Whistling in the Dark (1/3)
Okay, so here it is, Whistling in the Dark, aka the Fic That Ate Bella's Brain, part the first. I've decided I am going to write the Buffy side of things . . . eventually . . . but that to get started with the evolution of her story I need to find out what people think of Xander's. So here I go with the posting.
Disclaimer: Xander, Buffy, Giles, and the other characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and Fox. Adam and the Immortal are also their characters, but have been fleshed out within my own imagination. All other characters are the original creations of Bella Temple, and should not be used without permission. All locations in the first part of this fic are real; I hope that I've managed to bring them somewhat to life for my readers. Enjoy.
Notes: I've mentioned before that this story was inspired by Casix Thistlebane's Waking Up and a little by Mr. Blue Sky, as well as Garden State, The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, and I <3 Huckabees. Knowledge of any of those stories/movies is not a requirement, I just want to credit where credit is due.
Adam (or at the very least, the actor who played him) appeared twice in cannon, first in The Harvest as a guy in Willow and Cordelia's computer class, and second in The Pack. The name "Adam" came from buffyguide.com. I've always been intrigued by how Willow and Xander interacted more in a friendly manner with their classmates in season one than in two or three.
Summary: One deals by always traveling, the other by never going anywhere at all. It's not the same as living.
Whistling in the Dark
by Bella Temple
A woman came up to me and said
"I'd like to poison your mind
with wrong ideas that appeal to you,
though I am not unkind."
--They Might Be Giants, "Whistling in the Dark"
Hassam's new and used bookstore was like most of the buildings in downtown St. Petersburg--squat, concrete, and washed out by the sun. The guide book Xander had scanned on the flight over had used a peculiar phrase to describe the architecture of the city: Polynesian Gothic. He had no idea what that meant--apparently it meant short, hard, and beige. Or aquamarine. Or pink. It was hard to get used to. Every plant that surrounded him was brilliantly green, the festive banners that lined Central Avenue were painfully bright, and the sun reflecting off the sidewalk made him wish that he'd remembered to bring his sunglasses. He was thankful that he was only supposed to be here for a little while.
The interior of the store was nearly arctic compared to the muggy heat outside, and Xander shivered as he stepped through the doorway and into the blasting air-conditioning. He considered for a moment pulling his jacket out of his backpack, but as he walked further into the store, decided against it. He had only come for one thing and would soon be getting back into his rental car, where he had full control over the temperature. He'd just deal with the cold. It was nothing compared to the other St. Petersburg in mid-March. He was becoming quite the world-traveler, really, and had gotten good at quickly adapting to a new situation.
The bookstore was hardly what he'd come to expect from the places Giles sent him. It was neither dark nor stuffy, but instead brightly lit by strips of flourescent bulbs. The shelves were prefabricated monstrosities of compressed wood pulp, not hand-crafted from hardwood. The books on the shelves looked new, practically untouched, still sporting their dust-covers and gleaming slightly. The main room was large and uncluttered, and the front desk was painted white, with a modern register and even a credit card machine. The woman behind it appeared to be about Xander's age, with white-blonde hair and the soft, uniform tan of someone used to spending most of her time outdoors. She didn't wear glasses, and she smiled at him when he entered. He stopped briefly, taken by surprise. He was used to used bookstore clerks being standoffish, pale, older men who ignored you even when you were making your purchases. Perhaps that was a European thing.
The only familiar aspect of the store was its surreality, as if it had been constructed only moments before he entered, and the books were painted onto the walls. But Xander got that feeling everywhere he went, these days. His lack of depth perception hadn't been so bad in Sunnydale, where he could blame his strange feelings on the medications he was taking, and where he knew the shapes and contours of everything without having to really see them. It wasn't until he'd started going to places he'd never been that he'd realized how much he'd lost with his left eye. His ability to easily walk downstairs was one. His sense of reality was another.
"Is there anything in particular you're looking for, today?" The clerk continued smiling as she spoke, even as her forehead crinkled. He tried not to stare at her teeth as she tried not to stare at his eye- patch. He'd forgotten how incredibly white American teeth could be. He forgot how bright and clean everything in America seemed to be. It only added to his sense of detachment.
"Yeah," Xander slipped into his easy-going, Californian accent like an old t-shirt. His voice had picked up a clipped edge during his time overseas, especially the months he'd spent in South Africa. He'd thought that discarding it would be more difficult than this, but he was falling quickly back into the American rhythm with its round, slightly nasal vowels and softened consonants. "I'm here to pick up an order. Under the name of Rupert Giles?"
The woman's smile faded. "Can I see some ID?"
Xander fished his international driver's license out of his back pocket and handed it to her. She glanced from his face to his picture, then to her computer monitor. The smile returned in full force. "This'll take a minute. You can take a look around if you like, something else might catch your--" She grimaced slightly, and finished apologetically. "Your, um, eye."
He smiled to let her know he didn't take offense. Political correctness was an almost purely American reflex. "I'm not really much of a reader."
She nodded, the flush of embarrassment still darkening her cheeks, then ducked back into the employees only area, shooting back a "Just a sec, Mr. Harris," as she went. Xander let his eye wander slightly around the store again as he waited, tapping his fingers.
A long haired, bristly bearded young man wearing a style that Willow had once called "beach-nik" stepped around one of the corners, his arms laden with paperbacks, flipping through the one on top. A battered spiral notebook stuck out of the top of one of the cargo pockets of his khaki shorts, and his birkenstock sandals made a soft clopping noise as he approached Xander and the checkout counter at a blind jog. Xander stepped to one side to avoid a collision and then turned back to the counter, placing the kid squarely in his blind spot. He shrugged as the kid apologized distractedly, and nearly jumped when it was followed with an exclamation.
"Holy crap! Xander!"
Xander closed his eye, steeling his nerve for what was certain to be an incredibly awkward reunion, then turned back to the kid. His eyebrows rose as he tried to place the face.
"Oh, man, it's good to see you! We all figured you kicked it when Sunnydale did." The kid, who was probably a little bit too old to actually be referred to by that term, shoved his stack of books onto the counter and offered a darkly tanned hand. Xander noted that his wrist was circled by a number of battered looking hemp bracelets, then startled again as the kid dragged him by his grip into a one- armed hug. He frowned as he drew back. The kid shook his head. "Aw, don't tell me you don't recognize me." He held out his arms, displaying two bunches of dark armpit hair sticking out of his sleeveless t-shirt. "SHS, class of ‘99, the class that went out with a literal bang?"
Xander squinted his eye. The hair color had changed, currently an orangey wheat color that didn't exist in nature, and the kid was more tan than Xander had seen him before, and certainly a lot more relaxed than he'd ever been in Sunnydale, but he did recognize him. He was one of the few people other than Willow or Jesse who'd ever been nice to him during his twelve years of public schooling. Of course, that was before Xander had encouraged Kyle and his gang to steal the kid's food while he was hyena- fied. "Adam. How are you?"
Adam grinned. "I'm doing great, man!" He shook his head. "This is unbelievable. What brings you to St. Pete?"
Xander shrugged. "Business." He watched Adam silently, trying to decide if he wanted to continue the conversation to its inevitable conclusion of reminiscing about high school, or just get Giles' book and go. The clerk returned with a carefully wrapped package.
"Here you go, Mr. Harris. We got payment from Mr. Giles already, so you're all set."
He nodded, taking the package. He offered Adam a small smile. "Well," he said, then couldn't think of what he was supposed to say next. He shrugged again instead, then turned and headed for the door. Adam apparently abandoned his stack of books and dashed after him.
"Hey, Xander, hold up."
Xander choked on a sigh, his hand frozen on the door handle. Almost literally, as he was now standing right under the air-conditioning again. Adam dodged into his field of vision. "Yeah?"
"How long are you here for?"
It seemed he was going to have his "happy" reunion whether he liked it or not. Of course, now that he had Giles' book, he had a full day and night left with nothing to do. Maybe hanging out with an old acquaintance would help shake the strangeness of being back in the states after so long abroad. "Just until tomorrow. I have to get back to London."
Adam began nodding. "That's cool, that's cool, you got any plans tonight?"
Sleeping, mostly. Catching up on the latest infomercials when he woke up at 2 am after a nightmare. "Not really."
"Great." Adam yanked the battered notebook out of his pocket. A black pen was wedged into the spiral binding, and he tugged it out, then pulled the cap off with his teeth. He scribbled for a full minute, then ripped the page off and thrust it into Xander's hand. It had a phone number, address, and brief directions. Xander blinked at it. "That's my place. We're having a back-to-school thing tonight. You won't know anyone but me there, but it should be a good time. You should come."
Xander stuck the paper into his pocket. "Yeah, I'll see if I can make it." He took Adam's hand when it was offered, giving it a firm squeeze to keep from getting hugged again. "I guess I might see you."
"Could be." Adam grinned, then stepped out of his way so he could get going. Xander heard him chatting up the clerk as he stepped back into the Floridian August. Between the flatness of his monocular vision and the humidity, it was like walking through a wall.
* * *
He stopped for lunch at a small diner on the main strip, boasting the name "Kristina's Cafe". It was an unassuming building, with a bland, beige and brown sign and a tiny parking lot off to one side. He'd discovered while traveling that he preferred the little spots like these, the ones that didn't flash or sparkle to draw your eye. They were honest, somehow. "We won't try to entertain you," the sign seemed to say, "just get you something to eat".
It also said "99 cent egg breakfast served all day". The thought of a couple of eggs, over medium, with maybe some sausage on the side, fried within an inch of its life, set him salivating.
There were, it turned out, things about America that he missed.
The interior of the restaurant had a simple sort of elegance to it. The walls were, of course, beige, with a cherry wood chair rail and a handful of framed articles and paintings. A serving-counter lined the wall that faced the kitchen, and was separated from the main floor of the restaurant by a wrought iron railing. Blue collar workers and blue haired ladies dotted the tables and the counter, chatting with each other and the staff, eating from plates filled with sandwiches and french fries or eggs and hashbrowns. He stood for a moment in the doorway, his back to the heat and the parking lot, letting the air-conditioning, blasting like it did in the book store, wash over him as he took it all in.
A career waitress, dressed in a Kristina's Cafe t-shirt, black slacks, and an apron stuffed with napkins and straws, stepped from behind the counter and smiled at him. Her eyes tracked toward his patch, but drifted off again as she gathered a menu from their shelf by the counter. "Just one?"
The question was cheerful and melancholy at the same time. She was happy he was here, to eat their food and tip her, perhaps not so happy that he was only him, and not a crowd of five or more. Or maybe she could feel his isolation. He didn't really care which. "Yeah."
She lead him to a table by the enormous windows that look out over the street and handed him the menu. "Want anything to drink? Got the usual coke products, or iced tea, or coffee."
