Gray
Gray
After having her world destroyed by the Winchesters, Eve wanted to rebuild her family. She claimed a soul with his own dark power and his own moral gray. He would be her champion. Hopefully. Xander just wanted to go home, preferably before the hunters Sam and Dean Winchester caught up with him.
Chapter ONE :: Chapter TWO :: Chapter THREE :: Chapters 4+5 :: Chapter SIX :: Chapter SEVEN :: Chapter EIGHT :: Chapter NINE :: Chapter TEN :: Chapter ELEVEN : Chapter TWELVE :: Chapter THIRTEEN :: Chapter FOURTEEN :: Chapter FIFTEEN :: Chapter SIXTEEN :: Chapter Seventeen ::
Eighteen
And this Willow is definitely not Xander's Willow.
“You’re military?” Xander hissed at Willow.
“What? Me? No. I’m sort of military adjacent.”
“I can see I make you uncomfortable, Mr. Harris. That’s not my intention.” Major Dorsey held his hands out to the sides like that made him look one inch less intimidating. The guy was huge. His muscles had muscles, and it didn’t take a genius to spot the shoulder holster under his jacket. Nothing was going to make him look anything less than scary as hell. “We do have some experience with dimensional travelers.”
“Oh yeah, leave it to Willow to land in the weird,” Xander said softly.
Major Dorsey gave her an amused look. “Ms. Rosenberg is very capable of landing in trouble in any universe, I take it?”
Xander snorted.
“Hey!” Willow complained, but she kept her hands to herself. His Willow would have hit him. This Willow would have hit her Xander. But now there was a distance between them.
“Mr. Harris, I understand you have no reason to trust me, but I’m asking that you trust Ms. Rosenberg. We need to talk, and it shouldn’t be on the streets.”
“And yet we have that whole I have no reason to trust the military thing going on,” Xander pointed out. He knew what the military had done to Spike, and now that he was on the other side of the demony fence, he was way less okay with it.
Dorsey and Willow traded meaningful looks, and Xander tried really hard to not ache at one more piece of evidence that this wasn’t his Willow.
“Look, maybe I should just make myself scarce, you know, until my Willow can get this fixed.”
“How can another Willow fix this without access to…” Willow blushed, and Major Dorsey moved so that he was standing at her back. “access to stuff,” she finished lamely.
“Smooth, Will,” Xander said. “But my Willow will fix this with her witchly powers of witchiness.”
“Witch?” Willow blurted the word out so loud that it started a bird in the tree over them. “Oy gevalt. I can’t be a witch. I’m Jewish.” She leaned closer. “I would not sell my soul for power.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Xander immediately agreed. “All Willows in all worlds would be saying no to the selling of souls, well, except for that vampire Willow we ran into, but vamp Willow definitely didn’t have a soul to sell. Why would you think that?”
“But…” Willow looked up at Dorsey, but he seemed more interested in watching their perimeter. Oh yeah, this guy was all military. Xander’s arm hairs felt like going to attention. Willow sighed. “A witch is someone who has dabbled in the dark arts, and that means demons and deals.”
“Or it’s someone who has tapped into the whole mother Earth goddess religions and white magic and who then feels a need to add a whole bunch of lectures on the evils of stereotyping ancient religions and pagan beliefs to her set of lectures on misogyny and the evils of assuming that Santa visits every house.”
“He has your number, Rosenberg,” Dorsey said with some amusement.
“Oh, shut up.”
Dorsey smirked at her before turning his attention to Xander, “So, the magic isn’t exclusively evil in your world?”
Xander shook his head. “Only about seventy percent evil. I mean, it’s easy to go evil if you’re on the power path, but plenty don’t.” Xander tried really, really hard to not look at Willow at that exact time. Nope, he was not getting into discussions of Warren. Nope. Not going there.
“And you’ve had some problems with the military,” Dorsey guessed. He held up his hand before Xander could say anything. “And you don’t have to tell me, but I’ll tell you right now that my only goal here is to protect my favorite geek. She’s a valued team member, and I would happily gut you if you threatened her for one second. However, unless you plan to threaten her, I don’t have an agenda. There’s no law against getting caught outside your home dimension.”
“That would be an awkward law to get past the Congress,” Xander agreed, “but I know this is really doing weird things to you guys to see me being not being dead, and I’m sorry,” Xander said as he studied Willow. She chewed on her lower lip. “Giles was hugely with the not amused, and I don’t think I’m going much better with you.”
“Giles?” Willow frowned.
“Oh god. You never… I mean… I…” Xander stopped. Without Buffy around to bring them together, there was no reason for Willow to ever meet Giles, but he’d been such a big part of their lives that Xander couldn’t quite think about Willow without Giles. When her own parents were doing the crushing her in guilt thing, Giles had made her feel better. He’d taught her things that made her feel special.
“Is this is a love interest?” Dorsey asked with a teasing look down at Willow.
