Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost) : Part 3 - Xander
Title: Part 3 - Xander
Series: Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost)
Pairing: Willow/Xander
Rating: R for sex
Setting: Season 4, post-Pangs, Xander's universe
Word Count: 2,272 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: There are a lot of ways to spend a day. There aren't quite so many ways to get a second go at it.
Carpet burn.
Holy stormtroopers in Cloud City, carpet burn. Xander blinks tears out of his eyes, waiting for the ringing in his ears that’s half from the world spinning the wrong way and half from the pain in places that shouldn’t be feeling this kind of pain to stop being quite so ringy.
Carpet burn.
Willow’s floor is a lot cleaner than the basement’s, but that’s a double standard. Or he thinks it’s a double standard-the fact that it’s Willow’s floor and the fact that it’s compared to Xander’s basement. That’s two things, right? Double standard?
He feels stupider than unusual in Willow’s presence-and that’s saying something.
He lifts himself from the floor with as little friction as is humanly possible, and certain parts protest only with the fury of a thousand suns-rather than ten thousand-when raw skin gingerly confronts open, dorm room air.
Yeah. Ouch.
The condom is-somewhere. It bothers him that it decided to hop off of him like a diving board-and boy, is that the worst thing he could have thought, or what? And the absence, of course, is the mechanism by which the worst possible spot to get carpet burn got carpet burn.
Walk it off, man.
He turns around. And then he squeals like a not-big-manly-man.
The bed, somehow, made itself up all on its own. And the various shreds of evidence to the that thing they were doing are missing. And, also, the naked Willow with whom he was sharing some very enjoyable together time is nowhere to be seen.
His brain kind of does a loop on that. Starts spouting theories about alien abduction or secret agencies, before reminding him that he’s never seen an alien or a secret agent with Willow-abducting protocols. Pretty much just the demons.
He spends another few seconds on the demon-abduction loop before shaking his head, reminding himself that there had been no demons present, abducty or otherwise, and that it had just been the two of them.
Being the two of them.
A whole new cycle of panic plus confusion comes out of nowhere, because he’s well aware that she’s capable of things that resemble magic enough to be called magic. So there’s that little part of him-that little insecure part of him that’s more ginormous than little-that fears this is something she did on purpose. He doesn’t know much about magic, so it’s not like he’s got any idea whether it’s easy or difficult to teleport yourself and a room full of sexy evidence out to somewhere that doesn’t have a Xander present.
But she’d been looking at him. With big Willow eyes.
The confusion goes away, but the panic doesn’t take quite as much of a hiatus as he’d have liked.
But you pick your battles.
His mind runs through a checklist. Present and accounted for? One naked Xander body. One Xander brain of debatable usefulness. Carpet burn that’s not going to be doing anything for anyone. Missing? One naked Willow body. One Willow brain of much greater usefulness than his own. Clothes.
He blinks. Clothes.
Oh, no, this isn’t going to be one of those days. He spins, wincing at the air against the burn, and stumbles toward Buffy’s bed, where there’s supposed to be a pair of Xander jeans, tossed there pretty carelessly by a Willow that had been more enthusiastic than he could have-
Ow. Carpet burn. Until that goes away, it might be better to keep his head away from thoughts of Willow doing sexy things. Like how she’d pulled the sides of his shirt apart hard enough to send the buttons launching in all directions. Or when she’d pushed him down and-
“Ow!” he squeaks. It figures he can’t put his head in a more professional place, so he just squeaks against the pain and glares at the not-jeans-having spot on Buffy’s bed.
Stupid Buffy’s bed. He’s so beyond confused and angry right now that he’s more than willing to blame the particularly blameless bed for the disappearance of Willows and clothing.
Boxers? Nope. Shirt? Nuh-uh.
“Hello, karma,” he says to himself. “How I missed you so.”
