His flesh is burning, burning away and he can feel it sizzle and peel from the bones and God, he doesn't want it to be this way, not now, not yet, not when he was so close. He wants to look in her eyes and confess every sin, he wants to tell her that he loves her truly, he wants to duck his head between her silky thighs one more time and hear her scream above him. He wants to touch her, to wrap himself in the purity of her, to feel her sink into him, atom by atom. He wants to drain her dry into himself.
And around him there is death, and the humming drumbeat of the hearts of the slayers, and the screams of his ancestors as they fall. They all fall, pretty maids into the graves he'd dug for them, Drusilla laughing and twirling around the holes, tossing dead flowers on their bodies. Her hair smells of copper and rosemary, and he buries his face in the curls, fingers tracing around the delicate sugar-sweet nipples beneath her filmy negligee. And Buffy smells like life, and detergent, and strawberries and...sunlight.
Sunlight, that is pouring through him and is coming from him, and he'd never imagined what it would feel like, to be filled with goodness. To be a champion. Knighted by the Slayer, in a basement, with the scent of his pouf's lips still clinging to her. He could spend hours worshipping the swan-curve of her neck, tracking the vertebrae he once dreamt of snapping. Champion.
He is dying.
Death is not something he wants, not something he has ever longed for. William the Bloody lives hard and long and fucking fights for every second of it. He is chained in the bathroom, and the watcher looks down at him with something that might be pity, and might be disgust. Might be both.
"Do you want some blood?" he asks, and Spike spits it in his face because he is an animal, and don't they remember that he is a monster, he could kill them, he has tried to kill them all? Don't they care?
He drives into the slayer with slow strokes, and she mewls and twists around him, and if the name that he forces from her lips is Angel, he pretends not to hear it.
"Oh, god, oh god oh god please Spike please god," her voice is sharp, even while her whole body is melting around him, and it's so hot, so bloody hot he's going to burn away in the fire of her, and he spills a second before she jerks, murmuring a word that might be William.
And he is burning, the fire creeping through him. Long, ropey unused lengths of his guts fall to ashes within them, and he can feel it. It hurts. It hurts like few things have hurt in the decades and centuries. Glory's finger inside of his belly twisted them all up, but this he will not heal from. This is final.
Burning. Fire is purification, isn't it? Did this mean he was absolved, this goodness that was trying to take root within him, anchoring itself in his anemic soul and spreading out? They die all around him, his kind, but then he's never been much for family.
He is a poet, still, searching for meaning in every action. This. Must. Mean. Something.
Everything crackles as he shifts his weight. One foot to the other, and he feels dry and ancient, his bones moments away from powdering to dust. And something inside of him, something swelling and rattling its cage. Something that sees its friend in the sunlight that fills him, that burns him, and it's burning him too. He wonders if he looks radiant, if this is what a woman feels, her belly brimming with life. He's seen their faces crumple as they realize their children will never draw breath.
"I can feel it, Buffy."
And he can't scream. He wants to say 'I don't want to die, not here, I love you, don't leave me, just stay, and we can lie down here in the sunlight' but he doesn't. He inhales, though he doesn't need to, and his lungs are charring as fast as the rest of him. Because...
This. Means. Something. But if he doesn't do it, then it won't. Then nothing will have meant anything, and they'll all die, all the shining slayers and Buffy and the sunlight that's ripping him apart. And the bit, and the watcher and the witch and the wanker, and somewhere far, far away, his sire.
"I love you," she whispers. Three years of wanting it. Three years of almost tasting what it would be to hear her say it, and now he cannot say it back. Because he understands, now, the fragility of love. The meanings behind the world, and that he had more of her than anyone else ever had. More, and much less.
She goes, at last. She understands that there are some things one has to do alone. She understands who she is, and that she cannot die here. Slayer, warrior, larger than life. Larger than the world. Hel, Kali, Cerridwen, devourer of the dead. A gift. His gift. His bright, gleaming sunlit goddess.
William worships at the altars of women that he can never touch. He takes it out on every hapless soul he meets, blood and pain and death and the stark knowledge in their eyes that he is everything in those last moments. And he would not have it any other way.
He takes it all within him, the light and the pain and the love. For Buffy, he knows. For himself. Crumbling to nothing. And in those last moments, he believes himself forgiven.
And he opens his eyes to the flames that do not purify, to a darkness made absolute, and the wails of the damned close in on him.