Xander made a show of opening his menu so he didn't have to see her staring at him. It'd been over a year now that he'd worn the eye-patch, and though he'd gotten used to most of the adjustments he'd had to make in his life, he still couldn't handle the looks it got. The expressions of curiosity and revulsion that let him know that he'd never be just another face in the crowd again. The life of a Scooby had permanently marked him as someone to be feared, respected, and pitied. "Just water, thanks."
"I'll give you a minute to look over the menu." She almost vanished, a nice trick considering he sat so that his blind side faced the windows. He'd gotten good at paying attention to his full vision, what little of it remained. He caught her quick pivot-turn in his peripheral vision, even as he scanned the menu.
He already knew what he wanted, knew it the moment he'd read the sign outside, but the choices on the menu distracted him from what his mind had been turning over and over in the car, so he weighed the corned beef sandwich against the fried mushrooms, the side of bacon against the side of sausage, and the hashbrowns against the grits.
That made him think of "My Cousin Vinnie" and he snorted a quick laugh. He already looked a little insane, he thought, with his world-weary posture and his patch, he didn't need a random bout of hysteria to add to it. Still, snow birds or not, Florida was the South, and "two yout's" was still one of the funniest conversations in film history.
Grits were only entertaining for so long, though, and soon enough he was back to pondering the question of the day.
Adam. What did the kid want from him? Was he just looking to reminisce, or did he belong to a cult that needed a new, one-eyed sacrifice? Traveling the world had taught him that it wasn't just women who were friendly to him because they wanted to kill him. He'd been abducted, briefly, in Greece by a group of young men looking for a virgin sacrifice, and all of his stories about Faith and Anya didn't sway them. They'd said something about his "other" virginity, something he decided didn't bear too close an inspection. He didn't WANT anything pushed up his ass, thank you very much, even if they had promised to make it entirely pleasurable for him. Adam had never shown any cultish leanings in Sunnydale, but he hadn't spoken to the kid since graduation. Who knew what had happened in the meantime?
Lord knew the modern-day Xander bore little resemblance to the boy who decided to play the flugelhorn in eighth grade because the word "flugel" made his best friend spit milk out of her nose. Adam had sat next to him in band class, playing the trombone, which while it wasn't a saxophone or trumpet, was astronomically cooler than the flugelhorn.
Maybe all Adam wanted was to reconnect, however briefly, with the flugelhorn kid who'd gotten detention with him when they were caught with Spiderman comics on their music stands. Maybe he still wanted to know what Xander thought of the lead guitarist of Wretched Refuse. Maybe he wanted to punch Xander in the face for letting Tor and Heidi eat his hotdog.
That had been when Xander Harris' position at Sunnydale High School had fundamentally changed. Adam, like Xander, had never been one of the "cool" kids, but he'd always had his ears and voice in the center of the gossip mill, and after the hotdog/hyena incident, Xander had started getting the Look from his fellow classmates. The look that said that they didn't know or care what your problem was, but they knew and cared that you were Weird, as in not Normal, and were therefore to be ridiculed. The look that said that you had been swallowed by the strangeness of Sunnydale that people just didn't talk about.
That day was when Xander stopped having two best friends and a circle of friendly acquaintances and started just having two best friends. Adam had given him that Look right up until the moment that Xander had handed him a sword and shown him the best way to hold it when you were decapitating a person.
Xander closed his menu and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Now that he thought about it, that Look had been more than deserved, and that Look was probably what kept the survivors of Sunnydale High sane. Why the hell would Adam want to hang out with Xander Harris, the King of the Look?
The waitress swung back around to his table, even as his hands moved from his nose to his forehead and he started trying to massage away a burgeoning headache. This wasn't the way his trips were supposed to go. He was supposed to just show up, get the stuff, and get out. That's why Giles sent him on these trips; he was reliable Xander, who didn't get sidetracked on a mission and who always returned with whatever he was sent to retrieve, barring demons and death. It was just that his missions weren't normally as simple as this one, and they were NEVER to any place that he might KNOW somebody. Giles understood that Xander was tired of knowing people. Didn't he?
He placed his order, then grinned suddenly up at his waitress. She backed off ever so slightly at the sight of his smile, and he made an effort to dim the manic a little. "What's there to do in this town? I'm here on business, but I've got a whole afternoon free."
She smiled back at him, her eyes switching rapidly between his patch and his right eyebrow. "Well, there's the beach and Fort DeSoto if you head south. Baywalk and the movie theater and a couple museums are downtown. You could go to the Pier, but there's not much there if you've already eaten." She nodded at his menu even as she reached out to take it from him. "The Dali Museum is the big draw for a lot of tourists, if you like surrealism."
Xander shook his head. "Not so much. What do you do? Personally I mean? When you're not waitressing? I'm not really in a tourist-y mood."
Her cheeks darkened and her smile softened at the edges. "I like to go to the mall. Tyrone Mall. It's not far from here. I shop a little, but mostly I just people watch." Xander nodded slightly, even as he dismissed the idea. That left much too much time to think, for his tastes. "Sometimes, if I've got a whole lot of time on my hands, I'll go up to Ybor City in Tampa. It's the club district at night, but during the day they have some gorgeous antique shops."
"Thanks." Xander forced himself to keep smiling and nodding. It was looking more and more like he'd just be checking into his hotel and watching tv until his flight left tomorrow. He silently cursed Giles for insisting that he stay over night any time he flew more than five hours. He could have had a flight out this evening, and avoided the whole Adam issue all together. Maybe he'd give Willow a call. She'd love to hear that he'd run into someone from high school.
On the other hand, she'd be all for him hitting up that party and "giving himself a chance to relax". She wouldn't understand that Xander couldn't relax around people anymore.
The waitress smiled at him and promised to get his food out quickly. Xander turned back to his now empty table and leaned forward on his arms. It was times like these that he regretted never learning to read books for pleasure. If he had, he might not have looked so pathetic to his fellow customers, sitting in the corner by himself, staring at a glass of water.
He did have a book with him though. It was wrapped in brown paper and tucked into the special compartment of his backpack, the one sealed from tampering by a number of protective spells and one heavy duty travel lock. But Giles had specifically warned him against opening this one.
That rankled a bit. Giles had never gone out of his way to warn Xander on anything before, and he'd always returned any artifacts in their original wrapping, unopened. Xander wasn't a watcher, and frankly, he didn't want to be, but he knew better than to tamper with magical artifacts, by now. He'd been annoyed enough at the warning to revert back to his old, snarky form.
"I get it, Giles." He'd said. "Don't speak Latin at the books. Don't scan the books. Don't open the books because I'm not smart enough to understand them anyway, so it'll probably just lead to me getting eaten."
Giles had apologized, of course, and tried to reassure Xander that he was only looking out for his well being, so Xander had backed off the anger a little. He rode a knife's edge when he was at the Council, and had already alienated most of the watchers he'd ever met. He had no desire to add Giles to his list of enemies. So he'd made some joke about being Indiana Jones only with better luck and worse hair, and had basically babbled on about pop culture until Giles had stopped looking at him with sympathetic eyes and had started smiling knowingly.
Another relationship saved. Another friend reassured that Xander was still Xander, still goofy and inept, and not completely dead inside.
He leaned his head against his right fist, and turned to stare out the window at the traffic going by.
Another friend lied to.
* * *
The hotel was exactly as bad as he thought it would be. The sign on the front of the building read "Dolphin Resort" and sported two electric blue dolphins poised in mid jump over neon waves. The "resort" part of its bold name referred, it seemed, to the fact that it sat no more than twenty yards from Tampa Bay and had a pool; other than that, it was no different from any of the number of strip-mall motels that Xander remembered from Sunnydale and Oxnard. The room was beige, of course, with pastel prints of a red and orange sunset over brilliantly aquamarine water, almost identical to the one he could just barely see out his window. The bedspread was a jangling pattern of orange, red, and blue that made his eye ache. He was briefly surprised to see that there was no "magic-fingers" coin box on the headboard.
The air-conditioning was on high enough that condensation fogged the large window looking out over the courtyard and the pool, and Xander's first order of business was turning it down to a tolerable level. His next was flopping down on the cheerful bedspread and pulling Adam's note out of his pocket. He'd determined, after driving around town for several hours and checking out all the potential demonic hot spots, that St. Petersburg was a dead zone, magic-wise. He hadn't caught any of the usual signs of demon infestation. There were no abandoned buildings, no excessive religious sites or cemeteries, no ancient temples, or large stretches of undeveloped, forested land. Which meant that Adam's offer was on the up and up. Sometimes a party was just a party.
He wondered if he was brave enough to face the questions Adam would have about everything; his job, his eye, his friends, and the world. He wondered if he had the energy to feign interest in Adam's life and the lives of the other party-goers.
He wondered how quickly he'd find himself too obliterated to care.
Xander had not had more than a single serving of alcohol since before Sunnydale had taken its crumbling dive into the California desert, though it had not been through any conscious effort on his part. When he met with a slayer's family he was almost invariably offered a drink and he accepted so as not to appear rude, but always nursed it while he rattled his way through the recruitment monologue that the Watcher's Council had prepared. If Adam's party was anything like those that Xander had been unfortunate enough to attend back when Willow and Buffy were in college, he'd be expected to drink quite a bit more, and worse yet, to enjoy himself while he did it, and while he'd never quite reached his family's raging alcoholism, he knew all too well how easy it would be to do so. He set the invitation aside, turned on the television and let the mindless drone and canned laughter of the latest NBC sitcom wash over him as his thoughts wandered.
He spent his time traveling on autopilot. Get to the store or the house or the restaurant, retrieve the item, slayer, or information he'd come for, go back to the hotel, will himself to sleep, and then return to London for his next assignment. It wasn't the same as living. He spent most of his time anticipating his next move and trying not to think about everything he was leaving behind or missing. He lived out of a backpack, owning little more than two pairs of pants, a week's worth of wash-and-wear shirts and underwear, a jacket, and a pair of sturdy boots. He spent his time in hotel rooms and rental cars, ate mostly take out and airplane food, and had enough frequent flier miles to circle the world twice. Which he'd basically already done.
At first he'd tried to learn as much about each location he found himself in as possible, buying souvenirs for all his friends, writing numerous postcards, and using the afternoons and evenings that he had free to do touristy things. That had worn off quickly as he realized that every place he went was basically like everywhere else in the world--that people were rude and exclusive no matter what language they spoke, that they lived the same petty lives that everyone else did, never questioning whether or not this might just be the day that they kiss, eat, laugh, fuck, and breathe for the last time.
Xander felt his eye drift back over to the folded notebook paper on the bed next to him. He knew Adam and his friends would be no different. But the promise of someone from the past, from before Buffy had come into his life and turned everything on its head, made him wonder if maybe for one evening he could have a taste of that petty life.
