001. BtVS: Lost and Gone Forever, 3700 words (37 drabbles)
Title: Lost and Gone Forever
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: hkath
Summary: Buffy never comes back. Season 3 AU.
Notes: 37 of my 100 drabbles for whedonland's big bang alt challenge, on the theme "bad girls". I also offered it as a btvs_santa gift for xbitexmyxlipx, back when I thought I'd never finish the challenge. All of these drabbles are "author's choice".
Buffy never comes back. She's not where she said she'd be, and she's not at home, or at the mansion, or at school or the Bronze or anywhere else they think to look. Eventually even Xander's bitter reassurance - that the world obviously didn't get sucked into a hell-vortex, so Buffy's probably just holed up somewhere getting reacquainted with a freshly-souled Angel's everything-but - starts to sound weak.
There's a note, vague and not entirely grammatical. Some of her stuff is gone, although it seems unlikely, almost perverse, that Buffy would have left with such a limited supply of footwear.
*
Xander lost her. It's that simple. If he'd been there, like last time, with her to the end, maybe he could have stopped whatever happened. Kept her from getting lost. That's what she is, to him: not gone, not dead, not disappeared or kidnapped. Lost.
He blames himself, for awhile. After all, he left: got Giles to safety, got him to the car, then got him to the hospital. In their line of work, that sort of thoroughness starts to feel like avoidance.
When Giles' injuries have mostly healed, Xander tries dumping the blame on him. The break is nice.
*
It's like death, in a way. There are stages.
Denial: they stay home, get a full night's sleep for the first time in almost two years. It feels weird. They're creatures of the night, now.
Anger: Xander pounds a single idiot fledge into wet pulp at the foot of its own grave. Everyone sees him heft a broken chunk of marble over his head and bring it down on the vamp's face, neck, ribs, over and over. Adrenaline, Willow explains later. She tells some story about a soccer mom bench-pressing a Volvo. She doesn't look at him for a week.
*
Somehow, Willow convinces herself that Buffy's in hell.
She does some sort of spell that shows her the state of Buffy's soul in dazzling technicolour. The incense smoke turns a deep, groovy purple, and Willow bursts into tears. Apparently, purple means torment. Xander wishes he didn't know. He wonders what colour his soul-smoke would be.
“Personally, I think I'm more of an autumn,” he says. It comes out flat, not at all funny. He wants to kick himself.
“She's there, with Acathla,” Willow says. “I gotta get her out.”
No one even wonders what happened to Angel.
*
Xander buys a black leather jacket, second-hand. It helps with the whole slaying mindset. They might be a bunch of idiots with pointy sticks and a shamefully low kill ratio (Oz has this depressing theory that culling the herd of its weakest members actually qualifies as beneficial to Sunnydale's vampire population) but at least they're a bunch of idiots with pointy sticks who look relatively badass. Even Willow gets into it, sets aside the silly hats and fuzzy sweaters, at least at night.
When Cordy gets back, their badass factor shoots way up. So does their kill ratio. Go figure.
*
Acceptance: the first time any of them speak about her without the words feeling like they're made of cracked glass.
Cordelia gives them all codenames. Nighthawk, Copperhead.
“Foxglove to Big Kahuna. Come in, Big Kahuna.”
Giles always rolls his eyes, but he answers. She provides the radios, like they're actual spies, with a tech budget.
Oz won't answer to his codename, even after Cordy changes it from White Fang to Scarecrow.
“Buffy would answer,” Cordy says. “Goldilocks would understand the importance of reporting to base.”
When Xander looks at Willow, they both start laughing and can't stop.
*
They're at the Bronze one night when some girl, a little firecracker in skin-tight leather pants, disappears out the back door with an especially anemic-looking escort. Xander grabs his crossbow and signals the others. They have signals now.
When they get to her, she's just yanking a stake out of the fallen vamp, grinning as he crumbles to dust from the outside in. She stands, wipes her hands on her ass.
“Wow. Folks in the Sunny-D sure like to accessorize.”
They lower their weapons, but only a little.
“I'm Faith,” the girl says. “Dig the pointy look.”
*
What Faith is, at first, is doubt.
The only thing they know for sure is that the world didn't end back in May.
Besides that, everything's negotiable. The note. That smelly purple smoke.
Giles spends hours on the phone to London, then administers a series of watchery tests, for which Faith has little patience. Finally, he emerges from his office, grim-faced, and confirms what they've all known from the moment they saw her.
“Faith is indeed a Slayer. Now, I think it best that we avoid jumping to conclusions about, erm...”
This time, Willow's not the only one crying.
*
The timelines match up.
Early one morning in May, Faith Lehane woke up feeling different.
Late one night in May, Buffy Summers left a note. It said, I'm sorry Mom. I have to do this. I love you. Tell my friends I'm sorry & love them too.
