I'm screaming inside like William. -Te, "Killing Will" I almost expected finding out that Dru sired Spike- Joss had been dodging the bullet for too long on that one.  It was a shock, but I adjusted.  But this... this I was not prepared for.  James Marsters made some offhand comment to an interviewer during the filming of "Fool for Love," and suddenly I realized the terrible, looming truth.

Spike was a wussboy.

I couldn't believe it- couldn't even conceive of it.  Spike was a rebel, Spike was the Slayer of Slayers, Spike was a badass in leather, but Spike was never some pansy-ass poet, dammit.  To this day I don't know if I was upset at mischaracterization or the invalidation of every flashback scene I had ever written, but I remember that I was pissed off.

But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.  In fact, it seems that everything that Spike has become known for in the last century is a deliberate attempt to undo the twenty-something years he spent as William the Bloody Awful Poet.  William got kicked around, so this time Spike would do the kicking.  William was coldly rejected by the girl he loved, but Spike would make damned sure he got- and kept- the girl.

William is the stereotypical nerd who tries desperately to fit in and finds himself consistently unable to do so, so Spike is about as un-nerdy as he can manage.  One of the most telling differences between he and Angel is that Liam took nothing seriously, and therefore was not taken seriously in return.  After being turned, Angelus made sure that that sort of dismissal would not occur again.  Spike is, in a way, the very opposite- he seems to have taken everything pretty seriously as a human and is determined to have some fun now.

Spike's entire persona is a response to Cecily's rejection of him.  It is unclear whether her accusation of his being "beneath her" was meant in the economic sense- we have no evidence that William was in a different social class than Cecily, and if he had been, he probably wouldn't have been at that party- but it's fairly clear that his shyness, his bookishness, his overall inability to acclimate to her definition of society places her far beneath him. 

So along comes Dru... and death.  A chance to start over.  Beneath me?  I'll bloody well show them beneath me.  Spike's affected persona- the rough-edged, lower-class, badass Slayer of Slayers- is what kept Dru by his side for a century, and his inability to keep up the act is what lost her.  Whether it was the love for Buffy that Dru suspected or the love for Dru that drove him to make a truce with Buffy that finally drove a wedge between them, the fact remains that Spike made his mistakes with some very Williamlike intentions in mind.  Which is where we find Spike this season- left only with what he originally had as William, still trying desperately (pathetically, even) to remain Spike.

This severely complicates portraying Spike in fic, because nearly everything we think of as typical Spike is in fact an affected performance.  But how much is acting, and how much has become natural to him at this point?  Should you ever let William slip through, and if so, how much?  A moment of unusual sensitivity, shyness, or articulateness might be especially telling.  Don't use William as an excuse to make Spike wimpy- he's been working on this act for a century and he's had a lot of practice- but it's a useful device, if employed properly.