Fandom muses number 10
First thing first: My name isn't Spike. That's just a thing I like t' call myself.
Surprisin' to hear, for some. I'm willing to bet nobody thought of ol' Spike with any sort of perspective on things, yeah? Well, for a while I had none.
Funny what gettin' your soul shoved back into your body will do to you. Aside from the obvious, that is. The Is-It-Live-Or-Is-It-Memorex walk down memory lane of everybody you've hurt over the past century-plus, I mean. That's sort of a given. Never understood what Angel was constantly boo-hooing about before, gotta admit.
I get it now, though.
The first however many years, when I was still a warm, breathin' body, my name was William. Still is, I suppose. Dyin' don't change that. It makes you different in a lot of ways, yeah. In a lot of others, you're still the same, fundamentally speaking.
Gettin' the soul back taught me that, too.
I was a poet. A real Love-Above-All sap. Boo-hoo, poor William's alone, poor William's sensitive. Poor William's always sittin' right under the sphincter of the Great Bloody Beyond, waitin' for the world to relieve itself on his head again.
'S what it seemed like, anyway. Seemed like I was the guy that all the bad in the universe saved itself up for.
Till that fateful night when I met her. Drusilla.
I was cryin' into my notebook, tearin' out the pages, vowin' never to let what was in my heart be used against me again. Never to let someone get close enough to make me feel worthless, unwanted, the bottom of the sodding barrel, like Cecily did.
Vow didn't exactly take, did it?
Drusilla saw somethin' in me. I'd like, lookin' back on it, to think that there was a part of Dru, soulless as she was, that saw a spirit that wasn't exactly kindred, but somethin' close to it. That she needed a companion that would always be there for her, supportin' her, in the same fashion that Angelus and Darla musta seemed to her.
'Course, I had no bleeding idea at the time exactly the level of personal cruelty that my Dark Goddess was capable of, did I?
I'd like t' be able to say that I walked into the night with an open mind, knowin' what I was gettin' myself into. Dyin' didn't open my eyes as wide as I'd like to think. There was still plenty to learn. Only this time, my teachers were a lot more heartless than they were to live William.
Angelus, for one. I learned more about evil from him than I did anyone else. I think he was tryin' to create something as black and awful as he was, himself. That way, he could live with the awful wretch he was with a clean conscience. Don't let anyone try and tell you that vampires don't have that. A conscience. We do. We just spend so much time tryin' to drown out it's persistant little voice that we've trained ourselves not to listen. That's my theory, anyway.
We could be hurt. We could be killed. But the kinder, gentler emotions, the ones that make the breathin' ones that we hurt feel alive, for the most part, they're withered and dead inside the likes of us.
A lot of us change ourselves out, name-wise, to distance ourselves from what we were. A boy from Ireland named Liam becomes a monster named Angelus. A twit raised upper-class by his mum becomes Spike, the scourge of the living world, so he can try and keep up.
It's another kind of armor, y'see. A sheild y' put up to keep the world out. It's not poor vulnerable William, who can be betrayed and hurt by the world, doin' all this nasty to folks. It's Spike, who don't care a whit. It's Spike who killed those two Slayers, the one in China whose name I never bothered to learn, and Nikki Wood in New York. It's Spike who ate his fill of gypsies when Darla found out what they'd done to her lover.
Not William. Never him.
Problem with that is, no matter how well your armor is put together, people always find their way inside, through the seams, 'round the holes where your arms go into it, to get at your heart. With us vampires, it's deadlier than with humans. You get a hole in your heart as a vampire, and usually, there ain't enough left of you to fill the average ashcan.
First it was Drusilla, losin' interest, like a great child whose toy's no longer new. Tossin' me to the side like you'd throw out an empty beer can.
Made me angry. Made me hurt. Made the armor slip for the first time in a hundred or so years. Made William ache, not Spike. Never him. So, I struck out. Used Harmony, poor stupid thing. Tried to keep from hurtin' inside, from bein' lonely like William always was for all those years.
Didn't help.
Fell in love. Again. Let someone get close that I knew I wasn't gonna be able to keep close. Someone I wasn't worthy of. Can't ever make up for the bad I put her and hers through. So, off I went.
Only way to be worthy was to wake up that poor, dried up bit of myself I'd cast off, all those years back. Find a soul.
Did it.
All it gave me back was the worst inside myself. The self-pity. The responsibility. Spent far too long reveling in feeling like I was nothing all over again. Like I was back on the bottom. Beneath everyone this time, not just a beautiful girl or two.
Taken a long time to find a place for both sides of myself, William and Spike. Guess I'm still getting there, really. Think someone once told me that a real person never stops growing and learning and all that. Rubbish, I thought.