Late one night in May, a girl named Kendra died, in a pool of her own blood.
There's no way to be sure, and that's a problem. Doubts fester and grow like untended wounds.
One Slayer dies, another is called. Seems simple, but the easiest explanation is rarely the right one in Sunnydale.
*
Willow throws herself into desperate research. Despite Giles' warnings, she doubles her efforts to rescue Buffy from the hell she's convinced swallowed her. Xander pulls an all-nighter with her, not so much helping as existing near her. Being there for her, the only way he knows.
In the morning, they've found nothing, and Willow's close to tears. She's always close to tears. He can't bear it, so he kisses her. She kisses back.
That fall, Cordy is voted homecoming queen. She and Xander dance under twinkly lights.
He hates himself then, more than he's ever hated anything.
Well, almost anything.
*
When Willow finds the spell, it all happens in the space of a few hours. She stands in a circle of blood and ashes, chanting while they all look on in horror and hope.
When she conjures a spiny, drooling demon from nowhere, Xander's only a little surprised.
“Somebody blindfold me,” she says.
The demon thrashes in the middle of the circle, straining against some invisible barrier. Oz ties the scarf around her eyes.
The vortex is actually sort of beautiful when it opens. She sends the demon in screaming. Falls back, hands around a strong wrist, pulling hard.
*
It's not Buffy, but it's not a stranger.
There's an abundance of eager volunteers, but Willow won't let them stake him.
“He has a soul again,” she says. “I felt it happen.”
They lock him up until they can decide what to do. One day, Xander and Giles walk out of the office and find Faith standing there, hips cocked, watching him.
“Vamp in a cage, G?” she says. “Is this a fetish thing?”
“Faith, this is Angel,” Giles says flatly. “Angel, meet Faith. The Vampire Slayer.”
The two share a long, appraising look.
*
Spike crashes back into town, drunk and dangerous and all about the kidnapping and the threats. Unfortunately for her and Xander, word has spread that Willow's pretty handy with the mojo.
They spend a long night in captivity. Xander tries not to think about Stockholm Syndrome - can't really imagine himself writing letters to Spike in prison - because it distracts him from how he's trying not to think about kissing Willow again.
By morning, Spike's gone, Cordelia's hurt, Faith has sprung Angel from the book cage, and Xander and Willow are over - for good. Xander and Cordelia, too.
*
It sort of becomes the Faith and Angel show, after that: a partnership born out of grudging respect and a common mission. They're like the two treads of a Russian tank, flattening everything in their path.
Faith fulfilling her purpose. Angel carrying on Buffy's legacy.
They both have a tendency to disappear for long periods without warning. For maybe the first time since Buffy came to Sunnydale, it seems the Scoobies have shifted out of the supernatural cross-hairs. It's not as much of a relief as it should be.
It snows on Christmas. Xander thinks Buffy would have liked that.
*
The party is Willow's idea: birthday-slash-rememberance, she calls it. There's cake, but it's respectful cake, and a few tasteful balloons. Everyone's invited. Buffy's mom spends most of the night in Giles's office, the two of them sipping whiskey from teacups.
Xander finds Faith in the parking lot, blowing out smoke.
“Doesn't seem fair,” she says. “'Hey, thanks for dying, Buff. Really appreciate the superpowers. Leaving my crappy life behind was a nice bonus.'” She shrugs. “I don't belong in there.”
Xander wants to tell her Buffy's not dead, but he doesn't know how to say that, anymore.
*
The fight won't ever end.
They still patrol every night, protect their turf from those looking for human snackage. Sometimes Faith or Angel will tag along, if their busy Big Bad-slaying schedule is clear that week. Most of the time, it's just the core four and various stakes, blades and projectiles.
Cordy's got a natural talent for swords and staffs. She moves like a heroine from a fantasy novel, hair whipping out behind her.
Willow can dust a vamp from twenty yards - it's all that practice floating pencils.
Oz has his aim, Giles his experience.
Xander's good at ducking.
*
He loved Buffy, once.
Still does, but it's different now. Her being gone makes it easier, in a way. She's not here to wound him with effortless words like she used to. He doesn't have to bite down quite so hard on his feelings.
Still, more than he's ever wanted anyone else, he wants her. Not Cordy. Not Willow.
Not Faith. Not even when she's riding him rough, her fingers bruising his sides. It's fast. Surreal. Seems to happen out of nowhere, just like Faith.
Xander won't close his eyes, afraid of what he'll see if he imagines this away.
*
One night, Faith and Angel go out looking for information and come back covered in blood, Faith shaking, acting all tough. Eventually, they manage to explain about the Deputy Mayor, how she plunged the stake in and he just wouldn't dust.
It's ironic, Xander thinks, that the white hats' biggest stumble in this fight was due to their own tragic mistake. Ironic, but not very funny.
