Name: www.livejournal.com/users/tobywolf13

Romantic or Friendship pairing: Friendship

Other character(s) if any you want in the fic: Fred and Harmony

Requests (2 or 3 things you want in your fic): a visit to W and H in season five (pre-Illyria), Dawn trying to sneak some of the firm's champagne (reserved for special events), closure for the "going to set you on fire" threat in "Beneath You"

Restrictions (2 or 3 things you don't want): no smut, try to keep it a PG-13

A/N: Set immediately after "Harm's Way" and before "Soul Purpose." Constructive criticism and other feedback welcome; ask before any archival.

Disparities

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

TO: morningstar@hotmail.com

FROM: spike@wolfram&hart.com

SUBJECT: So…

I'm back.

-Spike

Part One

Harmony arrived at her desk at precisely 8:45 am. Draping her jacket over the back of her chair, she pulled a mug from its storage niche and departed again, headed for the employee lounge and Angel's breakfast.

By now, her morning routine had become so thoroughly imprinted that Harmony was free to watch the other office workers as she filled the mug with blood and microwaved it, tapping her long and elegantly manicured fingers against the counter. She surveyed the room, noted the presence of a new human female (yet another human female? Didn't Wolfram & Hart employ enough already?) and retrieved the mug at the microwave's cheerful ding.

"Harmony, there's a problem—" started a nervous young secretary, but Harmony cut her off.

"Send me an e-mail," she said. "Or, like, page me or something. I have to get this to Angel, and his breakfast? So much more important than whatever you have to say."

"But—"

"Have a nice day," Harmony said cheerfully as she flounced away.

There, the mug rested on the uppermost flat surface of her desk, within Angel's clear line of sight to prevent his complaints about its inaccessibility; Harmony sat in her chair with a welcoming smile on her face; pulled out her legal pad of notes, and three, two, one—

"Harmony!"

"Coming, Boss," she sighed, snatching up the mug of blood before walking into his office and setting it before him. "Is there something I can do?"

"You," Angel said, gritting his teeth and steepling his fingers in his customary gestures of agitation, "can find out who stole the company champagne."

"I can what?"

"I said," he growled, drumming his fingertips on the desktop "you can find out who took the company champagne out of the employee refrigerator."

"Angel, I mean Boss, is it that…couldn't we just buy a new bottle—" She stopped speaking as he toyed with the edge of a particularly nasty-looking sword and looked up at her.

"No, Harmony, we cannot just buy a new bottle – that's company champagne. It's supposed to be for the meeting this afternoon."

"Oh, the one with the big sort of ugly Radrinzi demons? Because I've heard that they actually—"

"Harmony," Angel warned.

"—don't like alcohol," she finished apologetically, and shrugged. "It's a thing."

"Harmony, your job is to make my job easier. Not to argue with me over beverage choices. And you don't have any ground to stand on where catering is concerned, anyway."

"Camel is a delicacy for the Vinji! Just because you went all PETA in the lobby and didn't want to kill it doesn't mean I was wrong."

Angel frowned. "Flatbread?"

"No, genius," said Harmony, rolling her eyes. "PETA, not pita."

"Oh." He stopped, closed his mouth, opened it again. "Harmony, it's a '96 bottle of Dom Perignon Cuvee – it cost Wolfram & Hart 150 dollars. And now it's been stolen—"

"Why was it in the employee lounge in the first place?"

For a moment, Harmony almost thought Angel appeared embarrassed. He stared down into his mug and muttered, "My refrigerator's broken."

His refrigerator was broken. He was the CEO of an immense evil organization and his refrigerator— "What?" Harmony asked. "Your what?"

"Champagne has to be cool. That means refrigerator. Mine's broken. Normally, employees don't steal from the lounge. The lounge has a refrigerator with both available space and cooling capabilities. Therefore, I—"

"Okay, boss," Harmony said with a sarcastic little salute. "I'm on it."

She started her search in staff lounge itself, and was mildly surprised when she noticed a new scent in among the other, more familiar ones. The scent trailed through the other, more ordinary ones – coffee, white-out, fabric softener, cheap perfume – and led around the room in a spiral before meandering out the door and into the front lobby.

By this time Harmony was incensed. Not only had someone stolen the champagne from the employee lounge, said someone also had the raw nerve to walk around with said stolen item as if nothing was amiss. And so when she saw the long brown hair, the trim tanned legs, and the fashionably revealing sweater belonging to the culprit, she took a deep unnecessary breath and charged.

Part Two

Dawn hadn't thought Giles would understand, but when she finally broke down and told him that Spike was alive, he simply stared at her for a long moment and then handed her his credit card. "Don't tell her until you're sure," he'd said, and Dawn had understood exactly what he meant. Don't tell her. Don't break her again. Because Buffy had been broken in those few intervening months since his death, and was only just starting to pick up the scattered pieces of her life.