His hand hovered over the receiver of the hotel phone, and with a sharp exhale at his own ridiculous hesitation, he grabbed it and dialed the number Adam had scrawled on the top of the paper.
Screw it. He could just not drink. If the party sucked, he could leave.
He was going to do something different, for once.
He half-expected Adam to answer on the first ring, but instead found himself waiting through three of them before a female voice picked up. He cleared his throat, which had suddenly tightened at the thought of having to communicate without falling back on Council lines. "Is Adam there?"
"He's on a beer run. You wanna leave a message?" The girl's voice was flat and tinted with the barest hint of a Southern accent. She sounded like she'd rather drive a stake through her own foot than take his message. Xander coughed again.
"Just tell him Xander called. I'm coming tonight."
"Xander." The girl was definitely bored. "You're the Sunnydale guy."
"Yeah." Xander shook his head. He'd had more than a year to get used to not being a "Sunnydale guy" anymore. "I guess so."
"There's no RSVP." A beeping started up in the background. "Just show up."
"Oh." Xander rubbed his forehead just under the strap of his eyepatch. "Yeah, okay. What time?"
"Whenever. Hold on." There was a muffled thump, and he could hear the girl calling for someone to get brownies out of the oven. "Okay," she said when she returned. "Anything else?"
"I guess not."
"Right." She was silent for a moment, but before Xander could think of something to say to fill the gap, she let out a sharp "bye" and was replaced by a click and a dial tone.
Xander set the phone back into its cradle and closed his eye.
Oh yeah. This would be LOTS of fun.
* * *
Adam lived in a rented house a few blocks from the highway, an aluminum sided two-story affair with a hot tub and a small yard in front. The yard was filled with co-ed types drinking from green bottles or red plastic cups and smoking sweet-smelling cigarettes. Xander drove slowly past, and parked down the block. He stepped out into the slightly cooler air and closed his eye as a breeze blustered over him. The wind smelled like chlorine and salt. Xander opened his eye and started for the party.
Everyone in the yard ignored him, so he slipped through them to get into the house and found Adam lounging on a sofa in the front room, surrounded by girls in spaghetti strap tank tops and denim shorts, guys in cargo shorts and t-shirts with the sleeves cut out. Half of them had dreadlocks, and at least three sported blue hair. They looked as if they didn't have a care in the world. He caught snippets of conversations about classes and majors, and felt a blast of the old townie ache strike his chest. Before he could dwell on it, Adam was out of his seat and clapping his hand on his shoulder.
"Xander! Man! Welcome! Someone get this guy a beer!"
Xander winced and opened his mouth to refuse, but the demand for beer got lost in the crowd. Adam swiftly moved on to introductions that Xander would never remember, and explanations that barely registered. It seemed Adam was on some sort of "five year plan" at school, and was enjoying the college life a little bit too much. He was majoring in philosophy and working part time for one of his professors to help pay for his tuition. Then came the interview portion of the evening.
"How about you, man? What are you doing these days?"
"Working." Xander eased himself down onto the couch. "I travel a lot."
Adam nodded. "That's tough man. You said you're living in London, now?"
"Sort of." Xander let himself fall into the pattern of small talk. "I don't get back there much. I guess I mostly live on the road."
"And what kind of work do you do?"
"Acquisitions."
"Cool, cool. You still talk to people from Sunnydale?" Adam turned to accept a joint from one of the girls sitting on the floor. Xander stared at it as the boy raised it to his lips. Would he be expected to take a hit too? Social situations had never been his area of expertise. He finally decided that, if pressed, a hit or two might not be a problem. He'd only smoked once before, back in the year of the basement before Oz had left. It had been a male-bonding, cheer up the townie kind of thing.
"Willow and Buffy, mostly."
Adam grinned knowingly. "Of course. You three were like, attached at the hip." He narrowed his eyes, apparently looking for more names to drop. "How about Oz or Cordelia?"
"Not so much."
Another nod, and then the joint was being offered. Xander accepted it inexpertly and kept his eye on his host as he handed the joint off to whoever was on his left without taking a hit. He wondered when the conversation would get around to his eye, and what he would say when it did. It was possible that Adam remembered that there was more to the world than most people knew. It would go some distance towards explaining his major, at least.
They never got there, though, as someone else demanded Adam's attention, and the conversation turned to the sort of discussion that only happens when college students gathered together and got baked: the existence of God, the nature of mankind, and the hidden metaphors in the plot of the latest PlayStation first-person shooter. Xander continued to pass on the joints and bongs that were handed his way, and let the conversation wash over and around him.
Time began to stretch out and drop away from him, and he started to forget that the smoke bothered his eye and that he had a life outside of sitting in a room of strangers talking about things that couldn't be proved. The person on his left leaned against his shoulder.
"What do you think, Sam?"
"What?"
She was a girl, maybe nineteen years old, with green streaks in her blonde hair. She wore an Indian print t-shirt and a broomstick skirt that reminded him of Tara, and smelled like incense. Her eyelids glittered as she bat them at him.
"Angela says that life is purposeless, and that being happy is the only thing that matters. I say that we're here for a reason, we just don't know what it is. What do you think?"
Ah. The meaning of life. It must be one am. "I think you're drunk."
"Well, yeah." She sat up slightly and turned towards him. Now her breasts were pressing against his upper arm. "But is it a meaningless drunk?"
"Drunkenness is always meaningless." Xander nodded his head sagely, and wondered when it had stopped being connected to his neck. It took a moment for him to realize that he'd been sitting in a room full of pot smoke for several hours and had probably gotten inadvertently high. "That's the point."
The girl started giggling hysterically. Someone suggested putting in a movie. Adam seemed to have wandered off somewhere.
"You're a funny one, Sam."
"It's Xander."
"An excellent name. What year are you?"
"24."
She giggled again, and Xander gave himself a mental pat on the back for his masterful deflection of the question. "You're just full of interesting thoughts, Samder. I'm Gina." She stuck out her hand, but was pressed too close to him, and ended up jabbing him sharply in the sternum. He let out a breath with a dog-like *woof* and she backed up. "Oh god, I'm sorry." She grinned and shook her head. "I get very clumsy when I'm drinking. Well, most people get clumsy when they drink, but I tend to injure people. Are you okay?"
Xander nodded as he caught his breath. "It's okay," he gasped. "I wasn't using my lungs for much, anyway."
"Weren't you?" She leaned even closer to him, and Xander wondered when she'd forgotten the concept of personal space. Her lips pursed and her eyelids drooped, but something in his expression must have warned her off, because she suddenly sat back. He let out a tiny breath. If she'd kissed him, he'd probably have had to slay her. "Let me get you a drink. Or a smoke. Or both. Or a pill?" And then she was off before Xander could consider how to answer her. Xander leaned back against the couch, his head spinning faintly. After a moment's reflection, which might have taken anywhere from thirty seconds to fifteen minutes, he realized that if he wanted to be able to think straight and keep himself remotely sane, he had to get out of the smoke filled room.
That, of course, required moving, which it seemed would take a monumental effort. He concentrated on leaning forwards first, and was inordinately pleased when he managed to settle his elbows on his knees. That was a step in the right direction. He tried to remember how to stand up, but he couldn't seem to figure out exactly what muscles did what when. He always just sort of decided to stand, and then stood.
He was standing. Well. He was pretty sure that solved that problem. He saw Gina weaving back toward him through the room, and let himself give her an apologetic smile. "Need some air," he said, and she nodded and turned back into the crowd in Adam's tiny, dingy kitchen, a large brownie clutched in her left hand. Xander's eye dwelled for a long moment on the way her denim shorts stretched across her backside, then shook his head and made for the front porch.
The humid air, which when the sun was up had caused him such difficulty, felt light, warm, and clean across his skin in comparison to the smoke-filled, climate controlled living room. Most of the partiers seemed to have gone home or moved inside, leaving the porch and hot tub cluttered with cigarette butts and empty bottles. The breeze from earlier had stilled, and Xander could feel the air settle down around him like a blanket as he thumped down onto the steps and leaned against the railing. It was warm, slightly wet, and surprisingly comfortable. He took several deep breaths and tried to still his twitching fingers. He felt like he ought to have a bottle in his hands to complete the picture of quiet reflection, and only the fact that he'd have to get up and go back inside to get one saved his sobriety.
As Xander settled into himself and stopped moving, the rest of the world seemed to come alive. The silence began to fill with the sounds of traffic on the nearby highway and muffled island music from the house next door. A siren rang out briefly and then faded again. The orangey street lamps lit up palm fronds, turning them an almost electric green color. Invisible bugs nipped at his bare arms through the hazy, almost-liquid air, and Xander shut his eye to the world and let himself drift away from the moment.
Sunnydale seemed like ancient history. England and South Africa were a million light years away. The bookstore, the hotel room, even Adam's couch and Gina were a part of a distant, half-remembered past, and his flight out of Tampa airport was in an afternoon that would never come. Forever was right here where he sat, on this unfamiliar front porch in a town he didn't know, and under stars he couldn't see with his eye closed. Nothing would ever hurt or change again, and even if it did, Xander was suddenly filled with a sense that he could always come back here in his mind. He'd always remember the way this felt, even if he didn't remember the shape of the porch, or the scent of the air.
Xander wondered if he was stoned.
It hadn't been quite like this, back in his basement with Oz. Then it was a case of the familiar becoming slowly alien, filled with details he'd never noticed before. Now, it seemed like he was always noticing the details wherever he went, collecting the facts to prove to his friends that he'd BEEN somewhere and DONE something, even if his stories never had the little personal touches that came along with real life. He never told them how he was learning that Columbus was wrong, that the world really was a flat expanse surrounded by nothingness. He never told them that the people he met weren't real or that the details were just painted on the backdrop.
They'd worry, if he did.
He wondered if he could still make the world take shape around him, or if he would always feel like he was just watching a very long, very repetitive movie. If he'd always be alone when he was surrounded by people.
The door behind him creaked as it opened, but Xander didn't move.
"Hey man," Adam said. "Let's go to the beach."
* * *
Xander drove, since Adam was still drunk and flying on about six different substances of varying legality. He was surprisingly coherent for someone who'd taken as many pills and smoked as many strange cigarettes as Adam said he had, but Xander wasn't about to let him behind the wheel. He was leery enough about accepting the boy's directions.
The beach was only a few miles from the party, and Adam took great pride in pointing out the entrance to his school on the way. Xander caught a glimpse of a low, stone wall with the name of the school tacked onto it, and a road leading into a bunch of twisted, southern trees, but the campus was on his blind side. He found himself missing the traffic patterns of the UK, where at least he could tune out any passengers and keep a closer eye on oncoming traffic. His nose wrinkled as he caught a whiff of the air flowing in the open window. "Your school stinks."
Adam laughed. "Only when the wind is blowing the wrong way. It's from the water treatment plant next door. Did you go to college?"
