Paper Pusher :: Chapter 1 of ?
Title: Paper Pusher
Author: fenderlove
Pairing: Spike/Fred
Rating: PG-13 for some bodily fluid ickiness in this chapter.
Summary: This is a new ongoing series for sockmonkeyhere's Fantasy Island request. The events of this story include plot points from Angel: After the Fall as well as Angel: Almost Human. Spike is working at a medical examiner's office to earn extra cash after being brought back from Hell. Gunn arrives with a proposition that Spike can't refuse.



Paper Pusher

From the outside looking in, being a detective seemed glamorous, but in reality, bills had to be paid. Even when business was good, there never seemed to be enough money to go around. And when business was slow, well, sacrifices had to be made.

Spike had a tiny scrap of savings he had gathered from cash advances from Angel’s Wolfram and Hart credit cards before the big alleyway shakedown, but he’d blown through it paying six months in advance on a new apartment which doubled as his office. Without many investigation gigs coming in, Spike was forced to take odd jobs several nights a week. Unfortunately for him, the jobs available to a vampire with no Social Security card, no driver’s license, or any form of I.D. weren’t exactly the most desirable.

On Sunday and Wednesday nights, he bundled and delivered newspapers. Monday and Tuesdays were spent as the night watchman at a shady rental storage facility. Friday was both Spike’s favourite and least favourite night. During the earliest part of the evening, Spike shelved returned books at the library at a small community college. With vampiric speed and a familiarity with library procedures from his own years at university, he could do in half an hour that which would take a normal person several hours if they rushed. It gave him a lot of time to read and do a little writing. However, the latter part of the night was spent on North Mission Road at the L.A. County Coroners’ Office.

Spike donned a pair of pale blue scrubs and little nets over his boots as as he entered the outer corridor of the Forensic Pathology wing. The rooms of the wing were all interconnected, the morgue leading to the autopsy room and from the autopsy room to pathology and toxicology. Just as Spike was pulling on a pair of thick rubber gloves over his hands, Dr. Dominick, one of the medical examiners, came into the corridor, throwing her blood-covered gloves and plastic apron into a bright orange hazardous waste bin.

Dr. Salafia Dominick was short, chubby woman with a round face that made her look significantly younger than her actual age, which was slightly disconcerting to most considering what she worked around. She always had a cheery expression even when she had brain matter stuck to her hair and shoes.

“You’re here late, Doc,” Spike smiled, watching her pull a pen from her lab coat pocket and make a notation on a chart.

“Another day, another dead body,” she nodded and handed him a plastic face-shield. “Here, you’re going to need this tonight. We had a BNF brought in late this afternoon.” BNF was Dr. Dominick’s personal code for “bloat-n-float,” a drowning victim that had been in the water for too long.

“Got pretty nasty in there, huh?” Spike took the face shield and put it on, having to adjust it to its widest setting to get it to fit the circumference of his head. It was still too tight.

Dr. Dominick wrinkled up her nose, “Yeah, the guy popped on us in his drawer. The drain in the autopsy table is all clogged up. Hate to do that to you, Will.”

Spike had applied for his jobs using his real name. Getting jobs without I.D. is hard enough; he didn’t need to make it any harder by putting “Spike” on an application.

Shrugging nonchalantly, Spike grabbed the cleaning supplies from a nearby closet, “Don’t worry about it, Doc. This kind of stuff really doesn’t bother me.”

“For a handsome guy like you?” Dr. Dominick pushed her cat’s eye glasses further up on her nose, “Unless you think that being around ugly things makes you look even prettier.”

“Is that why you do what you do?” he raised his eyebrows sassily.

Dr. Dominick blushed, but tried to appear flirtatious, “Are you being fresh with me?”

“Lot fresher than the blokes in the meat lockers at least,” Spike smirked.

“Don’t make me regret leaving you a pan of my delicious red velvet cake in the break room,” Dr. Dominick said, crossing her arms with a huff.

Using his back to push the swinging door to the autopsy room, Spike gave a gracious little bow, “You spoil me, Salafia.”

She really did. Dr. Dominick left him all assortments of cakes, pies, cookies, and other homemade treats ever since he started working there. Spike thought of the adage about the path to a man’s heart being through his stomach but reminded himself that it probably wasn’t a good idea to get involved with a woman who cuts up dead bodies for a living, be she a wonderful baker or not.

The autopsy room was filled with a barely describable smell. It was caused by the festering excrement and bodily fluids of a rotting corpse that had basically exploded like a giant Tremors worm. The normal disinfectant-mixed-with-decaying flesh smell lingered underneath it all. All of this combined to assault Spike’s senses; his stomach lurched, and he was thankful that he had not had eaten anything before he went into work.

One must not mistake that Spike was a vampire and had seen (and done) all manner of horrible things. However, a vampire rarely stayed around to see the putrefaction and desiccation of a victim’s corpse, so many of the sights and smells Spike encountered in the morgue were totally new to him.

The bodies were gone, tagged and bagged, and the blood was hosed off the floor already. Spike could see that one of the autopsy tables had not been drained. Figuring this was the table with the clog that Dr. Dominick had mentioned, Spike sighed and resigned himself to trying to finish as quickly as possible. The table had at least a half an inch of clear fluid mixed with yellowish bile, orangey bits of fat, and pink swirls of blood.

Grabbing a couple of hazard buckets, Spike tossed them underneath the table near the drain pipe. Now, he wasn’t a plumber, but he knew enough to fix a simple clog. Or at least he hoped that he did. Crouching down, he took hold of metal washer that held the two pieces of pipe together and twisted. With a horrible shuddering groan, the metal creaked as a huge mass of splanchnic material came slogging out of the pipe in a slurping bubble, exploding into one of the hazardous waste bucket.