Could be that there's something to it, after all.
Surprisin' to hear, for some. I'm willing to bet nobody thought of ol' Spike with any sort of perspective on things, yeah? Well, for a while I had none.
Funny what gettin' your soul shoved back into your body will do to you. Aside from the obvious, that is. The Is-It-Live-Or-Is-It-Memorex walk down memory lane of everybody you've hurt over the past century-plus, I mean. That's sort of a given. Never understood what Angel was constantly boo-hooing about before, gotta admit.
I get it now, though.
The first however many years, when I was still a warm, breathin' body, my name was William. Still is, I suppose. Dyin' don't change that. It makes you different in a lot of ways, yeah. In a lot of others, you're still the same, fundamentally speaking.
Gettin' the soul back taught me that, too.
I was a poet. A real Love-Above-All sap. Boo-hoo, poor William's alone, poor William's sensitive. Poor William's always sittin' right under the sphincter of the Great Bloody Beyond, waitin' for the world to relieve itself on his head again.
'S what it seemed like, anyway. Seemed like I was the guy that all the bad in the universe saved itself up for.
Till that fateful night when I met her. Drusilla.
I was cryin' into my notebook, tearin' out the pages, vowin' never to let what was in my heart be used against me again. Never to let someone get close enough to make me feel worthless, unwanted, the bottom of the sodding barrel, like Cecily did.
Vow didn't exactly take, did it?
Drusilla saw somethin' in me. I'd like, lookin' back on it, to think that there was a part of Dru, soulless as she was, that saw a spirit that wasn't exactly kindred, but somethin' close to it. That she needed a companion that would always be there for her, supportin' her, in the same fashion that Angelus and Darla musta seemed to her.
'Course, I had no bleeding idea at the time exactly the level of personal cruelty that my Dark Goddess was capable of, did I?
I'd like t' be able to say that I walked into the night with an open mind, knowin' what I was gettin' myself into. Dyin' didn't open my eyes as wide as I'd like to think. There was still plenty to learn. Only this time, my teachers were a lot more heartless than they were to live William.
Angelus, for one. I learned more about evil from him than I did anyone else. I think he was tryin' to create something as black and awful as he was, himself. That way, he could live with the awful wretch he was with a clean conscience. Don't let anyone try and tell you that vampires don't have that. A conscience. We do. We just spend so much time tryin' to drown out it's persistant little voice that we've trained ourselves not to listen. That's my theory, anyway.
We could be hurt. We could be killed. But the kinder, gentler emotions, the ones that make the breathin' ones that we hurt feel alive, for the most part, they're withered and dead inside the likes of us.
A lot of us change ourselves out, name-wise, to distance ourselves from what we were. A boy from Ireland named Liam becomes a monster named Angelus. A twit raised upper-class by his mum becomes Spike, the scourge of the living world, so he can try and keep up.
It's another kind of armor, y'see. A sheild y' put up to keep the world out. It's not poor vulnerable William, who can be betrayed and hurt by the world, doin' all this nasty to folks. It's Spike, who don't care a whit. It's Spike who killed those two Slayers, the one in China whose name I never bothered to learn, and Nikki Wood in New York. It's Spike who ate his fill of gypsies when Darla found out what they'd done to her lover.
Not William. Never him.
Problem with that is, no matter how well your armor is put together, people always find their way inside, through the seams, 'round the holes where your arms go into it, to get at your heart. With us vampires, it's deadlier than with humans. You get a hole in your heart as a vampire, and usually, there ain't enough left of you to fill the average ashcan.
First it was Drusilla, losin' interest, like a great child whose toy's no longer new. Tossin' me to the side like you'd throw out an empty beer can.
Made me angry. Made me hurt. Made the armor slip for the first time in a hundred or so years. Made William ache, not Spike. Never him. So, I struck out. Used Harmony, poor stupid thing. Tried to keep from hurtin' inside, from bein' lonely like William always was for all those years.
Didn't help.
Fell in love. Again. Let someone get close that I knew I wasn't gonna be able to keep close. Someone I wasn't worthy of. Can't ever make up for the bad I put her and hers through. So, off I went.
Only way to be worthy was to wake up that poor, dried up bit of myself I'd cast off, all those years back. Find a soul.
Did it.
All it gave me back was the worst inside myself. The self-pity. The responsibility. Spent far too long reveling in feeling like I was nothing all over again. Like I was back on the bottom. Beneath everyone this time, not just a beautiful girl or two.
Taken a long time to find a place for both sides of myself, William and Spike. Guess I'm still getting there, really. Think someone once told me that a real person never stops growing and learning and all that. Rubbish, I thought.
Could be that there's something to it, after all.