FIC: Born Again (BtVS, 1/1)
May. 31st, 2003 01:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maidenjediTITLE: Born Again
AUTHOR: Maidenjedi
RATING: PG-13
ARCHIVE: List archives, otherwise please ask.
SPOILERS: Chosen (HEAVY SPOILERS)
DISCLAIMER: All hail Joss and Mutant Enemy. It was a brilliant time.
SUMMARY: "Nothing can happen more beautiful than death." - Walt Whitman
***
Author's Notes at the end.
*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*
Spike is dead.
He's thinking it while the sun courses through him
and burns him to ashes from the inside out. Spike
is dead, ladies and gents.
This isn't like it was before. This isn't like it
was the first time, when William died, ages ago, in
the arms of a dark and demented goddess. It was a
sweet death, a painful death, the death only a poet
would want to die. And William had been a bloody
awful poet.
This is the death only the unredeemed would want to
die. Irreversible, real, giving it all up so that
everyone else can run to safety. Standing before
a firing squad, a crowd holding stones, marching
head high into the lion's den.
A martyr's death. A hero's death.
Well, anti-hero, anyway. He grins and lifts his
face to the sunlight.
Sunlight feels different from the inside. He thinks
of the burns sunlight would leave in his vampire life.
Harsh burns, burns that went to the bone, burns that
served to mock and remind him "you are not a true
immortal." Sunlight telling him that there was a
reality that he could not have, and the demon in him
not wanting it anyway.
Not unlike the burns it would leave in William's life.
William had preferred the moon anyway. The moon is a
romantic's celestial icon. The sun was too harsh, too
bright.
Too bloody real.
Sunlight feels like cleansing. Like a proper scrubbing.
It tickles a little and he's laughing, it positively stings
and he could shout from the joy of knowing why. He has a
soul and he can actually feel it, beneath the cold layers
of necretized tissue that passed for a body. He'd known he
had the soul, known it because of the guilt, the human
emotions that had lain dormant since the night Drusilla
turned him. He always wondered, though, why redemption
echoed empty in his ears.
Because, Spike, you have to die to be reborn.
Rebirth. Salvation. Redemption.
He's turning to ash. It had been his greatest fear for so
long, it had haunted his dreams. The very smell of ash on
a victim would frighten him away, make him search for
cleaner skin to suck between his teeth. He's turning to
ash and he likes, he loves it, because this is how you
become a hero. You die.
Like Buffy, jumping to save them all.
She said she'd been in heaven.
Heaven is only for the redeemed. The saved.
The born again.
His ashes fall around him and he wonders why he's still
standing. A soul, free. Clean.
Spike is dead.
Long live Spike.
------------------
"All, all for immortality, Love like the light
silently wrapping all." - Walt Whitman
THE END
A/N: The Whitman quotes actually spurred me to write this, and
I got the original idea for this when I went off in my livejournal
about why Spike never sought redemption the way Angel did. The
difference lies in the theology of it, I think. You know how
Joss loves his religious symbolism.
If you're interested:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/maidenjedi/242786.html
Feedback/criticism welcome at texgoddess_at_yahoo.com
AUTHOR: Maidenjedi
RATING: PG-13
ARCHIVE: List archives, otherwise please ask.
SPOILERS: Chosen (HEAVY SPOILERS)
DISCLAIMER: All hail Joss and Mutant Enemy. It was a brilliant time.
SUMMARY: "Nothing can happen more beautiful than death." - Walt Whitman
***
Author's Notes at the end.
*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*X*
Spike is dead.
He's thinking it while the sun courses through him
and burns him to ashes from the inside out. Spike
is dead, ladies and gents.
This isn't like it was before. This isn't like it
was the first time, when William died, ages ago, in
the arms of a dark and demented goddess. It was a
sweet death, a painful death, the death only a poet
would want to die. And William had been a bloody
awful poet.
This is the death only the unredeemed would want to
die. Irreversible, real, giving it all up so that
everyone else can run to safety. Standing before
a firing squad, a crowd holding stones, marching
head high into the lion's den.
A martyr's death. A hero's death.
Well, anti-hero, anyway. He grins and lifts his
face to the sunlight.
Sunlight feels different from the inside. He thinks
of the burns sunlight would leave in his vampire life.
Harsh burns, burns that went to the bone, burns that
served to mock and remind him "you are not a true
immortal." Sunlight telling him that there was a
reality that he could not have, and the demon in him
not wanting it anyway.
Not unlike the burns it would leave in William's life.
William had preferred the moon anyway. The moon is a
romantic's celestial icon. The sun was too harsh, too
bright.
Too bloody real.
Sunlight feels like cleansing. Like a proper scrubbing.
It tickles a little and he's laughing, it positively stings
and he could shout from the joy of knowing why. He has a
soul and he can actually feel it, beneath the cold layers
of necretized tissue that passed for a body. He'd known he
had the soul, known it because of the guilt, the human
emotions that had lain dormant since the night Drusilla
turned him. He always wondered, though, why redemption
echoed empty in his ears.
Because, Spike, you have to die to be reborn.
Rebirth. Salvation. Redemption.
He's turning to ash. It had been his greatest fear for so
long, it had haunted his dreams. The very smell of ash on
a victim would frighten him away, make him search for
cleaner skin to suck between his teeth. He's turning to
ash and he likes, he loves it, because this is how you
become a hero. You die.
Like Buffy, jumping to save them all.
She said she'd been in heaven.
Heaven is only for the redeemed. The saved.
The born again.
His ashes fall around him and he wonders why he's still
standing. A soul, free. Clean.
Spike is dead.
Long live Spike.
------------------
"All, all for immortality, Love like the light
silently wrapping all." - Walt Whitman
THE END
A/N: The Whitman quotes actually spurred me to write this, and
I got the original idea for this when I went off in my livejournal
about why Spike never sought redemption the way Angel did. The
difference lies in the theology of it, I think. You know how
Joss loves his religious symbolism.
If you're interested:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/maidenjedi/242786.html
Feedback/criticism welcome at texgoddess_at_yahoo.com
(no subject)
Date: 2003-05-31 12:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-05-31 03:20 pm (UTC)