"Not really."
"It's amazing, man." Adam leaned heavily against the passenger side door. "It's not like highschool. You can do what you want and take what you want and stay forever."
"Is that why you're on your sixth year?" Xander didn't bother to mask the skepticism in his voice. He hadn't been very impressed by what he'd seen of UC Sunnydale, and once he'd landed regular employment, didn't see much worth in college at all.
"Fifth year." Adam raised a finger in front of his face. "I took a year off after graduation. Had to recover." He twisted his head over to peer at Xander. "You've got change, right?."
Xander shrugged. "If I'm driving, you're paying." He expected some sort of drunken protest, but Adam simply nodded as though Xander had said some universal truth and dug two quarters out of his pocket. Xander slowed as they approached the toll booth to the beach and winced inwardly at the task in front of him. There was no way he'd be able to toss the quarters into the basket on the first try, and he was likely to snap off the rearview mirror if he tried to pull up to the booth. Adam hadn't questioned his eye patch yet, but the sight of Xander leaning halfway out the window was likely to kick start the boy's curiosity.
But Adam remained strangely silent as Xander paid the toll and pulled out of the booth. Xander's shoulders tightened as he waited.
"It's like . . . like Zeno's paradox."
The tension vanished. He could handle bizarre, confusing philosophy. Xander's whole life could be boiled down to bizarre, confusing philosophy. "What is?"
"College. Life. Death." Adam twisted sideways in his seat. "You're always halving the distance, but never getting to your destination. The journey never ends."
Xander blinked. "Yeah. You've completely lost me."
Adam's head bounced up and down for a moment and he turned his eyes back to the road. "Did you take trig?"
"I barely passed Algebra."
"It's like the limit." Adam's head fell back. "Life approaches infinity as college approaches graduation."
Xander decided to just pretend he got it, in hopes Adam would let the topic rest. "Oh. Yeah."
"No, I'm serious." Adam sat up straight again. Just watching him out of the corner of his eye made Xander anxious. "Okay, like this. Say you're ninety miles away from home, and you're driving ninety miles an hour. It'll take you an hour to get there, right?"
Xander nodded.
"But, say, you start to slow down. You've gone ten miles, but you've slowed down ten miles an hour. You're going eighty from eighty miles away. You keep doing this, slowing down a mile and hour every mile. You'd always have another hour of driving before you get there."
Xander frowned. "But you'd still get there, eventually."
"But say, you're a mile away, but you're going a mile an hour. You could WALK there in fifteen minutes, but you just keep slowing down. Time approaches infinity as you approach home."
"You're giving me a headache."
"Sorry, man." Adam grinned at him wolfishly. "It's fascinating. How do we define the point where the journey ends and the destination begins? How do we know where anything ends and begins? The whole universe is made of out of the same things. My clothes, the trees, the car, all of it boils down to protons and neutrons and electrons." He reached out and touched one finger tip to Xander's forearm, near his wrist. Xander wondered for a moment if Adam was coming on to him. "When I touch you, the electrons in my atoms are spinning off into your atoms, and vice versa. Where do I end and you begin?"
Xander grunted. He couldn't tell if his whirling thoughts were pot- or philosophy-induced. Probably both. "And again with the headache. Why does it matter?"
Adam nodded again. "Why, indeed? Does anything matter?" He leaned his head against the glass of the window, taking his finger off Xander's arm. "Is everything matter?"
"Okay, seriously," Xander shot a very quick glare at his companion. "I'm trying to drive here."
"Take a left at the giant pink hotel."
Xander blinked. Sure enough, as they crested the rise of yet another bridge, a giant, pink hotel with white trimmings broke the horizon line. As if Florida weren't surreal enough. "Good god, WHY?"
Adam snorted on a laugh. "It's the Don Cesar. Pride and joy of St. Pete Beach. The classiest hotel around."
"You're kidding."
"Florida's like a whole different planet, man."
Xander nodded mindlessly as he stared at the offensive pink structure. "Just tell me that's not where we're going."
"Nah. South of the Don is Passe Grille. Keep going straight after you turn left, then loop around when you hit the end of the road. There's a stretch of parking lot along the beach, follow that until you reach the end, then park. We're headed to no man's land."
"Just so you know," Xander flicked the on the left-turn signal, though there wasn't any other traffic on the road. "I'm beginning to seriously doubt my sanity here."
"Then I'm doing my job right."
They fell into silence as Xander navigated the tiny, two-lane road that meandered between a hodge- podge mix of architectural styles on the right and a featureless boardwalk on the left. Signs for restaurants with nautical names and palm trees lined the route, and Xander really did feel like he'd somehow landed on another planet, in another dimension. A gray plastic manatee mailbox loomed in his headlights, and he turned right.
The world ended only thirty feet in front of him.
"Jesus."
It was no more than a whisper, and Adam simply nodded. The rental car's radio pumped out the latest pop hits at low volume, and Xander turned right again, driving parallel to the abyss.
"Here." Adam said, as a wall of palm trees replaced the road. Xander pulled into a parking space and shut the car off.
"Why are we here?"
"You're asking all the best questions, tonight." Adam slipped out the door even as Xander struggled to come up with a response. The kid was crazy, he decided. He willingly spent all of his time doing exactly what Xander spent his time avoiding doing: thinking about the world, and why things happened the way they did. Xander knew better than to question. That way lay madness. Things just happened, and would continue to just happen whether you knew the reasons why, or not.
Xander stepped out of the car and into the warm, humid air. The smell of salt struck him sharply in the chest, bringing to mind carefree beach parties on the Pacific coast, happier times before he knew that the world sucked.
He shook his head and followed Adam's silhouette over the edge of the world.
"Wanna go swimming?"
Xander followed Adam's shadowed gaze to the moonlit waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The sheen of silver undulating over the black water was hypnotizing to watch. The light of the night had dimmed the bright colors of the semi-tropical coast into deep muted greens and shades of grey, and the world looked even flatter from this angle than it usually did. He could feel himself believing that there was nothing beyond the faint horizon line, or beyond the edge of the pale gray sand, but a painted backdrop. Life consisted of only a few yards of space around him, and only a few seconds of time. "No."
"The water's really warm. You'd like it."
Xander shook his head. "Remember the swim team?"
Adam was quiet for a moment. "You mean the steroid scandal? When the swimmers started disappearing?"
"Yeah." Xander peered at the tiny waves, as though he might spot a dark, humanoid fish shape cresting over the water. "I haven't swum since then."
Adam nodded, then settled himself down on the sand. "How are you really, man?"
Xander didn't know how to answer that question. Society dictated that he should say "fine", and be done with it. Society was a bitch, and Xander didn't want to listen any more. "Not so great."
Adam nodded again, and they lapsed into silence.
It should have been monumentally uncomfortable. The sand was seeping into the back of Xander's pants and over the sides of his boots. He was sitting with a kid--with a man he hadn't spoken to in more than half a decade, and who he hadn't been all that close with to begin with. The answer, "not so good", should have hung over him the way Adam's refusal to ask about the eye-patch did. Xander blamed the pot he was certain was running through his system for his inability to care. The silence was better than the questions he didn't know how to answer.
"I still think about it a lot." Adam's voice drifted and rippled like the moonlight on the water. "The way it all went down, with the mayor and all of us fighting like that. The way the school lit up the sky and the sun went away." He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "How do you deal with it all? How can you have gone through all that and not wonder WHY?"
And Xander suddenly understood. He knew why Adam had hugged him in the bookstore, why he'd invited him to his party, and why he had insisted on going out to the beach and leaving said party behind. He was looking for someone who understood. Someone who might be able to answer the questions that Aristotle, Nietze, and all the other philosophers couldn't.
And neither could Xander. "I don't know." He mimicked Adam's position. "I don't know why, and I don't know how. I just know that you do. That you make friends, and you keep moving, and you try not to think about it."
Adam turned to look at him. "You've seen more of it than I have. I didn't understand until graduation, that you and Willow and Buffy and Oz weren't just some weird kids in a gang who had some fascination with death. Now I don't understand how you can not want to just scream, all the time. Or curl up in your bed and never go back out into the world again."
Xander smiled, but he didn't feel it in his heart. "I've tried that. You just end up with nightmares and probably in some ugly facility where the nurses never remember your name and your roommate is afraid of squirrels."
Adam stood suddenly. "But it's still THERE! Even HERE, where your friends don't disappear and the obituaries are only a page long, and the sun doesn't just VANISH, I can still feel it. Tugging at the corners, like I have to figure it all out and DO something about it. How do you do it? How do you forget all that?"
Xander shook his head. "You think I've forgotten?"
"You travel all the time, and you work in ‘acquisitions' and you wear polo shirts. That's not Xander Harris. That's not the guy who turned the football team into a platoon and showed the AV club how to use a bow."
Xander flinched. "I travel collecting mystical artifacts and spell books and heros. I'm still a good shot with a bow and arrow, and I've trained teenaged girls how to set people on fire with a zippo and kill evil things with a piece of wood." He turned to gaze at Adam, who stood stock still, just staring at him. "You don't just forget. You never forget the faces of the people you've saved and the people you've failed. You never forget the faces of the things you've killed and watched kill. You just move on."
Adam seemed to deflate. He settled himself back down onto the sand. Xander stayed quiet and waited.
"I can't."
Xander nodded.
* * *
"You okay to find your hotel?" Adam leaned through the open passenger side window, his face impossible to read in the shadows of the pre-dawn light. Xander gripped the steering wheel and shrugged.
"I don't think I'm stoned any more. I'm not sure if I was in the first place."
Adam smiled. "Oh, you totally were. The way you freaked out over the Don was a sure sign." He tilted his head. "You've got my number, now, man. Keep in touch, right?"
Xander shrugged again. "I'll try."
Adam stepped back a little from the car. "Well. Have a good flight back. Guess I might see you around?"
"Could be." Xander watched as Adam turned to go back into his rented house, where his college friends lay passed out from a night of forgetting things they'd never learned in the first place. "Hey, Adam."
The kid--the man--his friend turned back toward him, his eyebrows raised.
"You never asked about my eye."
Adam smiled slightly, shaking his head. "Didn't need to. There are some things you just don't ask about."
Xander stared at him even as he turned to go walk to the house. Adam had asked about everything else under the sun in the hours they'd spent on the beach. But there were some things you just don't ask about.
He glanced at the clock. It was almost six am. He had seven hours before he had to be back at the airport. It was eleven in London, meaning Giles would be at his desk, possibly going over the itinerary for wherever he was going to send him next. For a moment, Xander considered missing his flight. Staying in Florida and letting himself ask or not ask whatever questions he had about life, the universe, and everything. Get to know Gina and the bored girl with the southern accent and all of Adam's other friends and lose himself in the petty life.
He knew he wouldn't, though. He had to keep moving forward.