He scrambles to the mirror, checking his face. Nope, no unexpected changes. His hair’s the same length. He’s got the normal amount of morning stubble. There are still little marks on him from Willow, like the small bite mark on his shoulder. He grins a little at the-
“Ow!”
Dead puppies. Project Manhattan. Cousin Carol’s chins-there we go.
He ignores the kind of breathless and the sweaty-Willow hadn’t disappeared while they were playing patty-cake, after all. Instead, he focuses on his bearings. The clocks says it’s shortly after 9:00, and there’s nothing about the room-other than the rearrangement of the things that had been moved during the night before, like the lamp he’d knocked over or the chair that had been kind of tossed across the room-to make him think it’s not the genuine article. Poster on the door glorifying chocolate, a couple of bands whose music he’s never heard Buffy or Willow listening to.
No pictures of Oz. No pictures of Angel.
Yeah, this is the place.
“All right, Xander brain,” he says. “Show me what’cha got.”
It doesn’t have much for him, other than the fact that Willow’s not here, which can only mean she’s elsewhere. And since he doesn’t want to consider the possibility that teleporting her away like whatever happened could take her as far as, say, Siberia, he’s hoping she’s still Hellmouth-adjacent.
It’s kind of a mean thing to hope, actually, but it’s the best he can come up with. Weren’t there a few things Buffy had been complaining about recently? Not that there’s been so much in the way of hanging out for the sake of hanging out, but he can remember her griping a little about this demon nest or that, places she had cleaned up but not cleared out.
Revenge, maybe? What kinds of demons would Buffy have gone after that would be the types that would want revenge? The demon-hating corner of his brain says “All of them,” but the part that’s acquainted with an ex-demon or two says “All of them.”
Yeah. Only Xander doesn’t know much about demons, other than the holy crap! Bad! Stay away! that’s kept him alive for a few years now.
Giles! He can call Giles, because Buffy and Willow have a phone. He’s hit with a tiny little moment of concern, because he does not like the idea of talking to Giles while also naked. That path leads only to badness.
Clothes then. Presentablility. Not naked.
A quick perusal of Buffy and Willow’s closet demonstrates an understandable lack of anything with a Y-chromosome flair to it. He rifles through the dresser only for as long as it takes to see underwear that Buffy definitely wouldn’t want him to know about and Willow-
Well, she hadn’t been wearing this kind of underwear last night. He can’t imagine that she would mind, though.
No. Bad thoughts. Carpet burn aggravating thoughts, so he closes the dresser with a snap and stands again. Maybe there’s a guy that lives in the hall that’ll be sympathetic to his plight.
Not that Xander could see himself being particularly receptive if he opened his dorm room door and saw a naked other-guy standing on the other side. Mostly, he’d probably just shriek and stumble away from the door and say something to the effect of “Don’t touch or I’ll tell Buffy!”
When he cracks open the door and pokes his head out, he breathes a sigh of relief at the fact that it’s Thanksgiving weekend and most of the residents in the building are probably back home, pestering their parents with laundry and academic complaints. Not that Xander has much to judge them over, aside from the fact that it’s typically him that’s doing the laundry and that he long ago learned that his parents aren’t particularly receptive to academic complaints.
Garbage can in front of him, back against the wall, he tiptoes to the side, to the next door in the hall. It’s beyond him what the gender distribution in the building is. Co-ed dorms have ever been one of those things that would be not-for-him, if only because he’s far from smart and far from lucky. Buffy and Willow treat it like it’s no big deal, but they treat a lot of things that he’d be a little giddy over like that.
Maybe it goes back to the chromosome. As far as he’s aware, Buffy’s not a dude in disguise.
And he’s seen enough of Willow to know that’s definitely true for her, too.
He peers at the door, trying to make some sense of which gender might be apparent if he knocks on it. No flowers or hearts or big smiley faces on the marker board in front.
It takes him a second to realize that Cody and Skylark are written on name tags taped to the door.
