Fic: Let's Have Fun With Phonics! Or: Xander Harris Discovers the Joys of Literature (Xander, gen)
Title: Let's Have Fun With Phonics! Or: Xander Harris Discovers the Joys of Literature
Setting: A few months before Buffy's arrival in Sunnydale.
Spoilers: None.
Rating: I'll go with an R for underage groping.
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine.
“Willow still on the French literature kick?” asked Jesse sympathetically, as I stifled a yawn.
“Tell me about it, man,” I said gloomily. “It's getting later and later. Yesterday she called me at 2:30 AM because she'd read this book about a dude who finds his One True Love in this French village, and then went to Paris and found his other One True Love, and also he wanted to be Napoleon and got executed.”
“Not really tear-worthy in itself.”
“Not really, no.”
“I know what'll cheer you up, though,” said Jesse. “Check it out. There are some girls from out of town over there who wanted to sit with us. Well, primarily me, obviously, but I saved you a seat.”
“Actual girls? You mean, with girl parts and everything?”
“Well, not that I checked, as such, but behold. In the red corner, from Vermont...” He gestured towards a table.
“Wow. So, I'm guessing now would be a good time to start running up large credit card balances and/or praying?”
“Huh?”
“Because the end of the world is nigh. Wow,” I said again, as one of the girls - a short, chirpy blonde with a deep suntan - looked over and winked at me. “Nigh is occurring. Behold the nighness.”
We strode over with as much assurance as possible, which is to say that we only bumped into a couple of people on the way, and introduced ourselves. Short Blonde Person was called Shelley, and, although the seat Jesse had saved was on the other side of the table, she scooted over to make room for me. I glanced upwards and made a mental note to build an altar or something.
“So, where are you guys from originally?” asked a cute brunette named Emily on the other side of the table.
“We were actually born - Gah!” I said. There was a hand in my lap, and it did not belong to me. An actual hand, belonging to an actual - I tried to check surreptitiously to make sure that Jesse was keeping his hands to himself.
Lap-hand, meanwhile, went for the gold. Oh, god. What was I supposed to do at this point? What if I was smaller than she expected? I had a sudden mental image of Shelley standing up, saying “Nope, nothing there. Let's go, girls,” and sweeping out of the Bronze while the entire football team lined up and sniggered.
After a couple of minutes, during which Emily and Jesse chatted cheerfully about something I wasn't paying much attention to, the lap-hand started to withdraw. Resisting the temptation to shout “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, I worked my arm around Shelley as unobtrusively as possible and gave her boob an experimental squeeze. When pepper spray failed to ensue, I repeated the squeeze. Wow. A boob. With a girl attached to it and everything. I decided my brain needed to shut down for a while.
“Wanna dance?” said Shelley, in response to which I made inarticulate growly noises and we headed out to the dance floor.
“You look kind of tired,” she offered after a while. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she was going to have to do a disproportionate amount of work in this conversation.
“What?” I said. “No. No tiredness. Tiredness is not of me.”
There followed a long, awkward pause, during which I thought of a series of ever more bizarre and convoluted schemes to get into proximity range of her boobs again. I had gotten up to one which involved paramedics and an alien dressed as a monkey when she said, “So, let me get this straight. We're going to boink, right?”
Flowers blossomed. Birds took wing. A choir of heavenly angels did its stuff.
“Sure,” I said.
“Cool. Wanna head out to my car?”
I'm going to have sex. Me. Xander Harris, sex-haver. I am blessed among mortals. I am a living god. I -
“Call for you, Xander,” said Alec the barman.
“Um,” I said. “Right.” I headed in the direction of the telephone. A thought occurred to me. “Stay here,” I said to Shelley, darting back, and then, reassured, returned to the booth.
“Xander?” came Willow's voice from the other end of the line.
Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. CRAP.
“It turned out she really loved him after all only they never got the timing right and then they cheated and she wound up in a nunnery and -”
I am going to kill Willow. I am going to remove important outlying limbs and put them in the display cabinet with the cheerleader trophies. I am going to bury her in fourteen states, plow up the ground and sow the fields with salt. I 'm not quite sure why you would sow a field with salt, or how, but it is something that I feel that I need to do.
“I'll be right over,” I told her, and headed out to the dance floor.