It was his way of dealing.
The Buffy part will be posted eventually. Hopefully I'll get it at least mostly finished before Labor Day, when I flee the country.
Disclaimer: Xander, Buffy, Giles, and the other characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and Fox. Adam and the Immortal are also their characters, but have been fleshed out within my own imagination. All other characters are the original creations of Bella Temple, and should not be used without permission. All locations in the first part of this fic are real; I hope that I've managed to bring them somewhat to life for my readers. Enjoy.
Notes: I've mentioned before that this story was inspired by Casix Thistlebane's Waking Up and a little by Mr. Blue Sky, as well as Garden State, The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, and I <3 Huckabees. Knowledge of any of those stories/movies is not a requirement, I just want to credit where credit is due.
Adam (or at the very least, the actor who played him) appeared twice in cannon, first in The Harvest as a guy in Willow and Cordelia's computer class, and second in The Pack. The name "Adam" came from buffyguide.com. I've always been intrigued by how Willow and Xander interacted more in a friendly manner with their classmates in season one than in two or three.
Summary: One deals by always traveling, the other by never going anywhere at all. It's not the same as living.
Whistling in the Dark
by Bella Temple
A woman came up to me and said
"I'd like to poison your mind
with wrong ideas that appeal to you,
though I am not unkind."
--They Might Be Giants, "Whistling in the Dark"
Hassam's new and used bookstore was like most of the buildings in downtown St. Petersburg--squat, concrete, and washed out by the sun. The guide book Xander had scanned on the flight over had used a peculiar phrase to describe the architecture of the city: Polynesian Gothic. He had no idea what that meant--apparently it meant short, hard, and beige. Or aquamarine. Or pink. It was hard to get used to. Every plant that surrounded him was brilliantly green, the festive banners that lined Central Avenue were painfully bright, and the sun reflecting off the sidewalk made him wish that he'd remembered to bring his sunglasses. He was thankful that he was only supposed to be here for a little while.
The interior of the store was nearly arctic compared to the muggy heat outside, and Xander shivered as he stepped through the doorway and into the blasting air-conditioning. He considered for a moment pulling his jacket out of his backpack, but as he walked further into the store, decided against it. He had only come for one thing and would soon be getting back into his rental car, where he had full control over the temperature. He'd just deal with the cold. It was nothing compared to the other St. Petersburg in mid-March. He was becoming quite the world-traveler, really, and had gotten good at quickly adapting to a new situation.
The bookstore was hardly what he'd come to expect from the places Giles sent him. It was neither dark nor stuffy, but instead brightly lit by strips of flourescent bulbs. The shelves were prefabricated monstrosities of compressed wood pulp, not hand-crafted from hardwood. The books on the shelves looked new, practically untouched, still sporting their dust-covers and gleaming slightly. The main room was large and uncluttered, and the front desk was painted white, with a modern register and even a credit card machine. The woman behind it appeared to be about Xander's age, with white-blonde hair and the soft, uniform tan of someone used to spending most of her time outdoors. She didn't wear glasses, and she smiled at him when he entered. He stopped briefly, taken by surprise. He was used to used bookstore clerks being standoffish, pale, older men who ignored you even when you were making your purchases. Perhaps that was a European thing.
The only familiar aspect of the store was its surreality, as if it had been constructed only moments before he entered, and the books were painted onto the walls. But Xander got that feeling everywhere he went, these days. His lack of depth perception hadn't been so bad in Sunnydale, where he could blame his strange feelings on the medications he was taking, and where he knew the shapes and contours of everything without having to really see them. It wasn't until he'd started going to places he'd never been that he'd realized how much he'd lost with his left eye. His ability to easily walk downstairs was one. His sense of reality was another.
"Is there anything in particular you're looking for, today?" The clerk continued smiling as she spoke, even as her forehead crinkled. He tried not to stare at her teeth as she tried not to stare at his eye- patch. He'd forgotten how incredibly white American teeth could be. He forgot how bright and clean everything in America seemed to be. It only added to his sense of detachment.
"Yeah," Xander slipped into his easy-going, Californian accent like an old t-shirt. His voice had picked up a clipped edge during his time overseas, especially the months he'd spent in South Africa. He'd thought that discarding it would be more difficult than this, but he was falling quickly back into the American rhythm with its round, slightly nasal vowels and softened consonants. "I'm here to pick up an order. Under the name of Rupert Giles?"
The woman's smile faded. "Can I see some ID?"
Xander fished his international driver's license out of his back pocket and handed it to her. She glanced from his face to his picture, then to her computer monitor. The smile returned in full force. "This'll take a minute. You can take a look around if you like, something else might catch your--" She grimaced slightly, and finished apologetically. "Your, um, eye."
He smiled to let her know he didn't take offense. Political correctness was an almost purely American reflex. "I'm not really much of a reader."
She nodded, the flush of embarrassment still darkening her cheeks, then ducked back into the employees only area, shooting back a "Just a sec, Mr. Harris," as she went. Xander let his eye wander slightly around the store again as he waited, tapping his fingers.
A long haired, bristly bearded young man wearing a style that Willow had once called "beach-nik" stepped around one of the corners, his arms laden with paperbacks, flipping through the one on top. A battered spiral notebook stuck out of the top of one of the cargo pockets of his khaki shorts, and his birkenstock sandals made a soft clopping noise as he approached Xander and the checkout counter at a blind jog. Xander stepped to one side to avoid a collision and then turned back to the counter, placing the kid squarely in his blind spot. He shrugged as the kid apologized distractedly, and nearly jumped when it was followed with an exclamation.
"Holy crap! Xander!"
Xander closed his eye, steeling his nerve for what was certain to be an incredibly awkward reunion, then turned back to the kid. His eyebrows rose as he tried to place the face.
"Oh, man, it's good to see you! We all figured you kicked it when Sunnydale did." The kid, who was probably a little bit too old to actually be referred to by that term, shoved his stack of books onto the counter and offered a darkly tanned hand. Xander noted that his wrist was circled by a number of battered looking hemp bracelets, then startled again as the kid dragged him by his grip into a one- armed hug. He frowned as he drew back. The kid shook his head. "Aw, don't tell me you don't recognize me." He held out his arms, displaying two bunches of dark armpit hair sticking out of his sleeveless t-shirt. "SHS, class of ‘99, the class that went out with a literal bang?"
Xander squinted his eye. The hair color had changed, currently an orangey wheat color that didn't exist in nature, and the kid was more tan than Xander had seen him before, and certainly a lot more relaxed than he'd ever been in Sunnydale, but he did recognize him. He was one of the few people other than Willow or Jesse who'd ever been nice to him during his twelve years of public schooling. Of course, that was before Xander had encouraged Kyle and his gang to steal the kid's food while he was hyena- fied. "Adam. How are you?"
Adam grinned. "I'm doing great, man!" He shook his head. "This is unbelievable. What brings you to St. Pete?"
Xander shrugged. "Business." He watched Adam silently, trying to decide if he wanted to continue the conversation to its inevitable conclusion of reminiscing about high school, or just get Giles' book and go. The clerk returned with a carefully wrapped package.
"Here you go, Mr. Harris. We got payment from Mr. Giles already, so you're all set."
He nodded, taking the package. He offered Adam a small smile. "Well," he said, then couldn't think of what he was supposed to say next. He shrugged again instead, then turned and headed for the door. Adam apparently abandoned his stack of books and dashed after him.
"Hey, Xander, hold up."
Xander choked on a sigh, his hand frozen on the door handle. Almost literally, as he was now standing right under the air-conditioning again. Adam dodged into his field of vision. "Yeah?"
"How long are you here for?"
It seemed he was going to have his "happy" reunion whether he liked it or not. Of course, now that he had Giles' book, he had a full day and night left with nothing to do. Maybe hanging out with an old acquaintance would help shake the strangeness of being back in the states after so long abroad. "Just until tomorrow. I have to get back to London."
Adam began nodding. "That's cool, that's cool, you got any plans tonight?"
Sleeping, mostly. Catching up on the latest infomercials when he woke up at 2 am after a nightmare. "Not really."
"Great." Adam yanked the battered notebook out of his pocket. A black pen was wedged into the spiral binding, and he tugged it out, then pulled the cap off with his teeth. He scribbled for a full minute, then ripped the page off and thrust it into Xander's hand. It had a phone number, address, and brief directions. Xander blinked at it. "That's my place. We're having a back-to-school thing tonight. You won't know anyone but me there, but it should be a good time. You should come."
Xander stuck the paper into his pocket. "Yeah, I'll see if I can make it." He took Adam's hand when it was offered, giving it a firm squeeze to keep from getting hugged again. "I guess I might see you."
"Could be." Adam grinned, then stepped out of his way so he could get going. Xander heard him chatting up the clerk as he stepped back into the Floridian August. Between the flatness of his monocular vision and the humidity, it was like walking through a wall.
* * *
He stopped for lunch at a small diner on the main strip, boasting the name "Kristina's Cafe". It was an unassuming building, with a bland, beige and brown sign and a tiny parking lot off to one side. He'd discovered while traveling that he preferred the little spots like these, the ones that didn't flash or sparkle to draw your eye. They were honest, somehow. "We won't try to entertain you," the sign seemed to say, "just get you something to eat".
It also said "99 cent egg breakfast served all day". The thought of a couple of eggs, over medium, with maybe some sausage on the side, fried within an inch of its life, set him salivating.
There were, it turned out, things about America that he missed.
The interior of the restaurant had a simple sort of elegance to it. The walls were, of course, beige, with a cherry wood chair rail and a handful of framed articles and paintings. A serving-counter lined the wall that faced the kitchen, and was separated from the main floor of the restaurant by a wrought iron railing. Blue collar workers and blue haired ladies dotted the tables and the counter, chatting with each other and the staff, eating from plates filled with sandwiches and french fries or eggs and hashbrowns. He stood for a moment in the doorway, his back to the heat and the parking lot, letting the air-conditioning, blasting like it did in the book store, wash over him as he took it all in.
A career waitress, dressed in a Kristina's Cafe t-shirt, black slacks, and an apron stuffed with napkins and straws, stepped from behind the counter and smiled at him. Her eyes tracked toward his patch, but drifted off again as she gathered a menu from their shelf by the counter. "Just one?"
The question was cheerful and melancholy at the same time. She was happy he was here, to eat their food and tip her, perhaps not so happy that he was only him, and not a crowd of five or more. Or maybe she could feel his isolation. He didn't really care which. "Yeah."
She lead him to a table by the enormous windows that look out over the street and handed him the menu. "Want anything to drink? Got the usual coke products, or iced tea, or coffee."