“Suh-weet,” he says to himself, grinning. Making sure that the garbage can is effectively blocking his front, and glancing down the hall to make sure no one’s going to happen across his bare backside, he knocks.
Nothing.
He knocks again. Louder.
Nothing.
Biting back a frustrated grunt, he knocks hard enough to shake the door in the frame. When he hears a door open, it’s not the one in front of him.
“Dude, they’re not-”
He freezes, staring at the damningly closed door, trying to ignore the fact that the voice that just said that is very feminine and very behind him. He swallows hard, feeling something not unlike the icy hands of death around his throat, before turning to peer over his shoulder.
Girl. Girl as in the boob-having and blonde hair and the flowers and hearts on the door that’s opened.
She stares back at him, and he’s thankful that he has the presence of mind to keep the garbage can elevated when he turns around in panic.
“No!” he fumbles, holdings up his hands in a calming gesture. “It’s not what it-”
Um. He looks at his traitorous hands, notable in their lack of garbage can holding, before following the girl’s gaze downward.
“-looks like?”
She screams. She screams loudly and kind of frighteningly, and he’s afraid for a moment that she’s going to magic some pepper spray into her hands and make carpet burn the second worst thing to happen to him that day, aside from the whole Willow disappearing thing. She screams, and the next door down the hall opens to reveal another girl-was it only the guys that left for Thanksgiving!?-who joins in the noise as soon as she spots what’s going on in the hall.
Or rather, what it looks like is going on in the hall.
“Please don’t scream!” he shouts over the noise. “I promise it’s not what it-”
“Get out!” the first girl shrieks, and it isn’t quite by magic, but the textbook that appears in her hand only long enough for her to lob it at him does have a title that says something about paganism. He’s halfway through remembering Jenny Calendar fondly before it strikes him between the eyes.
“Agh!” he grunted. “Please don’t-”
Calculus is next. People in college have pretty eclectic class schedules.
He’s running before he can stop himself, because it’s not like there are a whole lot of places he can run to. His car, maybe, parked as it is across campus at the place he met Willow for breakfast yesterday. The idea of a solo naked mile isn’t at the top of his list of things to accomplish before hitting thirty, but neither is death by textbook.
He’s down the stairs and blasting out the front door before he knows what’s going on.
Huh. Lotta people outside this early on a holiday Saturday.
He sprints without thinking about where he’s going, drawing a general line for the place he left his car yesterday. With any luck, he’s running too fast for anyone to get a good read on his face. Funny, hasn’t he had this dream before?
He realizes that someone-several someones are running next to him. He glances back and stares in wide-eyed disbelief at the three other guys, naked if not for the college caps on their heads.
“What the hell are you doing!?” he can’t help but scream.
“Dude, couldn’t let you do something like this alone!” the closest of them says, and Xander can just make out the trio of Greek symbols tattooed into his shoulder.
Oh. So this is that guy.
Xander’s always hated that guy.
“You pledged yet?” the guy goes on.
“Go away!” Xander screams before turning back to the front, arms pumping furiously to escape both the dorm and now the trio of frat boys that had nothing better to do on a holiday Saturday than hop on a streaking bandwagon.
Willow! Willow’s there! Willow’s there, kinda of frozen in a mid-jog, her eyes wide and her face so red that he almost can’t tell the difference between it and her hair. Willow, with an arm full of his clothes, coming from the direction he’s heading, staring at part of him like she hadn’t spent most of last night becoming intimately acquainted with it.
“Xander!?” she shrieks in some troubling cross of surprise, relief, and horror.
She’s wearing the same thing she wore yesterday.
Xander opens his mouth to shout for her.
He doesn’t even see the security squad coming.
Some mornings just suck, really.
I'm going to recant my previous plan of knocking this entire story out before going back to Solo. It's going to be just a little lengthy for that, I think. One more of this, and then back to the action.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
The more time we lose, the more memories we make.
