FIC -- Can you believe it???

Jul 13, 2006 12:37

A long, long very long time ago, I said I would write a story for hpchick. It was to be a Xander story, post-Africa. A post "Seeing Africa" story, specifically. Since it’s so overdue, I made it more than twice as long as requested. (Anyone who knows me knows that’s bull - it’s actually an effort to get me to keep things short.)

If you haven't read Seeing Africa, you won't be lost - although there are a few references to that story, so if you have read it, you'll get (a little bit) more out of this one.

Title: Showing Sunnydale
Summary: “Tonight, I’m going to tell you a story. And it’s up to you, what you do with it.”
Pairing: None, unless you want to squint.
Warnings: Xander uses some foul language, but that's about it.
Timeframe: Three years after Chosen, two years after NFA
Notes: long-overdue fic for hpchick. Many thanks to nwhepcat for the beta, and the ego-boost, and not letting me give up on this. And thanks to annakovsky for naming Xander's Slayer, although this post-Africa history is not the same as the one she imagined.



If Xander had listened to Giles, he wouldn’t be here.

Not that Giles had forbidden it, really. He’d only said, “Perhaps it would be best if we didn’t consider attending the Sunnydale reunion.”

An out-and-out order from the Senior Watcher on the new council would have been interesting to watch, anyway. Given the present attitudes, which ranged from “Slayer is Boss,” through “Slayer is Queen,” right up to “Who the hell are you to tell a Slayer what to do?” it was hard to tell how much real authority the Watchers had these days. Tension was building, though, and one of these days it would come down to a real confrontation. He wasn’t looking forward to that. Maybe he could arrange to be out sick that day. Maybe that was why he was here, in Los Angeles, instead of somewhere closer to power-trip central.

Personally, Xander didn’t have any illusions about who would suffer more if the factions finally did do the irreconcilable differences thing. Naomi was probably surviving much better without him than he was without her. Not that she’d been convinced; the look on her face when he’d told her that he was taking vacation time and flying to Los Angeles had been mingled reproach, abandonment, and a deep skepticism. Reproach at him leaving her, of course, and skepticism at his ability to survive for more than a day without her watching over him. Years spent as the far-too-breakable assistant to far more powerful - and difficult - women had trained Xander to recognize the signs. She was worried about him, and, not happy about being worried, had settled into anger at him for making her worry. But by the time Naomi had said goodbye to him at Heathrow, it had all faded to a sad, quiet mournfulness as she oh-so-carefully didn’t cling to Giles’ hand, no matter that he kept it hanging conveniently down by his side, within easy reach. A couple of years of training and regular meals had put some meat on her bones, but every so often Xander would be reminded of how young she was, despite all that power flowing through her, power that was just waiting to surge out and, say, dislocate her Watcher’s shoulder during training, which just led to more “how dare you make me feel guilty and worried” glares cast his way. God, how he loved that scowl.

Giles had just looked worried. And reproachful. But when Giles had started to actually say something, he hadn’t finished, and just looked away. Xander wondered what Giles had seen in his face, if Giles could tell what he’d been thinking. Like you’re one to talk about abandoning your Slayer.

It was quite possible that Xander still had some unresolved issues where Giles was concerned.

“Hi!” A cheerful voice interrupted his thoughts, but he didn’t jump. It took more than that to startle him these days. He focused on the chirpy blonde behind the desk, then cast a quick glance up to the banner above her head. SUNNYDALE SURVIVORS. Like it was something to crow about. He wondered whether whoever had made that sign knew anyone who hadn’t survived. He thought of those damn “I survived the Sunnydale Crater!” T-shirts that Andrew had had made. He wondered where Andrew was at that particular moment, and exactly how long he could make that particular bout of suffering last.

He’d learned a lot in Africa.

Okay, well, maybe he hadn’t learned anything like that.

But it was fun to think about.

“Hi.” He attempted a smile.

She paused, as if expecting him to continue, then forged ahead through the awkward silence. “You’re from Sunnydale, then? Here for the reunion?”

“Born and bred. Have many showed up?”