Angel swears he'll take care of everything, and the body'll disappear forever. They must be growing up, because none of them says anything about it.
It's unfortunate, sure, but there are bigger things happening.
*
Turns out, the Mayor's planning some sort of rampage. Not a large-scale apocalypse - no, the guy's just planning to eat every single person Xander knows, that's all. This makes it somewhat difficult to enjoy prom.
Cordy looks amazing in the dress Xander bought her. She's graceful, soft-spoken. She smiles at him and thanks him, and it's honest, sweet. He asks her to dance and remembers homecoming, thinks how different things are, how much he's changed since then. They keep getting older and Buffy just... doesn't.
He's getting used to her absence. That might be the weirdest thing of all.
*
It's a risky plan, and the battle is especially chaotic and gruesome, so it's sort of unreal when Xander climbs out of the rubble and checks his watch to find that only forty-five minutes have passed.
This afternoon, while Xander was donning his cap and gown in the gym, his mom was likely just sitting down with her daily boilermaker to watch Days Of Our Lives.
Since then, Xander's seen a giant snake swallowing Principal Snyder, several classmates being ripped to bloody pieces by vampire gangs, and one incredibly pompous and boring speech.
His mom hasn't even reached the credits.
*
Xander made his road trip plans fully expecting to be dead come graduation day, which means they weren't all that big on the details. Like routes. Or destinations of any kind.
He heads straight for LA, drives as far West as he can without getting wet and then sits in his heap of a car, watching the sunset. He spends three nights there, and makes friends with a guy who sells pickles out of a little shack on the boardwalk.
On the fourth night, the pickle guy's gone. Instead, there's a vampire wearing pickle guy's face.
Xander's prepared, of course.
*
He sticks to the beaches and richer burgs. Brightly lit areas; he's not stupid enough to think he can face down any actual threats. Culling the herd, that's all it is. It's a numbers game. Xander does what he can.
He visits a couple of famous landmarks. Fits his feet inside Abbott's, then Costello's.
About once a day, he thinks about moving on. Pictures himself on a highway somewhere, munching Cheetos and singing along with bad country stations. Visiting a giant ball of twine, or whatever one does when one's trekking across backroads America in search of adventure.
Maybe tomorrow.
*
One night, he's chasing some crusty vamp on the Santa Monica Pier when he ducks behind the Crazy Submarine and comes face-to-face with a half-dozen of its undead brethren.
“Hey, these aren't the carnies I ordered,” he jokes, backing up. His ass hits a trash can.
The biggest one's already pouncing, fangs bared.
Xander ducks; he's good at that. He dusts one of the weaker members of the vamp chorus and evades another, but there are too many. Four hands grab him and yank. Two mouths fasten to his throat, drinking deep.
Then he's grabbed again. Four different hands.
*
“I'm Lily,” she says, but he knows her. That's not her name.
He's in bed, surrounded by blondes. It's exactly like what he thought heaven would be like, when he was fourteen.
“You lost a lot of blood, but you'll be okay.” Not-Lily frowns. “Does he look familiar?”
Bandages pull at his neck when he looks around. His leather's hung over an aluminum chair, his boots on the floor, stake in one of them. Buffy’s in the chair, arms crossed, staring at him.
She looks older than he ever imagined she could. This isn’t heaven at all.
*
He's out of it for a couple of days. It's not the blood loss, more that the girls rammed his head into a steel support beam pretty hard while “removing him from harm's way”.
They both work at a diner down the street, with red checked aprons and clip-on nametags displaying the wrong names. They trudge up the back steps after 1am, moaning and groaning about how their feet hurt, then change into jeans and sweaters and head back out in search of monsters.
Sometimes there's leftover pie, or cold fries. That's the only time Xander sees them smile.
*
Buffy goes with him to find his car. Maybe she's worried he won't come back. Or maybe he just hopes she is.
It's still there, bobbleheads and all, buried under a mountain of parking tickets.
“It's so weird. Xander with a car,” Buffy says. “You're like a grown-up or something.”
“But you have an apartment,” Xander says. “Apartment trumps car.”
They cruise around for a while in silence, before Buffy says, “You really weren't looking for me?”
It's heavy. She's been waiting to get him alone.
Xander just smiles. “I'm always looking for you.”
*
They have a cat, sort of: an ugly grey thing that hangs out on their fire escape making unpleasant noises when they're trying to sleep. At dawn, both girls huddle close in the narrow bed and Xander curls into a threadbare blanket on the floor.
They haven't really talked about why he's staying, or how long. They haven't talked at all, not the way they used to. She hasn't asked after anyone. He doesn't want to pry. They're on eggshells, all the time.
He hasn't even spoken her name out loud. Can't quite bring himself to call her Anne, either.
