A while back,
rubywisp and I did some rambling-at-each-other meta thing about Gunn/Xander (which she's written before, bless her to the ends of the earth). I can't write Xander for shit, but I threw a little snippet thang together. It ends abruptly, so be warned.
Title: Men Will Be Boys
Pairing: Gunn/Xander
Rating: PG
Sunday afternoons are dry cereal with fake, Styrofoam-type "marshmallows" in them. Whole milk, because men don't do two-percent, and they sneer at skim. By all rights, Saturday mornings should be cereal. And cartoons. But demon fighting doesn't really make early weekend mornings possible, and Saturday morning cartoons suck nowadays.
Gunn goes with Count Chocula, which earns him a snicker from Xander, who's sitting with his back against the arm of Gunn's couch, knees raised, bowl of Lucky Charms in his hands, an open comic propped on his legs.
"I see we still haven't learned to venture out into the wild cereal unknowns," Xander says, pieces of cereal coming out to stick to his lips.
Gunn watches him lick them away, sits on the other end of the couch and sets his bowl on the arm, reaches in front of him and takes his own comic from the coffee table. "Why mess with what works?"
Xander's eyes flicker from the comic on Gunn's lap--Batman--to the Count Chocula cereal. "Gee, I don't know, Hooper X."
"Oh, no you didn't," Gunn says, looking up from both bowl and comic. "And, so help me, if you ask--"
Wide grin coming to Xander's face. "What's a Nubian?"
Xander holds his hands up, gives in, makes Gunn retrieve his cereal from the coffee table, where he hastily set it when he was about to lunge at Xander. Normally, Gunn'd go for him anyway, but those Styrofoam marshmallows have a short milk submersion half-life. Five point five minutes, actually, is all the cereal can sit before it gets too mushy for Gunn's tastes. He and Xander were bored one night at the Hyperion. They timed it.
"Partake of the Chocula goodness," Xander tells Gunn around a mouthful of his own cereal. "I promise to hereby abide by the no Kevin Smith rule."
Gunn flicks traces of Lucky Charms from his cheek, where they landed after flying from Xander's mouth mid-sentence. "Good. 'Cause I'm two issues behind on this," he says, gesturing to his comic.
Silence from Xander, which makes Gunn nervous. Slants his eyes to the side, to see if there's a plan to hurl a spoonful of cereal at him in progress. But there's just Xander. Focused on his comic as he turns a page, giving Gunn a glimpse of yellow and blue spandex, oversized text reading "SNIKT".
Xander absently eats his cereal, reaching out with sticky fingers to adjust the comic on his legs when it slips, hold it in place. Brown eyes move in a disjointed pattern, reading dialog, monolog, pulling back to get the full effect of the artwork.
Long limbs folded in on themselves comfortably, boxer shorts and no shirt leaving more skin bare than is covered.
Gunn takes a last hit from the cereal bowl, leaves it on the coffee table to get congealed and all around gross. Slides his comic under the couch and shifts so that he's facing Xander, who looks up at the movements. Sees the look in Gunn's eyes and gives him this full grin that shapes his lips like the homemade bow Gunn made back in the day.
And it lights Xander's face up, takes away those shadows that everyone has nowadays, and Gunn can't help but grin back, wide and slow, and lean forward.
"I know that look," Xander tells him, eyes twinkling. "It means that in a few hours you're going to blame me for distracting you from getting caught up with Batman."