Her bright smile flickered. “Not as many as you’d think. We put advertisements in all the major papers, got on the news wherever we could, Web sites . . . we figured there’d be a lot of people who wanted to reconnect.”

“Sunnydale people were always strange that way.” The woman herself looked vaguely familiar, in a “shopped at the same minimart” kind of way, but he didn’t know her name. It was nice, though. It had been too long since anyone had looked familiar like that. It was either the handful of people he knew almost as well as he knew himself, or a world full of strangers.

“Yeah.” She looked down and fiddled with the papers in her hand. “I guess.” But she rallied quickly and smiled up at him again. “But you’re here, anyway, and we’re so glad you made it!”

Xander was constantly amazed at how much things had changed since High School. That any perky blonde would be that pleased that Xander Harris had shown up at her party . . . perhaps he was right to be worried about apocalyptic possibilities here.

So he signed his name, and received a nametag, suppressed a quick vision of Cordelia’s bright, angry smile (“That’s right. I’m a nametag person!”), and made his way to the main entrance where he paused, taking in the sign posted conspicuously above the door.

An open invitation and a warm welcome to anyone who made it out alive.

For anyone who didn’t know better, it was just strange wording, a bit morbid perhaps, but easily dismissed as black humor. For those who did know better, it was a very specific invitation - not necessarily including everyone who had actually made it out of Sunnydale.

Hanging above the door in a community center.

It was obvious that whoever planned this knew something, but only just enough to be dangerous.

He wished Buffy were here.

He frowned. He was mad at Buffy. He had to remember that. He’d even deleted the four voicemails she’d left for him since he left London without listening to them.

Xander made his way inside, and he rubbed a frustrated hand across his face when he saw that the hall wasn’t brightly lit. Instead, there were tasteful lamps on the tables, casting nice cheery glows over the nice white linen tablecloths, and casting nice deep shadows over the corners of the rooms.

He really wished Buffy were here.

Or maybe Willow. Yeah, Willow would be good, because she could cast some sort of light-spell and boost the lumens in here by about 20 percent. Get those lurk-worthy corners cleared out.

But he wasn’t all that thrilled with Willow, either, and he needed to remember that, too. Willow had backed Buffy up.

Damn the girls and their stick-together girlishness, anyway. At least Naomi had been pissed off for him. Almost as much as she’d been pissed off at him.

So. Deep breath, and head for the corners. No Buffy. No Willow. No Naomi. He’d just have to watch over this ill-fated gathering himself. Him, Xander Harris.

He really, really wished Buffy were here.

Probably nothing would happen. The demons and vampires and all the nasty crawling things of the night had been interested in Sunnydale because of the Hellmouth, not because of the people who had lived there. Take the Hellmouth away - which they had, thank you very much - and it was just another group of normal, completely unextraordinary people. No different than any other group of faceless, nameless people, important only for their O-pos, hunted only because they had the bad luck to be born in the center of the feeding ground. No vampire in his right mind would go out of his way to be here.

“Xander.”

Xander took a brief moment to allow his heart to settle down to a rapid canter before glaring into the already occupied bank of shadows that he’d been heading for.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Angel shrugged. “A friend asked me to keep an eye on things. Make sure there was no trouble.”

“A friend.” Xander couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his tone, didn’t even try. The last he’d heard, all of this particular vampire’s friends had been wiped out in the last LA apocalypse. He liked to think that it showed how much he’d grown as a person that he didn’t point that out.

Angel seemed to hear it anyway, and hunched further into his overcoat. Black, of course, and elegant in a way that lesser garments could only try to imitate. On Xander’s Council salary, he could probably afford one like it. Wouldn’t look like that in it, though. “She saw the notice. She was worried.”

“Oh.” For a weird moment, Xander felt bad for him. “So. This friend? Anyone I know?”

Angel was still taller than Xander, and could still make him feel even shorter than he was when he looked down at him that way. Literally and figuratively. “Does it matter?”

Xander’s lips twisted bitterly. “Just need to know whose funeral to prepare for.”