*
The first few times they slay together, he's too preoccupied with impressing her to notice anything else. He does well. Barely needs rescuing, and these aren't the lightweight beach vamps Xander was killing before; these guys are built Ford tough, and they travel in packs. Gang bangers, Buffy explains. Getting turned's just another initiation.
When he does look at her, he wishes he hadn't. She's like a machine, smooth and stiff at once, with a blank look on her face like she's forgotten what she's doing. There's no joy in it. Seems strange that they ever found joy in killing.
*
Lily slips him mozzarella sticks, muffins, pickles: whatever's extra in the kitchen once the manager's left for the night. She refills the sugar jars, balances the ketchup bottles so they'll drain down, then she comes around the counter with a history textbook and asks him to quiz her. She's going to night school, she says, twice a week, though her attendance is spotty.
It's the first Xander's heard about it, which is weird. He wonders if she's embarrassed.
He quizzes her on the Depression and FDR. She does pretty well. Smiles and thanks him with flavoured coffee and peach pie.
*
He's himself, sometimes: his older, disappeared self. Those are the times it's hardest to be there.
Buffy's starting to open up to him, slowly, messily. He can see that his presence causes her pain. She gets this look on her face, like she's splitting apart. Sometimes he sees the old Buffy break the surface, the one she's mostly locked away. Her face loses some of its hardness, then, goes soft the way it does when she's asleep.
Not that he's been watching her sleep, or anything. No, down that road lies nothing but madness and country music, he knows this.
*
One night they find a little girl, no more than six or seven, whimpering behind a stack of pallets and flattened cardboard. Lily's gone, just an echo of footsteps around the corner, fading away. Xander stares behind him into the dark, worried they might have missed something.
When he refocuses, Buffy's bent over the crying girl, her free hand reaching out slowly, brushing tears away. Then the other jabs forward, stake plunging deep inside the tiny chest.
There's a moment out of balance, where everything seems to hang, and then the kid crumbles to dust, and Xander can breathe again.
*
She asks for a ride to the mall, then stays in the car, just stares straight ahead at a concrete pillar until he gets the hint. They drive aimlessly around for a while.
“I hate Lily,” she says. “Hate you both.”
Xander focuses on the yellow line.
“Don't hold back, Buff. Say what you really feel.”
“Xander, what I had to do, it was... “ She shakes her head. “You and Lily. You're weaknesses. Vulnerable spots. If I was stronger, I'd be able to...”
Kill you. That's what she can't say. He knows it now.
*
They stop for ice cream and lean against the bumper, licking up the drips. He feels like a saint for buying her a double-scoop waffle cone.
“I hate myself more, y'know,” she says, like they never stopped talking. “I'm responsible for her. I can't leave. Now you're here, and... it's hard for me. You make me weak.”
Xander frowns at his pistachio swirl.
“That always sounded so much sexier when you said it in my head.”
“Xander-”
“It's cool, I-”
“You have to leave.”
He's surprised it's taken her this long to say it.
*
That night, he steps out of the tiny blue bathroom and Buffy's standing there, arms folded across her chest. Lily, who had already changed into her pajamas before Xander took over the shower, is now nowhere to be found.
He thinks this is Buffy driving the point home, so he grabs his jacket off the chair, swings it on and crams his hands into the pockets. Buffy steps close to pull them out again, squeezes his fingers.
When she looks at him, liquid eyes and trembling chin, he feels helpless. Always does, when she cries. Kissing her helps a little.
*
Alright, so he does watch her sleep. He's never done it while sharing her pillow, though. That part's new.
She crashed immediately after he made her come with clumsy fingers, dozed right off the way all the stereotypes say the guy is supposed to, and maybe his current waking state is just another way he fails as the bearer of a Y chromosome, but if it is, Xander's okay with that.
He's going to soak up as much of her as possible, because the moment he leaves LA, she'll be dead to him again, in all the ways that matter.
*
It's clear to him, once the girls have shrunk to twin dots in the rearview and then winked out altogether, that he can't go home. Not this version of Xander.
He drives South aimlessly, finally on his miserable goddamn road trip. It's less exciting than advertised.
He spends the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Oceanside. Drives back in the morning regretful, with a crick in his neck.
Thirty miles from Sunnydale, he spends the night in a crappy motel, a neon sign flashing a white collar and red bow tie at him through the flimsy curtains all night.
*
Willow bombards him with questions the second he gets to the Bronze, rambling about Graceland and Monument Valley and did he see the giant ball of twine?
So Xander tells her everything. Well, everything he thought up this morning between cups of terrible coffee in his motel room.
“Basically, I got as far as Oxnard,” he begins.
He barely gets to the end of his far-fetched yet oddly believable tale before Willow starts chattering about the awesomeness that is college. Her smile is the brightest it's been in a year.
