Chapter Text
Students. Happy meals on legs, walking around, none the wiser of the apex predator among them.
Spike grinned, enjoying the heat of the sun on his skin. He stopped for a moment, closed his eyes, and breathed in, hoping to catch the slayer’s scent, when he caught the conversation of a pair of students.
“What’s your midterm project?” asked a girl’s voice.
“I’m writing up an analysis on The Road Not Taken,” a boy’s voice answered.
Spike frowned slightly into the sun. Poetry assignments?
“Oh, I love that poem! I studied it in highschool! It’s about taking a path other people wouldn’t and the satisfaction in doing so.”
Was that misinterpretation still going around? Eyes still closed, Spike grimaced.
“Are you serious? That’s completely wrong. The whole poem is about missing out! It’s about being sorry you didn’t take the other path.”
“Well, I like my interpretation better.”
Spike scoffed, unable to ignore the debate any longer. “You’re both wrong,” he said, spinning into the conversation. “Frost was taking the piss. It’s about his mate Thomas being too indecisive on their walks.”
The two students, while momentarily surprised, were having too much fun with the debate to back down now.
“That only goes along with my interpretation,” said the boy proudly. No older than 20, that one. “He talks about heaving a sigh about not taking the other road when he talks about it later.”
“Yeah,” the girl said, cutting back in, “but he does say the one side is grassier, like it hasn’t been walked on-“
“And then he says the roads are the same!”
“Frost’s mate Edward Thomas was constantly whinging on about paths they didn’t take on their walks,” Spike said, rolling his eyes. “In the first bit the speaker is kickin’ his feet about, not wanting to decide, an’ trying to make up reasons to go one way or the other. That’s what Thomas did on their walks.”
“Well, what’s the point of that?”
“The point is that when Frost sent Thomas that poem, Thomas enlisted in the British Army, and he died in France in 1917. Frost’s poem was just a jab at his mate and it still made him look into himself enough to make a choice like that.”
A couple of other students had gathered now
“I-I didn’t know all of that,” said a girl with blonde hair. “It actually makes it more meaningful, I think.”
“You know your way around English poets,” said the boy who had argued the second meaning. “You should join our study group on Tuesday. We meet at 3pm in conference room 40.”
“Oh, I- Don’t go here,” Spike said, suddenly feeling oddly embarrassed. “I- ah- I’m on visit, from Oxford. Thinkin about a transfer.”
“Oh! You’re looking to join the graduate program then?” spoke another young man, this one closer in age to Spike when he’d been turned. “A room just opened up in the place my buddies and I are renting out. You can stay with us if you don’t have anywhere else. And I can put in a good word for you with Dr. Bourque, she’s the Dean of the school of Literature and I’m her TA for Poetry 101.”
“Why would you want to come here, if you’ve studied at Oxford?” the first girl asked incredulously.
Spike grimaced. “Met a girl,” he said simply.
“Well, I hope that works out,” the girl said sympathetically. “I gotta go in a minute. I have a required math course. Ugh.”
“Let me write my number for you,” the older boy said, pulling sticky notes from his bookbag.
“That’s, ah-“
“What’s your name, anyway?” the younger boy asked.
“It’s… William,” Spike said finally.
“Y-you don’t look like a William,” said the blonde girl with a small smile. “I’m Tara.”
“Katie,” said the girl who needed to get to class.
“Vincent,” said the boy who’d chosen The Road Not Taken for his midterm project.
“And I’m Darren,” said the one who’d offered him a place, handing him the sticky note and shaking his hand. “See you on Tuesday!”
The group dissipated, leaving Spike with a yellow sticky note, and a feeling of being gobsmacked.
What just happened?
Had he just become one of these walking happy meals?
Absolutely barmy.
That was what it would be, to walk in the sun like a human, study like a human, talk poetry of all things with humans. Completely ridiculous.
Spike eyed the ring on his finger and groaned. He hadn’t really planned what he’d do next, after he killed the slayer. He’d thought about a bloody rampage, but then he remembered the mob that had come after Dru in Prague, and he knew that ring or no he wouldn’t last very long if he did something like that.
He thought about Frost’s poem, and recited the first stanza quietly to himself as he turned his hand and watched the ring glint in the light.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;”
Yes, he could use the ring and his new invincibility to go on a beautiful blood-bathed, sun-bathed path. He could. It sounded delicious.
He turned his hand and looked at the yellow sticky note.
“Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,”
He could also blend in, assimilate with the humans, maybe enjoy another debate. These humans seemed to actually admire his knowledge. It might be interesting to see how far he could take this.
“And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.”
He knew that if he decided to do this, he could still go on a bloody rampage. He could. Right? He might not. He might become a bloody poofter like Angelus, helping the sodding humans. But he could, still, choose to do that.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Spike turned around and went back to his and Harmony’s lair. He’d kill the slayer some other time, after he was bored of this. It was time to pack.