“Um, Shelley? I'm afraid something came up ...”
The End
A/n: The books referenced are well-known novels by Stendhal.
Setting: A few months before Buffy's arrival in Sunnydale.
Spoilers: None.
Rating: I'll go with an R for underage groping.
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine.
“Willow still on the French literature kick?” asked Jesse sympathetically, as I stifled a yawn.
“Tell me about it, man,” I said gloomily. “It's getting later and later. Yesterday she called me at 2:30 AM because she'd read this book about a dude who finds his One True Love in this French village, and then went to Paris and found his other One True Love, and also he wanted to be Napoleon and got executed.”
“Not really tear-worthy in itself.”
“Not really, no.”
“I know what'll cheer you up, though,” said Jesse. “Check it out. There are some girls from out of town over there who wanted to sit with us. Well, primarily me, obviously, but I saved you a seat.”
“Actual girls? You mean, with girl parts and everything?”
“Well, not that I checked, as such, but behold. In the red corner, from Vermont...” He gestured towards a table.
“Wow. So, I'm guessing now would be a good time to start running up large credit card balances and/or praying?”
“Huh?”
“Because the end of the world is nigh. Wow,” I said again, as one of the girls - a short, chirpy blonde with a deep suntan - looked over and winked at me. “Nigh is occurring. Behold the nighness.”
We strode over with as much assurance as possible, which is to say that we only bumped into a couple of people on the way, and introduced ourselves. Short Blonde Person was called Shelley, and, although the seat Jesse had saved was on the other side of the table, she scooted over to make room for me. I glanced upwards and made a mental note to build an altar or something.
“So, where are you guys from originally?” asked a cute brunette named Emily on the other side of the table.
“We were actually born - Gah!” I said. There was a hand in my lap, and it did not belong to me. An actual hand, belonging to an actual - I tried to check surreptitiously to make sure that Jesse was keeping his hands to himself.
Lap-hand, meanwhile, went for the gold. Oh, god. What was I supposed to do at this point? What if I was smaller than she expected? I had a sudden mental image of Shelley standing up, saying “Nope, nothing there. Let's go, girls,” and sweeping out of the Bronze while the entire football team lined up and sniggered.
After a couple of minutes, during which Emily and Jesse chatted cheerfully about something I wasn't paying much attention to, the lap-hand started to withdraw. Resisting the temptation to shout “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, I worked my arm around Shelley as unobtrusively as possible and gave her boob an experimental squeeze. When pepper spray failed to ensue, I repeated the squeeze. Wow. A boob. With a girl attached to it and everything. I decided my brain needed to shut down for a while.
“Wanna dance?” said Shelley, in response to which I made inarticulate growly noises and we headed out to the dance floor.
“You look kind of tired,” she offered after a while. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she was going to have to do a disproportionate amount of work in this conversation.
“What?” I said. “No. No tiredness. Tiredness is not of me.”
There followed a long, awkward pause, during which I thought of a series of ever more bizarre and convoluted schemes to get into proximity range of her boobs again. I had gotten up to one which involved paramedics and an alien dressed as a monkey when she said, “So, let me get this straight. We're going to boink, right?”
Flowers blossomed. Birds took wing. A choir of heavenly angels did its stuff.
“Sure,” I said.
“Cool. Wanna head out to my car?”
I'm going to have sex. Me. Xander Harris, sex-haver. I am blessed among mortals. I am a living god. I -
“Call for you, Xander,” said Alec the barman.
“Um,” I said. “Right.” I headed in the direction of the telephone. A thought occurred to me. “Stay here,” I said to Shelley, darting back, and then, reassured, returned to the booth.
“Xander?” came Willow's voice from the other end of the line.
Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. CRAP.
“It turned out she really loved him after all only they never got the timing right and then they cheated and she wound up in a nunnery and -”
I am going to kill Willow. I am going to remove important outlying limbs and put them in the display cabinet with the cheerleader trophies. I am going to bury her in fourteen states, plow up the ground and sow the fields with salt. I 'm not quite sure why you would sow a field with salt, or how, but it is something that I feel that I need to do.
“I'll be right over,” I told her, and headed out to the dance floor.
“Um, Shelley? I'm afraid something came up ...”
The End
A/n: The books referenced are well-known novels by Stendhal.