Xander swallows his secret deeper down. Back to reality.
END
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: hkath
Summary: Buffy never comes back. Season 3 AU.
Notes: 37 of my 100 drabbles for whedonland's big bang alt challenge, on the theme "bad girls". I also offered it as a btvs_santa gift for xbitexmyxlipx, back when I thought I'd never finish the challenge. All of these drabbles are "author's choice".
Buffy never comes back. She's not where she said she'd be, and she's not at home, or at the mansion, or at school or the Bronze or anywhere else they think to look. Eventually even Xander's bitter reassurance - that the world obviously didn't get sucked into a hell-vortex, so Buffy's probably just holed up somewhere getting reacquainted with a freshly-souled Angel's everything-but - starts to sound weak.
There's a note, vague and not entirely grammatical. Some of her stuff is gone, although it seems unlikely, almost perverse, that Buffy would have left with such a limited supply of footwear.
*
Xander lost her. It's that simple. If he'd been there, like last time, with her to the end, maybe he could have stopped whatever happened. Kept her from getting lost. That's what she is, to him: not gone, not dead, not disappeared or kidnapped. Lost.
He blames himself, for awhile. After all, he left: got Giles to safety, got him to the car, then got him to the hospital. In their line of work, that sort of thoroughness starts to feel like avoidance.
When Giles' injuries have mostly healed, Xander tries dumping the blame on him. The break is nice.
*
It's like death, in a way. There are stages.
Denial: they stay home, get a full night's sleep for the first time in almost two years. It feels weird. They're creatures of the night, now.
Anger: Xander pounds a single idiot fledge into wet pulp at the foot of its own grave. Everyone sees him heft a broken chunk of marble over his head and bring it down on the vamp's face, neck, ribs, over and over. Adrenaline, Willow explains later. She tells some story about a soccer mom bench-pressing a Volvo. She doesn't look at him for a week.
*
Somehow, Willow convinces herself that Buffy's in hell.
She does some sort of spell that shows her the state of Buffy's soul in dazzling technicolour. The incense smoke turns a deep, groovy purple, and Willow bursts into tears. Apparently, purple means torment. Xander wishes he didn't know. He wonders what colour his soul-smoke would be.
“Personally, I think I'm more of an autumn,” he says. It comes out flat, not at all funny. He wants to kick himself.
“She's there, with Acathla,” Willow says. “I gotta get her out.”
No one even wonders what happened to Angel.
*
Xander buys a black leather jacket, second-hand. It helps with the whole slaying mindset. They might be a bunch of idiots with pointy sticks and a shamefully low kill ratio (Oz has this depressing theory that culling the herd of its weakest members actually qualifies as beneficial to Sunnydale's vampire population) but at least they're a bunch of idiots with pointy sticks who look relatively badass. Even Willow gets into it, sets aside the silly hats and fuzzy sweaters, at least at night.
When Cordy gets back, their badass factor shoots way up. So does their kill ratio. Go figure.
*
Acceptance: the first time any of them speak about her without the words feeling like they're made of cracked glass.
Cordelia gives them all codenames. Nighthawk, Copperhead.
“Foxglove to Big Kahuna. Come in, Big Kahuna.”
Giles always rolls his eyes, but he answers. She provides the radios, like they're actual spies, with a tech budget.
Oz won't answer to his codename, even after Cordy changes it from White Fang to Scarecrow.
“Buffy would answer,” Cordy says. “Goldilocks would understand the importance of reporting to base.”
When Xander looks at Willow, they both start laughing and can't stop.
*
They're at the Bronze one night when some girl, a little firecracker in skin-tight leather pants, disappears out the back door with an especially anemic-looking escort. Xander grabs his crossbow and signals the others. They have signals now.
When they get to her, she's just yanking a stake out of the fallen vamp, grinning as he crumbles to dust from the outside in. She stands, wipes her hands on her ass.
“Wow. Folks in the Sunny-D sure like to accessorize.”
They lower their weapons, but only a little.
“I'm Faith,” the girl says. “Dig the pointy look.”
*
What Faith is, at first, is doubt.
The only thing they know for sure is that the world didn't end back in May.
Besides that, everything's negotiable. The note. That smelly purple smoke.
Giles spends hours on the phone to London, then administers a series of watchery tests, for which Faith has little patience. Finally, he emerges from his office, grim-faced, and confirms what they've all known from the moment they saw her.
“Faith is indeed a Slayer. Now, I think it best that we avoid jumping to conclusions about, erm...”
This time, Willow's not the only one crying.
*
The timelines match up.
Early one morning in May, Faith Lehane woke up feeling different.
Late one night in May, Buffy Summers left a note. It said, I'm sorry Mom. I have to do this. I love you. Tell my friends I'm sorry & love them too.
