Cereal: Yay! I'm learning HTML and it makes the world go round (or at least the poem look readable).

That was cool. Spike would be proud, I think.

I don't that Spike would be proud. Human William might have been pleased with it. But I'm glad you liked it.

Yes, you're right. It would give the Bloody Awful Poet some degree of pride. Not that I think it's awful, though. Spike lacks patience with poems. And most people, living and Undead.

A lot of Spike's problems stem from lacking patience. It's hardly surprising he wasn't a great poet!

Imposters In This Country is finally up and archived so I can safely go back to the Special Hell making.

Oh, shit. And I need to work on the HCL/AtS that SA and I are doing. Kerfuckity.

Poor Mr. The Bloody. There are so many *decent* rhymes of effulgent.

And one would think, on edit, that when one spends all day making sure XML files are well-formed, one could START a tag properly.

Yes, there are. Though I suspect Spike would try to make them *in*decent as quickly as possible.

Even Online Rhymer [link] came up with: accent, advent, ascent, assent, augment, bent, cement, cent, comment, consent, content, convent, dent, descent, event, extent, ferment, foment, forwent, fragment, gent, hellbent, indent, intent, invent, lament, leant, lent, meant, misspent, pent, percent, portent, present, prevent, relent, rent, repent, resent, scent, sent, spent, tent, torment, trident, unbent, unmeant, unsent, unspent, vent, went

How long a poem do you think you could make from that lot, eh? Not that they're all very good. And I'm talking too much about nothing, and should shut up now.

Well done on posting Imposters, BTW.

I had half a bottle of wine last night with dinner, as there are only the two of us, and it doesn't keep well.

I'm shocked I didn't totally f-up my posting.

Here is my still untitled Xander/Spike angst fest. SPOILERS for HIM.

This is the missing scene between grabbing the jacket and getting back to Buffy's.

Xander and Spike dashed around a corner and ducked into a side street, not the safest place to be after dark in Sunnydale. They probably should have taken Xander's car, but the girls really needed to go back to Buffy's and it wasn't like Xander hadn't spent all of high school patrolling on foot. RJ didn't seem to be following them, which kind of seemed odd but maybe he was still stunned by the sudden raid. They slowed to a walk and then stopped. He'd taken the jacket from Spike as they ran and now he twisted it in his hands. He regretted not bringing the car, it was taking time to get back and he was stuck with Spike and he couldn't stop thinking.

"We should get this back to Willow and Buffy right away."

The jacket felt heavy and warm, coarse material and so much like high school; a letterman jacket. The Holy Grail of high school. If you had one it meant you were an athlete, you belonged; you wore your jacket like a shield of honor. Although lots of guys didn't wear their jackets, their girlfriends wore them. Xander held the jacket in front of him; he tried to remember if he'd ever seen Cordelia date Lance, RJ's brother, but he couldn't recall. Cordelia had worn a jacket like this, a symbol of her boyfriend wrapped around her like a prize. Xander wanted to try on the jacket, to see if he felt different. He wondered if it changed the wearer as much as the girls. And how exactly were the girls affected?

"How do you think it works? Do you think it works off the attraction of the wearer or the attraction of some random girl?"

Spike only shrugged.

"It can't affect every girl," Xander continued, "otherwise RJ would be mobbed and while it sounds like fun to have every woman after you, in reality, not so much. So you think only works for the family? It could be something with the way RJ felt about the girls? " Xander looked back up at Spike. "Probably just RJ, because of Willow, I mean she's not into boys anymore."

Spike snorted.

"Wha?" Xander shot Spike a glance but Spike was silent again. "I would be field testing the jacket, before taking it back to Buffy where it might not be safe."

Spike snorted again.

"Look if you have something to say, just spit it out. Unless you're about to start talking to your InvsoFriends and then spare me and don't."

"It's magic. It just works." Startled by Spike's voice, Xander looked up. He waited to see if Spike would say anything else, but he just stood there, back in his creepy silent mode.

"So it's just magic, and it just works. There should be some kind of test. We should know how it works, just in case. I'd suggest you try on the jacket but we both know women just fall all over themselves for you." Xander couldn't keep the bitterness out of his last words. Why was he even here, talking to Spike? Spike, who was living with him---again. Spike who hurt Buffy and fucked Anya and fought to protect Dawn; and first he had a chip and he was evil, now he had a soul and he was insane; and what had happened to the days of Giles warning about the evilness of vampires and their lack of humanity and why couldn't it be as easy as "vampires are evil, so stake them." Xander wondered if it had ever really been that simple, or if it had been a kind of delusion. Like the jacket; that made Lance bigger and more powerful but how could you hate someone that was living your loser life, fast-tracking the Pizza Barn management program?