Mid-to-later Season Seven, post-'Showtime,' but before 'Get it Done.'
Criticism is always loved, appreciated, and responded to, even if you tell me I'd be better off doing something else with my time.
Spike had a curious habit of dissecting words, taking them apart to search for a deeper meaning. It began, he supposed, during the Latin he'd studied as a young boy, finding the 'study of life' in biology, the 'previous to war' in antebellum.
But later on, as newspapers began to take the place of his studies in Latin, the habit changed to searching for meanings that weren't rooted in a dead and decaying language. It was a common occurrence, with the linotype printing presses of the day, that movement of the printing blocks once they had been set would jostle everything else out of order, making a single article of only forty-five lines take a half-hour to decipher. When he finally admitted to himself that he would benefit from a pair of glasses, this time was cut down quite a bit.
The words were spliced apart and mashed together in a rocky stream that could make the article mean something else entirely. Jostle the block too much, and articles intersected in a mish-mash of broken words.
William had never minded this, however, finding different meaning in ideas that had been split in half and melded with something else entirely, to form new interpretations. 'Village,' when split to form 'vill' and 'age' became a 'vile age' or an 'ill age,' perhaps coined by some hermit that looked upon his time with others as better forgotten. When reading the line, 'the presentation given by Dr. Grimsby on the stateof Lon dongen e ralh eal this toodet ailed...' all that he could think of was how there seemed to be an ill air about the word 'detailed.'
Though he mostly stuck to literary reviews and the social pages, every once in a while he felt it his civic duty to educate himself on the status of crime in the area. Later on, even as a vampire, he remembered that in the midst of the article, some text had shifted and the sentence read, 'the condition of theb ody w henpoli cefish edit from theTh amesw as blueBell reported...'
He would always remember that in the midst of all the chaotic text and grotesque descriptions of the murder, a single flower had sprouted in the newsprint.
Over a century later, sleepy, but trying to concentrate on the paperback he was reading in the Summers basement, his tired eyes came across the word 'redemption.'
Only, with his eyes playing tricks on him, the word split apart into 'red emption.'
Empty the red.
Spike snorted, tossing the paperback to the floor with a satisfying slap against the concrete and determinedly rolling over. It was a stupid word game, he decided. He would never, ever be able to empty the red. He'd lived most of his life in a red haze, and every time he dreamt, he was drenched in it and horrified...
He had won his soul to pierce that crimson flood, but it could not banish his sins, only illuminate them.
He shut his tired eyes, but could only see the red.