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Title:
Cubed
Author:
Miss Murchison
Rating:
R, overall
Disclaimer:
All characters are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy,
etc. Only the lame plots and dialogue herein are mine.
Word Total: about
20,000.
Summary: To solve a
mysterious string of deaths, Buffy and Spike must go where they have
never gone before—undercover at a large company, where they must hunt
down a murderer amid the cubicles while coping with PowerPoint
Presentations and the Coffee Fund Rules.
Extra long, boring,
skipable note: This is a long-gestating fic. In fact, several
elephants could have gestated, been born, and grown to adolescence
since I started it. I started it just before Season 7 began airing and
worked on it a bit more during the depths of angst-ridden drama on the
screen, at my job, and in my fic. I kept adding to it whenever I was
desperately in need of cheering myself up. I finished it as an
antidote to my current fic, which chronicles Buffy's depression.
Therefore, I've set it in an alternative Season 6 where there is no
angst. Assume Buffy didn't die at the end of Season 5, or, if she did,
she was glad to get back. Don't go looking for any huge problems among
the canon characters. They're not there, although all is not sweetness
and light. Which is good, because we all know how bad light is for
Spike.
Thanks:
To
Keswindhover and
to the friend who has since disappeared from the fandom but who
encouraged this idea in the first place. (If you ever read this, you
know who you are, and you are missed by others as well as by me.)
Thanks as well to
It Must Be
Tuesday, for creating the
Seasonal Spuffy community on Live Journal that encouraged me to
finally finish this story.
Chapter Five
"Who left this here?" demanded Melandra.
Buffy looked over the cubicle wall and saw that her boss was standing
in front of a pile of hardware that seemed intended to build yet more
cubicles. She noticed it earlier when she came back from a meeting.
"Some guy from Facilities," said Rita. "He dumped them a couple of
hours ago. I don’t know where he went. Stephanie was complaining that
he’s never where he’s supposed to be."
"I thought they fired that guy last week," said Harry, who had
approached at the sound of a possible opportunity to volunteer for
something.
Rita shrugged. "There’s a new one now. They always have at least one
guy like that working in Facilities. I think it’s an OSHA rule." She
smiled looked down as if thinking of something pleasant. "This one has
very nice blue eyes."
Melandra was not inclined to be intimidated, even by the threat of
mindless government regulations. "Get Stephanie to tell him to clean
up this mess."
Rita had turned back to her monitor with a set to her shoulders that
said running this kind of errand was not in her job description. "She
says she can’t make him follow orders. And she thinks he’s cursing her
out half the time, but she can’t be sure because she doesn’t
understand half of what he says."
"Why, is he foreign?" demanded Melandra.
"Oh, yes." Rita smiled again. "He’s English. The accent’s quite nice,
really."
Well, thought Buffy as Harry volunteered to call Stephanie and
pass on Melandra's message, at least Spike is settling in as well
as can be expected. Too well, as far as Rita is concerned.
A few minutes later, Buffy saw Spike wandering down the far hallway, a
toolbox dangling from his left hand. She slid out of her chair, and
dodged past Rita’s empty desk and Melandra’s open office door. Her
eyes widened as she heard laughter from behind Stan’s door, but she
kept going until she had tracked Spike through two heavy double doors
and into a loading dock.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
He was seated on a pile of boxes that sagged under his weight. "Having
a fag and otherwise loafing, of course. Should be obvious."
Buffy regarded the boxes. "I think you're crushing whatever's in
there."
"Yeah." He leaned back and took a drag on his cigarette.
"And my boss is pissed off because you dumped a load of junk just
outside her office."
"Yeah." He was watching a truck pull away from the open door of the
dock, exposing a swathe of blue sky.
Since this conversation was going nowhere, Buffy looked around the
loading dock. There were cages full of equipment, which she assumed
was kept locked up to keep someone from stealing it, but the contents
seemed to consist mostly of broken furniture. Newly delivered boxes of
probably expensive and fragile equipment were lying around, free for
thieves to take and vampires to lounge on. Some kind of machine made
of lots of red metal with a big gate in front of it lurked by the
door. The floors were dusty and stained cement, and the air was so
full of truck exhaust, Spike's cigarette didn't even qualify as a
minor annoyance.
He tossed away the butt-end. "Actually, Slayer, I came in here because
I smelled someone. Couldn't find him, though, because that great semi
blasted the place full of diesel. Soon as it clears, I'll see if I can
tell what he was up to."
"You're turning into a regular Joe Hardy."
"Since Nancy Drew is falling down on the job, I had to. Or did you
find out anything this morning?"
Buffy drew herself up to her full 62 inches. "I was in a meeting all
morning."
He slipped off the boxes, grinning with such a superior expression she
wanted to hit him. "I, on the other hand, have been detecting." He
stepped towards her. "Do I get a reward?"
She stepped away, and found her back against the side of the red
machine. "Not until you tell me what you found out. And you may want
to avoid telling me what you broke, destroyed, or stole in the
process."
He tried to look insulted. "I only nicked things I found under copier
hoods. Everyone seems to walk away from those things without taking
their originals back. I’ve been checking machines all over the
building." He opened the lid of a toolbox lying on the floor and took
out some papers.