Xander made a show of opening his menu so he didn't have to see her staring at him. It'd been over a year now that he'd worn the eye-patch, and though he'd gotten used to most of the adjustments he'd had to make in his life, he still couldn't handle the looks it got. The expressions of curiosity and revulsion that let him know that he'd never be just another face in the crowd again. The life of a Scooby had permanently marked him as someone to be feared, respected, and pitied. "Just water, thanks."
"I'll give you a minute to look over the menu." She almost vanished, a nice trick considering he sat so that his blind side faced the windows. He'd gotten good at paying attention to his full vision, what little of it remained. He caught her quick pivot-turn in his peripheral vision, even as he scanned the menu.
He already knew what he wanted, knew it the moment he'd read the sign outside, but the choices on the menu distracted him from what his mind had been turning over and over in the car, so he weighed the corned beef sandwich against the fried mushrooms, the side of bacon against the side of sausage, and the hashbrowns against the grits.
That made him think of "My Cousin Vinnie" and he snorted a quick laugh. He already looked a little insane, he thought, with his world-weary posture and his patch, he didn't need a random bout of hysteria to add to it. Still, snow birds or not, Florida was the South, and "two yout's" was still one of the funniest conversations in film history.
Grits were only entertaining for so long, though, and soon enough he was back to pondering the question of the day.
Adam. What did the kid want from him? Was he just looking to reminisce, or did he belong to a cult that needed a new, one-eyed sacrifice? Traveling the world had taught him that it wasn't just women who were friendly to him because they wanted to kill him. He'd been abducted, briefly, in Greece by a group of young men looking for a virgin sacrifice, and all of his stories about Faith and Anya didn't sway them. They'd said something about his "other" virginity, something he decided didn't bear too close an inspection. He didn't WANT anything pushed up his ass, thank you very much, even if they had promised to make it entirely pleasurable for him. Adam had never shown any cultish leanings in Sunnydale, but he hadn't spoken to the kid since graduation. Who knew what had happened in the meantime?
Lord knew the modern-day Xander bore little resemblance to the boy who decided to play the flugelhorn in eighth grade because the word "flugel" made his best friend spit milk out of her nose. Adam had sat next to him in band class, playing the trombone, which while it wasn't a saxophone or trumpet, was astronomically cooler than the flugelhorn.
Maybe all Adam wanted was to reconnect, however briefly, with the flugelhorn kid who'd gotten detention with him when they were caught with Spiderman comics on their music stands. Maybe he still wanted to know what Xander thought of the lead guitarist of Wretched Refuse. Maybe he wanted to punch Xander in the face for letting Tor and Heidi eat his hotdog.
That had been when Xander Harris' position at Sunnydale High School had fundamentally changed. Adam, like Xander, had never been one of the "cool" kids, but he'd always had his ears and voice in the center of the gossip mill, and after the hotdog/hyena incident, Xander had started getting the Look from his fellow classmates. The look that said that they didn't know or care what your problem was, but they knew and cared that you were Weird, as in not Normal, and were therefore to be ridiculed. The look that said that you had been swallowed by the strangeness of Sunnydale that people just didn't talk about.
That day was when Xander stopped having two best friends and a circle of friendly acquaintances and started just having two best friends. Adam had given him that Look right up until the moment that Xander had handed him a sword and shown him the best way to hold it when you were decapitating a person.
Xander closed his menu and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Now that he thought about it, that Look had been more than deserved, and that Look was probably what kept the survivors of Sunnydale High sane. Why the hell would Adam want to hang out with Xander Harris, the King of the Look?
The waitress swung back around to his table, even as his hands moved from his nose to his forehead and he started trying to massage away a burgeoning headache. This wasn't the way his trips were supposed to go. He was supposed to just show up, get the stuff, and get out. That's why Giles sent him on these trips; he was reliable Xander, who didn't get sidetracked on a mission and who always returned with whatever he was sent to retrieve, barring demons and death. It was just that his missions weren't normally as simple as this one, and they were NEVER to any place that he might KNOW somebody. Giles understood that Xander was tired of knowing people. Didn't he?
He placed his order, then grinned suddenly up at his waitress. She backed off ever so slightly at the sight of his smile, and he made an effort to dim the manic a little. "What's there to do in this town? I'm here on business, but I've got a whole afternoon free."
She smiled back at him, her eyes switching rapidly between his patch and his right eyebrow. "Well, there's the beach and Fort DeSoto if you head south. Baywalk and the movie theater and a couple museums are downtown. You could go to the Pier, but there's not much there if you've already eaten." She nodded at his menu even as she reached out to take it from him. "The Dali Museum is the big draw for a lot of tourists, if you like surrealism."
Xander shook his head. "Not so much. What do you do? Personally I mean? When you're not waitressing? I'm not really in a tourist-y mood."
Her cheeks darkened and her smile softened at the edges. "I like to go to the mall. Tyrone Mall. It's not far from here. I shop a little, but mostly I just people watch." Xander nodded slightly, even as he dismissed the idea. That left much too much time to think, for his tastes. "Sometimes, if I've got a whole lot of time on my hands, I'll go up to Ybor City in Tampa. It's the club district at night, but during the day they have some gorgeous antique shops."
"Thanks." Xander forced himself to keep smiling and nodding. It was looking more and more like he'd just be checking into his hotel and watching tv until his flight left tomorrow. He silently cursed Giles for insisting that he stay over night any time he flew more than five hours. He could have had a flight out this evening, and avoided the whole Adam issue all together. Maybe he'd give Willow a call. She'd love to hear that he'd run into someone from high school.
On the other hand, she'd be all for him hitting up that party and "giving himself a chance to relax". She wouldn't understand that Xander couldn't relax around people anymore.
The waitress smiled at him and promised to get his food out quickly. Xander turned back to his now empty table and leaned forward on his arms. It was times like these that he regretted never learning to read books for pleasure. If he had, he might not have looked so pathetic to his fellow customers, sitting in the corner by himself, staring at a glass of water.
He did have a book with him though. It was wrapped in brown paper and tucked into the special compartment of his backpack, the one sealed from tampering by a number of protective spells and one heavy duty travel lock. But Giles had specifically warned him against opening this one.
That rankled a bit. Giles had never gone out of his way to warn Xander on anything before, and he'd always returned any artifacts in their original wrapping, unopened. Xander wasn't a watcher, and frankly, he didn't want to be, but he knew better than to tamper with magical artifacts, by now. He'd been annoyed enough at the warning to revert back to his old, snarky form.
"I get it, Giles." He'd said. "Don't speak Latin at the books. Don't scan the books. Don't open the books because I'm not smart enough to understand them anyway, so it'll probably just lead to me getting eaten."
Giles had apologized, of course, and tried to reassure Xander that he was only looking out for his well being, so Xander had backed off the anger a little. He rode a knife's edge when he was at the Council, and had already alienated most of the watchers he'd ever met. He had no desire to add Giles to his list of enemies. So he'd made some joke about being Indiana Jones only with better luck and worse hair, and had basically babbled on about pop culture until Giles had stopped looking at him with sympathetic eyes and had started smiling knowingly.
Another relationship saved. Another friend reassured that Xander was still Xander, still goofy and inept, and not completely dead inside.
He leaned his head against his right fist, and turned to stare out the window at the traffic going by.
Another friend lied to.
* * *
The hotel was exactly as bad as he thought it would be. The sign on the front of the building read "Dolphin Resort" and sported two electric blue dolphins poised in mid jump over neon waves. The "resort" part of its bold name referred, it seemed, to the fact that it sat no more than twenty yards from Tampa Bay and had a pool; other than that, it was no different from any of the number of strip-mall motels that Xander remembered from Sunnydale and Oxnard. The room was beige, of course, with pastel prints of a red and orange sunset over brilliantly aquamarine water, almost identical to the one he could just barely see out his window. The bedspread was a jangling pattern of orange, red, and blue that made his eye ache. He was briefly surprised to see that there was no "magic-fingers" coin box on the headboard.
The air-conditioning was on high enough that condensation fogged the large window looking out over the courtyard and the pool, and Xander's first order of business was turning it down to a tolerable level. His next was flopping down on the cheerful bedspread and pulling Adam's note out of his pocket. He'd determined, after driving around town for several hours and checking out all the potential demonic hot spots, that St. Petersburg was a dead zone, magic-wise. He hadn't caught any of the usual signs of demon infestation. There were no abandoned buildings, no excessive religious sites or cemeteries, no ancient temples, or large stretches of undeveloped, forested land. Which meant that Adam's offer was on the up and up. Sometimes a party was just a party.
He wondered if he was brave enough to face the questions Adam would have about everything; his job, his eye, his friends, and the world. He wondered if he had the energy to feign interest in Adam's life and the lives of the other party-goers.
He wondered how quickly he'd find himself too obliterated to care.
Xander had not had more than a single serving of alcohol since before Sunnydale had taken its crumbling dive into the California desert, though it had not been through any conscious effort on his part. When he met with a slayer's family he was almost invariably offered a drink and he accepted so as not to appear rude, but always nursed it while he rattled his way through the recruitment monologue that the Watcher's Council had prepared. If Adam's party was anything like those that Xander had been unfortunate enough to attend back when Willow and Buffy were in college, he'd be expected to drink quite a bit more, and worse yet, to enjoy himself while he did it, and while he'd never quite reached his family's raging alcoholism, he knew all too well how easy it would be to do so. He set the invitation aside, turned on the television and let the mindless drone and canned laughter of the latest NBC sitcom wash over him as his thoughts wandered.
He spent his time traveling on autopilot. Get to the store or the house or the restaurant, retrieve the item, slayer, or information he'd come for, go back to the hotel, will himself to sleep, and then return to London for his next assignment. It wasn't the same as living. He spent most of his time anticipating his next move and trying not to think about everything he was leaving behind or missing. He lived out of a backpack, owning little more than two pairs of pants, a week's worth of wash-and-wear shirts and underwear, a jacket, and a pair of sturdy boots. He spent his time in hotel rooms and rental cars, ate mostly take out and airplane food, and had enough frequent flier miles to circle the world twice. Which he'd basically already done.
At first he'd tried to learn as much about each location he found himself in as possible, buying souvenirs for all his friends, writing numerous postcards, and using the afternoons and evenings that he had free to do touristy things. That had worn off quickly as he realized that every place he went was basically like everywhere else in the world--that people were rude and exclusive no matter what language they spoke, that they lived the same petty lives that everyone else did, never questioning whether or not this might just be the day that they kiss, eat, laugh, fuck, and breathe for the last time.
Xander felt his eye drift back over to the folded notebook paper on the bed next to him. He knew Adam and his friends would be no different. But the promise of someone from the past, from before Buffy had come into his life and turned everything on its head, made him wonder if maybe for one evening he could have a taste of that petty life.
His hand hovered over the receiver of the hotel phone, and with a sharp exhale at his own ridiculous hesitation, he grabbed it and dialed the number Adam had scrawled on the top of the paper.