Drawing blood from Angel wasn’t nearly as satisfying as he’d imagined it would be when he was 17. At Angel’s wince, Xander looked down at his own feet. Actually found himself saying, “Sorry.”

A long silence, and when he looked up, Angel looked . . . strange. It took Xander a moment to identify the expression. Disbelief. Xander huffed out something like a laugh. “Yeah, I can’t believe I said it either.”

For a moment, neither spoke. They didn’t really have anything to say to each other, but “so, so not nice to see you,” and walking away just seemed . . . wrong. So after a long, awkward moment, they did what men had done for centuries when faced with such long, awkward moments - they headed for the bar. Where Angel again looked uncertain, wary, when Xander reached for his wallet.

“You’re buying?”

“Why not?” Xander shrugged. “Watcher Council expenses. I want to see the reaction from some of those old guys when they find out they’re paying for your drinks.”

That brought a brief flicker of a smile to Angel’s lips, and hey, that felt better than drawing blood. Go figure.

“Whiskey.”

Xander turned to the bartender. “Scotch. Make it two.” An inquiring glance back at Angel. “Neat? Rocks?”

Only to see Angel looking disapproving again. “I said whiskey, not Scotch. Jameson’s, if they have it.”

“Right.” Xander chuckled. “The ‘e’ makes all the difference, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not just the spelling.” Angel frowned, and he sounded… peevish? “You’d think with a name like Harris you’d know that.” Yes, that was definitely peevishness.

Xander decided if making Angel smile was better than making him flinch, annoying him was better than both put together.

“Hey, it was always Tennessee bourbon in the Harris household. The colonial stuff. Much to Giles’ horror. He took it as some sort of a personal mission to teach me about single malt once we hit London.”

A couple of glasses - Macallan for Xander, good Irish Jameson’s for Angel - and the two of them moved away from the press of people at the bar to a corner table.

It was a pretty disorganized “celebration.” Just one person after another, getting up on stage and talking. About Sunnydale, about the things they remembered, things they missed. Things they didn’t miss. As the evening wore on, Angel and Xander didn’t talk - just sat, eyes on the dark corners, the stream of talking a hum in the background, or rising to break into their concentration. All these people, telling what they’d left behind, where they’d been.

Xander kept his fingers busy by tearing little strips off the corners of the white paper special event menus, printed up in some attempt at elegance. They reminded him of the road trip from the wreck of Sunnydale to Cleveland. Dawn mostly hung out with Andrew - go figure - and the baby Slayers assembled, broke apart, and reassembled just like any group of high-school girls anywhere, with all the accompanying snipes and squeals and sulks. He, Buffy, Willow, and Giles always staked out the corner booth in whatever diner they came across.

“Six,” Willow would say, only a few minutes after they sat down, her voice breathless and proud.

Giles would consider a minute longer, then raise an eyebrow and say, “Nine.”

Just like old times, the two of them would pore over the menu, keeping a running tally of misspellings and typos. Xander didn’t like to think about why it didn’t bother him the way it used to during post-patrol meals out back in Sunnydale, when he would scowl at the menu in frustration, at mistakes he couldn’t see, then do something stupid, using condiments as props so that they wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t volunteered a number. Now it just felt familiar, like old times, like nothing much had changed, and the ritual failed to bother him. He barely looked at menus post-Sunnydale anyway, and always ordered the same thing.

One night, the corner booth had been a six-seater, curving around the wall, and Faith and Robin had joined them. Robin had picked out a mistake that even Giles had missed and made a happily contemptuous remark about the standard of education these days. No one had noticed Faith get a little smaller in her seat, and Xander had suddenly despised Robin Wood with an intensity that he’d previously reserved for the Undead. Xander had kicked at her shit-kicking boots under the table until she’d looked up, then he’d rolled his eye and made her dimple, and the two of them had gone to the bar next door and downed shots until the bar closed and they shimmied back to the motel singing Blue Moon in full voice. The next morning, the baby Slayers had stared with wide eyes as the two of them staggered onto the bus and collapsed into their seats with stifled groans. The next evening, Faith and Robin had taken separate motel rooms, and Robin spent the rest of the trip glowering at Xander through dark sunglasses.