Late one night in May, a girl named Kendra died, in a pool of her own blood.
There's no way to be sure, and that's a problem. Doubts fester and grow like untended wounds.
One Slayer dies, another is called. Seems simple, but the easiest explanation is rarely the right one in Sunnydale.
*
Willow throws herself into desperate research. Despite Giles' warnings, she doubles her efforts to rescue Buffy from the hell she's convinced swallowed her. Xander pulls an all-nighter with her, not so much helping as existing near her. Being there for her, the only way he knows.
In the morning, they've found nothing, and Willow's close to tears. She's always close to tears. He can't bear it, so he kisses her. She kisses back.
That fall, Cordy is voted homecoming queen. She and Xander dance under twinkly lights.
He hates himself then, more than he's ever hated anything.
Well, almost anything.
*
When Willow finds the spell, it all happens in the space of a few hours. She stands in a circle of blood and ashes, chanting while they all look on in horror and hope.
When she conjures a spiny, drooling demon from nowhere, Xander's only a little surprised.
“Somebody blindfold me,” she says.
The demon thrashes in the middle of the circle, straining against some invisible barrier. Oz ties the scarf around her eyes.
The vortex is actually sort of beautiful when it opens. She sends the demon in screaming. Falls back, hands around a strong wrist, pulling hard.
*
It's not Buffy, but it's not a stranger.
There's an abundance of eager volunteers, but Willow won't let them stake him.
“He has a soul again,” she says. “I felt it happen.”
They lock him up until they can decide what to do. One day, Xander and Giles walk out of the office and find Faith standing there, hips cocked, watching him.
“Vamp in a cage, G?” she says. “Is this a fetish thing?”
“Faith, this is Angel,” Giles says flatly. “Angel, meet Faith. The Vampire Slayer.”
The two share a long, appraising look.
*
Spike crashes back into town, drunk and dangerous and all about the kidnapping and the threats. Unfortunately for her and Xander, word has spread that Willow's pretty handy with the mojo.
They spend a long night in captivity. Xander tries not to think about Stockholm Syndrome - can't really imagine himself writing letters to Spike in prison - because it distracts him from how he's trying not to think about kissing Willow again.
By morning, Spike's gone, Cordelia's hurt, Faith has sprung Angel from the book cage, and Xander and Willow are over - for good. Xander and Cordelia, too.
*
It sort of becomes the Faith and Angel show, after that: a partnership born out of grudging respect and a common mission. They're like the two treads of a Russian tank, flattening everything in their path.
Faith fulfilling her purpose. Angel carrying on Buffy's legacy.
They both have a tendency to disappear for long periods without warning. For maybe the first time since Buffy came to Sunnydale, it seems the Scoobies have shifted out of the supernatural cross-hairs. It's not as much of a relief as it should be.
It snows on Christmas. Xander thinks Buffy would have liked that.
*
The party is Willow's idea: birthday-slash-rememberance, she calls it. There's cake, but it's respectful cake, and a few tasteful balloons. Everyone's invited. Buffy's mom spends most of the night in Giles's office, the two of them sipping whiskey from teacups.
Xander finds Faith in the parking lot, blowing out smoke.
“Doesn't seem fair,” she says. “'Hey, thanks for dying, Buff. Really appreciate the superpowers. Leaving my crappy life behind was a nice bonus.'” She shrugs. “I don't belong in there.”
Xander wants to tell her Buffy's not dead, but he doesn't know how to say that, anymore.
*
The fight won't ever end.
They still patrol every night, protect their turf from those looking for human snackage. Sometimes Faith or Angel will tag along, if their busy Big Bad-slaying schedule is clear that week. Most of the time, it's just the core four and various stakes, blades and projectiles.
Cordy's got a natural talent for swords and staffs. She moves like a heroine from a fantasy novel, hair whipping out behind her.
Willow can dust a vamp from twenty yards - it's all that practice floating pencils.
Oz has his aim, Giles his experience.
Xander's good at ducking.
*
He loved Buffy, once.
Still does, but it's different now. Her being gone makes it easier, in a way. She's not here to wound him with effortless words like she used to. He doesn't have to bite down quite so hard on his feelings.
Still, more than he's ever wanted anyone else, he wants her. Not Cordy. Not Willow.
Not Faith. Not even when she's riding him rough, her fingers bruising his sides. It's fast. Surreal. Seems to happen out of nowhere, just like Faith.
Xander won't close his eyes, afraid of what he'll see if he imagines this away.
*
One night, Faith and Angel go out looking for information and come back covered in blood, Faith shaking, acting all tough. Eventually, they manage to explain about the Deputy Mayor, how she plunged the stake in and he just wouldn't dust.
It's ironic, Xander thinks, that the white hats' biggest stumble in this fight was due to their own tragic mistake. Ironic, but not very funny.