"You found all that in copy machines?"
"Well, I might have picked up an item or two that people dropped in
the trash instead of shredding it. And a few things off the edges of
desks." As he flipped through the pages, he gave up on his faux air of
apology and a native pride in his thievery was echoed in his voice.
"Quite a haul. Lots of porn. Some medical claim forms—do you know
Susan down the next aisle from you has a yeast infection?"
"Ick, no." But Buffy reached out for the papers.
He held them away, maneuvering her against the side of the machine as
he held the documents just out of reach. "Rita’s buying some naughty
underwear. She left the lingerie catalog when she Xeroxed the order
from. I thought at first that was another porn haul." He contemplated
it for a few seconds until Buffy tore it from his grasp. He went on.
"Your good friend Eric is also filing a medical form. Seems he has an
even more embarrassing problem than Susan."
"Eww. What does this have to do with anything, Spike?"
He flipped to the final document. "And your charming boss left some
copies of financial reports."
She put out her hand. "Let me see." She snatched at more papers and
grimaced. "Eww again. I didn’t mean Eric’s doctor’s note! Gross!"
Spike was smirking. He leaned a hand against the metal spine of the
machine and his face was next to hers. "I saw him trying to chat you
up. Gives a different perspective on him, doesn’t it?"
"He never had a chance with me, you lunatic." She stared at the paper
in horror. "Fortunately."
"I saw you laughing at his jokes. But next time he tries to give you a
jolly, just remember that paper." His hips moved closer. "And remember
this."
Buffy put her hands on his chest and prepared to push him away.
"Spike, put aside your insane vampire jealousy, stop trying to wig me
out, and show me that financial report."
"I'll show you anything you want, Slayer." But the hand holding the
papers was behind her head now, which made it awkward to reach back
and grab them away. Besides, he was managing to use his fingers to
send little shivers down her spine without ever dropping the papers.
And somehow the hands she had on his chest weren't doing much in the
way of shoving. They were doing a lot more in the way of inching up to
his shoulders.
A moment later, their lips and tongues were busy not-arguing too.
Their embrace tightened and she was pushed back against the metal
thing behind her. The entire machine shuddered, giving a thud that
sent vibrations coursing through her body.
"What is that thing?" she asked, pulling away a half-inch.
"Cardboard crusher." His hips thrust against hers again, and there was
another thud. "It takes a messy pile of old boxes and turns them into
neat cubes for recycling. Your pretty little bum is pressed against
the start button." Thud. "Makes for an interesting sensation,
doesn't it?"
Thud. That one set every nerve tingling, and Buffy had to admit
he was right. A small part of her brain was also insisting that making
out in an open loading dock with incriminating papers literally in
hand was probably not the best way to be spending her second day on
the job. Dawn would be very disappointed if her sister got fired
before collecting at least one full paycheck, and it would be very
hard to explain the reasons for the latest employment interruptus.
But Spike's lips and teeth were tugging at Buffy's nerve endings as
surely as the thuds from the cardboard crusher, and his hips were
starting to set up an interesting rhythm that promised consummations
that had nothing to do with minimum wage.
One of Spike's hands slid up under her skirt, his fingers taking a few
minutes to play with the softness of her thigh before moving on to
even more sensitive spots. Buffy, in spite of her earlier hesitation,
found her own hand inching southward. A fly button snapped, a zipper
slid a few inches, and she felt the hard column of his cock in her
hand.
As her fingers grasped him, Spike began thrusting against her hand,
pushing her back time and again, his own hand and lips as busy as
ever. The rhythm pulsed through her, and she took a moment to wonder
if the designer of the cardboard crusher realized that his invention
could double as a full body vibrator.
Spike moaned and pushed against her harder than ever. He was building
up to a howl, and she was getting close too. Buffy gasped and was
astonished to hear how loud she screamed. Then she was shocked to
realize she wasn't screaming at all. The machine was. It was shrieking
at fire alarm levels, loud enough to warn half the huge building that
something was afoot on the loading dock.
"What's wrong with it?" she demanded, reluctantly pulling away from
Spike and straightening her clothes, her eyes on the door to
cubicle-land. Someone was bound to burst in on them any second, and
her sense of embarrassment was starting to overwhelm her frustration
at the thudus interruptus.
"It's jammed." Spike was doing up his zipper and looking more worried
than she would have expected. "And I think I know who's jamming it!"
"Who?" Buffy stopped in the act of buttoning her blouse. "What do you
mean who? Not what?"
"You sound like Abbott. Or Costello. And it doesn't smell like a
what." Spike stepped to the front of the machine and yanked on the
grid covering it. It squealed open, and several cardboard boxes slid
out, along with the other contents of its maw.
"Hey, is there a problem here?" Harry trotted into the loading dock,
several coworkers at his heels. "Do you need any help with the
crusher? Because I volunteered to work out here once when—" He
stopped, staring.
The people behind him also stared, and some of them began screaming.
Buffy looked at the thing that had fallen out of the crusher. "That’s
Eric’s name tag on the top."
Spike nodded grim agreement.
"What happened to him?" asked Harry.
Buffy shook her head in disbelief. "He’s been cubed."
In
Chapter Six, Spike encounters Melandra
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