It wasn’t like anything had happened, or was likely to - ever. It was just that Faith was a Slayer, and one of the most alive people Xander had ever met, and no one should be allowed to make her small like that. Never mind that she’d tried to kill him - had tried to kill them all. He was adult, mature Xander. He could get over that.

Couldn’t he?

He glanced sideways at Angel, then swirled the liquid in his glass, listened to the sound of the ice. “So… who was it?”

Angel blinked, apparently surprised that Xander had broken their strangely comfortable silence. “What?”

“The friend. Who asked you to come. Who was it?”

“Oh.” Angel paused, almost smiled. “Anne. Her name is Anne.”

Xander shrugged. “Don’t know any Annes.”

Onstage, a man was reminiscing about how he and his friends used to scam drinks at the Bronze. Funny, all the time Xander had spent at the Bronze, and the man didn’t even look vaguely familiar.

“You did meet her once,” Angel said. “She was going by the name Chanterelle.”

“Chante…” Xander blinked, then laughed out loud. “Huh. Didn’t figure on that one.”

“What?” Angel frowned, annoyed.

“A vampire groupie doesn’t seem your style. A built-in fanbase seems more Spike’s speed than yours.”

“She’s not a vampire groupie,” Angel said.

Xander looked at him. “I do have the right Chanterelle here? ‘The lonely ones,’ all that crap?”

“She’s not… she’s changed. She’s grown up. A lot. People do that.” Angel glared at him. “Some people do, anyway.”

“Yeah.” Xander slouched back in his seat, crossed his arms across his chest. “So I hear.”

There was a long silence between them, not so comfortable this time, while Xander fumed. Chanterelle got Angel running her personal errands for her, and Andrew got to run all Giles’ personal errands for him - the mushroom people got patted on the back for being adult and responsible, and Xander got this. Xander had grown up, damnit, and for Angel of all people to rebuke him for being childish wasn’t…

It wasn’t fair.

Which made Xander shake his head, and chuckle, and reach for his whiskey again. A sip - a measured, adult sip, and he tried again.

“So… Anne. Is she doing the Robin thing?”

“The… what?”

“You know, trusty sidekick to the brooding dark knight?”

Angel took a quick gulp of his own drink. Less measured, Xander noticed, than Xander’s own. “No. She’s not. She… she runs a shelter in Los Angeles. For runaways, and homeless kids. She… getting away from Sunnydale helped her.”

“Getting away from Sunnydale helped a lot of people.”

Angel glanced toward the stage, where Mrs. Mulvaney was tearfully recalling the old second-hand bookstore on the main street. “You don’t miss it?”

“If ever there was a town that got what was coming to it, it was Sunnydale.”

Mrs. Mulvaney had been the crossing guard at the elementary school since before Xander had started first grade. She was now living outside Cincinnati, working in a day care center. But she still remembered that bookstore.

“So…” Xander tried again. “Who is working with you these days?”

“No one.” Angel stared at the stage as if Mrs. Mulvaney was going to say something world-changing.

“No one?”

“No. I’m working alone.”

“Huh.” Another measured silence.

“What?”

“Huh?” Xander looked up to find Angel glaring at him. “What?”

“Why do you have a problem with that?”

“I don’t have a problem with that!”

“You were… frowning.” Angel huffed. “Why is it so hard to believe I’m working alone?”

Xander pushed down the immediate impulse to object - again - and considered. Because apparently he had been frowning. “I don’t know. I guess… you always seemed like a joiner. Despite yourself, you know? I mean… you’re this gazillion-year-old vampire, and you were hanging out with high school kids. I guess I just… you had to be pretty desperate. For company, I mean.”

Angel stared at him long enough that Xander’s younger self wanted to start yammering. Instead, he started swirling his ice cubes again.

Angel finally relented. “It can be… lonely. The vampire thing.”

“Well, yeah. Since vamps have a charming habit of eating their company…”

And look at that. Angel-glare worked on adult, mature Xander, too.

“You’re no better,” Angel said.

