These Prizes Are for Living Men (Buffy/Angel, PG)

He tips her back, her gold hair raining over his knees. She is soft and warm in his hands, and she smells like funeral flowers. Heaven is being with her, being inside of her, but he’d give that up if she could only forget where she’s been.

“How come you never brought me flowers?”

Angel rests in the bowl of her clavicle. “Bad memories,” he says. “He brought you flowers.”

“Not even to my funeral.” Her fingers thread through his hair.

Her heartbeat echoes through him, filling his flesh. Always so good at getting inside him.

“Bad memories,” he says.

Overtime (Angel ensemble, PG)

The Lakers are beating the hell out of the Clippers, and Gunn has lost his cool, jumping up and down on Wesley’s sofa, yelling, “I told you, English, I toooooooooold you,” even though Wesley has no feelings, one way or the other, about the Clippers.

Earlier in the evening, some slimies in the park beat the hell out of Angel. He finally put them down, but he’s getting too old for things to keep running into overtime. At the kitchen table, Cordelia bandages and fusses over him, and thinks how odd it is that she doesn’t care about basketball anymore.

Big Fuckoff Desk (Angel, Spike, R)

Angel has an office and a big fuck-off desk. Spike feels he, too, is entitled to these things. Not because he wants them—William the Bloody with a secretary, for God’s sake—but because he’s sure that whatever Angel has, he deserves one, as well.

Angel doesn’t see things the same way, and he would like Spike off his desk. Off his desk, out of his office, out of his hemisphere.

He stabs at the intercom. “Harmony, please bring me a stake.”

“Red meat’s not good for you, boss.”

Angel winces, in slow motion.

Spike swings his legs. “Sharp as a tack, that one.”

Angel sighs. “Spike. Please. Just . . . go.”

Spike does not go. What he does is scoot across Angel’s desk, tearing Angel’s papers and knocking over pens and knickknacks and shit. He scoots across Angel’s desk until he’s at the very edge, directly in front of the old man.

Angel doesn’t move. He stares at the same spot on his desk, like his papers are still there and unmarred, like he’s not all of a sudden staring at Spike’s denim-clad crotch.

“All I want,” he says, in a granite voice, dead and somber and so detached that Spike knows Angel is not speaking to him, but to the waiting air, like a character in a play soliloquizing to the audience. “Is a little peace and quiet, a little space to get things done. Is that so much to ask?”

Spike sighs. The old man can be such a fucking drama queen. It’s really a drain on Spike’s cool.

“I can think of some ways you can get me off your desk,” Spike says. He would meet Angel’s eyes, if the old fuck would ever stop the aside shit and look up.

Angel doesn’t move. Spike entertains the notion of just unzipping his fly and letting Angel’s unwavering gaze feast on Spike’s namesake, but then Spike is overcome with a sudden wave of maturity. Instead, he rests his hand on the back of Angel’s neck.

The old man relaxes the tiniest amount. And he looks up.