-Anonymous
Series: Lost and Found (but Mostly Just Lost)
Pairing: Willow/Xander
Rating: R for sex
Setting: Season 4, post-Pangs, Xander's universe
Word Count: 2,272 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: There are a lot of ways to spend a day. There aren't quite so many ways to get a second go at it.
Carpet burn.
Holy stormtroopers in Cloud City, carpet burn. Xander blinks tears out of his eyes, waiting for the ringing in his ears that’s half from the world spinning the wrong way and half from the pain in places that shouldn’t be feeling this kind of pain to stop being quite so ringy.
Carpet burn.
Willow’s floor is a lot cleaner than the basement’s, but that’s a double standard. Or he thinks it’s a double standard-the fact that it’s Willow’s floor and the fact that it’s compared to Xander’s basement. That’s two things, right? Double standard?
He feels stupider than unusual in Willow’s presence-and that’s saying something.
He lifts himself from the floor with as little friction as is humanly possible, and certain parts protest only with the fury of a thousand suns-rather than ten thousand-when raw skin gingerly confronts open, dorm room air.
Yeah. Ouch.
The condom is-somewhere. It bothers him that it decided to hop off of him like a diving board-and boy, is that the worst thing he could have thought, or what? And the absence, of course, is the mechanism by which the worst possible spot to get carpet burn got carpet burn.
Walk it off, man.
He turns around. And then he squeals like a not-big-manly-man.
The bed, somehow, made itself up all on its own. And the various shreds of evidence to the that thing they were doing are missing. And, also, the naked Willow with whom he was sharing some very enjoyable together time is nowhere to be seen.
His brain kind of does a loop on that. Starts spouting theories about alien abduction or secret agencies, before reminding him that he’s never seen an alien or a secret agent with Willow-abducting protocols. Pretty much just the demons.
He spends another few seconds on the demon-abduction loop before shaking his head, reminding himself that there had been no demons present, abducty or otherwise, and that it had just been the two of them.
Being the two of them.
A whole new cycle of panic plus confusion comes out of nowhere, because he’s well aware that she’s capable of things that resemble magic enough to be called magic. So there’s that little part of him-that little insecure part of him that’s more ginormous than little-that fears this is something she did on purpose. He doesn’t know much about magic, so it’s not like he’s got any idea whether it’s easy or difficult to teleport yourself and a room full of sexy evidence out to somewhere that doesn’t have a Xander present.
But she’d been looking at him. With big Willow eyes.
The confusion goes away, but the panic doesn’t take quite as much of a hiatus as he’d have liked.
But you pick your battles.
His mind runs through a checklist. Present and accounted for? One naked Xander body. One Xander brain of debatable usefulness. Carpet burn that’s not going to be doing anything for anyone. Missing? One naked Willow body. One Willow brain of much greater usefulness than his own. Clothes.
He blinks. Clothes.
Oh, no, this isn’t going to be one of those days. He spins, wincing at the air against the burn, and stumbles toward Buffy’s bed, where there’s supposed to be a pair of Xander jeans, tossed there pretty carelessly by a Willow that had been more enthusiastic than he could have-
Ow. Carpet burn. Until that goes away, it might be better to keep his head away from thoughts of Willow doing sexy things. Like how she’d pulled the sides of his shirt apart hard enough to send the buttons launching in all directions. Or when she’d pushed him down and-
“Ow!” he squeaks. It figures he can’t put his head in a more professional place, so he just squeaks against the pain and glares at the not-jeans-having spot on Buffy’s bed.
Stupid Buffy’s bed. He’s so beyond confused and angry right now that he’s more than willing to blame the particularly blameless bed for the disappearance of Willows and clothing.
Boxers? Nope. Shirt? Nuh-uh.
“Hello, karma,” he says to himself. “How I missed you so.”