“Oh yeah? How do you figure?” He was going to be sorry he asked, he just knew it.

“You sent me a gift. The carving.”

“Your point?”

“You must have been pretty lonely, all alone in Africa. To send me a present.”

Xander frowned. “Maybe I did it to piss you off.” He shrugged at Angel’s skeptical look. “I never pretended to be anything but a pack animal. You’re the one playing all lone-wolf avenger of the night. But you’re going to start collecting people again, sooner or later. I just want you to be honest.”

“I’m not going to collect people. You were right. People get close to me, people get dead. It’s not fair to bring them into it.”

“And here I thought people brought themselves into it. Pesky free will, and all that.”

“It’s not their fight.”

“Not their fight?” Xander stared at him for a moment. “Whose is it, then?”

“Mine,” Angel said. “People… humans just get hurt. Or dead. They shouldn’t have to… I was selfish, before, to bring them into it, when it’s up to me to keep them safe.”

“You…” Xander searched for words, found them. “You arrogant ass.”

Angel’s surprise just made Xander angrier. “You and your superpowers, you think the world revolves around you. Oh, you say it’s because humans are so precious, pretend it’s because you think they’re better than you, but that’s not it at all. It’s you who think you’re better. You push all the real people away and it’s all, ‘oh, you’re too important’ when you really mean, ‘you’re too weak,’ and you think you’re being all self-sacrificing and selfless when you’re really being pompous and stupid.”

Angel’s expression had shaded from surprise into confusion.

“And then you get all saintly and heroic and martyred and say that no one understands, and you’re so fucking alone, and well, you wouldn’t be alone if you didn’t make it that way, would you?”

“Xander-”

“So you fight for the humans while the lowly, weak humans do… what, exactly? Get a tan? It’s our world. Doesn’t that give us the right to fight for it? The responsibility? If we just sat back and let the superpowered set do all the work, we’d be just as fucking useless as you think we are when you tell us to let it go, to take a rest-”

“We’re not talking about me, are we?”

The ice in Xander’s glass was suddenly fascinating.

Angel didn’t back off. “This is about Buffy. Something she said?”

Xander huffed out a breath, and relented. “Something, yeah. Something about retirement.”

“She wants you to quit?”

Who knew ice could be so interesting? “Her and Willow both. They… neither of them really ever got over the eye thing, which is pretty funny, since it was my eye, and I stopped walking into things years ago. But they think that since there are so many Slayers now to do the heavy lifting, that I should retire. What do they think - that I can go off somewhere and forget all about everything I know and live a normal life? I mean, do they know me at all?”

“Maybe it’s a good idea.” Angel forestalled Xander’s angry rejoinder with a short jerk of his head to indicate the rest of the room. “These people - they’re all so innocent. They don’t know… they lived in Sunnydale for how many years? And the darkness didn’t touch them. You don’t have to live in the dark. You have a choice.”

“Right. A choice. Like Wesley had a choice, and Cordelia. And me, I respect the choices they made. You look at these people and see innocents. I see guilt. All that evil. All that violence, and death, and pain, and they did nothing. You say it’s your fight - I say that if it’s their world, they damned well better fight for it. And if they won’t, why are they worth fighting for? Let the demons have the world - at least they’ve earned it.”

“These people, they don’t know-”

“Because the evil in Sunnydale was just so cleverly hidden? We blew up the high school, and a giant snake ate half the graduating class. They handed Buffy an award at prom, as if a fucking umbrella could make up for everything she lost, and after graduation, no one stepped up to fight beside her. They made the choice to be blind. And I don’t respect that choice at all.”

Angel stared at him for a moment, then his gaze darted up to the stage where Mrs. Mulvaney was being assisted down the steps, and his lips twisted into something like a smirk. “Sounds as though you’ve got something to get off your chest.”

Xander gaped in disbelief. “What? No!”

“Oh? Oh, well, I can understand the stage fright thing.”

“Fright? No! There’s no fright-”

Angel tilted his head in a completely infuriating way, and Xander wondered if he’d gotten it from Spike, or whether Spike had picked it up from him. “Okay.”