And so it was that Dawn found herself on a Watchers' Council chartered flight from London Heathrow, routed through Chicago O'Hare to LAX. She scribbled off a quick e-mail to Spike during the layover – Got your message, coming to LA, meet me at W&H. Dawn – and spent the rest of the flight time watching tasteless movies that she knew would have ordinarily teased a giggle or two from between her lips. But not now, with Spike maybe alive and somehow with Angel in LA and just when she had finally been getting over his death he was coming back and it wasn't fair, because— She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and settled in for the rest of the ride.

The driver of the first taxi in queue knew where Wolfram & Hart was, and didn't voice surprise when she asked to be dropped off before the door. Given the slightly green tinge of his skin, she suspected that she hadn't been picked at random by this particular cabdriver. She took special care to brush her crucifix against his shoulder as she climbed in. When no smell of sizzling flesh arose, she sighed and murmured an apology, leaning back in the seat behind him and curling her fingers around the strap of her purse. She figured that, given warning, she could probably hit the demon over the head enough times to prevent its harming her before she managed to exit the car. Knowing that the vast majority of demons in fact lived comfortably within society reassured her that this one was no exception.

She took a certain pride in knowing also that Buffy would disapprove.

The receptionist at the front desk of the Wolfram & Hart main lobby smiled at Dawn and asked her where she needed to go. Dawn mumbled something about Angel and CEO and being friends with him, and the demon secretary (Dawn was fairly certain no human could be so cheerful this early in the morning) directed her to the elevators.

Wolfram & Hart's top office floor was empty. Completely, utterly empty. The elevator chime echoed in the cavernous lobby, off glass and faux wood and metal. Dawn stood there, arms wound tightly about herself, and shivered.

Tapping footsteps alerted her to the presence of another being. "Hello?" Dawn called, chiding herself for the nervous waver in her voice. "Is there anyone here?"

"Hello?" came another, much more nasal voice in response. "Who's that?"

"I'm me?" Dawn tried. "Dawn?"

"No, I'm Fred," said the voice. "I'll be out there in a minute – just hold on."

"No, I'm Dawn. Buffy's sister?"

A young woman, tall thin, and bespectacled, approached from the juncture between the hallway and the open space. She cocked her head slightly to one side, brushed her unruly brown hair away from her face, and smiled at Dawn. "Can I help you?"

Immediately at ease, Dawn smiled back. "I just got an e-mail, and I thought – well, I'm looking for Spike, and he said he'd be here, and—"

"Spike?"

Something about Fred's tone alarmed Dawn. "He's here, right?"

"Well, here is relative. I mean, here is this plane of existence, but also this country, this city, this room, and whether Spike is in any one of the last three I actually don't know. Except I do know that he's not in the room because I have a feeling that if he was he'd be saying something and this whole awkward 'so who are you again?' conversation wouldn't be happening. So who are you again?"

"I'm Dawn Summers, Buffy's little sister, and, you know, a friend of Spike's. Which is why I'm – is this even the right place?"

Fred nodded. "You're in the right place. I just don't know when Spike's going to be back around – he doesn't really work here. And he just became corporeal again, so I'm going to chance a guess and say he's out drinking somewhere and won't be back until late this morning." When Dawn's face fell, Fred hastened on, "Of course, you're perfectly welcome to stay here – we have a really nice employee lounge with all the food and drinks you'd ever need all coupled with one of the worst microwaves in the western hemisphere so that every time someone makes coffee and turns the microwave on high at the same time, it trips the circuit and someone has to call tech support to get it fixed because we don't know where the circuit box is."

As she chattered, Fred steered Dawn down a radial hallway and toward a set of doors. "It's in there," she said. "I really can't stay – the daily disaster is sort of in progress right now – but I can get someone to come in and check on you later and if I see Spike I'll totally send him your way. It was nice meeting you!"

A wave, a cheerful, toothy smile, and then she was gone.

Dawn pushed the doors open and stepped into the lounge. She hadn't known what to expect from a massive evil organization, but complimentary breakfast pastries certainly weren't on the list. She snagged a blueberry muffin and a handful of doughnut holes before settling at the table farthest away from the door, at a seat where she could see the room without being seen.

An hour passed like this, a tine during the course of which Dawn wrote in her journal, stared blankly at a page of her assigned poetry, and snagged two more muffins from the table. By the time the clock indicated that nearly two hours had gone by in an agonizingly slow progression of seconds and minutes, Dawn could easily have screamed in frustration. Restless, she rose from her seat and wandered in an aimless pattern around the room, stopping to examine (without touching) a strange idol resting near one tall, thin window and opening the refrigerator to peer inside.