Angel swears he'll take care of everything, and the body'll disappear forever. They must be growing up, because none of them says anything about it.
It's unfortunate, sure, but there are bigger things happening.
*
Turns out, the Mayor's planning some sort of rampage. Not a large-scale apocalypse - no, the guy's just planning to eat every single person Xander knows, that's all. This makes it somewhat difficult to enjoy prom.
Cordy looks amazing in the dress Xander bought her. She's graceful, soft-spoken. She smiles at him and thanks him, and it's honest, sweet. He asks her to dance and remembers homecoming, thinks how different things are, how much he's changed since then. They keep getting older and Buffy just... doesn't.
He's getting used to her absence. That might be the weirdest thing of all.
*
It's a risky plan, and the battle is especially chaotic and gruesome, so it's sort of unreal when Xander climbs out of the rubble and checks his watch to find that only forty-five minutes have passed.
This afternoon, while Xander was donning his cap and gown in the gym, his mom was likely just sitting down with her daily boilermaker to watch Days Of Our Lives.
Since then, Xander's seen a giant snake swallowing Principal Snyder, several classmates being ripped to bloody pieces by vampire gangs, and one incredibly pompous and boring speech.
His mom hasn't even reached the credits.
*
Xander made his road trip plans fully expecting to be dead come graduation day, which means they weren't all that big on the details. Like routes. Or destinations of any kind.
He heads straight for LA, drives as far West as he can without getting wet and then sits in his heap of a car, watching the sunset. He spends three nights there, and makes friends with a guy who sells pickles out of a little shack on the boardwalk.
On the fourth night, the pickle guy's gone. Instead, there's a vampire wearing pickle guy's face.
Xander's prepared, of course.
*
He sticks to the beaches and richer burgs. Brightly lit areas; he's not stupid enough to think he can face down any actual threats. Culling the herd, that's all it is. It's a numbers game. Xander does what he can.
He visits a couple of famous landmarks. Fits his feet inside Abbott's, then Costello's.
About once a day, he thinks about moving on. Pictures himself on a highway somewhere, munching Cheetos and singing along with bad country stations. Visiting a giant ball of twine, or whatever one does when one's trekking across backroads America in search of adventure.
Maybe tomorrow.
*
One night, he's chasing some crusty vamp on the Santa Monica Pier when he ducks behind the Crazy Submarine and comes face-to-face with a half-dozen of its undead brethren.
“Hey, these aren't the carnies I ordered,” he jokes, backing up. His ass hits a trash can.
The biggest one's already pouncing, fangs bared.
Xander ducks; he's good at that. He dusts one of the weaker members of the vamp chorus and evades another, but there are too many. Four hands grab him and yank. Two mouths fasten to his throat, drinking deep.
Then he's grabbed again. Four different hands.
*
“I'm Lily,” she says, but he knows her. That's not her name.
He's in bed, surrounded by blondes. It's exactly like what he thought heaven would be like, when he was fourteen.
“You lost a lot of blood, but you'll be okay.” Not-Lily frowns. “Does he look familiar?”
Bandages pull at his neck when he looks around. His leather's hung over an aluminum chair, his boots on the floor, stake in one of them. Buffy’s in the chair, arms crossed, staring at him.
She looks older than he ever imagined she could. This isn’t heaven at all.
*
He's out of it for a couple of days. It's not the blood loss, more that the girls rammed his head into a steel support beam pretty hard while “removing him from harm's way”.
They both work at a diner down the street, with red checked aprons and clip-on nametags displaying the wrong names. They trudge up the back steps after 1am, moaning and groaning about how their feet hurt, then change into jeans and sweaters and head back out in search of monsters.
Sometimes there's leftover pie, or cold fries. That's the only time Xander sees them smile.
*
Buffy goes with him to find his car. Maybe she's worried he won't come back. Or maybe he just hopes she is.
It's still there, bobbleheads and all, buried under a mountain of parking tickets.
“It's so weird. Xander with a car,” Buffy says. “You're like a grown-up or something.”
“But you have an apartment,” Xander says. “Apartment trumps car.”
They cruise around for a while in silence, before Buffy says, “You really weren't looking for me?”
It's heavy. She's been waiting to get him alone.
Xander just smiles. “I'm always looking for you.”
*
They have a cat, sort of: an ugly grey thing that hangs out on their fire escape making unpleasant noises when they're trying to sleep. At dawn, both girls huddle close in the narrow bed and Xander curls into a threadbare blanket on the floor.
They haven't really talked about why he's staying, or how long. They haven't talked at all, not the way they used to. She hasn't asked after anyone. He doesn't want to pry. They're on eggshells, all the time.
He hasn't even spoken her name out loud. Can't quite bring himself to call her Anne, either.
