus]

Cain laughed at the description, finally moving to insert the piece which would hopefully get this thing going properly. If nothing else, it would be a good stop-gap measure that would allow Spike to get his shows with audio until Cain could get a better piece and attach it better than this slapdash method he had going now.

"Exactly," he said. "Pretty sure that's what happened with my eyes, and there have been smaller instances to go off of, too."

[idolpire]

And because Spike was Spike and couldn't let it go, he helpfully asked, "What? Like your bollocks? Or the whole package?"

Oh yes, Cain. He went there.

[aeturnus]

Who was surprised by this? Not Cain. He'd hardly known this guy for an hour and already he was pretty sure he could assume all shallow interactions from hereon.

"No. Thankfully," he added almost as an afterthought. After a certain point, he wasn't sure that excruciating, intolerable pain was really any different no matter where it was enacted. "But I guess it'll have to happen sometime."

[idolpire]

"You volunteering as a guinea pig yourself? I'd be happy to help out with that. Or, hold onto them. In a jar." Because yes, Cain, he was an ass. That's what asses did.

[aeturnus]

"No," he said. He wasn't really in the mood to entertain the idea of being a guinea pig so soon after the last time. Brow furrowed in concentration as he placed the backing into its place on the TV, he set it on the floor in front of him and turned it around. He looked over to Spike and gestured to it. "You have an outlet around here?"

[idolpire]

He nodded his head over towards the far wall. "Dragged an extension cord over. Don't ask." It was a complex network of cords resulting in him having power in the crypt. It'd likely only be needed for the tv and fridge, when he got one, but it was what he'd been used to.