Deciding to let the table drain at its own pace, Spike went into the morgue area with his cleaning supplies, the overhead light flickering lazily. One of the drawers had been left open, and the smell was impossibly worse as Spike went near it. With his gloved hand, he pulled out the tray where, normally, a cadaver would be placed. It was coated in what remained of the drowning victim's stomach and bowel contents.

"Welcome to 'Rock Bottom,' Population: Spike," the bleach-blonde vampire snarked to himself as he began scrubbing and disinfecting the tray with enough industrial strength cleaner to make his eyes water.

Peering into the dark recesses of the cold storage drawer, Spike realized that he would have to crawl inside to decontaminate it. He sighed as he hoisted himself belly-down onto tray and slid into the drawer to begin cleaning.

"You know, it makes no sense for the autopsy room to have a pressure hose and not the morgue. I mean, if every body in these drawers turned out to be a zombie or a vampire, it would be a real blood bath in here... I wonder if zombies would try to snack on a vampire... Would that make a zombie vampire? No one's done a movie like that. There's an idea, I suppose. Maybe I can write schlocky horror flicks for a living... Unliving? Nevermind. I mean, if that piece of shite remake of House of Wax got made, then I could definitely... Great, now I'm talking to myself-"

Suddenly the ancient HVAC kicked on, rattling the walls and sounding like a sonic bomb inside the metal locker, and Spike wound up smacking his head hard on the top of the drawer. Clutching the back of his skull, he ambled out of the cold storage drawer.

"Son of a-" he hissed, his eyes clenched shut, speaking to no one in particular, "I've done enough damage to my head for several lifetimes. Can I please not get a bloody concussion every five minutes? At this rate, I'll be worse off than the Watcher."

"Vampire Watchers would be a far freakier combination than vampire zombies," a voice said.

Spike's eyes snapped open and he saw Gunn leaning against the doorway between the morgue and the autopsy room. He looked exhausted though he smiled softly, his left eye covered by a patch.

"Didn't expect to see you 'round, Charlie. Thought you and Big Blue scampered off somewhere," Spike felt a huge wave of relief wash over him. There was something about seeing a familiar face that gave him a lot of comfort. He hadn't see anyone he knew in several months. Connor was busy getting back into university and dealing with the fall-out from his romantic entanglement with Electro Girl. Spike had to admit that he became lonely far too easily. Hell, even Angel would have been a welcomed presence at times. Spike's well-timed quips wouldn't be wasted on himself.

Gunn nodded, "We were around, saw some stuff, learned some things."

"Well, don't stand there and gush. Can't you see I'm already covered?" Spike smirked, motioning to his scrubs.

For the first time, it seemed like Gunn had the realization he was standing in the middle of an autopsy room.

"That's just nasty, man. I'll wait outside."


Spike exited the autopsy room and into the outer corridor of the Forensic Pathology wing of the basement a short time later sans face shield and gloves, wearing a new set of scrubs, and smelling strongly of anti-bacterial soap.

"Does it bother you being in a place where they hack and slash dead bodies?" Gunn said, running a hand over his smooth-shorn head.

Spike shrugged, "Not as long as no one tries to make a Y-incision in me. It's decent pay at any rate." He pointed to his employee badge clipped to his pants pocket. "Look, I've got a name badge with my picture on it and everything."

Spike led Gunn down the corridor to the break room. It was even bleaker than the autopsy room if that was possible. On a small table in the center of the room was a plate of red velvet squares wrapped with cling-wrap with that note that read "William- Eat me! Just kidding! But, seriously! You look too heroin chic! Love, Salafia."

Gunn picked up the note, "These from your girlfriend?"

Spike blanched, "No, she's not my girlfriend... She's a friend... sort of. We went to see Rocky Horror together last month at the Bellecourt, but we aren't dating or anything."

"Women don't leave you baked goods for nothing," Gunn replied, removing one of the cake squares from the cling-wrap and taking a bite. "Damn, I haven't had anything remotely this good in a while."

Spike shifted nervously. Gunn had never been an extremely talkative man, but Spike felt the presence of something being left unsaid in his demeanor. "So... where's Illyria?"

"Around," came the reply.

Spike's jaw ticked in irritation, and he jerked the plate away before Gunn could grab another square, "Charlie, don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you came all the way down here to shoot the breeze and devour the Doc's cakey treats."

Swallowing hard, Gunn's expression grew grimmer. "I learned a lot of things in Hell, Spike."

It was going to be one of those talks. Spike took a seat.

"I learned that no matter what kind of man you think you are, having a demon inside you changes you. It can make you think that what you're doing is right, righteous even, but deep down, no matter how you rationalize it, it's still evil. I thought it was the Powers that Be trying to help me, but it was just Wolfram and Hart trying to screw me over one last time..." His brown eyes were dark with the grief of his experience, returning both to a human body and soul after being stuck in Hell as a vampire.

"I can imagine that it must be worse for you," Spike said quietly. "You were trying to save everyone even without a soul..."

"I got used, and I got everyone killed," he replied.

"Can't say that I haven't almost been there several times myself. All worked out in the end though," Spike, however, could not shake the memory of holding Connor's lifeless body in his arms, could not forget the image of Angel's head being cleanly sliced off his shoulders. Gunn had murdered them, and Spike could not erase that fact though he wished he could.

"It wasn't all for nothing," Gunn stated calmly, his voice low, dangerous. "I can bring her back, Spike."

Spike's head tilted to the side, brow furrowed, "Whatcha mean?"

"Fred," Gunn looked up, unshed tears wetting the corners of his eyes. "Wolfram and Hart lied to me before, tricked me into unleashing Illyria's true form, but I found a loop hole... I'm going to bring Fred back to us once and for all, and I need your help."