*
The first few times they slay together, he's too preoccupied with impressing her to notice anything else. He does well. Barely needs rescuing, and these aren't the lightweight beach vamps Xander was killing before; these guys are built Ford tough, and they travel in packs. Gang bangers, Buffy explains. Getting turned's just another initiation.
When he does look at her, he wishes he hadn't. She's like a machine, smooth and stiff at once, with a blank look on her face like she's forgotten what she's doing. There's no joy in it. Seems strange that they ever found joy in killing.
*
Lily slips him mozzarella sticks, muffins, pickles: whatever's extra in the kitchen once the manager's left for the night. She refills the sugar jars, balances the ketchup bottles so they'll drain down, then she comes around the counter with a history textbook and asks him to quiz her. She's going to night school, she says, twice a week, though her attendance is spotty.
It's the first Xander's heard about it, which is weird. He wonders if she's embarrassed.
He quizzes her on the Depression and FDR. She does pretty well. Smiles and thanks him with flavoured coffee and peach pie.
*
He's himself, sometimes: his older, disappeared self. Those are the times it's hardest to be there.
Buffy's starting to open up to him, slowly, messily. He can see that his presence causes her pain. She gets this look on her face, like she's splitting apart. Sometimes he sees the old Buffy break the surface, the one she's mostly locked away. Her face loses some of its hardness, then, goes soft the way it does when she's asleep.
Not that he's been watching her sleep, or anything. No, down that road lies nothing but madness and country music, he knows this.
*
One night they find a little girl, no more than six or seven, whimpering behind a stack of pallets and flattened cardboard. Lily's gone, just an echo of footsteps around the corner, fading away. Xander stares behind him into the dark, worried they might have missed something.
When he refocuses, Buffy's bent over the crying girl, her free hand reaching out slowly, brushing tears away. Then the other jabs forward, stake plunging deep inside the tiny chest.
There's a moment out of balance, where everything seems to hang, and then the kid crumbles to dust, and Xander can breathe again.
*
She asks for a ride to the mall, then stays in the car, just stares straight ahead at a concrete pillar until he gets the hint. They drive aimlessly around for a while.
“I hate Lily,” she says. “Hate you both.”
Xander focuses on the yellow line.
“Don't hold back, Buff. Say what you really feel.”
“Xander, what I had to do, it was... “ She shakes her head. “You and Lily. You're weaknesses. Vulnerable spots. If I was stronger, I'd be able to...”
Kill you. That's what she can't say. He knows it now.
*
They stop for ice cream and lean against the bumper, licking up the drips. He feels like a saint for buying her a double-scoop waffle cone.
“I hate myself more, y'know,” she says, like they never stopped talking. “I'm responsible for her. I can't leave. Now you're here, and... it's hard for me. You make me weak.”
Xander frowns at his pistachio swirl.
“That always sounded so much sexier when you said it in my head.”
“Xander-”
“It's cool, I-”
“You have to leave.”
He's surprised it's taken her this long to say it.
*
That night, he steps out of the tiny blue bathroom and Buffy's standing there, arms folded across her chest. Lily, who had already changed into her pajamas before Xander took over the shower, is now nowhere to be found.
He thinks this is Buffy driving the point home, so he grabs his jacket off the chair, swings it on and crams his hands into the pockets. Buffy steps close to pull them out again, squeezes his fingers.
When she looks at him, liquid eyes and trembling chin, he feels helpless. Always does, when she cries. Kissing her helps a little.
*
Alright, so he does watch her sleep. He's never done it while sharing her pillow, though. That part's new.
She crashed immediately after he made her come with clumsy fingers, dozed right off the way all the stereotypes say the guy is supposed to, and maybe his current waking state is just another way he fails as the bearer of a Y chromosome, but if it is, Xander's okay with that.
He's going to soak up as much of her as possible, because the moment he leaves LA, she'll be dead to him again, in all the ways that matter.
*
It's clear to him, once the girls have shrunk to twin dots in the rearview and then winked out altogether, that he can't go home. Not this version of Xander.
He drives South aimlessly, finally on his miserable goddamn road trip. It's less exciting than advertised.
He spends the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Oceanside. Drives back in the morning regretful, with a crick in his neck.
Thirty miles from Sunnydale, he spends the night in a crappy motel, a neon sign flashing a white collar and red bow tie at him through the flimsy curtains all night.
*
Willow bombards him with questions the second he gets to the Bronze, rambling about Graceland and Monument Valley and did he see the giant ball of twine?
So Xander tells her everything. Well, everything he thought up this morning between cups of terrible coffee in his motel room.
“Basically, I got as far as Oxnard,” he begins.
He barely gets to the end of his far-fetched yet oddly believable tale before Willow starts chattering about the awesomeness that is college. Her smile is the brightest it's been in a year.
Xander swallows his secret deeper down. Back to reality.
END