“What? No! Oh my god, no. Ick. Giles is more… parental,” Xander said. “Okay, maybe I shouldn’t say this because this isn’t my world and Spike is definitely going to give me all kinds of crap about sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but Rupert Giles was our expert in all things that went bump in the night. He has books on books on books about demons, and in my world, he worked with the slayer, the one girl in all the world with the powers to kick demon ass while still complaining about her inability to find a cute pair of shoes she could afford on her allowance.”
“Allowance?” Dorsey urged Willow closer to Xander and sat on the bench. Clearly the rule about not talking about confidential stuff in public only applied to their secrets.
“Um, the slayer would get her power at fifteen, and after that it was a game of balancing the whole secret identity with the need to no get kicked out of high school,” Xander admitted.
“Oy,” Willow breathed softly. Dorsey’s dark hands flexed like he wanted to grab someone and choke them.
“Yeah, Riley had that reaction when he found out, too,” Xander said, “so it must be a soldier thing, but Willow and me were just there. And yeah, fighting demons at fifteen isn’t exactly great, but it’s not like we didn’t win our fights. And here, you guys have those Winchester boys, and they were fighting demons when they were like… I don’t know, six or seven? They were way younger than us.”
“I fought demons when I was fifteen?” Willow asked, her voice getting all shaky.
Dorsey reached out and rested his large hand on her knee. “You aren’t getting near a demon fight without me and the guys with fully automatic weapons and hex bags being there with you.”
Willow swallowed and nodded. “I guess I shouldn’t be all that shocked. We know that alternate dimensions have some resonance with each other, so if I’m part of the fight here, it makes sense to be part of the fight there,” Willow said. “What about Jesse?”
She asked it with such an innocent, open air that it took Xander a second to really register what she’d asked, and then it took several more seconds to realize that big old stones had just dropped into his belly.
“It looks like you lost your friend. I am sorry,” Dorsey offered.
“Jesse?” Willow asked. “Jesse’s dead? I can’t imagine growing up without the three of us.”
Xander tried hard to shove all those old memories back in their box, but now that she’s said his name, specters of Jesse rose up from the pavement. The Jesse in his graduation cap pressed up against vamp Jesse, his face twisted with malicious glee the way it had been two seconds before Xander had staked him.
“A vampire…” Xander stopped. Before he could say anything else, Willow reached out and grabbed his hands and held on tightly.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and his Willow had never said that. His Willow had been in so much pain that she’d rushed past all the grieving. And even though he didn’t doubt that she’d cried at home, there was some little part of him that had always wanted to hear that. He pulled one of his hands free and wiped away the tears.
“I had to…” Xander stopped and took a breath, and all the specters scattered to the wind. “I had to dust him.”
“Oh Xander.” Willow still had one of his hands and she held it tightly. She might not be his Willow, but she had a heart just as big. And he didn’t want any Willow in danger if he could protect her. And yes, the idea of him protecting her was pretty amusing because Willow in any universe was a scary thing.
“But Rupert Giles, who on paper looks like a stuffy old English guy… or not so old English guy,” Xander added as he realized that Giles and Dorsey were about the same age, “is this total genius with all things that go bump in the night. I tracked him down the second I got here because I was a little weirded out, and in this universe, he’s an expert and a hunter and a little terrifying. But I know it’s still Giles down under all the gruff, so he’ll do anything to save the world. Anything,” Xander said. Willow was still giving him tragic face, but Dorsey nodded.
“Rupert Giles of England. We will look for him to see if he wants an alliance.”
“You may want to avoid mentioning me,” Xander said.
“Oh?” Dorsey gave him a one eyebrow up look. Other than the fact that Dorsey was huge and clearly military and black, Xander would have said he looked exactly like Spike.
“When I went missing, my Willow sent backup through until she could figure out how to undo what someone else did, and my backup is of the less than human variety.”
Willow jerked her hand back. “A demon?”
“As in a human that’s been to hell? God no,” Xander said. “The only person I know who’s gone to any hell dimension is Angel, and he deserved to go. If Willow had sent him through, I would have been greatly tempted to shove a piece of wood in him, even if is an ally at least fifty percent of the time.” Xander made a face. While hating Angel with a passionate fury was a little childish, he was willing to sacrifice his maturity for a good cause. “The whole humans selling their souls thing is not nearly as common in my world, and most of what we call demons, you call monsters.”
“So a monster is your backup,” Dorsey checked. He had a good poker face going, but then so did Willow.
Xander shrugged. “Hey, not all monsters are all that monstrous. Clem’s people… his people’s demon name is unpronounceable even for Giles, so I have no hope. But other than his bad habit of eating kittens and getting Willow’s PETA speech, he doesn’t do anything evil.”
“And he feeds on…” Dorsey let his voice trail off, but it was pretty clear that he thought the only answer would be humans. Xander flashed on his own meal of giant-mouthed demon-monster thingy. Yeah, not all monsters liked human flesh.
“Embarrassment,” Xander said, “which is why he was best friends with me, and then he went off and was Harmony’s best assistant.”
“Harmony Kendall?” Willow asked. Her eyebrows went all the way up.
