Spike strode through the graveyard. He ignored the midwinter snow that battered at his pearlescent skin and sodden hair. Swirls of flakes danced around his boots and flirted with the hem of the red coat he had taken to wearing. It glowed darkly with remembered sins and old blood, weighing heavily upon his shoulders and his newly regained conscience. Spike walked fast, his strides were long as he attempted to escape the feelings that constantly roiled within him.
When he regained the soul, Spike felt the change in his heart and his head, the weight of self-awareness bore him downward, deeper and deeper into his own mind. Glorious memories rich with blood became shameful pages in his personal history; all that he used to be proud of become all that he needed to escape. At first he continued to exist out of habit not thought. He did not even remember how he had reached Europe.
He had travelled for six months since Africa and finally he hoped to find a moment of peace. He had shunned humanity since the change – all laughing faces were recriminations for the happy moments he had stolen , all the sad looks brought him the burden of a thousand, thousand victims tears. He knew he needed to find a purpose, a way to live again, He was no longer the big bad, but no longer was he William. He was a new thing, Pinocchio had become a real boy, hacked from the wood of centuries of death, newly fleshed and carved with a soul in his centre.
"How can you escape the horror – when you ARE the horror" he mumbled through lips blue from the cold within and the cold without. He stalked onwards – searching for a part of the William he once was. He had come here to find his first beginning; Williams parents. Spike hoped to find a third start "Third time lucky" he laughed at himself. Somewhere here near where he had first begun perhaps he could find a way to carry on beyond the horror he felt at who he had been and what he had done. Spike hoped to supersede the horror he had become in Dru's kiss and his thirst for undeath. His old home was gone under some tacky tower block that imprisoned a thousand lonely souls in daily drudgery and the alley in which he had bought free of his soul was now flattened under some dual carriageway. Spike hoped that perhaps here with his parents' grave he could find a moment of peace from the past.
He reached the end of the graveyard and saw the angel standing over his parents tomb. Its eyes were downcast and London pollution and the passing of years had worn its wings to frail and fragile things – but for a moment he felt a sense of tranquillity. Spike realized that with the tears and the pain that were the burden of his soul he had also earned a right to his first past, his first family, and his humanity.
Spike lay down under the protecting spread of the angels wings and rested for the first time in six months. The snow continued to fall, dappling the red of his coat and the black of his boots. Soon Spike wall only another corpse covered by the blanket of midwinter snow in a London graveyard