Chapter 3: Considering the Nature of Death

Acceptance of one's death is, in some traditions, a phase that lets the soul move forward through the afterlife. (This chapter has a single drabble, whose name "Biting" is the prompt on which it's based.)

Biting

After Lloyd's nudge toward this moment of transition in his soul's journey, Spike pauses in contemplation. Of course, considering death, a vampire's thoughts skip naturally to the act of being bitten. But, is that the only death that matters? Is death merely a transition between phases of one's being? Being Spike, he gamely delves into these thoughts until he gets to the nugget he needs to find, after which he decides he's had enough.

-oo-00-oo-

Lloyd's words rang in his head. Ask yourself: how many times did you die? Then make of it what you will. This from the same tosser who, the first time they'd met, had said he was a pathetic excuse for a demon who'd let himself be castrated. Ta, ever so.

While waiting for another memory, he had a moment to think. All right then, assuming the big, glowing-eyed blowhard was onto something, how many times had he died? Seemed straightforward. He counted two deaths; the first by biting, the second by fire. Because he was pretty sure he was here after burning to a dusty end in the battle against the First Evil.

Then make of it what you will, Lloyd had said.

Well, fine. His first death was immediately after Cecily Addam's heart-skewering rejection. He'd escaped the demise of his dreams only to rush, if unwittingly, right into the arms of Drusilla. The woman who'd made him into a vampire by biting and killing him. That was it: the first death of William Pratt, Esquire. Late heir to his mother's ancestral lands in Derbyshire and his father's minor import-export business. R.I.P.

But wait, was that almost two deaths already?

As though it were yesterday, he remembered his hopes and dreams wither like dead vines scorched by Cecily's dry spurning of his love. If he'd had any doubt, their mutual peer's mockery of the poems she'd inspired had hammered her rejection like a nail into his very being.

Had he not run into Dru, he likely would have resigned himself to a dreary role in his late father's business. Perhaps he'd have accepted a loveless marriage to please his mother. He'd have been walking to his grave, day by day, probably perishing from TB within a couple years after his mother. Wasn't that simply a slow, drawn-out death? He'd felt that way about it more than once.

So perhaps two deaths made him a vampire. First Cecily killed his will to live and then Drusilla killed his body. It seemed a bit tenuous, but he could make the argument.

More interestingly, he'd never felt more alive than he did as a vampire. It was life on steroids. Was his time as a vampire actually a different type of living? He didn't quite know what to make of that.

His final death, of course, was his willing sacrifice at the Hellmouth in the fight to beat the First Evil. If he concentrated exactly right, he could still feel the flames racing along his nerves. He could still see the destruction his death had brought down on Buffy's enemies. It had been the most worthy of his deaths.

But… wait. Why had Lloyd shown up like an uninvited guest in his surreal afterlife party? Was it a sodding hint that his passage through the demon trials in Lloyd's cave had also been a death, of sorts? After all, he'd risked his very self and would never be the same vampire after he regained his soul.

Sodding, buggering fuck. His head was starting to hurt. And another uncomfortable thought had just ambushed him.

Was he really dead if he was here , in this inexplicable theater of his memories? And… bollocks . Was the person who became a vampire actually dead when the vampire kept all of their memories and feelings? He had no doubts that, soul or no soul, William had never quite left him.

Lloyd's description echoed in that thought. Dark warrior, who seeks again and again to birth himself into something different. And, sod it, didn't the act of birth imply that there had been a point beforehand when one had not been alive? Did that imply that, each time he'd recreated himself, he'd overseen the death of who he'd been before? That would mean he'd had dozens of deaths before now. They were piling up like bloody kindling saved before a storm.

If he had another life after this death, who would he be? Who would he want to be?

Really, being the one to whom Buffy had said "I love you" was enough. Make of it what you will, Lloyd had said. Well, being in Buffy's life was it, for him.

The final bloody lesson here was that Lloyd was an absolute pillock and an arse. Each time he'd met the sodding menace with radioactive green eyes, he'd left with more questions and tortured thoughts than he'd had before. Lloyd could shove it up his demonic bunghole. Assuming he had one.

.

To be continued...