Death Becomes...
An Angel shortfic
by P.H. Wise

Disclaimer: Buffy, Angel and all their various and sundry associated characters belong to Joss Whedon. I am not Joss, make no claim to be Joss, and am not doing this for commercial purposes.

Warning: This ficlet is set during the Angel season 5 episode entitled, 'Time Bomb.' Character death is involved, though if you've seen the episode, you know it wasn't permanent.

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He'd always known he would die a violent death. It kinda went with the territory of the whole 'vampire, creature of the night' thing. Well, he could have kissed sunlight, but William the Bloody was never one for rampant jackassery.

... ok, so maybe he was. But he wasn't stupid.

OK, but at least he was clever.

Right. Where was I?

Oh yeah. Spike. Dying.

He'd always known he would die violently, but he'd never expected it to be like this. He stared down at the wooden stake that Illyria had driven clear through his chest and out the front, unable to quite believe what he was seeing. Time seemed to stretch out endlessly in that moment between life and dust.

This wasn't right. This wasn't right at all! He was a hero. A champion. To die like this? Casually destroyed by a creature so much more powerful than he was that he had about as much of a chance as a kid on a tricycle did against a tank? It was right undignified, it was.

Maybe she'd missed.

That was it. She had to have missed.

Fate couldn't mean to kill him. Fate could not mean to kill him.

It was stupid. It was inconceivable. Surely fate would not allow him to die. If he was to die here, why had he been brought back in the first place? What was the point of getting a soul, becoming a Champion, and working towards redemption if it was all going to end like this?

What about that whole 'Shanshu bugaboo'? Was that really about Angel after all? That annoyed him perhaps more than anything else, more than even the thought of dying. Again. Yeah, he was getting a little annoyed with the whole 'death' thing. Bloody hell! It wasn't right. It wasn't right. Angel should be the one dying here at Illyria's whim. It wasn't FAIR. It wasn't supposed to be this way!

But it was.

"Bugger," he said, and died.

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Written originally for the 'Survivor Round 1' thread at Twisting the Hellmouth.