It had been a long fight, but a good one, uphill all the way but with more rewards than he could ever have imagined. As the end drew near, the action went into slow motion and Spike remembered the people who had finally believed in him and loved him and allowed him to become what he was now. He remembered the small blonde woman who had fought him and fought beside him, tried to kill him then learned to love him and who had eventually become his wife and later left him a widower. He remembered the sister-in-law who would, he knew, miss him and mourn him but who was a strong woman with family of her own and who would carry on. He remembered the red-haired witch and her quiet lover, "the birds" he'd called them, who had moved to his homeland with the Watcher. The Watcher was gone. The ex-demon he'd spent the final years of his life with had mourned him more deeply than he'd ever seen anyone mourn before and then one day the whelp had phoned her and in middle age they were able to find the abiding love that had eluded them in their younger years. He smiled, remembering them all and loving them as much as he ever had.
He didn't want his life to end, no matter how large the hole his love had left when she'd been killed doing what he was doing now. But, just as had happened to her, someone had come along that was a little bit faster, a little bit stronger. Not a lot, but enough to let the stake slip through his defenses. He'd never made a secret of the fact that he was still a vampire no matter how much good he'd done in the past decades, and the enemy always tried to take advantage of that fact. Now, on a late Sunday evening in early winter, in an old churchyard with the wind crying through the bare trees, the end was here.
Just as the action sped back from slow motion to real time, Spike's ears registered the words of the song carried on the wind from the church next door. "...and shall be till I die. Redeeming love has been my theme and shall be till I die."
And as the dust o'ertook him, he smiled.