Oh, cheers! Really glad you liked. Spike's is definitely a story of trying not to look back to Sunnydale and generally failing - to everyone's advantage but his own, I feel. :D
I'll confess that line was composed extremely prosaically by tossing ideas about sweet decay (to go with the petrol and ash) over and over, reworking it from the first draft of the poem, which was from Spike's POV (it refused to settle well there), ending up with my decision that there was too much about the surroundings and not enough physically locating Dru, such that 'sleep' was introduced as plain old description. But it did have a nice sense of All Death Ever, I thought; a bit like all those dead maidens in ballads who end up in clay and sods of earth.
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I'll confess that line was composed extremely prosaically by tossing ideas about sweet decay (to go with the petrol and ash) over and over, reworking it from the first draft of the poem, which was from Spike's POV (it refused to settle well there), ending up with my decision that there was too much about the surroundings and not enough physically locating Dru, such that 'sleep' was introduced as plain old description. But it did have a nice sense of All Death Ever, I thought; a bit like all those dead maidens in ballads who end up in clay and sods of earth.