Click.

As Spike pushes it closed, the back door settles back into its frame with snap of the catch; his last hope of happiness fizzling out with a gentle rapping of the blind against the glass.

He should have guessed the value of the best night of his life would be nothing.

As he digs around in his pocket for an essential cigarette, the disappointment plummets into a vast chasm in his stomach. He’s a messed up guy and she’s no better. It’s too late now for the empty phrases she offers that seem to promise the world but just ring hollow. He has no time for denials or maybes grudgingly given; it’s down to a simple yes or no and Buffy isn’t giving.

He’s heard her words, but the emotion behind them is still beyond his reach. Hope has been a curse, with fingernails as sharp as claws that rip gashes into his heart, but as his hope lies dying he can finally admit the truth about those sparks of attraction he’s mistaken for love. She needs him, yes, but he shouldn’t mistake them for something deeper.

Muttering a curse he hopes he hasn’t spoken too loudly, his hand tries to grip the lighter, his finger slipping against the wheel as it trembles. He doesn’t want to wake the girls. Right now he can’t face thirty-odd curious teenagers hearing the emotion break in his voice.

Flick. Flick.

He fumbles with the wheel until he can sustain a flame long enough to raise it to the cigarette perched on his lip, his hands still shaking as the flame licks the end and his lungs finally fill with the nicotine he needs to calm his nerves. He wants to be numb, but the sour feeling in the pit of his stomach where his heart fell again at her words, won’t let up.

“Does it have to mean something?” she’d said. Bloody Hell, she still doesn’t know it means everything.

The night before she’d held him; touched him like she forgave him the unforgivable, for that which he couldn’t forgive himself. The dirtiness he feels inside washed clean in her embrace. To hold, and for once, to be held; it had hardly been an exciting night, it wasn’t snapping the neck of your second slayer or bringing down a house, but it’s a memory he will treasure and keep close to his heart for all the time he has left on this earth. He already knows he’s a fool; but hope is a phoenix that has a habit of reeling him in all over again, tempting him with illusions he should know could never be real.

And what makes all that much more than worse is the fact that he’ll never really matter to her, not really, because she’ll never feel the way he wants her to feel, never see him inside and will never fall for him the way he fell so hard for her, and if she can’t feel this way and her heart she hides so well is forever locked to him, then he doesn’t blame her. That kind of love is denied to the dead. He knows all this has happened because of a deep flaw of his own. William’s romantic heart is too quick to hope and his heart is too easy to shatter. How could all that love be reflected back, when his mirror will always be empty.

The smoke ghosts into the night and dissolves into the haunting air as he climbs onto the motorbike, dead lungs drawing cold comfort from a flame that could turn them instantly to dust. He’ll live forever, but she makes her decisions in geological time, and he’s done with this waiting. Love was just a hormonal reaction, after all, chemicals mixing together to release butterflies into his stomach, he should ignore it as he would a sore arm or aching head.

He doesn’t want to think anymore. He doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t want to think at all. He’ll ride away and forget he’d ever thought he’d had a chance with her.

The ride to the vineyard gives him some time for his thoughts to settle. He even indulges in a small detour to give him more time. They didn’t have a lot of that spare, but he hasn’t asked for much and he needs this space.

Jealously, greed, want, insecurity, loneliness, despair, the threads that keep Spike together unravel with every mile until, by the time he pulls the bike over, his anger roils like the roll of a turbulent sea.

Yet Caleb’s gone. There’s no sign of the preacher man, and the vineyard is all but abandoned. This will not be the battleground. Spike’s anger has nowhere to go, so he smashes the place into splinters. But the flare of hurt and pain and frustration doesn't last long and it’s power splutters out as he sinks to the floor, his temper vented. It’s over. This pain will be his penance, his reward for what he did over a hundred or so years of death. He thought the soul would be the quick-fix panacea for everything he’d done wrong, that he could be accepted, loved, but all it has done is wear him down, and it hasn’t been rewarded.

So if this is to be the final battle, then that’s fine with him. He’s jaded, tired, enduring life now just for her, and he needs it all to end. He’s not looking for a relationship anymore, god knows, he doesn’t think he could handle one but he’ll stay to see it finished, he’s still fool enough for that. He’ll go out fighting. It doesn’t occur to him that he could ever just walk away. He’ll protect them all and then be done. Make something good out of the wreckage he’s become.

When he picks himself up, he squares his shoulders, flexes his jaw, his determination set. Prepares himself to be nothing less than Spike again. He sets off with the swagger back in his stride. What she feels is irrelevant now. This is the final battle.

And he’s ready.