TITLE: Little Harm Goes A Long Way
AUTHOR: Ragna (writinggoddess@aol.com)
RATING: FRT
CLASSIFICATION: Spike POV.
SUMMARY: Thanks to yet another Harmony goof-up, Spike's stuck baby-sitting...
SPOILERS: Set after "Shells" in season 5 A:tS.
DISTRIBUTION: Any sites with my fic up; you all have unspoken permission. I write it, you can post it. Everyone else just keep my name on it and let me know.
DISCLAIMER: If you don't recognize it, chances are it's my own creation. If you do, I don't own it. Joss Whedon, Kazui Sandollar, The WB, UPN, et. al. most likely do.
FEEDBACK: Please send it offlist and let me know it's feedback; I do rapid delete on my account due to a lot of spam.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Once upon a time, I wrote my very first Harmony POV fic, where she was watching Spike bake cupcakes for a contest. "Very Bad Combination" went on to make a lot of people laugh. So now, in response to a challenge laid out by gidgetgirl (who sent out a long list of them, and I'm going to try and answer them all), this is a Spike POV fic meeting the following requirements for...

Also, using the wonder that is Challenge In A Can (http://www.dymphna.net/challenge), got "Harmony," "lucky" and "credit card."

***

"Blondie bear! Where are you, blondie bear? It's time for dress-up!"

Bloody hell, what did I, Angel and the rest of us who help the hopeless do to deserve this? It isn't as though we were all that evil...all right, it isn't as though Wesley or Gunn are all that evil. Not so sure about Illyria, but since she has some of Fred's memories floating around and seems rather fond of at least those of us here at good old Wolfram & Hart, I suppose she hasn't done much harm, in this incarnation.

Harm. Bloody hell, I hope the little brat never finds me. Never.

"Spike! I'm gonna dress you up now, do you understand me? You promised you'd play with me!"

Please, no, I hear her getting closer...

"Boo!"

Damn!

***

I glare at the little imp. I'm wearing lipstick (in pink), eyeshadow (in purple) and clip on pearl earrings. An electric blue feather boa's around my neck. She tried to put me in one of Fred/Illyria's dresses, but I drew the line there.

If I have to dress up, then I may as well set a few limits. At least she agreed to paint my nails black. Angel wasn't so lucky when he got suckered into playing dress-up; he got orange nails and she found some nail decals or something so he had smiley faces on the thumbs.

"Bloody hell," she mutters, vamping out and glaring, just like me. "I hate my life, I hate not being a member of the Slayer Fan Club anymore and I hate dresses, So bugger off." She went back to human form, looked at me, and giggled. "What's 'bugger' mean?"

"Something you're too young to hear."

"Yeah, well, I used to be a big vampire."

"Well, now you're a little imp, so I'm not telling."

"I'm not an imp! I'm a vampire! Don't you know the difference, stupid?"

I sigh and lower my head. The entire room we're in is outfitted in pink, and staring at it too long gives me a migraine. Angel spent a fortune on the corporate credit card after the incident, making sure Harmony was happy so she'd leave us all the hell alone. Didn't help much, really. Wonder if we can bring Cordelia back from the dead for some help in dealing with this hellspawn. After all, they knew each other as little tykes, right?

"Drink your tea!"

"Harmony, love, I don't want to drink it."

"It's from that bottle that you tell me not to touch."

Okay, maybe this won't be so bad. I take a drink and spit it out. "Bloody hell, Harm, what did you do to my whisky?"

"I added some water to it. It was too dark for tea. Then it got too light, so I added some Coke. And then...well, I like strawberry stuff, so I thought I'd add it."

"Add what?"

"Strawberry syrup."

I shake my head, and then an awful thought hits me. "You didn't do it to the whole bottle, did you?"

"No." I start to actually take a breath so I can sigh in relief until she adds, "But I added the strawberry to the clear stuff in the other bottle, and that's my tea."

Then I realized Harmony, little Harmony, had just had seven cups of strawberry flavored tequila.

"Bloody hell. ANGEL!"

***

Harm had a lot of fun mimicking Angel. She'd been doing it since she was hired, and being turned into something between a five and seven year old didn't stop her. In fact, made her better at it.

A drunken Harm, though, made for some interesting mockery.

"Oh, I'm so alone. I fight the forces of evil in dark clothes from a law firm, and woe is me because I'm all alone." And then she hiccupped like one of those cartoon characters who's had too much to drink and giggled insanely. Never cared much for her laugh as an adult, and this just reminded me why: she had the laugh of a little girl in a big girl's body.

Now that she was a little girl, it seemed more appropriate.

Come to think of it, ever since Harmony walked in on the meeting between Angel, Wesley and the demon mage from the Sumynorieh tribe and pissed off the mage by complaining about the foul stench (even if she was right), having her be a little girl just seemed so...appropriate.

Though I wish the mage had turned her into an actual five year old, or seven year old, or whatever bloody age he'd turned her into, because as a vampire, it bloody well hurt when she bit during a temper tantrum. Leads me to think she's maybe five and a half, but she looks a little older. Six, maybe? Do six year olds have tantrums that include vamping out and biting?

Granted, she never bites Wesley. No, she has a thing for the bugger. He comes into the room and there's blissful silence. I almost wonder if there's a way we could make a Wesley bot, like that Buffy bot I had a while back, and give it to her for keeps.

I do think Gunn was smart not to smack her on the head when she bit him; he just flinched and yelled for Angel to come take care of the problem. For some reason, in the end, it always falls to one of us to take care of her.

***

Angel put her in bed and now she's asleep. She has one of those canopy beds, and unicorns all over the place. There's even unicorn wallpaper up. It's enough to make a fantasy novel hater scream.

Course, I can handle it, I suppose. Don't mind Harmony so much when she's asleep; that's how it was when she was an adult and we were together, anyway. So yeah, some things stay the same.

But Harm, now...well, they always say a little goes a long way for a lot of different things, and now a little Harm is going a long way, too.

A long way to annoy the bloody hell out of all of us. I swear, we all count down the time it takes for her to fall asleep. Thank goodness little girls tire out so quickly after they've spent the day terrorizing those around them.

I quietly get up to leave, and as I turn off the light to shut the door, I hear it.

"Blondie bear?"

I shut the door. Maybe she'll think I didn't hear her...

"Spike! Wanna bedtime story!"

Oh, bloody hell.