Between two thermoses, one marked ANGEL – DO NOT TOUCH and the other covered with glittering unicorn stickers, sat a deep green bottle of champagne. Dawn picked it up.

"Dom Perignon Cuvee," she read to herself. "1996." Dawn knew nothing about champagne, and knew she knew nothing about champagne, and therefore almost set the bottle back on its refrigerator shelf until she remembered a conversation she'd had with Spike over two years before.

"Any alcohol is good alcohol," he'd said, leaning back in his chair and examining the swirl of whiskey in his glass before swallowing it in one shot. "All gets you drunk just the same – the faster the better."

Dawn had wrinkled her nose and glared at him. "You have to enjoy the bouquet," she'd intoned. "And examine the rich colors before taking a sip and let it wash gently over your tongue. And then you have to name every ingredient, and the wood of the barrel it came from, and probably the region of the world, and the rainfall in inches that year in that place. Then you can take another sip."

He'd laughed at her with a grin in his eyes that had turned her insides to jelly. "That's for wine, Bit, or champagne. Me, I like the good stuff." He'd poured himself another shot of whiskey. "Cheers."

Dawn shook off the memory and glanced around the room furtively before stuffing the bottle of champagne into her backpack and zipping the bag closed. Just in time. A woman appeared in the doorway, glanced at Dawn once, and then beelined for the coffeepot. Good idea, Dawn thought, and headed in the same direction, slinging her backpack over one shoulder and taking it with her.

She had poured a Styrofoam cup full of the darkest coffee she could find and dumped four packets of sugar into it when a female voice from behind her growled, "You." The single word was accompanied by the creaking of bones Dawn had heard countless times while witnessing vampires shift into their demon faces. She tensed, whirled, and instinctively hurled her coffee in the general direction of the threat.

Naturally, she missed, and had time only to think, I am so dead before the demon charged.

Faced with a vampire approaching so fast that her face actually blurred, Dawn screamed the first name that came to mind.

Part Three

"Spike!"

Spike looked up from his game of solitaire and cocked his head to one side, listening. He could've sworn that was….

"Help!"

Yes. It had to be. No one else – but what was she doing here? And how had she gotten into trouble already? With a muttered curse, he took the stairs two and three at a time towards the sounds of a fight clearly audible two floors above.

By the time he skidded to a halt inside the employee lounge, the room looked as if someone had set small explosive charges throughout the most damageable areas. One of the coffeepots had been overturned and had spilled coffee in a dark spreading puddle on the floor; the tray of muffins was upside-down on top of a great many of its former occupants while the rest of the pastries had rolled away from the disaster area. Along the far wall, four young men in suits had gathered into a huddle and seemed to be taking bets on the probable outcome of the fight.

The fight currently incorporating two sets of fists, one set of fangs, and two women Spike recognized immediately. Somewhere in the tornado of grunts and intermingling blonde and brown hair was his Nibblet, and he'd be damned (not that he wasn't already) if he'd let Harmony at her.

So, logically, he lashed out at Harmony with his left arm while hauling Dawn out of the fight with his right. There was a little satisfying thump as Harmony hit the floor of the lounge, out before she started to fall. And then he pushed Dawn away, grabbing her arms to keep her from overbalancing, and glared at her, clenching his jaw to keep from screaming his anger and fear at her.

"What the bloody hell were you playing at, Nibblet?"

Dawn sniffled and stared at the toes of his boots. "I wanted to bring you something."

"Wanted to – what?"

Slowly, Dawn unzipped her backpack and nodded toward the bottle nestled therein, amazingly unbroken. "Wanted to bring you something."

Cue, lightbulb. "So you steal the company champagne."

"Well, yeah. Now if you want to go all retrospective, probably not one of the best Dawn-sponsored ideas of all time."

"How many times do I have to tell you? Don't steal something'll be missed ten minutes later."

"Sorry," she whispered, still studying an area somewhere around his shoelaces. "I just – sorry. I wanted it to be special."

Spike closed his eyes, fought the waves of remorse and guilt that washed over him, and finally gave up his pretexts. Reaching out, he caught her chin with one finger and tilted her face up until he met her gaze, and then, carefully, smiled. The moment should have been suspended in time, he thought, but everything happened so fast within the moment that he couldn't distinguish one motion from the next. In the end result, he found himself with an armful of shivering Dawn, her face buried in his shoulder, her backpack forgotten on the floor behind her.

"Hey now," he said, softly. "Hey now." But he didn't push her away, instead let her curl her fingers into his shirt and shake silently.

When the tension that stretched her whole body eased, Spike took a step away from her and grinned. "Breakfast?" he said, and from her reaction, he might as well have offered her the riches of the world.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, that'd be nice."

Part Four

"Why won't you come back to London with me?" Dawn whined, draining her third McDonalds milkshake (who knew Wolfram & Hart had a McDonalds on the second-level basement?) and opening her eyes wide in the Bambi look that had swayed Spike so often in the past.