Xander gaped at him. “Are you daring me?”

Angel shook his head. “No. Just saying. You shouldn’t be ashamed about being scared to get up in front of people.”

“I’m not falling for that, you know. I’m a lot smarter than I used to be.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Hey, everyone. My name is Xander Harris. I lived my whole life in Sunnydale, until I didn’t anymore. I always thought that someday I’d leave town. Actually tried, a couple of times, but it didn’t take. In the end, I didn’t leave Sunnydale - it left me.”

There was a murmur of soft laughter, and Xander rubbed a hand back through his hair.

“Since then, I’ve traveled a lot. I spent a little time in Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia … the last few months, I’ve been living in London, along with some other refugees. Sounds exotic, but just try getting a passport when anything resembling an official ID is at the bottom of a crater.”

Laughter again, and Xander shifted uncomfortably. Laughter was easy. He could always make them laugh.

“In case anyone’s keeping track, Willow Rosenberg is alive and well. So are Dawn and Buffy Summers.”

There was a weird buzz in the room, and Xander knew it - he knew they recognized the name, and the anger spiked in him. A fucking umbrella. And she was so happy to get it, too.

“Most of the past few years I’ve spent in Africa. I’ve been traveling a lot. I’ve been collecting stories, folktales, and I’ve been telling some of my own. One thing I’ve learned is that whoever tells the stories - whoever controls the information - they have the power to create, or destroy. It’s amazing.

“So far, there have been a lot of people lining up to tell us what happened to Sunnydale. They told us these beautiful, easy stories about earthquakes and seismic shifts, and subsidence due to underground rivers drying out. And I guess a lot of people believed those stories, or else there’d be a lot more people here tonight. But I’m guessing that you all, the people who actually showed up, came because you can’t just put Sunnydale behind you, like some really bad dream. For good or evil, Sunnydale was our home. It made us what we are. And you need something more.”

Xander straightened up, and squared his shoulders, and felt as tall as Angel.

“Tonight, I’m going to tell you a story. And it’s up to you, what you do with it.”

There is a natural way for his story to begin, after all this time. Once there was a girl.

But he knows how he wants to start the story, and the temptation is strong. Here, where the dim, tasteful lamps in the center of white linen tablecloths seem to flicker and dance and change into hundreds of small campfires, casting eager, intent faces in shadow and light, the temptation is strong. Once there was a boy.

But his story isn’t theirs. It isn’t the way. The way is to give them what he was given, let them take it from there. Whether they accept it, and do something, or choose to believe it a fiction, and turn their backs, it will be up to them. Let them fight for it, or not.

So he clears his throat, and hears the soft whirring of a ceiling fan in a room long destroyed, sees the dust specks hanging in afternoon light, smells the mustiness of old books that had never meant learning to him, as it had to Willow, or knowledge, as it had to Giles, but instead companionship and belonging. He could see, hear, the spinning of the globe. Giles had had props.

Maybe the drama queen instinct was a Watcher thing, too.

He spares a moment to hope that he could do it justice, this story that he’d never told before, the one that had changed his life.

“The world,” he begins, “is older than you know.”

When he finished, he couldn’t be sure how it went over. Some people applauded, and he knew that they hadn’t really gotten it. To them it was a performance, he supposed, a neat trick that he’d picked up somewhere outside the ruins of Sunnydale.

The others, the ones who sat in silence, he had more hope for. Maybe they’d come up to him later, and ask him questions. Better to tackle them one on one, anyway. Denial was always easier as a group activity, and maybe that had been Sunnydale’s secret, after all.

He had to admit, though, he was curious to see what Angel had thought of it.

But the person sitting at the table wasn’t Angel - couldn’t ever be confused with Angel. He was a she, first of all. She was fair-haired instead of dark, and she was half Angel’s size. Xander knew who he’d bet on in a head-on between the two, though. She was beautiful, and when she smiled up at him, Xander had to remind himself that he was pissed off at her.

“Well,” he said, “this is an improvement in dining companions.”

Buffy’s smile faded. “I thought you and Angel had played nice.”

