There's a light at the end of the tunnel.

All's well as ends well.

The ends justify the means.

English is a bloody wonderful language, isn't it? All those burning words and flaming phrases, all mashed up – as darling Dru would say – into a muddled miasma of madness. Well, she knew about madness, did Dru. She could also be quite a poet, when she was in a prophetic sort of mood.

I was a poet, too. Bet you didn't figure that one. Yeah, I was a poet, hopelessly devoted to good old English – the flowing of the shimmering words, the thrill and frustration in the chase of an idea, hounding it to its exhaustion until it was trapped, caught, shaken and snapped but still so alive you could sink your teeth into it.

A little like that.

Well, what do you expect? I'm a vampire. I dare say Wee Willy Winky was a little more sweet and innocent and frolicking lambkins when it came to poetry, but there you are. That was him. This is me: Spike. William the Bloody if you like, but you, mate, you're the only one who's bloody here, or you will be once I get my teeth into you. Yeah, I'm a vampire. I see poetry in other things now. I see it in blood, hunting, in killing. I see it in song (Sid Vicious, never Billy Idol) and wine (whisky, vodka, the few acceptable beers) and women.

In Buffy.

That's the only way I can think of her, the only way my bloody thesaurus of an ex-wimpy, not-quite-ex-poet's mind can find to describe her: she's a poem, with her dichotomy (thesaurus mind again, yeah?) of beauty and darkness, her loveliness and her plain and simple scariness. A fifth of my age, but somehow older. More mature, maybe. More uptight, definitely.

She said that I was beneath her. Can't say that surprised me completely. Guess the swagger must be a bit of a show – what a shocker. Beneath her, like I'm beneath Dead Cecily, and Dead Nikki, and all the other dead slayers and girls and humans I've eaten. Of course, humans have never killed, or done other nasty little things to each other. Buffy doesn't like to think about that. Why would she? She's above all that.

So, I traded up on the food chain. I'm a vampire now, which means that I do all the little things that humans do, but I'm evil enough to admit it. And guess what?

(Now there's a phrase we didn't have back when I was human. I might have traded up, or down, but at least I traded out.)

I'm still a poet. I see poetry in everything – a fairly singular kind of poetry. I see everything – vampire vision, remember? – and I translate it into the chase and the kill and into blood. I've got a century of death and slaughter behind me, and I'm monster enough to admit that it's beautiful. But Buffy… that bitch of a slayer, with her righteousness and her uptightness, has managed what a century's worth of begging, drivelling idiots never did, never could have. She made me believe that William the Bloody's beneath a whiny Californian blonde. She made me believe that I traded down, not up; that there's poetry in other things. And I'll kill her for it.

She's the slayer; I'm a vampire. She hurt me; I'll hurt her, a bit more efficiently. Yeah, I know how this one ends.