Screw it. He could just not drink. If the party sucked, he could leave.
He was going to do something different, for once.
He half-expected Adam to answer on the first ring, but instead found himself waiting through three of them before a female voice picked up. He cleared his throat, which had suddenly tightened at the thought of having to communicate without falling back on Council lines. "Is Adam there?"
"He's on a beer run. You wanna leave a message?" The girl's voice was flat and tinted with the barest hint of a Southern accent. She sounded like she'd rather drive a stake through her own foot than take his message. Xander coughed again.
"Just tell him Xander called. I'm coming tonight."
"Xander." The girl was definitely bored. "You're the Sunnydale guy."
"Yeah." Xander shook his head. He'd had more than a year to get used to not being a "Sunnydale guy" anymore. "I guess so."
"There's no RSVP." A beeping started up in the background. "Just show up."
"Oh." Xander rubbed his forehead just under the strap of his eyepatch. "Yeah, okay. What time?"
"Whenever. Hold on." There was a muffled thump, and he could hear the girl calling for someone to get brownies out of the oven. "Okay," she said when she returned. "Anything else?"
"I guess not."
"Right." She was silent for a moment, but before Xander could think of something to say to fill the gap, she let out a sharp "bye" and was replaced by a click and a dial tone.
Xander set the phone back into its cradle and closed his eye.
Oh yeah. This would be LOTS of fun.
* * *
Adam lived in a rented house a few blocks from the highway, an aluminum sided two-story affair with a hot tub and a small yard in front. The yard was filled with co-ed types drinking from green bottles or red plastic cups and smoking sweet-smelling cigarettes. Xander drove slowly past, and parked down the block. He stepped out into the slightly cooler air and closed his eye as a breeze blustered over him. The wind smelled like chlorine and salt. Xander opened his eye and started for the party.
Everyone in the yard ignored him, so he slipped through them to get into the house and found Adam lounging on a sofa in the front room, surrounded by girls in spaghetti strap tank tops and denim shorts, guys in cargo shorts and t-shirts with the sleeves cut out. Half of them had dreadlocks, and at least three sported blue hair. They looked as if they didn't have a care in the world. He caught snippets of conversations about classes and majors, and felt a blast of the old townie ache strike his chest. Before he could dwell on it, Adam was out of his seat and clapping his hand on his shoulder.
"Xander! Man! Welcome! Someone get this guy a beer!"
Xander winced and opened his mouth to refuse, but the demand for beer got lost in the crowd. Adam swiftly moved on to introductions that Xander would never remember, and explanations that barely registered. It seemed Adam was on some sort of "five year plan" at school, and was enjoying the college life a little bit too much. He was majoring in philosophy and working part time for one of his professors to help pay for his tuition. Then came the interview portion of the evening.
"How about you, man? What are you doing these days?"
"Working." Xander eased himself down onto the couch. "I travel a lot."
Adam nodded. "That's tough man. You said you're living in London, now?"
"Sort of." Xander let himself fall into the pattern of small talk. "I don't get back there much. I guess I mostly live on the road."
"And what kind of work do you do?"
"Acquisitions."
"Cool, cool. You still talk to people from Sunnydale?" Adam turned to accept a joint from one of the girls sitting on the floor. Xander stared at it as the boy raised it to his lips. Would he be expected to take a hit too? Social situations had never been his area of expertise. He finally decided that, if pressed, a hit or two might not be a problem. He'd only smoked once before, back in the year of the basement before Oz had left. It had been a male-bonding, cheer up the townie kind of thing.
"Willow and Buffy, mostly."
Adam grinned knowingly. "Of course. You three were like, attached at the hip." He narrowed his eyes, apparently looking for more names to drop. "How about Oz or Cordelia?"
"Not so much."
Another nod, and then the joint was being offered. Xander accepted it inexpertly and kept his eye on his host as he handed the joint off to whoever was on his left without taking a hit. He wondered when the conversation would get around to his eye, and what he would say when it did. It was possible that Adam remembered that there was more to the world than most people knew. It would go some distance towards explaining his major, at least.
They never got there, though, as someone else demanded Adam's attention, and the conversation turned to the sort of discussion that only happens when college students gathered together and got baked: the existence of God, the nature of mankind, and the hidden metaphors in the plot of the latest PlayStation first-person shooter. Xander continued to pass on the joints and bongs that were handed his way, and let the conversation wash over and around him.
Time began to stretch out and drop away from him, and he started to forget that the smoke bothered his eye and that he had a life outside of sitting in a room of strangers talking about things that couldn't be proved. The person on his left leaned against his shoulder.
"What do you think, Sam?"
"What?"
She was a girl, maybe nineteen years old, with green streaks in her blonde hair. She wore an Indian print t-shirt and a broomstick skirt that reminded him of Tara, and smelled like incense. Her eyelids glittered as she bat them at him.
"Angela says that life is purposeless, and that being happy is the only thing that matters. I say that we're here for a reason, we just don't know what it is. What do you think?"
Ah. The meaning of life. It must be one am. "I think you're drunk."
"Well, yeah." She sat up slightly and turned towards him. Now her breasts were pressing against his upper arm. "But is it a meaningless drunk?"
"Drunkenness is always meaningless." Xander nodded his head sagely, and wondered when it had stopped being connected to his neck. It took a moment for him to realize that he'd been sitting in a room full of pot smoke for several hours and had probably gotten inadvertently high. "That's the point."
The girl started giggling hysterically. Someone suggested putting in a movie. Adam seemed to have wandered off somewhere.
"You're a funny one, Sam."
"It's Xander."
"An excellent name. What year are you?"
"24."
She giggled again, and Xander gave himself a mental pat on the back for his masterful deflection of the question. "You're just full of interesting thoughts, Samder. I'm Gina." She stuck out her hand, but was pressed too close to him, and ended up jabbing him sharply in the sternum. He let out a breath with a dog-like *woof* and she backed up. "Oh god, I'm sorry." She grinned and shook her head. "I get very clumsy when I'm drinking. Well, most people get clumsy when they drink, but I tend to injure people. Are you okay?"
Xander nodded as he caught his breath. "It's okay," he gasped. "I wasn't using my lungs for much, anyway."
"Weren't you?" She leaned even closer to him, and Xander wondered when she'd forgotten the concept of personal space. Her lips pursed and her eyelids drooped, but something in his expression must have warned her off, because she suddenly sat back. He let out a tiny breath. If she'd kissed him, he'd probably have had to slay her. "Let me get you a drink. Or a smoke. Or both. Or a pill?" And then she was off before Xander could consider how to answer her. Xander leaned back against the couch, his head spinning faintly. After a moment's reflection, which might have taken anywhere from thirty seconds to fifteen minutes, he realized that if he wanted to be able to think straight and keep himself remotely sane, he had to get out of the smoke filled room.
That, of course, required moving, which it seemed would take a monumental effort. He concentrated on leaning forwards first, and was inordinately pleased when he managed to settle his elbows on his knees. That was a step in the right direction. He tried to remember how to stand up, but he couldn't seem to figure out exactly what muscles did what when. He always just sort of decided to stand, and then stood.
He was standing. Well. He was pretty sure that solved that problem. He saw Gina weaving back toward him through the room, and let himself give her an apologetic smile. "Need some air," he said, and she nodded and turned back into the crowd in Adam's tiny, dingy kitchen, a large brownie clutched in her left hand. Xander's eye dwelled for a long moment on the way her denim shorts stretched across her backside, then shook his head and made for the front porch.
The humid air, which when the sun was up had caused him such difficulty, felt light, warm, and clean across his skin in comparison to the smoke-filled, climate controlled living room. Most of the partiers seemed to have gone home or moved inside, leaving the porch and hot tub cluttered with cigarette butts and empty bottles. The breeze from earlier had stilled, and Xander could feel the air settle down around him like a blanket as he thumped down onto the steps and leaned against the railing. It was warm, slightly wet, and surprisingly comfortable. He took several deep breaths and tried to still his twitching fingers. He felt like he ought to have a bottle in his hands to complete the picture of quiet reflection, and only the fact that he'd have to get up and go back inside to get one saved his sobriety.
As Xander settled into himself and stopped moving, the rest of the world seemed to come alive. The silence began to fill with the sounds of traffic on the nearby highway and muffled island music from the house next door. A siren rang out briefly and then faded again. The orangey street lamps lit up palm fronds, turning them an almost electric green color. Invisible bugs nipped at his bare arms through the hazy, almost-liquid air, and Xander shut his eye to the world and let himself drift away from the moment.
Sunnydale seemed like ancient history. England and South Africa were a million light years away. The bookstore, the hotel room, even Adam's couch and Gina were a part of a distant, half-remembered past, and his flight out of Tampa airport was in an afternoon that would never come. Forever was right here where he sat, on this unfamiliar front porch in a town he didn't know, and under stars he couldn't see with his eye closed. Nothing would ever hurt or change again, and even if it did, Xander was suddenly filled with a sense that he could always come back here in his mind. He'd always remember the way this felt, even if he didn't remember the shape of the porch, or the scent of the air.
Xander wondered if he was stoned.
It hadn't been quite like this, back in his basement with Oz. Then it was a case of the familiar becoming slowly alien, filled with details he'd never noticed before. Now, it seemed like he was always noticing the details wherever he went, collecting the facts to prove to his friends that he'd BEEN somewhere and DONE something, even if his stories never had the little personal touches that came along with real life. He never told them how he was learning that Columbus was wrong, that the world really was a flat expanse surrounded by nothingness. He never told them that the people he met weren't real or that the details were just painted on the backdrop.
They'd worry, if he did.
He wondered if he could still make the world take shape around him, or if he would always feel like he was just watching a very long, very repetitive movie. If he'd always be alone when he was surrounded by people.
The door behind him creaked as it opened, but Xander didn't move.
"Hey man," Adam said. "Let's go to the beach."
* * *
Xander drove, since Adam was still drunk and flying on about six different substances of varying legality. He was surprisingly coherent for someone who'd taken as many pills and smoked as many strange cigarettes as Adam said he had, but Xander wasn't about to let him behind the wheel. He was leery enough about accepting the boy's directions.
The beach was only a few miles from the party, and Adam took great pride in pointing out the entrance to his school on the way. Xander caught a glimpse of a low, stone wall with the name of the school tacked onto it, and a road leading into a bunch of twisted, southern trees, but the campus was on his blind side. He found himself missing the traffic patterns of the UK, where at least he could tune out any passengers and keep a closer eye on oncoming traffic. His nose wrinkled as he caught a whiff of the air flowing in the open window. "Your school stinks."
Adam laughed. "Only when the wind is blowing the wrong way. It's from the water treatment plant next door. Did you go to college?"
"Not really."
"It's amazing, man." Adam leaned heavily against the passenger side door. "It's not like highschool. You can do what you want and take what you want and stay forever."
