Oooh... This is good.

He sometimes thought he was born to be a vampire; he’d been so lousy as a human. ...he remembered what he was at heart.

I love these lines and the juxtaposition. And I love how you conveyed so much with so little (a skill I'm working on!).

Nicely done - love the transition from pure evil to William.

Wow ... great job.

He cocked the gun. She looked up with a tear-stained face, and he remembered what he was at heart.

eta, as I the post button without commenting!

Gah. Really like this! Very powerful!

Edited at 2012-10-28 05:44 pm (UTC)

Awww.

Can't kill the romantic, even if the man is dead.

Lovely!

Oh, very nice. Short can be good.

Perfect. I loved the last line.

What a powerful punch this packs in such a short fic! that last sentence is amazing. (When I wrote poetry years ago, I tended to write poems in which the last lines reflected/called back the first in some way, and when I see it done and done well in prose I adore it. there's something about circularity in literature that really pleases me.)

Yes exactly!

Rereading this (which I always do before I reply to a reply) what occurs to me in a way that didn't quite before, was that this fic also in a sense is a bit "meta" - or to be more precise, it can be read as a brief "history of Spike" on the show from S2, even though I know you're talking about FFL. The Spike we originally saw was someone who I thought was going to be the Big Bad, along with Dru, and they electrified me. Of course the Angelus arc made for more heartbreak and shock, but I never can quite forget (perhaps because I saw everything in a brief span of time on Netflix, including Spike attempting to kill Buffy on multiple occasions, as well as the moments of negotiation, friendship, etc. You've got the whole character here, which is amazing.

No I hadn't seen that! It's a brilliant bit of characterization, to go back into William's life, to have him so very different from Spike (as opposed to who Angel was as a human); and to me it contributes to my understanding of him as being someone for whom "Self" is a performance (as it is with all of us, but explicitly so with him); and the fact that he is often perceptive and truthful, but not necessarily to be taken at face value. (His statement to Buffy in FFL is proven wrong when the Chinese Slayer mentions her mother in her dying breath. He really doesn't know as much as he thinks he does sometimes - part of his arrogance - and I think in some way it's also part of getting under Buffy's skin, of getting through to her, of trying to "possess" her: I understand her better than she does herself. Which a theme throughout the series: the men in Buffy's life presuming they know her (or know what she should do) better than she does (Giles, Angel, Xander, Riley, etc) If the poor girl is confused about her feelings in S6 & S7, is it any surprise? She's had years of people telling her she doesn't.

I read a fanfic - and I wish I remembered it - that's AU of S6, in which Buffy goes to Wes instead of Tara to find out if she came back wrong, and Angel reminds her that, basically, Spike is full of BS sometimes (in his "You came back wrong" statement.) I don't remember which story that was, but that scene was my favorite part because it's so true.

And I did not mean to ramble like that, sorry.