Sweet William
William hadn't come back from the library when he said he would, and now John and Thomas were out looking for him. Elizabeth paced the front room waiting for her brothers to come home with their wayward cousin.
When they did, all she could do was cry.
William's lithe body was cold and his skin was grey as cobblestones.
The funeral was held the next day; a small service with only a handful of tearful relatives and morose neighbours, school chums, and those pious women that saw it fit to attend all funerals in the little churchyard.
The police had done a short, small investigation, but as there were no wounds on his body and no witnesses of a crime, the case of the mysterious death of William James Kirby.
It was a week later when Elizabeth took fresh flowers to lie by her cousin's grave when she saw the upturned soil and dirty footprints on the lawn.
Frightened and assuming that someone was trying to rob her William's grave, Elizabeth called the police. A cement casing was laid overtop of the grave and a cross etched into the smooth stone.
The Kirby's thought that their cousin would rest in his eternal peace.
It only made him and Angelus laugh.
Drusilla and William often visited his own grave when a melancholy mood fell upon him, she would his and giggle at the crosses on the stone and sing nursery rhymes.
Nearly two hundred years later William stood over his own grave once more.
It was surprising to him that it hadn't been dug up to make room for some other poor sod, as was common in those days to do. Lucky for him the grave had been shallow, not like the way they dig them now. Buffy had to dig herself out from six feet under, he had only crawled out of hardly three, but it had been winter when he met Drusilla in the lawn maze outside the library, so he could hardly blame the poor gravediggers that had to scrape up the frozen dirt.
He and Illyria were in the old, musky cemetery alone.
They were the only ones to survive the army of demons.
Gunn had died not long into the battle, and the great Poof ended up in that damned dragon's gullet, but not before destroying most of the army.
Illyria crouched next to the worn headstone and titled her head as she read the faded inscription.
"Who was this William James Kirby? He died long ago – did you know him?"
Spike grinned.
"That I did, Blue. Knew him like the back of me hand."
"Who was he?"
"He was me, or I was him to be correct."
Illyria, in the shape of long departed Fred, tilted her head to the other side and furrowed her brow. "Did the stone not keep you in your grave?"
"Ha," the vampire chuckled, running a hand through his brown curls, "they didn't know left from right back then. I'd already gone and buggered off with Dru by the time they slapped that stone and cross stuff on my grave. 'Spose it would have been fun if they'd have dug it up to recycle and found no bones in a clawed up casket, eh?"
Illyria didn't comment, but stood and continued to wander through the shadowy graveyard.
Spike watched after her – she had saved his life, after all, and they had escaped with a little help from the slayers in LA.
Spike sighed – his duster had been wreaked in the fight and his spares were most likely all ashes by now. He was just lucky that he wasn't too.
Now he had been called up to dorky central by the new Watchers Council from his retirement digs in Ireland.
His new look still wasn't working for him – he let his hair grow out a bit and gotten rid of the bleached look, and even tried a goatee (which was promptly shaved off after comments from Illyria that the facial hair indeed made him look like a goat) but he missed his old black clothes and the comfy leather coat.
Illyria called over from the far end of the graveyard, so he obligingly left his post over his own grave and came to stand next to the bewildered ex-God.
"These people have the same last name as you, and appear to have lived in the same time. Who were they and why are they not placed where you were?"
Spike cocked an eyebrow at her comment, but looked down at the shared headstone.
Kirby – Jason, Emma, John, Thomas and Elizabeth, the large stone read, listing off the dates of birth and the common date of death, only three weeks after his own.
"Wha – but they didn't die then! I saw Elizabeth at least ten years after I died."
"They have a crossed stone above their graves like your own," Illyria commented. "Were they bitten as well?"
Spike blanched.
"I don't know. If they did… are they still around…." The vampire brooded over the question, and he was silent.
When they left the gloom of the cemetery for the council he was silent, and when they got there and were surrounded by watchers and slayers, he was silent.
Not even when Giles appeared and started bugging the vamp did Spike speak a single word.
The only thing that made him finally break his silence was when someone gasped, "Oh my God! Spike?"
It was Dawn Summers – she raced across the crowded room to grip him in a bear hug.
"Andrew didn't tell us you were back until we heard about LA, but we thought that for sure you had gotten killed, again, but permanently this time."
Allowing the slightest shade of a smile, Spike hugged the younger sister of the oldest slayer. "Good to see you too, niblet."
((This was written before I ever saw the episodes of Buffy where we met his mother and so on and so forth. Just ignore that those ever happened and read this, okay? ;) ))