“He said that?”

“Well, no. But he didn’t look all tense and pissy like he used to whenever the two of you spent time together.”

Xander considered all the possible answers to that, and rejected them in favor of new, improved, mature Xander. “You should go talk to him. If you want. I’ll - I’ll hang out here, keep an eye on the alcoves.” That new, improved, mature Xander didn’t want to fight with Buffy didn’t enter into it.

Buffy just looked at him for a moment, then said, “Later. Right now, I think I need to talk to you.”

Xander considered, then relented and slid into the seat next to her. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

“So.” Buffy crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward in a way that would have made younger Xander light-headed. “What’s a girl gotta do to get a drink around here?”

Older, mature Xander was unmoved. “Depends on what you want,” he said, not giving in to the temptation of old, familiar banter and not-really flirtation. “There are waiters around somewhere.” He looked for one, grateful for a real excuse not to make eye contact.

“Xander.” Her voice was firm, reproving, and he turned his attention to the tabletop. She let the silence between them rest for a moment, then sighed. “I liked your speech.”

“Really?” His lips twisted into a rueful half-smile. “I wouldn’t have thought it was your kind of thing.”

“Okay,” she said, drawing the word out as if tasting it. “Considering that my whole life has been ‘that kind of thing,’ maybe you’d better explain that.”

Xander shrugged. “Okay, maybe not the story, as much as who I was telling it to.”

She considered, then huffed out a breath. “I do understand, Xander.”

“Really?” Xander couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his tone.

“Yes, really.” Buffy countered with a smile. “You know, the ‘I’m the only one who understands’ riff you’re playing is really getting old.”

He could feel his eye narrow. Could feel the eye that wasn’t there try to. He knew the look on his face, knew how attractive it wasn’t. “Miss Pot? You’re looking awfully black tonight.”

She leaned forward again. “That’s just it, Xan. It was such a huge relief for me, that Willow could wave her magic wand and make, like, a bazillion more of me. You think I don’t understand you wanting there to be more of you?”

Xander stared at her in disbelief. “You… but you were the one who wanted there to be less of me.”

Buffy shook her head, and boy, was that look familiar. Exasperation. Xander could draw that look. In the dark. With crayons.

“Xander, you really need to work on listening to what people are actually saying instead of assuming you know what they’re not saying and getting pissed off at them for it.”

Xander took a moment to try to translate that. “What?”

“I wasn’t telling you to quit, doofus.” Her expression was exasperation, yes, but he recognized affection there, too, which made him warm and embarrassed and guilty and grateful, all in one inextricable muddle.

“You weren’t?”

“No. I was telling you to take a break. A vacation. Like I did with the whole Roman Holiday stint. You came back from Africa so tired. And so sad. And so serious. So… so not Xander.” She held up a hand to forestall his protest. “I know, we grow up, we change, we mature, whatever. I get that. I do. But you didn’t look mature, Xan, you looked old. And you were back, what, a day? Before everyone started piling all their crap on you, too. And it wasn’t fair, and you needed a break. We were worried about you, we weren’t trying to get rid of you.”

Xander stared at his hands. Adult, responsible, mature Xander was suddenly feeling pretty silly. Was feeling an awful lot like young, immature Xander, actually. “You weren’t?”

“No, silly.” She paused, then continued, her voice soft. “I’m too selfish for that.” At his startled look, she smiled. “I couldn’t do this without you. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

He smiled, and it felt shaky, but it also felt real, for the first time in a long time. “Probably as many times as I have to tell you that you don’t have to.”

Her grin was beautiful, and older, mature Xander reflected that however stupid he’d been about so many things, younger, immature Xander had had impeccable taste in hopeless crushes.

“Well,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “Just keep telling me, okay?”

“Yeah. You too.” He curled his fingers around hers. “And for what it’s worth, Buff… Willow didn’t make a bazillion more of you. She just made more Slayers.”

He had just enough time to see that her eyes were wet before she ducked her head to rest against his shoulder. Together, in silence, they listened to the others tell their stories.

-End

fic

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