He sighed. "Explained it to you already, Nibblet – can't be going back yet. I'm not finished here."

"What do you mean, not finished?" she asked, petulant. An excited light flared to life in her eyes. "Is there going to be another apocalypse?"

"Probably. There's always another apocalypse."

"If you die, I'll kill you," she said. "I mean, really. I couldn't – we couldn't – live like that again."

Spike smiled at her, a sardonic little half-smile that stalled at the planes of his cheekbones and didn't quite reach his eyes. "Seem to recall your welching on death threats before," he said. "Something about my flaming demise."

She was suddenly uncomfortable, staring at the table and twisting her fingers together. "I know," Dawn whispered. "I know, I—" Stopping, she took a deep breath and let it through her lips slowly, carefully.

"I didn't talk to Buffy for almost a month after she told me what happened between the two of you. You know, everything that happened, not the Xander-ified version." Dawn looked away from him, squinting into the early morning sunlight, and wrapped her long arms around her knees. "It just hurt, knowing that the two people I love more than anything had, you know, done that to each other."

Spike had the sense not to speak, but she felt his eyes on her and smiled ruefully. "You two? Totally redefined my concept of fucked up."

"Understandable," he said. "It redefined my concept of fucked up."

"Let me finish," Dawn said. "It's like, I didn't want you back at first, because of what you did, and then for a lot more selfish reasons.

"Really? I sort of didn't want you back because before you left you ignored me and when you cut town you didn't even say goodbye. I guess I sort of thought I meant more than that, and I get now why you did, you know, what you did, but it still hurt." She swallowed, picked at the edge of the table with a bitten fingernail, and then tipped her head back up to look at him. "Besides, you were lying to me. You never sleep."

Smirking, Spike winked at her. "Discovered my secret, you have."

Is that the only one? she thought, but said, "I still wish you'd come back."

"Can't. Won't. Not yet, at any rate. Need to find some of myself before I set to patching up you lot."

"Can I at least tell Andrew that you're alive?" Dawn let out a giggle at Spike's immediate intense negative reaction to her query.

Spike muttered something that might have included the words "ponce," "git," and "onion," though Dawn wasn't sure about the last one. "Is that a no?" she said.

"That's a no," he affirmed.

A silence stretched, comfortable and satiated. At long last Spike rose from his seat and adjusted his duster. "Should be getting back," he said. "And you'll need to be on your way back to Jolly Olde."

She'd known that her visit couldn't last, but still Dawn clung to the remnants of their conversation, pulling the threads that still linked them. "Last chance to fly with me," she whispered, her voice catching and tears pooling at the corners of her eyes.

Spike shook his head. "Thanks for asking," he said, "but you'll have to get back to where you belong, and I have a job to do."

Nodding, Dawn said, "I know. Everyone always has a job, right?"

"Yeah," he said, and shrugged. "Doesn't mean we can't spend time with important people."

"No." Dawn fisted her hands in the pockets of her jeans and rocked from heel to toe.

"Well."

"Yeah."

Sheepishly, Dawn opened her backpack and fished out the champagne. "D'you want it?"

"Sure," he said, accepting the bottle without looking at it. "You want a cab? Can't exactly wave one down for you – sunlight and all – but I could call, or something."

"I'm fine," said Dawn, smiling to prove her words true. "I'll just stand out in the street and make them decide whether to hit me or pick me up."

She rode up in the elevator with him until they reached the ground floor, then walked to the front entrance, feeling strangely formal all the while. Evidently, the formality extended to Spike as well – he kissed her cheek distantly before nudging her towards the doors.

The first taxi she flagged down stopped before her at the curb. The driver reached across to open the door for her and smiled. "Where to?" he asked.

For a moment, she couldn't answer for the churning of her stomach. "Could you just hold on for a minute?" she said. "I need something inside."

"Sure," he said. "It's been a slow morning anyway."

Dawn sprinted back through the doors, to where Spike stood, unblinking, and tackled him into a fierce hug. "I love you," she said. "Write."

And then she was gone.

TO: morningstar@hotmail.com

FROM: spike@wolfram&hart.com

RE: Week One

Dawn,

You'd never guess what Angel gets himself into in his off hours. This week it was hallucinogenic parasites. Nasty buggers. Don't ask how they got to him – don't know myself. Just know they're not healthy.

Look, if it's not too hard, and if you can, could you sort of tell Buffy hello for me? Don't have to tell her I'm back, just that I’m thinking of her. I'll be back permanently sometime or another, and I don't want to get her hopes up just yet.

Thank Rupert for me, while you're in the message-passing business. When he's not a total git, he's a decent man.

I'll be home soon, but don't wait up.

Love,

Spike