“Yep, only vampire Harmony Kendall. Sometimes she still does evil stuff, but honestly, she’s no more evil than she was as a human. But anyway, Harmony is such a…” Xander waved his hand to show how impossible it was to explain Harmony. “Between the people who are embarrassed for her as she makes a fool out of herself with that show of hers and the men who humiliate themselves trying to get in her bed, Clem is very well fed.”
Dorsey leaned closer. “She’s a vampire with a show?”
“Well, sort of. It’s this whole internet show, and most people think it’s cheesy vampire pseudo-porn. Not that I’ve watched.” Xander felt his face warm up. “I’ve never. I mean, it’s Harmony, so I wouldn’t.” Xander groaned and let his head drop into his hands. “In my defense, it started as a morbid curiosity thing,” he said, his voice muffled in his hands. He rolled his head to one side, and Willow’s mouth was open in an “o” and Dorsey looked more than a little amused. “I’m in hell,” Xander whispered.
“Xander Harris. You watched Harmony do porn?”
“I watched Harmony try to do pseudo porn,” Xander corrected her before sitting back up. “And as far as monsters go, Harmony is more the sort to call one of those celebrity shows and try and spread rumors about someone having a pedophilia habit than the type to end the world. And Clem is harmless. And the Oden Tal are actually way more on the side of good than anything else, although they do get really cranky and burn people to death when backed into corners.”
“So monsters are good?” Willow asked. Her voice had gone all hard and brittle and hugely disbelieving.
Xander shook his head. “They aren’t good or bad, and more often than not, they’re hungry, and trying to play nice with a hungry rabid wolf would be way smarter. But some are really, really evil. Lots of kind of evil, and most are generally just interested in getting a meal, and we happen to be the easiest food source. And yes, I know your world is different because you have, I don’t know, weird good versus evil issues. Our world is a little more about grays. And then sometimes you have monsters that are actually good and care about honor and justice and upholding the family name. Groo is scary honorable, way more than me. He’d cut his own arm off before he’d run away from a fight screaming like a little girl, and me… yeah, both arms still attached.”
“Rosenberg?” Dorsey asked.
Willow was shaking her head. “It’s not possible. I mean, if there were any, wouldn’t we have met them?”
“Any what?” Xander asked.
“Non-evil monsters,” Willow snapped at him. Okay, Quantum-Willow was cranky.
“Actually, the non-evil sort usually do their best to make sure no one ever meets them. When Spike was evil, he was all ‘bloody look at me be bloody,’” Xander said in a fake British accent that would get him killed if Spike ever heard it. “But after he fought to earn his soul back, he was not really big on letting anyone know who he was. He’s pretty low-key now.”
“Your backup used to be evil?” Dorsey checked.
“Oh yeah. He once hit me over the head with a microscope and kidnapped Willow to make her do a love spell because his vampire girlfriend fell out of love with him after a hundred years. It makes Romeo and Juliet look a little pathetic.”
“And he’s your backup?” Willow’s face scrunched up. “And just for the record, I don’t do spells, and if he tried to kidnap me, he would end up a very dead monster.”
“For the record,” Xander said, “he died saving the world, and he doesn’t kidnap people anymore. Usually. And when he does, it’s because that’s the right thing to do. Since he earned his soul back, he’s done more to make the world safe than anyone, except for maybe you and Buffy.”
“Buffy?” Dorsey jumped on the name. Xander had the feeling there was a tape recorder somewhere.
“She was the slayer, but I checked, and there’s nothing to say slayer, so she’s just one more young woman shopping for expensive shoes,” Xander said apologetically. “I wish I could help with that, but if you hook up with Giles, he’ll have all sorts of neat tricks.”
Xander frowned as something skittered across his skin. He looked around.
“Problem?” Dorsey immediately stood, and Xander was more than a little creeped out that Willow reached under her jacket, revealing a shoulder holster of her own.
“Um, less creepy crawly than the big old mouth demon, but someone’s here.” Xander stood and turned in a slow circle.
“Psychic?” Dorsey asked.
“It looks like,” Willow agreed. “Xander always was the one who seemed to know when the bullies were coming or how to avoid the teachers. Jesse and I called him Radar, like Radar from MASH, you know?”
Xander stopped. His Willow had never done that, but then this wasn’t his world.
“Okay, then the other question is what mouth demon are you talking about?”
“The woman whose whole head opened into a mouth, and there was this tongue, and she…” Xander stopped. Okay, how did you explain to people who hated monsters that you were an alpha monster?
“That’s what was in the restaurant?” Willow asked in a horrified voice.
“That’s why you went for a kitchen, for the cleaners,” Dorsey said, and he gave Xander a very approving look. “I wouldn’t recommend taking on a Leviathan alone, but I’m impressed that you survived long enough for rescue to come.”
Xander opened his mouth and then closed it again. There was just not a good way out of this.
Turning toward a limestone building, Xander started walking. “Trouble?” Dorsey asked as he fell in behind Xander with Willow next to him.
“You could say that, mate,” Spike said as he stepped into the shadowed archway. “Harris, I’m going to chain you to a soddin’ bed until you learn to keep out of trouble.”