"Is that why you're on your sixth year?" Xander didn't bother to mask the skepticism in his voice. He hadn't been very impressed by what he'd seen of UC Sunnydale, and once he'd landed regular employment, didn't see much worth in college at all.
"Fifth year." Adam raised a finger in front of his face. "I took a year off after graduation. Had to recover." He twisted his head over to peer at Xander. "You've got change, right?."
Xander shrugged. "If I'm driving, you're paying." He expected some sort of drunken protest, but Adam simply nodded as though Xander had said some universal truth and dug two quarters out of his pocket. Xander slowed as they approached the toll booth to the beach and winced inwardly at the task in front of him. There was no way he'd be able to toss the quarters into the basket on the first try, and he was likely to snap off the rearview mirror if he tried to pull up to the booth. Adam hadn't questioned his eye patch yet, but the sight of Xander leaning halfway out the window was likely to kick start the boy's curiosity.
But Adam remained strangely silent as Xander paid the toll and pulled out of the booth. Xander's shoulders tightened as he waited.
"It's like . . . like Zeno's paradox."
The tension vanished. He could handle bizarre, confusing philosophy. Xander's whole life could be boiled down to bizarre, confusing philosophy. "What is?"
"College. Life. Death." Adam twisted sideways in his seat. "You're always halving the distance, but never getting to your destination. The journey never ends."
Xander blinked. "Yeah. You've completely lost me."
Adam's head bounced up and down for a moment and he turned his eyes back to the road. "Did you take trig?"
"I barely passed Algebra."
"It's like the limit." Adam's head fell back. "Life approaches infinity as college approaches graduation."
Xander decided to just pretend he got it, in hopes Adam would let the topic rest. "Oh. Yeah."
"No, I'm serious." Adam sat up straight again. Just watching him out of the corner of his eye made Xander anxious. "Okay, like this. Say you're ninety miles away from home, and you're driving ninety miles an hour. It'll take you an hour to get there, right?"
Xander nodded.
"But, say, you start to slow down. You've gone ten miles, but you've slowed down ten miles an hour. You're going eighty from eighty miles away. You keep doing this, slowing down a mile and hour every mile. You'd always have another hour of driving before you get there."
Xander frowned. "But you'd still get there, eventually."
"But say, you're a mile away, but you're going a mile an hour. You could WALK there in fifteen minutes, but you just keep slowing down. Time approaches infinity as you approach home."
"You're giving me a headache."
"Sorry, man." Adam grinned at him wolfishly. "It's fascinating. How do we define the point where the journey ends and the destination begins? How do we know where anything ends and begins? The whole universe is made of out of the same things. My clothes, the trees, the car, all of it boils down to protons and neutrons and electrons." He reached out and touched one finger tip to Xander's forearm, near his wrist. Xander wondered for a moment if Adam was coming on to him. "When I touch you, the electrons in my atoms are spinning off into your atoms, and vice versa. Where do I end and you begin?"
Xander grunted. He couldn't tell if his whirling thoughts were pot- or philosophy-induced. Probably both. "And again with the headache. Why does it matter?"
Adam nodded again. "Why, indeed? Does anything matter?" He leaned his head against the glass of the window, taking his finger off Xander's arm. "Is everything matter?"
"Okay, seriously," Xander shot a very quick glare at his companion. "I'm trying to drive here."
"Take a left at the giant pink hotel."
Xander blinked. Sure enough, as they crested the rise of yet another bridge, a giant, pink hotel with white trimmings broke the horizon line. As if Florida weren't surreal enough. "Good god, WHY?"
Adam snorted on a laugh. "It's the Don Cesar. Pride and joy of St. Pete Beach. The classiest hotel around."
"You're kidding."
"Florida's like a whole different planet, man."
Xander nodded mindlessly as he stared at the offensive pink structure. "Just tell me that's not where we're going."
"Nah. South of the Don is Passe Grille. Keep going straight after you turn left, then loop around when you hit the end of the road. There's a stretch of parking lot along the beach, follow that until you reach the end, then park. We're headed to no man's land."
"Just so you know," Xander flicked the on the left-turn signal, though there wasn't any other traffic on the road. "I'm beginning to seriously doubt my sanity here."
"Then I'm doing my job right."
They fell into silence as Xander navigated the tiny, two-lane road that meandered between a hodge- podge mix of architectural styles on the right and a featureless boardwalk on the left. Signs for restaurants with nautical names and palm trees lined the route, and Xander really did feel like he'd somehow landed on another planet, in another dimension. A gray plastic manatee mailbox loomed in his headlights, and he turned right.
The world ended only thirty feet in front of him.
"Jesus."
It was no more than a whisper, and Adam simply nodded. The rental car's radio pumped out the latest pop hits at low volume, and Xander turned right again, driving parallel to the abyss.
"Here." Adam said, as a wall of palm trees replaced the road. Xander pulled into a parking space and shut the car off.
"Why are we here?"
"You're asking all the best questions, tonight." Adam slipped out the door even as Xander struggled to come up with a response. The kid was crazy, he decided. He willingly spent all of his time doing exactly what Xander spent his time avoiding doing: thinking about the world, and why things happened the way they did. Xander knew better than to question. That way lay madness. Things just happened, and would continue to just happen whether you knew the reasons why, or not.
Xander stepped out of the car and into the warm, humid air. The smell of salt struck him sharply in the chest, bringing to mind carefree beach parties on the Pacific coast, happier times before he knew that the world sucked.
He shook his head and followed Adam's silhouette over the edge of the world.
"Wanna go swimming?"
Xander followed Adam's shadowed gaze to the moonlit waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The sheen of silver undulating over the black water was hypnotizing to watch. The light of the night had dimmed the bright colors of the semi-tropical coast into deep muted greens and shades of grey, and the world looked even flatter from this angle than it usually did. He could feel himself believing that there was nothing beyond the faint horizon line, or beyond the edge of the pale gray sand, but a painted backdrop. Life consisted of only a few yards of space around him, and only a few seconds of time. "No."
"The water's really warm. You'd like it."
Xander shook his head. "Remember the swim team?"
Adam was quiet for a moment. "You mean the steroid scandal? When the swimmers started disappearing?"
"Yeah." Xander peered at the tiny waves, as though he might spot a dark, humanoid fish shape cresting over the water. "I haven't swum since then."
Adam nodded, then settled himself down on the sand. "How are you really, man?"
Xander didn't know how to answer that question. Society dictated that he should say "fine", and be done with it. Society was a bitch, and Xander didn't want to listen any more. "Not so great."
Adam nodded again, and they lapsed into silence.
It should have been monumentally uncomfortable. The sand was seeping into the back of Xander's pants and over the sides of his boots. He was sitting with a kid--with a man he hadn't spoken to in more than half a decade, and who he hadn't been all that close with to begin with. The answer, "not so good", should have hung over him the way Adam's refusal to ask about the eye-patch did. Xander blamed the pot he was certain was running through his system for his inability to care. The silence was better than the questions he didn't know how to answer.
"I still think about it a lot." Adam's voice drifted and rippled like the moonlight on the water. "The way it all went down, with the mayor and all of us fighting like that. The way the school lit up the sky and the sun went away." He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "How do you deal with it all? How can you have gone through all that and not wonder WHY?"
And Xander suddenly understood. He knew why Adam had hugged him in the bookstore, why he'd invited him to his party, and why he had insisted on going out to the beach and leaving said party behind. He was looking for someone who understood. Someone who might be able to answer the questions that Aristotle, Nietze, and all the other philosophers couldn't.
And neither could Xander. "I don't know." He mimicked Adam's position. "I don't know why, and I don't know how. I just know that you do. That you make friends, and you keep moving, and you try not to think about it."
Adam turned to look at him. "You've seen more of it than I have. I didn't understand until graduation, that you and Willow and Buffy and Oz weren't just some weird kids in a gang who had some fascination with death. Now I don't understand how you can not want to just scream, all the time. Or curl up in your bed and never go back out into the world again."
Xander smiled, but he didn't feel it in his heart. "I've tried that. You just end up with nightmares and probably in some ugly facility where the nurses never remember your name and your roommate is afraid of squirrels."
Adam stood suddenly. "But it's still THERE! Even HERE, where your friends don't disappear and the obituaries are only a page long, and the sun doesn't just VANISH, I can still feel it. Tugging at the corners, like I have to figure it all out and DO something about it. How do you do it? How do you forget all that?"
Xander shook his head. "You think I've forgotten?"
"You travel all the time, and you work in ‘acquisitions' and you wear polo shirts. That's not Xander Harris. That's not the guy who turned the football team into a platoon and showed the AV club how to use a bow."
Xander flinched. "I travel collecting mystical artifacts and spell books and heros. I'm still a good shot with a bow and arrow, and I've trained teenaged girls how to set people on fire with a zippo and kill evil things with a piece of wood." He turned to gaze at Adam, who stood stock still, just staring at him. "You don't just forget. You never forget the faces of the people you've saved and the people you've failed. You never forget the faces of the things you've killed and watched kill. You just move on."
Adam seemed to deflate. He settled himself back down onto the sand. Xander stayed quiet and waited.
"I can't."
Xander nodded.
* * *
"You okay to find your hotel?" Adam leaned through the open passenger side window, his face impossible to read in the shadows of the pre-dawn light. Xander gripped the steering wheel and shrugged.
"I don't think I'm stoned any more. I'm not sure if I was in the first place."
Adam smiled. "Oh, you totally were. The way you freaked out over the Don was a sure sign." He tilted his head. "You've got my number, now, man. Keep in touch, right?"
Xander shrugged again. "I'll try."
Adam stepped back a little from the car. "Well. Have a good flight back. Guess I might see you around?"
"Could be." Xander watched as Adam turned to go back into his rented house, where his college friends lay passed out from a night of forgetting things they'd never learned in the first place. "Hey, Adam."
The kid--the man--his friend turned back toward him, his eyebrows raised.
"You never asked about my eye."
Adam smiled slightly, shaking his head. "Didn't need to. There are some things you just don't ask about."
Xander stared at him even as he turned to go walk to the house. Adam had asked about everything else under the sun in the hours they'd spent on the beach. But there were some things you just don't ask about.
He glanced at the clock. It was almost six am. He had seven hours before he had to be back at the airport. It was eleven in London, meaning Giles would be at his desk, possibly going over the itinerary for wherever he was going to send him next. For a moment, Xander considered missing his flight. Staying in Florida and letting himself ask or not ask whatever questions he had about life, the universe, and everything. Get to know Gina and the bored girl with the southern accent and all of Adam's other friends and lose himself in the petty life.
He knew he wouldn't, though. He had to keep moving forward.
It was his way of dealing.
The Buffy part will be posted eventually. Hopefully I'll get it at least mostly finished before Labor Day, when I flee the country.