He scrambles to the mirror, checking his face. Nope, no unexpected changes. His hair’s the same length. He’s got the normal amount of morning stubble. There are still little marks on him from Willow, like the small bite mark on his shoulder. He grins a little at the-
“Ow!”
Dead puppies. Project Manhattan. Cousin Carol’s chins-there we go.
He ignores the kind of breathless and the sweaty-Willow hadn’t disappeared while they were playing patty-cake, after all. Instead, he focuses on his bearings. The clocks says it’s shortly after 9:00, and there’s nothing about the room-other than the rearrangement of the things that had been moved during the night before, like the lamp he’d knocked over or the chair that had been kind of tossed across the room-to make him think it’s not the genuine article. Poster on the door glorifying chocolate, a couple of bands whose music he’s never heard Buffy or Willow listening to.
No pictures of Oz. No pictures of Angel.
Yeah, this is the place.
“All right, Xander brain,” he says. “Show me what’cha got.”
It doesn’t have much for him, other than the fact that Willow’s not here, which can only mean she’s elsewhere. And since he doesn’t want to consider the possibility that teleporting her away like whatever happened could take her as far as, say, Siberia, he’s hoping she’s still Hellmouth-adjacent.
It’s kind of a mean thing to hope, actually, but it’s the best he can come up with. Weren’t there a few things Buffy had been complaining about recently? Not that there’s been so much in the way of hanging out for the sake of hanging out, but he can remember her griping a little about this demon nest or that, places she had cleaned up but not cleared out.
Revenge, maybe? What kinds of demons would Buffy have gone after that would be the types that would want revenge? The demon-hating corner of his brain says “All of them,” but the part that’s acquainted with an ex-demon or two says “All of them.”
Yeah. Only Xander doesn’t know much about demons, other than the holy crap! Bad! Stay away! that’s kept him alive for a few years now.
Giles! He can call Giles, because Buffy and Willow have a phone. He’s hit with a tiny little moment of concern, because he does not like the idea of talking to Giles while also naked. That path leads only to badness.
Clothes then. Presentablility. Not naked.
A quick perusal of Buffy and Willow’s closet demonstrates an understandable lack of anything with a Y-chromosome flair to it. He rifles through the dresser only for as long as it takes to see underwear that Buffy definitely wouldn’t want him to know about and Willow-
Well, she hadn’t been wearing this kind of underwear last night. He can’t imagine that she would mind, though.
No. Bad thoughts. Carpet burn aggravating thoughts, so he closes the dresser with a snap and stands again. Maybe there’s a guy that lives in the hall that’ll be sympathetic to his plight.
Not that Xander could see himself being particularly receptive if he opened his dorm room door and saw a naked other-guy standing on the other side. Mostly, he’d probably just shriek and stumble away from the door and say something to the effect of “Don’t touch or I’ll tell Buffy!”
When he cracks open the door and pokes his head out, he breathes a sigh of relief at the fact that it’s Thanksgiving weekend and most of the residents in the building are probably back home, pestering their parents with laundry and academic complaints. Not that Xander has much to judge them over, aside from the fact that it’s typically him that’s doing the laundry and that he long ago learned that his parents aren’t particularly receptive to academic complaints.
Garbage can in front of him, back against the wall, he tiptoes to the side, to the next door in the hall. It’s beyond him what the gender distribution in the building is. Co-ed dorms have ever been one of those things that would be not-for-him, if only because he’s far from smart and far from lucky. Buffy and Willow treat it like it’s no big deal, but they treat a lot of things that he’d be a little giddy over like that.
Maybe it goes back to the chromosome. As far as he’s aware, Buffy’s not a dude in disguise.
And he’s seen enough of Willow to know that’s definitely true for her, too.
He peers at the door, trying to make some sense of which gender might be apparent if he knocks on it. No flowers or hearts or big smiley faces on the marker board in front.
It takes him a second to realize that Cody and Skylark are written on name tags taped to the door.
“Suh-weet,” he says to himself, grinning. Making sure that the garbage can is effectively blocking his front, and glancing down the hall to make sure no one’s going to happen across his bare backside, he knocks.
Nothing.
He knocks again. Louder.
Nothing.
Biting back a frustrated grunt, he knocks hard enough to shake the door in the frame. When he hears a door open, it’s not the one in front of him.
“Dude, they’re not-”
He freezes, staring at the damningly closed door, trying to ignore the fact that the voice that just said that is very feminine and very behind him. He swallows hard, feeling something not unlike the icy hands of death around his throat, before turning to peer over his shoulder.
Girl. Girl as in the boob-having and blonde hair and the flowers and hearts on the door that’s opened.
She stares back at him, and he’s thankful that he has the presence of mind to keep the garbage can elevated when he turns around in panic.
“No!” he fumbles, holdings up his hands in a calming gesture. “It’s not what it-”
Um. He looks at his traitorous hands, notable in their lack of garbage can holding, before following the girl’s gaze downward.
“-looks like?”
She screams. She screams loudly and kind of frighteningly, and he’s afraid for a moment that she’s going to magic some pepper spray into her hands and make carpet burn the second worst thing to happen to him that day, aside from the whole Willow disappearing thing. She screams, and the next door down the hall opens to reveal another girl-was it only the guys that left for Thanksgiving!?-who joins in the noise as soon as she spots what’s going on in the hall.
Or rather, what it looks like is going on in the hall.
“Please don’t scream!” he shouts over the noise. “I promise it’s not what it-”
“Get out!” the first girl shrieks, and it isn’t quite by magic, but the textbook that appears in her hand only long enough for her to lob it at him does have a title that says something about paganism. He’s halfway through remembering Jenny Calendar fondly before it strikes him between the eyes.
“Agh!” he grunted. “Please don’t-”
Calculus is next. People in college have pretty eclectic class schedules.
He’s running before he can stop himself, because it’s not like there are a whole lot of places he can run to. His car, maybe, parked as it is across campus at the place he met Willow for breakfast yesterday. The idea of a solo naked mile isn’t at the top of his list of things to accomplish before hitting thirty, but neither is death by textbook.
He’s down the stairs and blasting out the front door before he knows what’s going on.
Huh. Lotta people outside this early on a holiday Saturday.
He sprints without thinking about where he’s going, drawing a general line for the place he left his car yesterday. With any luck, he’s running too fast for anyone to get a good read on his face. Funny, hasn’t he had this dream before?
He realizes that someone-several someones are running next to him. He glances back and stares in wide-eyed disbelief at the three other guys, naked if not for the college caps on their heads.
“What the hell are you doing!?” he can’t help but scream.
“Dude, couldn’t let you do something like this alone!” the closest of them says, and Xander can just make out the trio of Greek symbols tattooed into his shoulder.
Oh. So this is that guy.
Xander’s always hated that guy.
“You pledged yet?” the guy goes on.
“Go away!” Xander screams before turning back to the front, arms pumping furiously to escape both the dorm and now the trio of frat boys that had nothing better to do on a holiday Saturday than hop on a streaking bandwagon.
Willow! Willow’s there! Willow’s there, kinda of frozen in a mid-jog, her eyes wide and her face so red that he almost can’t tell the difference between it and her hair. Willow, with an arm full of his clothes, coming from the direction he’s heading, staring at part of him like she hadn’t spent most of last night becoming intimately acquainted with it.
“Xander!?” she shrieks in some troubling cross of surprise, relief, and horror.
She’s wearing the same thing she wore yesterday.
Xander opens his mouth to shout for her.
He doesn’t even see the security squad coming.
Some mornings just suck, really.
I'm going to recant my previous plan of knocking this entire story out before going back to Solo. It's going to be just a little lengthy for that, I think. One more of this, and then back to the action.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
The more time we lose, the more memories we make.
-Anonymous